Steve Kass

Facts
  The reflecting pool on the National Mall covers an area of about 8 acres. [reference]
  An American football field including the endzones covers about 1.3 acres. [reference]
  The seating area of Michigan Stadium covers about 6 or 7 acres. [reference]
  The capacity of Michigan Stadium is about 100,000 people. [reference]

Observations
  At the most crowded locations, the density of people on the Capitol lawn today was no more than in a packed stadium. [references: lawn, stadium]
  Most of the people on the mall today were within an area of two or three reflecting pools in size (and white). [reference]

Estimate
  (2.5 reflecting pools) × (8 acres per reflecting pool) ÷ (6.5 acres per stadium) × (100,000 people per stadium) × (average 0.5 density) = 150,000 people. More than 87,000, perhaps. Hundreds of thousands, as in more than 200,000? Not too likely. A million? No.

CNN doesn’t get nearly as much attention as it should, given that they’re easily as irresponsible as their buddies at [expletive deleted]. Today they’re fanning the fires about “illegal immigration,” the current euphemism for people we don’t like because they’re brownish and speak another language especially Spanish. Writer Arthur Brice devotes a big chunk of a 900-word article on CNN.com today to a discussion of “anchor babies,” the current not-so-euphemism for babies of people we don’t like because they’re brownish and speak another language especially Spanish. Here’s my brief rant on the article, “Report: 8 percent of U.S. newborns have undocumented parents.”

Before ranting, though, let me be one of the first to greet all these new and beautiful U.S. citizens: “¡Welcome, and bienvenidos!”

This rant has two parts. First, let’s see what “have undocumented parents” means, so we know more about this 8% on whom the goons will be spreading their invective. The phrase shouldn’t mean anything other than “have undocumented parents,” but somehow it does, and not just because of headlinic license. It means “has at least one undocumented parent.” Here’s the relevant wording (emphasis mine) from the Pew report Brice describes:

A child has unauthorized immigrant parents if either parent is unauthorized. A child has U.S.-born parents if all identified parents are U.S.-born.

Well, that’s stupid. The asymmetry reminds me of the definition of Colored, as in for the purpose of what school you can go to, what train car you can sit in, and what drinking fountain you can use, and, before the 14th amendment was ratified, as in whether you were a U.S. citizen, more or less.

Next thing you know, today’s goons who want to abridge the Fourteenth Amendment will find a way to damn not only these youngsters but sus hijos y nietos también, no matter what, probably because fuck the Constitution and Bill of Rights, God tells them to.

Not to mention that “[s]ome pregnant women from other countries are traveling to the United States to give birth and then taking their babies back home to raise them as terrorists that would return to attack America,” a concern raised by Texas state representative Debbie Riddle, “a Republican,” that Brice thought fit to pass on.

Tattooing the letter U on them to start, maybe? (You can bet they’d have no problem paying for that medical procedure with government dollars.)

Part 2: The word “anchor babies” doesn’t appear in the Pew report, but instead of leaving it out of the article entirely, Brice fills us in. He knows that more people will read an article if it’s about anchor babies.

“Babies born to illegal alien mothers within U.S. borders are called anchor babies because under the 1965 immigration Act, they act as an anchor that pulls the illegal alien mother and eventually a host of other relatives into permanent U.S. residency,” says an organization called The American Resistance, which has described itself as “a coalition of immigration crime fighters opposing illegal and undocumented immigration.”

Minor partial credit to Brice for using the past tense when mentioning The American Resistance, but he forgot to mention that they are “no longer an active – or updated – Website or effort,” and haven’t been since 2006, according to — well, themselves, in a message they left on the web four years ago. The fact that Brice names them at all is goofy, to put it kindly. There are dozens of non-moribund organizations he could have called up. A Youtube link to a [expletive deleted] broadcast from within the last week, maybe.

That’s all. Have a nice week.

Internet news aggregator robots never leave me alone. Internet news aggregator robots, never leave me alone.

Every day or more, one of the news aggregator robots gets both my attention and my goat. Here’s one of today’s missiles: “CDC: Most Teens Choose to Abstain,” at cbn.com. The first paragraph:

A recent study shows that most teenagers are virgins, contradicting claims from family planning groups that most young people do not abstain from sex and more sex ed should be taught in schools.

Image by Kelley Boone, some rights reserved (CC-BY-SA 2.0)

This kind of blabbery drives me nuts. They might has well have said, “A recent study shows that the earth is flat, contradicting claims from Unitarians that the planets revolve around the sun and astronomy should be taught in schools instead of the Bible,” when in fact a recent study showed no such thing, and even if it had, it wouldn’t contradict what the Unitarians supposedly said. Maybe if I’d been on the debate team I’d know how to respond more effectively.

If I were a fundamentalist Christian who wanted to justify abstinence education, I wouldn’t quote or misquote studies, nor would I attempt to use logic. I’d be honest: “According to my church, the world is flat, most young people abstain from sex, and abstinence should be taught in schools right after study hall and before creationism. That’s what I believe, because faith in the church is my guiding light.”

Studies be damned, science be damned, the church is the ultimate authority. I might have more respect if they put it that way more often. (I would still object if it got to the point of the Constitution be damned and laws be damned.) Why should fundamentalists care a whit about the fact that science is consistent, well-founded, and predictive? Why should they care about evidence from studies and measurements, if faith, not intelligence, is their life’s compass? I can disagree, disapprove, and be dismayed, but I have no appeal. We live on different planets; we grew up in different universes.

Anyway, for readers who might appreciate facts and figures, let me explain the CBN’s vulpigeration.

What is “sex,” anyway? For its study, the CDC defined “sex” to be heterosexual vaginal sexual intercourse¹ only (though the boy need not stay on top). Many English speakers would call a bunch of other things people do naked with others sex, but the CDC’s restrictive definition should suit the Christian Broadcasting Network in two ways. First, this definition doesn’t infringe on the way CBN might define another word, “sodomy.” They might prefer it for that bunch of other things people do naked with each other. Second, it yields higher virgin percentages. As far as the CDC and CBN.com are concerned, you’re a virgin if you haven’t been part of any penis-in-vagina hanky-panky, even if you’ve gotten plenty naked and nasty with one or more hims or hers.

Fact: Most young people do not abstain from sex. (Or “sex.”) Not during their entire youth, which is what CBN.com suggested. According to the CDC study, most (65% of) boys aged 18-19 and most (60% of) girls in the same age group have had heterosexual vaginal sexual intercourse. The CDC numbers suggest that most young people do abstain from sex “sex” until about age 17 or 18, but abstaining until you stop abstaining is not the same thing as abstaining. Using the CBN.com logic, you could say that all people abstain from sex, ’cuz they all do — until they stop, and most stop, as we know from all the babies being born and abortions being performed. Few babies (or aborted fetuses) are incarnate nowadays.

¹ Additional information available on the internet.

I did a double take when I read today’s email from Affinia Hotels to find this image. Actually, two double takes — one because the page layout made me think I’d hit the landing page of a parked domain, the other because of the image. I puzzled for quite a while wondering what city skyline had those matching buildings. (I’m still not sure. Bostostoston, maybe?)

Wait, make that three double takes. Naturally, I zoomed in to look at the photoshopping more closely, and by golly there it was right there. The creepy Mars face, peeking out from behind the model’s forearm. Look for yourself at the Affinia face and the Mars face, side-by-side, in unretouched (by me, except for the circle) crops, and I think you’ll agree.

After getting over seeing the Mars face, I took the opportunity to see if Affinia was still playing fast and loose with its promo codes. Not like before, I’m pleased to report. They seem serious and honest about their “Our Best Rate Promise.”

Nonetheless, it still bugs me that their “Best Available Rate,” described here as being the Best Available Rate, is not the best available rate. The best available rate is the “Our Promise Rate.” You have to scroll to find the Our Promise Rate, but it always shows up, whether or not you entered a promo code and whether or not you logged into the site.

Before you get too psyched about the free Flip camera, though, you should realize that the “Flippin’ Summer Getaway” promo is probably not a deal. It’s not dishonest, but it’s not a deal. The details of the non-deal are: if you pay Affinia a high enough rate, then you get the same room you could have gotten for less (maybe a lot less), plus you get a Flip camera, a $10 MetroCard, and a tote bag. Supposed retail value, $180. Cost to you (for various vacation dates at New York’s Affinia 50, the only hotel I priced), at least $130 plus tax (for a two-day stay, the shortest for which the offer is valid), and as much as several hundred.

[Added: It occurs to me that if you’re on an expense account, maybe it is a deal. Your company pays for the room, and you get the camera. Someone with more expense account experience can clue me in.]

I believe this is called marketing, and Affinia is doing it honestly. Some promo codes are non-deals, some are deals. (There are some good ones at RetailMeNot.) I’ve stayed at the Affinia 50 twice, and it was just great both times. Their other properties are probably fine, too, and maybe the Flip promo really is a deal at their other locations. One thing I can guarantee is that you won’t get the panoranoramic view pictured, but you might pack a mirror so you can pretend.

Finally, in the interest of full disclosure, “Affinia promo code” has long been the #1 search term sending visitors to my web site, and I’m happy to be posting something new and relevant. But even if that’s what brought you here, do stay and visit for a while.

Thanks to Edward Tufte, millions of people have seen Charles Minard’s remarkable chart of the French Army’s losses during its Russian campaign in the winter of 1812-13. Minard’s chart is a joy to behold. It’s the acme of data presentation — magnificent, spectacular, inspiring. So it kills me that Gene Zelazny, who wrote the you-know-from-the-title-it’s-bad book “Say it with Charts” FUCKING SHAT ALL OVER MINARD’S LEGACY.

I learned about Zelazny’s desecration here, though Andrew Abela, who reported it, failed to call it that. “Zelazny notes that the graphic is difficult to read, and proposes that there might be better ways to convey the same information.”

Sure, there might be, just like there might be better ways to decorate the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, but what Zelazny offers is an epic numerical fail, because IT NOT ONLY DEPICTS DIFFERENT (AS IN WRONG) INFORMATION, IT ALSO DEPICTS THE WRONG INFORMATION BADLY (as in we can’t even tell what wrong numbers he wants us to find and what they are supposed to quantify).

Zelazny might as well propose that “there might be better ways to clean up the Gulf of Mexico,” trot out a broken doorknob and a bent bicycle tire, and ask us to wonder with him. Ugh, ugh, ugh. And ugh.

Here are a few of the gory details (of which there can be but few, given how little actual stuff there is in Zelazny’s chart).

Ok, so the spirit levels in the cutesy clipart thermometers don’t match the numbers, only their absolute values (sort of).  But the numbers are wrong, too. Five of Zelazny’s six data points are wrong — misread from Minard’s original. Five out of six. That’s almost all wrong, for those of you who aren’t counting. Badly, differently, and horrifyingly wrong.

Minard reports that there was rain on October 24, and that the temperature was about zero*. Zelazny misread the day of the month (24) as a temperature, then used the only other written figure at that spot on Minard’s chart (8^bre, for octobre) for both the month and the day. No explanation short of “Who gives a fuck?” works for this slop.

*Minard’s figures give the Réaumur scale temperature, which detail Minard, lest future readers misconstrue his chart, tells us. Minard cared deeply about communicating. (Zelazny’s figures are wrong in every known temperature scale. He cares less. Much less, like not at all.)

Remarkably or not, almost nothing is correct in Zelazny’s “presentation.” The border between Poland and Russia is misplaced, and all the graphical scales are wrong. I’m no PowerPoint guru, but I assume you have to work very hard to incorporate numbers into a slide this wrongly (as was famously done here, and better).

Even Zelazny’s title is wrong.

Things got bad on the retreat from Moscow. And it’s not clear how many died. Minard charted the number of troops, not deaths. Some who didn’t return were captured. Others may have deserted. And the overall message isn’t “the colder … the more.” The biggest declines were early in the campaign, when the temperatures aren’t given. So the title is all wrong, but hell, IT FIT ON TWO LINES. Shit like this matters. It’s our planet’s fucking history.

Sure, Minard’s correct title (Carte figurative des pertes successives en hommes de l’ Armée Française…, and penned more beautifully than any web typography can be rendered) won’t work projected at WXGA resolution or on your favorite eReader or phone.

THIS IS WHY WE PRINT STUFF ON PAPER. If you don’t have a copy of Minard’s chart, buy yourself one. Fuck, if you’re one of the first five people to ask me, I’ll buy you one.

Now turn off your computer and pick up a beautiful book. Or go to the library. Or write. On paper. Thanks for listening.

A recent numerical expedition led me to these summary statistics from a 2009 Pew survey on Religion and Public Life.

Looks like a typo to me. At a glance, the breakdown by age seems inconsistent with the aggregate result.

Most (about 85%) of the survey participants fell into one of the three oldest age groups, all of which favored gay marriage at a lower rate than the general population. The 65+ crowd, numbering 507, favored gay marriage at a rate a full 17 points lower than the rate for all ages combined. Although young’ens favor allowing Adam¹ and me (or Autumn and Eve) to get married legally, and they smile with approval at a rate almost 20 points higher than the rate for all ages combined, there are too few of them (only 283) to balance out the manier² old grumps and middle-aged semigrumps.

I have no reason to suspect the Pew folks of vulpigeration, so I tried to find an honest basis for these apparently contradictory figures.

Pew’s full report on survey question Q146a revealed one potential source of slop: the number under “Favor” seems be the sum of two individually rounded percentages: one for “Favor” and one for “Strongly Favor.” The actual survey instrument included both possible answers. Therefore, 39% could mean anything between 38% and 40%. Survey percentages are routinely rounded, but one expects 39% to mean somewhere between 38.5% and 39.5%.

Even allowing for extra slop, the numbers don’t agree. Here’s a tabulation (using the increased slop allowance) that gives the minimum and maximum numbers of favorers in each age group and (by summing) the minimum and maximum number of favorers among those in any age category.

According to these numbers, between 34.8% and 36.8% of 1,980 respondents would be cool with my marrying Adam legally.

According to Pew’s summary chart (at the top), though, between 38% and 40% of 2,010 responses, or between 764 and 804 people, answered “Favor.” That’s quite a bit higher than the breakdown figures show, and even if the 30 people in no age category (who presumably withheld their age or were under 18) all favored gay marriage, the maximum (and an unlikely maximum, because it would require all the rounding and missing information to be skewed favorably) number of favorers is 759.

As another plausible scenario, I calculated a Total percentage based on the age breakdown but weighted according to the actual histogram of age in the U.S. Still no dice. If anyone has an idea, let me know.

¹ For the record, I’m currently Adamless and available

² manier, adjective. Comparative of many; more numerous. To be coined presently. Many and numerous are synonyms; if things can be more numerous, I see no reason they can’t also be more many, or manier.

A letter to the editor about Daylight Saving Time is today’s most-viewed article in the Panama City (FL) News Herald today, and it deserves more attention than it got over at whatwelookat.com. Letters to the editor routinely begin with their first sentence, but Gene Cabot’s letter begins with its first and longest sentence.

It’s daylight saving time again — called “summer time” in some of the many countries around the world that yearly move their clock hands and pretend that it’s earlier than it really is according to the sun.

Except that we don’t pretend it’s earlier than it really is according to the sun when we move our clocks forward for daylight saving time. We pretend it’s later than it really is. So much for Gene’s viewpoint that we should move daylight saving time to winter. If we had it backwards like he seems to think, it might make sense to move it to winter, but we don’t have it backwards.

Gene goes on to write,

The rationale now for daylight saving time is to save fuel, as people wouldn’t use as much electricity in the mornings because the sun was up.

Except that it’s in the evening, not the morning, that daylight saving time can cut down the amount of electricity used for lighting. With or without daylight saving time, in most parts of the U.S., the sun is up when people start their day, so there’s no effect on morning energy use.

Gene wraps up his confusing argument against a misconception by noting,

… in Miami with a Dec. 21 sunrise of 6:41 a.m. and sunset of 5:15 p.m. — they still had more than 11½ hours of sunlight, plus the twilight hours.

Except that in Miami (or anywhere else on Earth), 5:15 p.m. is only 10 hours and 34 minutes after 6:41 a.m. Unless I missed the news about Miami slipping into the Bermuda Triangle.

The Journal of the National Cancer Institute just published the results of a large study evaluating the survival benefit of contralateral prophylactic mastectomy in the surgical treatment of breast cancer. In some mastectomy patients, breast cancer will reoccur in the remaining breast, and that risk can be reduced (but not eliminated) by removing the non-cancerous breast .

Contralateral prophylactic mastectomy lowers post-mastectomy five-year death rate by 30%

The five-year death rate after mastectomy was 11.5% for women who had both breasts removed. It was 16.3% for those who only had the cancerous breast removed. Adding a contralateral prophylactic mastectomy to the original surgery therefore reduced the five-year death rate from 16.3% to 11.5%. Almost a third fewer mastectomy patients died within 5 years when the had chosen to remove the second (healthy) breast, compared to mastectomy patients who had not chosen to remove the second breast. The bilateral mastectomy decreased the 5-year death rate by 29.4%.

This strikes me as a significant benefit. Suppose I have breast cancer and need a mastectomy. I can choose a single mastectomy and have a one-in-6 chance of dying in five years, or I can choose a double mastectomy and have a one-in-9 chance of dying in five years. One-in-9 sounds quite a bit better to me. If 100,000 women with unilateral cancer need mastectomies, performing 100,000 double mastectomies instead of 100,000 unilateral mastectomies will reduce the number of deaths in the first five years from 16,300 to 11,500. About 4,800 fewer women will die within five years.

Contralateral prophylactic mastectomy benefits only 5% of mastectomy patients.

The reporting of this study takes a very different viewpoint. It compares the survival rate, not the death rate, and notes that the bilateral prophylactic mastectomy increases the survival rate from 83.7% to 88.5%, “a difference of less than 5%.” Five percent sounds like a small number, but 5,000 lives saved sounds like a large number.

Point of view

Both statements (lowers by 30%; benefits only 5%) are the same. Only the intent to communicate is different. Whether prophylactic mastectomy is good practice depends not only on the change in five-year survival rate, and I don’t have more information.. For example, how does a double mastectomy (which for 95,000 of the women will not change the five-year death rate outcome) affect a woman’s well-being and general health over time? What is the cost to save these 5,000 lives, and how will the disparity of death rates change more than five years after surgery?

Good news

There is a good piece of news in the study: The study data identified a subgroup of women for whom double mastectomy had an even greater benefit: women 50 and younger with early stage estrogen receptor negative cancer. Removing the second breast had no benefit for women 60 and older, and the benefit for women in their 50s was uncertain, presumably because of the small number of bilateral mastectomies in the sample.

The journalists writing about this study generally downplayed the benefits. It would have been better for them to downplay the benefits on most of the women, but hype the discovery that there is a subgroup of women who might get a substantial benefit from this procedure. If you read the study, or find better summaries of it, you may find that this study can help patients and doctors make wise treatment choices (contralateral mastectomy sometimes among them). With luck and more studies like this, prophylactic mastectomies might in the future go only to those women whom they might help. With even more luck, we’ll improve our diagnosis and prevention of breast cancer and the number of mastectomies will go down.

Scientific American, you ruined my day, but thanks, I needed it.

Silly me for thinking the Math Wars ended when Mathland bit the dust a couple of years ago. Last May, according to this month’s Scientific American, the Seattle School Board adopted the “Discovering Mathematics series, a reform-math high school text that uses student investigations as a means of discovering math principles—such as using toothpick models to derive recursive sequences.”

I looked at it for as long as my stomach could bear — at least at the one chapter that’s available online as a .pdf file here. It’s wretched. Wrong. Not only wrong like in I-don’t-like-it wrong (which it also is), but falselike wrong. And bad, stupid, dumb, and foolish, among other things. It would take me too long to point out all the things wrong in just the first few pages. (I won’t lie. There were some good things, but not many.)

I don’t think the students who wouldn’t have gotten much out of mathematics curricula in the ‘60s will do any better with this. For the students who want to learn mathematics, unfortunately, school will be even more of a waste than it used to be. They should do their best (especially if they go to public school in Seattle) to learn mathematics from the Internet, which is not nearly so wrong as Discovering Mathematics. With luck, any poor grades they get in stupid reform math courses won’t count against them, and if College Board caves and reforms the SAT to correlate with grades in stupid reform math courses, there will hopefully still be pressure for them to keep the AP and SAT II tests. If everything falls apart, kids that like math can drop out of school, learn from the Internet, then make a living tutoring the hapless victims of the new reform math.

Oh, and if you ever see an elevator whose “control panel displays ‘0’ for the floor number,” when it’s at the basement, please take a photo and send it to me.

In July, I griped here about misleading news reports of a higher crash risk among texting truckers than among non-texting ones. I pointed out that the research quoted had not shown an increased crash risk, and in fact observed fewer crashes (zero, in fact) among the texting truckers. The data might suggest a decreased crash risk among texting truckers, I noted. The reason for the confusion was that crashes and near-crashes (which included sudden and possibly crash-preventing maneuvers) hadn’t been separated in the calculations. Nevertheless, the increased crash-or-near-crash risk was widely reported as an increased crash risk. I wondered whether more near crashes might in fact be a positive thing; those who occasionally swerve suddenly might be paying more attention to the road than those who rarely do.

Today, researchers and others are expressing surprise that just-in real crash data doesn’t support what they don’t realize the earlier research didn’t show in the first place. For example:

• Results of Study on Cellphone Use Surprise Researchers
• Cell phone bans do little to reduce crashes, study finds

If researchers (or journalists) are surprised by today’s news, they probably didn’t examine the research very closely. They may have believed the misleading headlines instead.

Disclaimers: I haven’t read all the research, and some studies might have in fact shown an increased crash risk, unlike the one I mentioned. That might be reason for real surprise. In addition, today’s data doesn’t specifically show that less phone use means no fewer accidents, because laws don’t always change behavior. But some of the reports I read did suggest that there was less phone use, yet no lower crash rate, in places that instituted bans.

Ironically, the crash data out today could make things worse. If drivers think phone use while driving is not as unsafe as previously thought, they might be less careful when using a phone while driving, and phone-related crashes might increase. Common sense suggests that multitasking requires greater concentration. If you do use a phone while driving, drive with even more care than usual. In other words, this might be one situation where being wary might have benefits, even when its not warranted by the facts – especially because being somewhat over-cautious while driving has no serious down side, it seems to me. (It’s not like it infringes upon hundreds of millions of people’s civil rights, like acting on other unwarranted fears can and does…)