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Signifying nothing
Jun. 23rd, 2012 11:42 pm
Currently at Toronto Pearson: 22. High today: 26. Between 10 and 11 p.m. the dewpoint dropped five degrees, back down to 9, for some reason. Still 15 at the island. (ETA: Down to 9 at midnight at the island. Weird.)
The National Hurricane Center notes that today Debby became the earliest fourth named storm on record by nearly two weeks, the previous earliest having been 2005's Dennis, which qualified on July 5.
I just noticed a stupid and annoying thing about the Weather Network's microcast ("future radar") thing on its website: it doesn't distinguish between real and phantom radar echoes, and so it projects phantom movements of phantom precipitation on the basis of phantom echoes. Right now there are phantom echoes all around Georgian Bay and eastern Lake Huron, and so it's moving a Georgian-Bay-and-eastern-Lake-Huron shaped line of rain south-eastward across southern Ontario through the night. (You don't always need comprehension for competence, but sometimes it helps. Oh, Dennett. So darned bright, in some ways.... What's striking to me about that article is that Dennett's distinction between competence and comprehension is, you might say, a way of nutshelling the basic idea of Searle's Chinese Room, but Dennett wants to get to pretty much the opposite conclusion from Searle about artificial intelligence--something like, if you keep adding up competences, comprehension emerges; competence and comprehension are different, but the mechanisms are the same, and so there's no mystery about mindedness....)
This afternoon the Weather Network had a mathematically impossible weather forecast for tomorrow--it had a 30% probability of precipitation for the morning, a 60% probability of precipitation for the afternoon, and a 40% probability of precipitation for the entire day ... or possibly for the period of 6 a.m. to 6 p.m.; it's not really clear (but nor is it in any way evident what precisely they mean by "morning" or "afternoon"). I often wonder when I see POP in a forecast whether the person writing the forecast is actually using it according to its technical definition; this forecast seems to indicate that this forecast writer is not (although it could also mean that the short-term and seven-day forecasts are written by two different people, and no one bothers to make sure they agree with each other when they overlap on the first day). How do people reading forecasts understand POP? I really don't know, but my guess would be that if it pours for ten minutes on an otherwise dry day, people will generally think that a forecast with a POP of 60%, was "wrong"--i.e., I'd guess that people take a 60% POP to mean that if you go outside, you're more likely than not to get rained on. If that's actually the case, then having a POP for a given period that is lower than the POP for a shorter period included within that period would be in accord with people's intuitive understanding of POP, despite being mathematically impossible given the technical definition of POP.
Elsewhere in meaningless statistics, today's Post--the first free one this week left me wondering whether they'd gone soft, what with an editorial saying the Conservatives should knock off the omnibus bills and an op-ed saying that we shouldn't toughen the bail system, but I've been reassured by several days of Alice Walker bashing and today's column defending the Franco dictatorship (and concluding that Egypt should be so lucky)--has a full-page article (OK, a half-page article with a half-page photo illustration) nominally about the reckless debt-accumulation of Generation Y, citing a survey by American Express showing that people born after 1983 increased their spending by eye-catching percentages in a bunch of categories of frivolities (the most eye-catching of which is a 102% increase in spending on "find [sic!] dining") between 2009 and 2011. What it doesn't say anything about (in addition, natch, to not saying anything at all about the methodology of this survey, or even where the Gen-Yers surveyed were located ... or, for that matter, whether Gen-Yers' credit-card debt has actually increased!) is how much the discretionary income of Gen-Yers increased over those years. I suppose it's trading on the general assumption that incomes have been flat since 2008, but it strikes me (as being painfully obvious) that the incomes of people born after 1983 (i.e., people who would have been 25 and younger at the beginning of 2009) are not likely to have been flat between 2009 and 2011--in fact, many of them would have experienced infinite or near-infinite income growth, and many more would have experienced infinite or near-infinite growth in discretionary income, as they left school and joined the full-time workforce; many others would have moved up from entry-level jobs, and so forth. (I'm not saying that this article isn't pointing at a real phenomenon of young people spending increasingly recklessly. I'm just saying that the article itself presents no real evidence that there is such a phenomenon. It gets a free rhetorical ride from the assumption that there is such a phenomenon, and contributes to it by way of confirmation bias.)
Sometimes I'm sad about what I'm missing by not getting a paper paper anymore, but I should be thankful I don't have stuff like this to complain about every day.
( Oh look, a lolowl in honour of the Leafs' surprising first-round draft pick, how droll: )
The National Hurricane Center notes that today Debby became the earliest fourth named storm on record by nearly two weeks, the previous earliest having been 2005's Dennis, which qualified on July 5.
I just noticed a stupid and annoying thing about the Weather Network's microcast ("future radar") thing on its website: it doesn't distinguish between real and phantom radar echoes, and so it projects phantom movements of phantom precipitation on the basis of phantom echoes. Right now there are phantom echoes all around Georgian Bay and eastern Lake Huron, and so it's moving a Georgian-Bay-and-eastern-Lake-Huron shaped line of rain south-eastward across southern Ontario through the night. (You don't always need comprehension for competence, but sometimes it helps. Oh, Dennett. So darned bright, in some ways.... What's striking to me about that article is that Dennett's distinction between competence and comprehension is, you might say, a way of nutshelling the basic idea of Searle's Chinese Room, but Dennett wants to get to pretty much the opposite conclusion from Searle about artificial intelligence--something like, if you keep adding up competences, comprehension emerges; competence and comprehension are different, but the mechanisms are the same, and so there's no mystery about mindedness....)
This afternoon the Weather Network had a mathematically impossible weather forecast for tomorrow--it had a 30% probability of precipitation for the morning, a 60% probability of precipitation for the afternoon, and a 40% probability of precipitation for the entire day ... or possibly for the period of 6 a.m. to 6 p.m.; it's not really clear (but nor is it in any way evident what precisely they mean by "morning" or "afternoon"). I often wonder when I see POP in a forecast whether the person writing the forecast is actually using it according to its technical definition; this forecast seems to indicate that this forecast writer is not (although it could also mean that the short-term and seven-day forecasts are written by two different people, and no one bothers to make sure they agree with each other when they overlap on the first day). How do people reading forecasts understand POP? I really don't know, but my guess would be that if it pours for ten minutes on an otherwise dry day, people will generally think that a forecast with a POP of 60%, was "wrong"--i.e., I'd guess that people take a 60% POP to mean that if you go outside, you're more likely than not to get rained on. If that's actually the case, then having a POP for a given period that is lower than the POP for a shorter period included within that period would be in accord with people's intuitive understanding of POP, despite being mathematically impossible given the technical definition of POP.
Elsewhere in meaningless statistics, today's Post--the first free one this week left me wondering whether they'd gone soft, what with an editorial saying the Conservatives should knock off the omnibus bills and an op-ed saying that we shouldn't toughen the bail system, but I've been reassured by several days of Alice Walker bashing and today's column defending the Franco dictatorship (and concluding that Egypt should be so lucky)--has a full-page article (OK, a half-page article with a half-page photo illustration) nominally about the reckless debt-accumulation of Generation Y, citing a survey by American Express showing that people born after 1983 increased their spending by eye-catching percentages in a bunch of categories of frivolities (the most eye-catching of which is a 102% increase in spending on "find [sic!] dining") between 2009 and 2011. What it doesn't say anything about (in addition, natch, to not saying anything at all about the methodology of this survey, or even where the Gen-Yers surveyed were located ... or, for that matter, whether Gen-Yers' credit-card debt has actually increased!) is how much the discretionary income of Gen-Yers increased over those years. I suppose it's trading on the general assumption that incomes have been flat since 2008, but it strikes me (as being painfully obvious) that the incomes of people born after 1983 (i.e., people who would have been 25 and younger at the beginning of 2009) are not likely to have been flat between 2009 and 2011--in fact, many of them would have experienced infinite or near-infinite income growth, and many more would have experienced infinite or near-infinite growth in discretionary income, as they left school and joined the full-time workforce; many others would have moved up from entry-level jobs, and so forth. (I'm not saying that this article isn't pointing at a real phenomenon of young people spending increasingly recklessly. I'm just saying that the article itself presents no real evidence that there is such a phenomenon. It gets a free rhetorical ride from the assumption that there is such a phenomenon, and contributes to it by way of confirmation bias.)
Sometimes I'm sad about what I'm missing by not getting a paper paper anymore, but I should be thankful I don't have stuff like this to complain about every day.
( Oh look, a lolowl in honour of the Leafs' surprising first-round draft pick, how droll: )
