Badscience.net

Badscience.net is especially good recently.

Ten Pieces Of Advice For Old Media is a list of suggestions - well, more like a series of brusque demands - for conventional paper, book, and journal publishers who are trying to establish an internet presence. All the suggestions are spot-on, but my personal favorite is number 7: DON'T FORCE ME TO REGISTER. The instant I see that login box, I am closing the window. There goes your ad revenue.

Here's a post trash-talking the conclusions drawn from a color preference study. Basically, it all comes down to journalists who just can't resist the temptation to sensationalize scientific data in order to excite their readership. I see it as a special case of what I have just now decided to call my Theory Of Post Popularity, which states that the most effective way to garner feedback and responses to your forum, blog post, news article, or television show, is to post something that scores as high as possible on three benchmarks:

1. Inflammatory
2. Hilarious
3. Clearly WRONG

(There is probably a place for a fourth benchmark: 4. Erotic . This is evinced by the thousands of YouTube clips with endless comments beneath them like "shes dumb but id totally do her"... But posting erotic content is a much more overt tactic than these other three.)

The articles discussed in the Badscience post about color preference score pretty well on all three benchmacks, but their scores are nothing compared to the study discussed here, where a couple of racist twits from Italy claim that there is a behavioral relationship between individuals with Down's Syndrome and Oriental people.

... Inflammatory, hilarious, and clearly wrong. Bingo: Attention. Well, hilarious in a kind of Three Stooges poke-in-the-eyes way, at least. And I thought racism was ugly in America -- these are Italian scientists? The text of the published study itself is absolutely astounding. (Note that if you choose the second provider in the list, you'll also discover the email addresses of the two lunkheads who wrote it. Feel free to email them LOLcats macros.)

Oh, if you're interested in taking that quaint "Bem Sex Role Inventory" test mentioned in the color preference discussion, I threw together a self-scoring Javascript version. So far, everyone I know has scored right around 60 - 60 - 60 ... Except The La got about 15% higher in the 'feminine' points than I did. I guess that shows who wears the pink around here, huh. Or the blue. Or whatever.

Love that Orwell

In (4), the writer knows more or less what he wants to say, but an accumulation of stale phrases chokes him like tea leaves blocking a sink.

I started reading this from the bottom up, because I was most interested in the short list of rules that Orwell presents at the end. I've been really into critiques lately - of movies, of scientific studies, of Miss America contestants - and now here's one of language-mangling writers and speakers from Orwell's time. The advice is excellent of course, but I also find it amusing that some of the "vast dump of flyblown metaphors" he derides have passed out of style and could actually be resurrected. "Ride roughshod" for example, or "fishing in troubled waters". ... Well, on second thought, ...

He also makes several points that I agree with but am also certain would drive my high-school teachers crazy:

"The defense of English language [...] has nothing to do with archaism, with the salvaging of obsolete words and turns of speech, or with the setting up of a "standard English" which must never be departed from. ... It has nothing to do with correct grammar and syntax, which are of no importance so long as one makes one's meaning clear."

He's also particularly irritated by the use of foreign phrases to give "an air of culture and elegance". The question I have now is: How is this all going to work when half the population of my home state speaks Spanish? Are we really just going to keep jamming Spanish and English together until they become Spanglish, and go from there?