Diversion Tactic

I demonstrated earlier for the people in my office how my new Nautica umbrella works. Basically, I push the button to open it, and the top of the umbrella separates from the handle and shoots five feet into the air. It then opens up, eventually floating back down to the pavement. I can't remember whether I bought this piece of crap at Linens and Shit or Bed, Bath and Beyond My Price Range. In any case, I lost the damn receipt so now I'm stuck with it.

I plan to use this if I ever get mugged. Just press the button and run. The mugger will hopefully be distracted by the pretty umbrella top slowly floating back to Earth and won't chase after me. I understand a certain species of lizard can do something similar, such that its enemies end up chasing its detached and wriggling tail instead of the lizard itself.

First Messings With GarageBand

Last weekend, I was playing around in the basement and I decided to lay down an instrumental that I wrote many years ago. It's this acoustic guitar tune I often play when warming up. I always heard it in my head as something you'd play for a young kid (a new nephew?), kind of like when Eddie Van Halen played "3:16" for his son, Wolfgang. Anyway, after messing with it a while, I added some more instrumentation, which is all me. For the acoustic guitar, I used my Brian Moore C-90P, with the piezos run right into the input jack of my Mac's USB soundcard. There's a clean electric guitar there, too (faintly in the background), for which I also used the Brian Moore, but with the magnetic pickups. I played the drums and did my best to quantize them. There's also the Warwick bass I bought from a client about a year ago - Yep, that's a real bass, and I've never played bass before. There's a keyboard line in there, too.

Check it out: Alex's Lullaby Groove (MP3, 2.3 MB)

Correlation vs. Causality

I'm really amazed at what passes for health news stories these days, especially in my favorite newspaper, Newsday. If you think the MSM jumps the gun in poltical or hard news reporting, that ain't nothing compared to the MSM's approach to health stories. At the mere mention of some sort of correlation between X and Y, newspapers run stories about how X causes Y or Y causes X. And when these stories are corrected (or perhaps I should say "If they're corrected.") they almost invariably fit one of two descriptions:

1) Three-line "oops" mention in the "Corrections" section, or 2) Trumping up of their prior incorrect story to medical consensus status and feigned surprise at evidence that contradicts the earlier story.

Not only does the mainstream media need to learn the difference between correlation and causality, but so does the public. It does NOT logically follow that because there's a statistical correlation between X and Y that X causes Y. Such thinking leads to paranoid moms suddenly uprooting their families to avoid bird flu, huge new markets for anti-bacterial crap and decades of discrimination against perfectly good sweeteners like saccharine.

All this misunderstanding of the concept of correlation is a great argument for making statistics part of the required curriculum in high school.

Open Thread

Unfortunately, a comment spammer has latched on to the Irit Spitalnik post and Just. Won't. Let. Go. So I've closed the comments on that thread. If you'd like to share an Irit story or comment, please post it to this thread. Thanks.