"The Medium is the Massage" message

Check out the Amazon.com listing of Marshall McLuhan's iconic The Medium is the Message. This particular printing turns the word "message" into "massage" not just on the cover but the back jacket as well. The Amazon reviewers don't seem to notice. The error continues in their postings.

WTF? How does a publisher screw up the title of so famous a book? And why aren't reviewers LOLing all over this goof?

McLuhan is likely rolling in his grave. Or perhaps he'd say, "told you so."

Hat-tip to The Last Psychiatrist. I agree with him, that there's something creepy in an Orwellian sense here. People in touch with the past are supposed to pipe up and correct the present when it gets the past so wrong. The continuity of the historic record keeps us grounded in reality. It keeps us sane.

Oh Noes! Dey Got Oprah!!!1!

The bad people fooled Oprah yet again! Read all about it here.

Oprah Winfrey once dubbed it the "greatest love story" she had ever heard: a boy held at a Nazi concentration camp during World War II and a girl on the outside who tossed him apples to keep him alive. They eventually married and grew old together.

It turns out the story of Herman and Roma Rosenblat isn't true.

I want to talk to Oprah. Hang on, she's far away so I must shout...

OPRAH, I LOVE YA. BUT PLEASE, FOR AMERICA'S SAKE, BUY A FRIGGIN CLUE! PLEASE STOP PROMOTING GULLIBILITY. GULLIBILITY KILLS.

START BY SURFING THE SKEPTIC'S DICTIONARY. LINKING AROUND FROM THERE, YOU'LL SOON FIND MANY EXCELLENT BOOKS ON CRITICAL THINKING. ADD A COUPLE TO THE OPRAH BOOK LIST FOR 2009 AND REDEEM YOUR GOOD NAME. KTHXBAI!

The Texas Sharpshooter

Someone looking at the graph in my last posting asked what the increase in aggression around age 45 might mean.

It may represent a sampling problem. There may be an outlier, a single individual who is very aggressive pushing up the numbers. Or there may be a disproportionate number of 45 year-olds in the group.

But let's say we rule out a sampling problem. Then we might have fun speculating about why humans seem to become more aggressive around age 45. Midlife crisis? Brain changes? Hormones? Empty nest syndrome? Seven year itch? When inventing explanations, one's powers of imagination are the only limit.

Hence the reason we don't take post-hoc explanations for apparent correlations very seriously. Such explanations are like a rustling in the leaves - might be the wind, might be an animal, might be a friend come to visit. We can't know without further investigation.

The Texas sharpshooter fires his rifle at the side of a barn repeatedly and randomly. He then searches for a cluster of shots close together and he draws a bullseye around them. We control for this kind of error by insisting that the researcher predict what he expects to find before seeing the data.

The alt med guys are Texas sharpshooters. They order hundreds of lab tests without first predicting what they expect to see or what those results might mean. Order enough tests and it's a statistical certainty that something will come back abnormal.

An honest researcher looking at the graph with the bump in aggressions around age 45 would say, "Could be this; could be that. Can't be sure without further study."

But here's the typical alt med doc:

Our group has found that toxin accumulation in the colon becomes critical by the age of 40. Take a look at this graph BigPharma doesn't want you to see...

Symptoms of CTS or Colonic Toxic Syndrome include:

- depression
- irritability
- low self-esteem
- bad breath
- stinky feet
- a tired feeling

If you haven't had regular colonic irrigations and think you might have CTS ...blah blah blah free consultation bogus testing and so on.

Snark for the day

LHC: IF IT WASN'T A BLACK HOLE, WHAT SHUT IT DOWN?
A federal judge in Honolulu dismissed the lawsuit seeking to stop operation of the giant collider, not because the science fiction writer who filed the suit was a few neurons short of a full compliment, but because CERN is not in Honolulu.

Old news, but I just read it and it made me lol. "CERN is not in Honolulu."

Gotta love Bob Park, the physicist and author of What's New, a weekly report of Washington happenings. No wasted words and always the appropriate amount of snark.

He's got a new book out: Superstition: Belief in the Age of Science (Princeton, 2008). Anyone read it yet?