02 June 2005

What is wrong with you people?

Via Buzz Machine we have this report concerning the suppression of visible human female nipples on television —

A similar situation exists on Canadian actress Pamela Anderson’s new TV series, Stacked. In an April interview on Howard Stern’s radio show, the actress complained that network censors ordered her nipples be “taped down” during filming so as not to offend prime-time audiences. [emphasis added]

OK, can someone explain how seeing Anderson’s nipples sticking out under her shirt will offend prime-time audiences while naming a show starring Anderson “Stacked” won’t? That’s without even considering the target demographic and how they’d feel about this issue.

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Better organizing the deck chairs

[source]

The New York Sun reports that Francoise Le Bail, spokeswoman for the president of the European commission, “suggested that improvements in the E.U.’s communications apparatus could have swung the vote the other way, and the European project needed to be ‘explained more clearly to citizens.’ “

Isn’t the real problem that the EU Constitution can’t be explained clearly?

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Number sense

[source]

When I was in college, one of my professors used to complain that too many of his students had no “number gut.”

A number gut is an intuitive feel for the possible magnitude of a particular number that describes a particular phenomenon. […]

The lack of a number gut destroys any sense of context for numbers that describe a phenomenon, leading people to casually accept as valid statements that a little double-checking would show to be just plain silly. […]

Which brings me to the subject of the Lancet Iraqi Mortality Survey.

A lot of people who would know better in another context seem perfectly willing to swallow the estimate of 300,000+ dead that LIMS reports with the Falluja cluster included. Examined in detail, LIMS reports that of those 300,000, roughly 250,000 died from violence, and of those something like 220,000 died from Coalition airstrikes. The LIMS authors even suggest [p6 pg7] that this is likely an underestimate.

Anyone with a good number gut for such phenomenon would immediately recognize such numbers as implausible.

Why couldn’t 250,000 be dead from violence? Well, the first clue is that the total population of Iraq is around 25 million, so 250,000 dead represents 1% of the entire population. That means if LIMS is accurate then 1 in every 100 Iraqis were killed in the war up to Sept 2004. So what? After all, it’s a war and lots of people die in wars right? Well, not as many as most people think.

For example, during WWII the Japanese mainland suffered the most extensive aerial bombardment in history. Every major urban area save one (Kyoto) was burned to the ground. On march 10th, 1945 the great Tokyo fire raid burned down a third of the city and killed 100,000 people. Two major cities were nuked. Japan at the time had a population of 78 million, so 1% of the population would have been around 780,000. Now, what is your guess as to the number of Japanese killed on the Japanese mainland?

Did you guess around 500,000? Under 1%? Well, that is in fact the number (note: that’s only dead, not dead-and-wounded).

I just wonder how many people were counting the Japanese civilian war dead so assiduously in the aftermath of WWII. And it should also be noted that the casuality figures for Iraq include all combat related deaths, meaning enemy combatants as well.

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