Looking Out To Sea

Spoof science stories are a bit of a tradition in the BMJ for their Christmas edition. I only read the journal when I’m at Helen’s parents’ house but even I’ve managed to spot the light-hearted articles amongst the serious science.

Alas, I seem to be in the minority. The BBC, for example are reporting one man’s adventures on a unicycle as the gospel truth. This is obviously pretty sad. I wonder how soon they’ll pick up another article in this year’s Christmas edition, looking at how magical ability in the world of Harry Potter relates to genetics.

Two things strike me. First, there’s what the original article says in the BMJ. Essentially, the author took up unicycling and recorded the reactions of strangers in the street. Young males reacted aggressively towards him: either physically or verbally. Older men, women and children did not have this reaction.

The BBC reported this as “testosterone causes humour”, something which isn’t even supported by the original article. What it actually says is that testosterone causes aggression, which evolves from violence into mocking humour as people grow up. Admittedly this wasn’t the clearest part of the article, but anyone who took the slightest time to read the content rather than the conclusion would understand completely.

This is a rare insight into the process of mainstream science reporting. The science wasn’t real science, in any way. It was meant explicitly as humour. The study was made up. It seems the only person who didn’t understand this was the reporter. The author points out all the areas in which his method was deficient — but these caveats are not reported by the BBC.

Second to the BBC’s response to the original article, are other responses to the BBC. The bloggers at Feministing have taken the gist even further: “Unicycle-enthusiast professor claims men are funnier than women”. It would seem in the interests of a feminist blog to correct, rather than spread, such silly rumours. Last I read there was a small comment war going on there over whether or not it was real, and whether or not Feministing, being “only a blog” should have to examine such stories further before reporting on them.

My opinion, of course, is yes, for pity’s sake, yes. But giving the benefit of the doubt, how easy is that to do? The only source cited by the BBC is “he told the British Medical Journal”, a fleeting reference with no mention of what his submission was called, which edition you might find it in, or anything else.

• If you Google for sam shuster (no quotes) you find several things he’s written and reactions to the BBC’s story. The fourth one on the list has done a bit of research and suggests that Prof Shuster is a “wind-up merchant”. This is not the first time his writings have been outlandish and absurd, yet reported with a straight face by people who should know better.

• Searching for sam shuster bmj reveals a list of useful publications. The first result is the BMJ’s home page, which contains a link to the original article by Prof Shuster. Oh, how difficult that was.

• Looking further down the page, what do we find? The next one relevant to this story is the all-knowing Language Log, doing what it does best: pointing out that the BBC are a bunch of idiots. To quote: “The practice of running spoof stories in the BMJ Christmas issue is not exactly a secret. … Apparently, it’s an equally old tradition for the reporters and editors at BBC News to swallow such jokes hook, line and sinker.” Look to the bottom of the page for a terrifyingly comprehensive list of other people who can’t tell humour from real science.

It doesn’t take long to find the original article, which you can read in all its gently silly glory.

I’ve finally got it together and installed Markdown here on my blog. It took a bit of effort to get exactly what I wanted so I thought I’d document.

I wanted:

• Markdown syntax (or similar) for writing blog posts. I’m sick to high heaven of WYSIWYG editors pretending to know what I’m asking for.
• Syntax highlighting for code snippets.
• Minimal effort to actually use both of the above.

The third point is pretty important because Markdown on its own doesn’t support any particular varieties of code, though it has good means of separating code from other information in a page. You can’t specifically say, “this snippet here, it’s written in Python, so I want you to highlight it accordingly”.

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Arnold Zwicky over at Language Log gets to complaining about, well, things in general. Including the amount of email he gets and how long it takes to write a good post. He lets slip that

…I have a more-or-less constant queue of 250 postings in preparation, that is, partly written.

Would this be what they call slightly excessive? I have never had more than twenty unpublished posts and have long since come to the conclusion that any post that hangs around unedited and unpublished for more than a few weeks will probably never see the light of day. At least, not without a complete rewrite and probably a shift in focus and tone.

Two hundred and fifty posts!

Transferring stuff over from LiveJournal is a bit less hit, a bit more miss than anticipated. Most of the problems are caused by the fact that, while the LJ API offers all the tricks you’d expect for exporting blog posts, the web-based export tool supports very few of these features. You can’t save any of the comments for the posts. There is no “export all” function: everything has to be done a month at a time. Blech.

The good news is that Helen has agreed to do guest food blogging and, maybe, science blogging too. That will be cool beans. (And also probably fried beans, and maybe some kind of warming bean soup.)

The time has finally come to move away from LiveJournal. I don’t think the move will be as simple as all that, however. So I thought it best to explain why I’m going through the pain anyway.

The advantages of LiveJournal

So there will be a load of stuff that I’ll miss. In fact, so much that I’ll probably stick around there for a while. There are still a bunch of communities that I read fairly regularly, though I am not an active participant to any degree.

The biggest thing LJ has going for it is the friends page. Being able to subscribe to other people’s password-protected blogs in a really seamless way. So I’ll continue to lurk.

The shortcomings of LiveJournal

Of course, I am moving. And there are a whole bunch of reasons, not all of which will seem very meaningful. But I promise they all add together to make it feel worthwhile for me to escape.

Obviously, there’s the technological side. All those facilities that Six Apart have been dragging their feet over since they bought out LiveJournal? Well, they’re available to me now. Categories; pingbacks and trackbacks; proper spam filtering; and even getting to add javascript to pages.

And there’s a wee bit of aesthetics involved too. I can go mad with the themes and the style sheets! I can properly separate different parts of my blogging for those not interested in everything I do.

And there’s also a wee ethical consideration. Cos try as they might pretend to be a cutting-edge forward-thinking outside-the-box company, LiveJournal’s owners have demonstrated repeatedly that this is not the case. Instead, they’ve demonstrated that their morals are completely at odds with that image and with the majority of their users (and paying customers). I could have paid for a full account but I don’t want to give them any money. So I’ll leave instead.

I’m not gone yet

I’ll continue to get this place set up, piece by piece, and meanwhile the blogging I do on LiveJournal will reduce in volume. I don’t know when it’ll all be done, but I’ll let everyone who’s interested know in good time.