Monthly Archives: March 2010

The Most Ridiculous Thing I've Heard … Today

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Lindsay Lohan wants $100M over E-Trade ad

Lohan’s lawyer, Stephanie Ovadia, said the actress has the same single-name recognition as Oprah or Madonna.

…

“They used the name Lindsay,” Ovadia said. “They’re using her name as a parody of her life. Why didn’t they use the name Susan? This is a subliminal message. Everybody’s talking about it and saying it’s Lindsay Lohan.”

Yeah, right. I’m barely aware of who Lindsay Lohan is, and I’m more than happy to testify that I did not think of her when I saw the commercial. I didn’t associate her with the commercial until now; besides, they said ‘milkaholic,’ not ‘attention whore.’

A really funny thing is that because I’m a geek, and since Lindsay/Lindsey is a fairly common name, I actually checked a baby-name database (requires java to be enabled) and Lindsay and Lindsey are much more popular names than Susan these days and have been for a while now. As far as single-name recognition goes, Oprah doesn’t crack the top 1000 and Madonna never got used on more than a few dozen babies a year and dropped off the radar by the ’70s. i.e. those are recognized single names because the people a) have unusual names and are b) actually quite famous

(As an aside, especially to Johnny Cash fans, if you check the stats for the names, you can restrict them to one gender or the other. There actually have been boys named Sue.)

Bad Name for a Medical Partnership

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Scott and Scurvy

How the cure for scurvy was found and lost again.

They had a theory of the disease that made sense, fit the evidence, but was utterly wrong. They had arrived at the idea of an undetectable substance in their food, present in trace quantities, with a direct causative relationship to scurvy, but they thought of it in terms of a poison to avoid. In one sense, the additional leap required for a correct understanding was very small. In another sense, it would have required a kind of Copernican revolution in their thinking.

I find this fascinating: the application — almost — of the scientific method, only to fail at the crucial falsification stage. And how the wrong answer propagates because of this failure.

Heisenberg, Unquantumfied

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Hearing The Uncertainty Principle

The frequency content of that little pop spans several octaves. It no longer resembles a pure note at all. The large degree of certainty with respect to the time of the note means a large degree of uncertainty with respect to the frequency of the note.

It’s the uncertainty principle and it’s not even quantum!