Daily Archives: May 16, 2011

Fun With Dick and Jane's Bar-Graph Software

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Even More Fun With Charts: Making the Poor Look Rich

Lies, damned lies and statistics brought to life in the tale of three bar graphs.

From one of the included links

[I]f you add up all the lines of income over $200,000, you get around $2 trillion. (I may be off, because I’m eyeballing it, but I’m not off by much.) That obviously far exceeds the nearly $1.4 trillion accruing to the $100-200,000 set. And it undermines rather than bolsters (though does not disprove) Reihan’s argument that “the collective political influence of the upper-middle-class is greater than that of the ultra-rich.”

And it’s true that the collective influence of the middle class is greater than that of the rich. If our foundational principles included “one economic class, one vote,” there might be a point to the WSJ graph. But since it’s one person, one vote, you have to normalize the income by the number of people.

Title Research Could Someday Lead to Article Titles Which Do Not Make Misleading Dramatic Claims!

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… but this would violate the second law of journalism (sensationalism can never spontaneously decrease), so it will probably never happen.

Antihydrogen could lead to antigravity

Scientist also want to find out if the anti-atoms exhibit antigravity effects. This would mean the atoms would fall up instead of down. Since this would be a violation of the law of conservation of energy it is unlikely, however many scientist still find the idea worth exploring.

IOW, antihydrogen could lead to antigravity if some well-established physical principle turns out to be wrong. It hasn’t been ruled out, so it’s technically not a lie, but amore accurate title like “Gravity properties of antihydrogen to be tested” is way too boring for an article that’s not about bat-boy or some new diet. Which it could be — they could have gone with “Shed ten pounds with new antihydrogen diet!” Boy did they ever blow it on this one.

Pair of Ducks? No, it's a Buttered Cat!

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The Buttered Cat Paradox

Those who have tackled the problem as a thought experiment (meaning, no cats were harmed) have come to the conclusion that the buttered cat would stop falling at some point above the floor. Then, as the cat tries to orient its feet against the attraction of the butter to the floor, the cat would begin spinning -and never stop. The result could be called a true perpetual motion machine.

The claim is that the kinetic energy of the buttered (or jellied) cat is converted into rotational energy as the cat hovers; in that sense it is not necessarily an over-unity device since the cat could then slow down as you tapped into that energy.