“It is not necessary to understand things in order to argue about them.” — Caron de Beaumarchais.

You probably know about Car Talk, the public radio talk show about cars and car repair. The hosts, Click and Clack (a/k/a Tom and Ray Magliozzi) once had a spirited conversation about whether two people who don’t know anything about a subject know more or less the one person who doesn’t know anything about that subject.

The answer, of course, is that two people know less. Two people arguing about something that neither knows anything about are capable of building an entire towering construct of ignorance and supposition, each particle of non- or mis-information building on the one previous.

 

A 5-year-old is awarded a patent (6,368,227, if you’re counting) on a technique for swinging on a swing. More evidence of a system out of control.

 

Susan Kitchens outpoints an L.A. Times story about an artist who altered a freeway roadsign so that people won’t actually get lost following it. The job was so good that Caltrans didn’t notice for nine months — until the story hit the paper. And they may well leave things as they are.

Any chance we can get this guy to come to New York City? The road signs here are atrocious. Some of it is that the roads here are old and not up to contemporary spec. Some of it is that signs were designed to be driven at 40 mph.

Anyway, I have two fairly trivial examples. On an overpass where the New England Thruway crosses the Hutchinson River Parkway, a sign read New England Thurway and stayed that way for some years. Two signs across the street from each other near here call it alternately “Schermerhorn St.” and “Schemerhorn St.” (missing the first “r”). What’s even worse is that they’re both right outside the NYC Board of Education’s personnel building. 

Matt Richtel in the NY Times reports on a Russian online market for stolen credit card numbers.

Among his data points is a finding from a market research firm that fraud rates are three times higher for online MasterCard and Visa transactions than in the real world. We’re still talking about a quarter of one percent, but that means one out of every 400 online transactions is fradulent, and that feels like  rather a lot.

 

Global Village Idiocy. Tom Friedman continues his work for yet another well-deserved Pulitzer. The nut grafs:

… [T]hanks to the Internet and satellite TV, the world is being wired together technologically, but not socially, politically or culturally. We are now seeing and hearing one another faster and better, but with no corresponding improvement in our ability to learn from, or understand, one another. So integration, at this stage, is producing more anger than anything else….

At its best, the Internet can educate more people faster than any media tool we’ve ever had. At its worst, it can make people dumber faster than any media tool we’ve ever had.

This is nothing that net-wise pundits and journo haven’t been saying for years. But Friedman adds an important data point, and adds it in his typically elegant and clear manner.

When I was in high school, I saw Tom Stoppard’s play “Jumpers” on Broadway. Twice. It was amazing, opening up all kinds of vistas of language and showmanship and Oxbridgian hoopdeedoo. That’s why I liked this story:

So God’s Really in the Details?. Last month, Richard Swinburne, a professor of philosophy at Oxford University, invoked probability theory to defend the belief that Jesus was resurrected from the dead.

I particularly loved this graf:

In plain English, this means that, by Mr. Swinburne’s calculations, the probability of the Resurrection comes out to be a whopping 97 percent.

I kind of thought that the whole point was to have faith in the face of what was surely impossible. But what the hey — if you can prove it anyway, how bad could it be?

From The New York Times:

Old Personal Computers Never Die; They Just Fade Into Deep Storage. It is estimated that three-quarters of all retired consumer PC’s sit gathering dust in closets, garages and attics across the nation. By Andres Martinez.

Let’s see. I’ve got a Mac SE and a Toshiba 1100 Plus sitting in the closet. I’ve given away an old Thinkpad and a Dell in the last couple of months and I sold a Gateway Handbook a few months ago. So those are three previously idle PCs that are (I believe) in current use, and I’ve got four more CPUs currently active around the house. That’s not counting the many PDAs of various vintages hanging around. (Yo! Steven! Do you still have that Sony Magic Link? And where’d my Newton go?)

Then again, I never did get involved with Commodores or Timex Sinclairs. I had serious lust for an Osborne 1 and a Kaypro, but they were beyond a UPI reporter’s salary. If I had come up with the scratch, though, I bet I’d still have them.

So — how many computers do you have around *your* place, just sitting idle?

Hey Kids: Did you know that some mail order companies inflate those packing material air cushions with helium? Turns out that the helium has so much buoyancy that the savings in shipping costs outweighs the price of the helium itself.

You read it here first.

The AP reports on University of Minnesota professor Jim Kakalios, who uses comic books to illustrate points of physics.

Very nice, innovative technique. The problems seem a little simple for college physics, but what do I know…

I wonder how the good professor would explain Wonder Woman?

A nice piece about PC voice recognition at Mitch Wagner’s drive-thru.org: YOU’LL ALWAYS BE ABLE TO SWEAR AT YOUR PC WHEN IT CRASHES. 

My friend Nat Polish was involved a few years ago in the launch of a company called Soliloquy. The basic idea was to create a voice interface to a database; you should be able to walk up to a computer or a kiosk and say, “I’m interested in a song by the Beatles,” and have the database respond and carry on a (highly structured) conversation. They got it working well enough to sell some real-life demos before the company collapsed.

As the company was launching, I overheard Nat giving an interview to CNBC, I think it was. I couldn’t catch the whole thing, but at one point Nat looked squarely into the camera and said from his considerably lofty technoperspective:

“You understand, of course, that the keyboard is a transitional device….”