Irrational Bias in the Guardian

Posted on 3 March 2018 by Larry Russwurm

This recent Guardian article whines about today’s children not being able to use a pencil properly because all they do with their hands is press buttons and screens. But of course they had to make a large point of holding your pencil properly. Their is no proof there are any advantages to holding your pencil properly.

They show 4 ways to hold your pencil in a diagram and only the “dynamic tripod” grip is considered correct. To make it abundantly clear they mark the other three methods with an x and the dynamic tripod method with a check.

I personally use the five fingered grasp when I draw or write. I can write as neatly as people with the dynamic tripod grip. I can write as quickly as them. I can write for just as long without my hand cramping up. What, may I ask, is the advantage? You know besides the fact that most people use it.

They try to tie it to “fine motor skills” while never saying how the dynamic tripod grip is better for this. This is pure bull$#!+. The dynamic tripod grip only uses two fingers and a thumb whereas my grip uses 4 fingers and a thumb. Obviously my way is superior because it exercises more fingers.

I can even prove that my handwriting is just as neat. Every teacher from grade 1 to grade 8 that I had took it upon themselves to force me to write the proper way. After noticing they would then show me the dynamic tripod method. And every time for the next two days they would make sure I only wrote in this way. So I know how to write with the dynamic tripod method. It’s just that I automatically pick up the pencil or pen in the five finger grasp. So how can I prove that my handwriting is just as neat? Why it’s the same in the five fingered grasp as it is with the dynamic tripod grip. Handwriting might very well be a product of the wrist.

And who picked out these names? Dynamic tripod? It sounds like you are getting ready for more action. And they made sure the other three ended in “grasp” while not using this end term for the dynamic tripod. They’re not a way to grip the pencil, just a grasp.

Did I mention that I can draw well? I’ve been paid for coming up with political cartoons that I draw. I can do this because I’m a talented enough artist to get a likeness of most people. Here is my Escher inspired drawing of hands drawing hands with my five fingered grip.

So maybe art doesn’t need the precision that musicians and others need.

I can play guitar fairly well and know a smattering of bass and keyboards that I also can play. I’m a very good crokinole player (which involves flicking buttons with precision across a board with obstacles).

I have never felt even slightly cheated because of the way I hold my pencil. Others have tried to make me feel this way. They are ignorant. To me today’s pencil holding is yesterday’s left handedness. Get a grip, the Guardian, and no I don’t care which one you use.

More on the Proper Way to Hold a Pencil

I take pride in the idea that my blog site contains as much truth as other sites that don’t call their writings “rants”. So when I was called out about my rant about the Guardian being wrong I at first ignored it but eventually decided to write this piece which corrects my mistakes and makes a clearer case against the Guardian.

I did overstate my side of the argument with the Guardian when I said, “Their is no proof there are any advantages to holding your pencil properly.” My sister pointed out to me that she holds her pencil improperly in a different way than I do and she gets hand cramps earlier than other people do from writing for too long. So with some pencil grips there is not as much stamina for the user. This is not true for my grip.

I have been trying to find the science behind pencil grips on the internet. I have found one occupational therapy post with a broken link that is supposed to tell us that different grips do not lead to less legible writing. So neatness will not become better if you force a student to write the proper way.

Then I tried looking up speed effects and came up with I think the same study that was discussed at 4 different sites. It involves testing grade 4 students with different pencil grips including the dynamic tripod. The study shows that none of the pencil grips was faster or neater than the others.

The only studies I found out about said that pencil grip doesn’t affect neatness or speed. In some cases it might affect stamina.

But why am I so sure that the Guardian was wrong to begin with?

It’s because I had the one anecdote of myself where my odd pencil grip was just as effective as the dynamic tripod. You may have heard that single anecdotes don’t help prove a theory. But for disproof a single anecdote is good enough. A single datum or replicable point on a graph is also good enough to take down a theory. It’s a lot harder to build up a theory than to take one down.

Of course the new theory may simply be the old theory with one new exception. That’s where the Guardian got it wrong. They might have said the dynamic tripod method of holding a pencil is sometimes better than other methods. But they didn’t. They just mark the dynamic tripod as being right which one assumes is in all cases. So the Guardian is blatantly wrong on this subject, because of the way they reported it.

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The Good Cop – Bad Cop of Rainforest Preservation

Posted on 24 February 2018 by Larry Russwurm

So far the rainforest preservation arguments have all been given by good cops. You know at least some of the arguments for preservation:

Don’t cut down the rainforest because it produces a large percentage of the world’s oxygen supply. This is something that all animals need – including humans.

Don’t cut down the rainforest because it is habitat for as much as 50% of the Earth’s animal and plant species. If biodiversity is important (and it is) cutting down the rainforest is a slap in the face for all people that have argued for biodiversity.

Don’t cut down the rainforest because it hastens climate change. All those trees take out some of the carbon dioxide in the air. Without them global warming is hastened. Especially if you burn those trees down instead of using the wood for other purposes.

Don’t cut down the rainforest because all the possible medicinal plants in the rainforest haven’t been studied well enough yet. This is another cry to keep the biodiversity of the rainforest because we don’t know all the future uses of this rich vegetation.

Don’t cut down the rainforest and expect to farm the underlying land. Without the rainforest, the land readily erodes and is only good for a few years of farming.

Well those are all good cop reasons to leave the rainforest alone. The bad cop reasons can be summed up by naming one country: The United States of America.

The US likes to fight in deserts. It is here where they can use all of their machinery and seemingly on a whim their military can take down whole countries. But really the American military is good anywhere there is farmland or at least no trees. Think how easily tanks can roll without trees. Think how easy it is to bomb targets without the coverage of trees. Think how well all their equipment can move as long as the terrain can support the movement of large wheeled vehicles.

Mountains and rainforests are the nemesis of the American military muscle. Look how tough a time the Americans had in Afghanistan with its mountains. But mostly, realize that the US lost the war in Vietnam because of the rainforest.

Oh, the Americans knew why they were losing. They even developed and used agent orange to defoliate large sections of Vietnam. It wasn’t enough.

So, Columbia, it might be wise to leave the Amazon rainforest alone. You know, in case the United States decides to double down on the war against drugs. Or perhaps the Americans would want to steal some of Brazil’s wealth. The parts where the rainforest has been cut down will be easy for the Americans to take and hold. As for the deforested parts of the African rainforest, don’t give the Americans an excuse like with a genocide. You’ll lose that war.

So the good cops say “Keep your rainforest intact. It’s in the best interests of the world.”

The bad cops are the Americans. And they will do whatever Americans do. Don’t say you weren’t warned.

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KO Wynne for Wind?

Posted on 17 February 2018 by Larry Russwurm

People are attracted to their own names. Many Dennises become dentists and many Lawrences become lawyers. I think Ontario’s premier, Kathleen Wynne is no different.

Wynne went into politics which contains clear winners and losers. It’s no surprise that she thought she could Wynne. Oh, but it gets worse. Her parents named her Kathleen O’day Wynne. Or K. O. Wynne. Is it that huge of a surprise in an election that looked like it was going to be a three way tie for the Liberals, Progressive Conservatives and New Democratic Party, that she pulled off a majority government win in our first-past-the-post system? Alright she got her KO win, now perhaps she can pull us further.

Electricity generation falls to the provinces of Canada. As such Wynne is in charge of our electricity. Perhaps she hasn’t been keeping her head stuck in the sand and has noticed that wind generation and to a lesser extent, solar generation has been becoming a better and better proposition. Whereas once the renewables were least cost efficient of all our power generation methods they are now some of the best.

Add a “d” to your name, Kathleen. Become the wind candidate (Wynnd?). Perhaps this will alter the shape of the next election contest coming up soon. We vote again this spring. Trail blaze and actually lead. That’s something this province could really get behind.

Are you worried about being called a Wynnd bag? That ship has already sailed. You became a politician and let’s be honest, the public already considers all politicians to be wynndbags. That’s the other reason you became a politician.

You don’t have to follow my advice. Just don’t whyne when you end up as the opposition party. Or worse. You could be leading the third biggest party. Then maybe you would resign and retire so you could drink wyne. But you would not be living up to your name of K. O. Wynne then.

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The Chinese Revolt

Posted on 10 February 2018 by Larry Russwurm

Capitalism and communism make strange bedfellows. In China at its present state, with the communist party in charge of the government and capitalist businesses driving the economy, strange bedfellows is the norm. That such a contradiction in systems could make such a powerful economy was never obvious before China.

Still I suspect there is anger amongst the government that capitalism has produced the next most powerful people outside of the communist party. And surely the successful capitalists would just like to get rid of communism once and for all. Indeed I think that the capitalists are trying to slowly overthrow the government.

Beijing, the capital of China, is polluted. Very polluted. This has all come about by capitalism’s factories spewing out premature death. It is no different in the capital as attested by the Beijing summer Olympics a few years ago.

Many of the powerful arms of government are in polluted Beijing, including the National People’s Congress. And, I think, almost all are going to die prematurely because of the pollution. This is the plan of the capitalists.

It might only be deaths that are premature by a couple months. Or maybe a couple years. But death it will be and it will be caused by the engines of capitalism – the factories.

Sure the capitalists are going to kill themselves prematurely, too. That just shows you how serious a struggle it is. They are so locked in their death struggle that they can’t even save themselves.

So when the communists’ top posts change personnel many years from now, you will know that it was the capitalists that did it. Maybe one of those new leaders will step away from communism and the death struggle will finally be at an end.

Maybe this will happen before Beijing is powered by windmills and solar panels. Because that, too, might end the death struggle.

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How to Increase the Number of Canadian Hockey Stars

Posted on 3 February 2018 by Larry Russwurm

I was first pointed out the selection bias in the NHL by the writings of Malcolm Gladwell. He noted that more NHL caliber players were born in the first three months of the year than any other three months.

The NHL has had this proven to them where scientists found that from 1980 to 2007 that 36% of the drafted players were born in those first three months and 14.5% of drafted players were born in the final quarter of the year.

The reason for this is clear. When these hockey players start at ages 4 and 5, there is definite differences between them due to those few months. As a result, those that make the rep teams are more likely to be the oldest kids. And those kids get more coaching and work on skills more. As a result, those minor differences add up in the lifetime of a player to make the older players seem more talented.

My suggestion is simple. Canada should institute two hockey systems. One for those with birthdays from January to June. The other league would have the players born from July 1st to December 31st. It’s only fitting that Canada Day will lead to more good Canadian hockey players.

Anyhow, this whole new branch of Canadian hockey should be just as good as the older kids. Perhaps they could officially be drafted half a year later. Everything else being equal, statistics should bear me out and more players from the Canadian system will be NHL caliber.

This has such a long wait time for the talent and the proof of the talent that maybe it will never be instituted. But if not acted on in Canada I wouldn’t be surprised if some smaller country, like say Sweden, enacted this scheme for exactly the same reasons. Expect that country’s adult teams to eventually be more competitive.

I don’t think this will be a hard sell to hockey parents whose kids are born in the latter half of the year. They will want an equal chance to be NHL ready. Every community big enough to field two or more teams of the same age ought to do this.

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Fewer Colds, Coughs, and Flus?

Posted on 27 January 2018 by Larry Russwurm

I have now heard people my age and older mocking the young for sneezing into the inner elbow part of their sleeve. What? Are you serious? Are you so intent on mocking the young that you don’t realize that this makes sense?

A decade ago when I first saw this I questioned it because it looked strange. But when it was explained that this is obviously more hygienic I had to agree. People sneezing into their hands are worse than just gross. They are obviously spreading illness by using those germy hands on everything. When’s the last time you touched something with your inner elbow? It’s rare, which is why it makes an hygienic and cleaner place to sneeze.

Now I’m not an expert, like germaphobes, but it seems to me that the younger generation has it right by fist bumping instead of shaking hands. This should also help stop the spread of germs like flu or colds.

Also the seeming ubiquitous nature of hand sanitizer seems to have caught on lately, first at hospitals and retirement homes but now also in public spaces like a bus terminal.

So I am betting that today’s younger generation spends a little less time being sick than previous generations. I am currently awaiting the comprehensive studies that prove this. It will never be perfect because with some sneezes clocking in at 100 miles per hour, there is going to be some bounce back from that inner elbow sleeve.

Even if these studies show that there are only negligible improvements in illness rates, the ick factor is certainly less. Do you want to shake the hand of someone who has just sneezed into that same hand? I don’t.

Now that society is waking up to things, perhaps those cooks who dip their fingers into a sauce for a taste can now stop this icky cooking habit. It gets even worse when they double dip their finger for a taste test a few minutes later.

Or could people stop licking their fingers to turn the next page of a book. I quadruply would like this to be true of everyone that reads a library book.

Maybe it is my age showing but I still think that the wearing of face masks is a bit too paranoid a strategy around germs. I would only do this if there was an outbreak of SARS or something similar again. But maybe the younger generation would allow this without being too judgmental on their peers. I think they’re going to have less illness – especially when us not so swift older people are not around to jinx things by our stuck-in-the-past actions.

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See! 1984 Didn’t Happen!

Posted on 20 January 2018 by Larry Russwurm

I am just old enough to have gone through high school in 1984. Being science fiction literate, I was aware of George Orwell’s prognosis for that year. But Big Brother didn’t show up that year, at least not as heralded in the book 1984. Businesses were investing in cameras but only to stop their losses. It was an almost sensible year.

Van Halen came out with an album at the very start of the year. So they stole the title for their album. The album had nothing to do with science fiction which is to be expected for David Lee Roth lyrics. But this just shows that everyone had heard about 1984 – the book – and were largely unconcerned. And why not? Cameras still were expensive enough to be thought of as an investment by business and even government.

Everyone just thought that Orwell was wrong and not that market forces made 1984 an expensive proposition. It may not have happened in 1984 but Orwell simply switched the last two numerals around from the year he published the book in 1948. There was never meant to be a time limit.

So here we sit in 2018 with the signs of 1984 all around us. Cameras cost next to nothing. And it’s getting less and less costly to watch with them. AIs that may be stupid in other ways are getting good enough to man (for lack of a better term) them. And facial recognition software has come a long way.

Then you have various governments using 1984 as a guidebook. Trump is casting aspersions at what remains of the real watchdog media while propping up and praising arms of society known for their atrocious lying. And this is in a country that claims to be free. Just look at what all the dictatorships are doing.

My own government (Canada) has secret trials where you can hire a lawyer but you and your lawyer aren’t allowed to see the evidence against you. They do this all in the name of terrorism. This is not the act of a free country.

Don’t be blinded by the year 1984 pride. We weren’t Orwell’s dictatorship yet because society needed time to get there. Technology needed time to get there.

In the free world we are coming into the fight of our lives. In the dictatorships the battle may already have been lost. 1984 seems a likelihood, now, just not by that due date.

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A Letter to the Editor of the Kitchener Post

Posted on 13 January 2018 by Larry Russwurm

I have written this letter to the editor in response to a letter in the Kitchener Post (a newspaper local to me), Climate Change Gurus Have No Evidence published on January 11, 2018 in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada. I think you can tell the main points of the letter I am disagreeing with by my rebuttals.

Global Warming Gurus Have Plenty of Evidence

Last week’s global-warming-denial letter to the editor got to me because there were problems with the “facts” that Lloyd Fex used.

First of all he called Al Gore “the leading climate change advocate” which I don’t think is true. For instance, based on results, climate change advocates in Europe are much more effective since real policy changes have resulted in those countries. As well, Al Gore has been out of the spotlight of any debate for quite some time.

I almost laughed when I saw that Fex said the polar ice cap increased in size one year by 920 000 sq. ft. This is a laughably small amount compared to the size of the ice sheets. Large shopping malls can have 5 times this square footage and that is only contained by one building. 920 000 square feet is 0.03 of the size of a square mile which polar ice sheets are more properly measured in. I doubt the purported increase is even big enough to be larger than the error margins of the size change of polar ice sheets.

Fex chooses to measure the severity of hurricanes by the amount of deaths they cause. By this measure he says that 2017’s hurricane season was the 17th most severe. But this ignores advances in tracking and knowing which way a hurricane was going that have come about in the end of the 20th century and the start of the 21st.

Of course more deaths happened in the past. In the early 1900s the hurricane prone areas didn’t have that many fast cars to flee with. The space race brought us satellites to spot hurricanes long before they made landfall. Demand for better predictions have brought better hurricane track forecasts. And finally we can board up buildings given warning. So of course fewer lives are lost in this day and age. Imagine Fex’s chagrin if I chose to measure severity of a hurricane in unadjusted dollar values of damage. Of course the most recent years would have the most severe hurricanes. That’s exactly what he is trying to do to us, just with the opposite result.

He says we can easily look up his facts at the NOAA, US Weather online and YouTube. When I tried to find his .07 degrees Celsius increase in temperatures since 1970, I found climate.gov which is an NOAA site and they said that the average surface temperature of earth had increased by 0.8 degrees Celsius since 1970.

I didn’t bother checking his 0.4 m sea level rise in the last two centuries because that is worrying enough. It is especially worrying if Greenland or Antarctica with their miles of ice sheets start to go suddenly. And for low lying islands, even half a meter might spell doom.

I have used facts to correct Mr. Fex since that is all he claims to respect. Global warming is a real problem that the earth faces today.

I don’t care that some scientists deny global warming. More scientists believe in it than doubt it. There were doctors and biologists who denied the science of tobacco being bad for you. Just as there was big money to be made in tobacco, there is big money to be made in carbon releasing via big oil and gas.

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The New Mall Help Desk

Posted on 6 January 2018 by Larry Russwurm

A few months ago the mall that I frequent the most installed a new Starbucks. I sometimes go to this new establishment with my sister. We prefer to drink our teas in the island “patio” which is in the middle of the ample aisle way and it looks to be completely separate from the Starbucks.

Yesterday we were the only ones on the high chairs with drinks on the wall of the island. There were other people too but they were in the much lower tables and chairs. So from a certain direction all that could be seen were two people drinking coffees or teas in a kiosk like environment.

The first lady who approached us said she had a question for us. Then suddenly she said “Oh, I guess you’re not mall information,” I think at this point she saw the lower tables with people at them. “I’m sorry.”

I could have acted like mall information and pointed out where mall information was. But she went quickly away. My sister and I joked that we didn’t get to hear her question which we might have been able to answer.

A half hour later a man came up to us and asked us where the bank was. We pointed to the Starbucks and said that used to be the bank. We told him we could tell him where there were bank machines in the mall. He had to hurry to catch his friend to tell him the bank was no longer here.

About a half hour after this incident, a couple came up to us and asked where the washrooms were. My sister told him that they were in the basement of the Bay. I couldn’t understand how my sister managed to get this wrong so I corrected her and said they were in the top floor of the Bay. We eventually realized we were both right but had been using the washrooms that we knew were there. Turning back to the couple we told them the official public washroom was way on the other side of the mall by the food court. They headed in that general direction so perhaps there were no accidents yesterday.

After three incidents of people asking for information I can only think that the mall had deliberately set the island up to look like information. Then, relying on the good nature of Starbucks customers, they knew that they no longer needed their information kiosk and could save money by shutting it down. I would rather they paid me the amount that a worker at the mall should get.

Or at least they could give me free coffee or teas at Starbucks. Information isn’t free you know.

If they think it can be, my only recourse will be to send my customers to the wrong parts of the mall.

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My Best Posts of the Year 2017

Posted on 30 December 2017 by Larry Russwurm

If you think my annual post about my favourites from the past year is a cop out, you are absolutely correct. I give myself one week a year when I don’t have to think of anything new and shiny. It used to be the easiest post of the year. Until this year.

My memory is slipping this year. In previous years all I had to do was scan the titles of my posts to pick a favourite for each two month period. The posts would then face off in my mind and most times I would pick a favourite easily. But sometimes it’s harder and I have to reread two or three posts to decide which one is truly best.

This year I am not reminded what the post is about from the title. So painstakingly I’ve had to read through almost every single post to remind me about all of them directly. Only the last month’s posts were remembered without reading.

So this year I put in more effort for this list. Thus I no longer see it as a cop out.

For my January and February pick I would have chosen from my sister site Nooz Spun Right my poll about who wore it better me or David Bowie. I captured a really neat photograph of myself with the setting sun’s light coming through the slats on my balcony. It looked like a lightning bolt due to the angles on my face. Unfortunately Poll Daddy wrenched the poll from the post and I really don’t want to sign up with them after that. So instead I will choose A Smoke Filled Bar for my first best post of the year.

The Canadian Duel lightened the month of April. My Plan to Counterfeit and Never Get Caught is a workable plan it’s just that I blew it by telling all of you. Don’t make the same mistake.

SETI: Dumb Isn’t Dumb is my real opinion on the topic, I just had to dress it up with humour to be a piece on my blog site.

The Secret Origin of Tail is a comic page departure from my usual post, but I think a good one. Just pardon me if there aren’t too many more of these in the future. I do want to finish at least one more but I may stop there as these are time intensive undertakings as I have to both draw and write. I can write three normal blog posts in the time I take for one of these.

I’ll leave the year suggesting that you read Water Roads, last week’s post. It is really flash fiction and is an example of my writing which I am very serious about even if this story isn’t quite serious.

Happy new year to anyone I’ve missed saying this to in the last week. I hope it brings good things to you and yours and to this site.

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