Don’t Be Sheeple to the Pollsters

Posted on 21 April 2011 by Larry Russwurm

My memory is long for things I’ve read over and over again, especially numbers, so I want to know what the pollsters are trying to put over on us.

You see I remember the polls from the ’80s and even possibly the ’70s and it was always a survey of over 1000 people that they would say was correct to 4%, 19 times out of 20.

This means that the polls, once every 20 times are total bull$#!+ . That’s my first point.

But recently I paid attention to the characteristics of a modern poll, in this, Canada’s 41st federal election. They had the results of less than 1000 people and they claimed their result was accurate to 3.1%. I don’t remember hearing the 19 times out of 20, but I believe statistical analysis hasn’t progressed any further, so it should still be there.

Now how can a lesser poll have more accurate estimates? Then it hit me what they had done. They had simply subtracted the undecided vote that used to be ever present in polls and that’s why the polling numbers were less than with the polls of decades earlier.

It seems to me they don’t want to remind the sheeple that usually there are 20% of the voters that are undecided. That means, in the present Canadian race, the NDP (New Democrat Party) which is currently in third at 17% of decided voters, could form a majority government with just the pull of the undecided voters. That’s the 2nd major reason the polls may be relative bull$#!+ . It might be a greater than 1 in 20 chance that such mayhem could ensue.

And I still haven’t worked on the third thing that seems suspiciously out of whack. That decrease in poll inexactitude from 4% decades ago to 3.1%, now. It’s even worse than that. Here I have a poll table that “shows” some of the errors are allegedly less than 1.7 %. I simply don’t believe these figures. Not unless the pollsters have gone the expensive route of polling 10 000 people at a time. I seriously doubt they’ve gone this route.

The only other thing I can think for inexactitude being lessened would be if the pollsters did other polls, like asking “Do you use polls to strategically vote?” In this case the pollsters might have a case for inexactitude being lessened but the response would have to be overwhelmingly “Yes.” But notice that this “correction” relies on another poll.

All I can say is don’t be a sheeple. If you ever strategically vote, do it based on the last election, not a random survey.

A corrupt survey system might result if we give their polls too much power. In these times of less oversight and a much smaller watch dog press, I don’t think we can afford to let any part of our democracy get any more powerful. Let’s go back to those ’70s and ’80s qualifiers for our polls. I don’t believe there is anything that would make me agree that statistics have miraculously gotten better. I think the pollsters are getting deeper in the bull$#!+ .

Posted in Mathematics, Politics, Wee Bit O' Humour | Tagged , , , , | 3 Comments

Pseudo Accents II

Posted on 17 April 2011 by Larry Russwurm

The reason I’m enthralled with pseudo accents is that I write science fiction. Of course aliens are likely to have accents to our ears, even if their mouths and voice boxes are identical to ours. And most likely these accents are going to be even stranger than human accents.

So the last post was an effort on my part to shake things up and jar my thinking so possibly I could come up with a new alien accent. But so far I’ve just thought that perhaps a human could say about an alien accent that it was kind of “Elmer Fuddian”.

But quite awhile ago, I did come up with an alien accent that a human can do, too. My inspiration was the rolled “r” that occurs in many non-English, European languages. The rolling is a sound that is concurrent with the “r”.

So that got me thinking and playing with what I could say. Eventually I came up with a clicked “n”. Next came the flatulated (yes I made the word up) “p” , the flatulated part I hope gets you thinking about gassy emanations, but really it’s more the sound a horse makes with it’s mouth that’s not whinnying. Still later I came up with a smacked “m”, that’s smack as in a kiss.

I threw all three together and placed them in a short story featuring an alien Nickpon with this accent. That story remains unsold so here I am today letting you see, dear reader and maybe some stage or screen production hears of it and makes me an offer. Perhaps they will want that extra verisimilitude for their piece. Or perhaps they just want to torture their actors. In the clips below, it was very hard for me to pull off the accents and I invented it.

Male homophobes wouldn’t like to do my accent because of the smacked “m”. I doubt they’ll like making kissing sounds every time they say man or male.

Now I should also mention that the three concurrent sounds can’t be used for a “p”, “m”, or “n” at the end of a syllable. Unfortunately, I can’t do these sounds without adding a syllable for end letters. If you can do it without the extra syllable, you have mastered it better than me. Also the “sp”, “sm” and “sn” blends are also very difficult to do so I didn’t include them in the examples below.

The smacked M

The Flatulated P

The Clicked N

The Full Nickpon Accent

Posted in Language, Wee Bit O' Humour, Writing | Tagged , , , , | 3 Comments

Pseudo Accents

Posted on 15 April 2011 by Larry Russwurm

Perhaps a one word title for this could have been “Dialects” because that word includes the social group identity and not necessarily the regionalism of the word “accent”. Still the word is still not right for all the groups we are going to mention and I choose to have fun with the regionalism.

My first example of pseudo accents is a huge group, those pseudo accents or patters used for cartoon characters. Mel Blanc, the Warner Bros. Cartoons genius is the biggest master of this field. His Tweetie Pie or Daffy Duck or Sylvester the Cat are all classics. For all of these he created a different way of talking that was self consistent for each character. These are some of the pseudo accents I wish to discuss.

There were other great inventions in speech for other cartoon characters like Donald Duck. I’ve never been able to master that style of speech but imagine it’s quite hard on the throat. Mickey Mouse wouldn’t count as a pseudo accent just because his voice is only raised in pitch.

If we were to say where these accents are spoken we’d have to say they take up whole continents since the field of animation is so rich in pseudo accents. Maybe there would be a continent of Blancia and Vox Animatia.

Then there is the deaf accent or pseudo accent. I’m not certain it is the same amongst all speakers, but the talented Marlee Matlin and the one deaf male I know seem to share the same pseudo accent. I am generalizing from these two lone examples that all deaf people who choose to speak, speak with roughly the same accent. If you know better, please correct me.

This is an amazing talent, to use a sensory output they have no governor for. That they are quite easily intelligible to non deaf people is quite remarkable. I think they could have come from a land called Skilya.

Then there are those with Down Syndrome. Different physical characteristics, mean a different mouth with a different way of talking or a pseudo accent. To my untrained ear, I think the deaf and the Down Syndrome people sound something alike. That might be something like both Japanese and Germans seeming to talk forcefully but with no real relation between the two ethnic groups. So the land of Downsie might be far away from Skilya.

Finally we come to the gay accent or pseudo accent. Most people have a large enough circle of people they know to know this accent. It’s important to remember that not all gays have this accent. The evolutionary purpose of this accent might have been to alert other gays that they are not alone. Or maybe some gays deliberately talk this way to increase their visibility. Regardless, every redneck can launch into his gay pseudo accent when around his “known to be straight” friends.

I know of no similar pseudo accent amongst lesbians. So perhaps we could say that people with a gay accent come from Gaia. But wouldn’t it be more fun if we said they were from rural Ontario? Or how about rural Colorado or rural Texas? I don’t have any biases, I just like to pepper my posts with the word rural and sometimes redneck.

Posted in Geography, Language, Stage and Screen, Wee Bit O' Humour | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Taking the Voluntary Out of Volunteer

Posted on 13 April 2011 by Larry Russwurm

Some time ago I participated in a program that helped people who hadn’t worked in a few years get a job. Part of the program was working at a volunteer job for a few weeks. Now I never thought about testing it at the time, but the volunteer part of the program may have been required. Philosophically I find this quite troubling.

I now know a young man who has completed more than his necessary high school credits. Still he doesn’t have his Ontario secondary school diploma. And no, there have been no conduct problems on his record. This is all because the province of Ontario has mandated that each graduate must have 40 hours of compulsory community service.

In the case of the young man I know, he has had a very time intensive part time job while attending secondary school. So finding time for involuntary volunteer work hasn’t been easy. Plus there is the troubling philosophy of it, too. Is it that Ontario social workers no longer need to know the definition of basic words, like volunteer? Or do they somehow think that involuntary volunteer work is somehow a plus for our society?

Let’s be honest about what involuntary volunteer work is. It is slavery pure and simple.

Some might object to my perspective and say that the students get to pick which job they do. Well let’s be truthful, slavery has taken many forms over the historical record, sometimes it was less tyrannical than at other times.

But it’s only 40 hours, not a life. You can be a slave for less than a lifetime historically, too.

I’m not saying that volunteer work can’t be good. Indeed if that young man I know hadn’t been able to find a job during high school, doing volunteer work could give him skills and thus a leg up on his competitors for jobs.

And volunteering can be rewarding. A number of years ago, when I wanted to give back to my community, I went to a place in my town called the Volunteer Action Centre and rifled through binders filled with volunteer positions separated according to type. Because of this, I did give back, and because of the choice it was in an area that was more pleasant to me than just picking anything.

Looking at the online propaganda of the Ontario secondary school system they sometimes call the volunteer work “community service” instead of volunteer work. And in my 40+ years in this province, the only other time I’ve heard the phrase “community service” was when we were punishing criminals.

So why are we punishing our youth with slave work?

Posted in Politics, Wee Bit O' Humour | Tagged , , , , | 4 Comments

The Invisible Man Problem

Posted on 9 April 2011 by Larry Russwurm

Have you heard of the invisible man problem? The typical invisible man, as envisioned by H.G. Wells, must somehow change food into something invisible during the digestive process else the invisible man will not stay invisible. Even if he does process food into something invisible, partially digested and thus partially visible food can render the invisible man seen.

Anyhow, philosophers and men of high learning have asked the question, ‘When, oh, when does the food become invisible?’

Since the food must become invisible at some point, I’m kind of ambivalent about the question. Instead I’m more concerned about the converse. When does the invisible man’s $#!+ become visible? This question can be just as important as the standard invisible man problem. Allow the following to illustrate this:

“Roger, what’s wrong with you? You smell like $#!+, today.”

“You know, I thought I stepped in $#!+ today on my front step. But when I looked carefully at my shoes I saw that nothing was there.”

“Aren’t you one of the neighbours of the invisible man?”

“Curse him!” Roger shakes his fist in the air and looks around for the source of his wrath but of course can’t see anyone. “I was only a couple days late in returning his lawn mower. But now it’s personal! See if he ever gets his lawn mower back!”

“Uh, Roger, aren’t you trying to keep something out of reach of the greatest thief that ever lived? I mean even motion detectors don’t work on him.”

“$#!+.”

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True If Destroyed

Posted on 6 April 2011 by Larry Russwurm

Growing up I had a number of siblings near my own age. Young siblings usually don’t see the advantages they have and instead compete with each other for attention and privileges. There were a lot of insults flying around in my childhood. Some even made it onto the family blackboard.

Even if an insult appeared on the blackboard, it just needed to be spotted to be immediately erased. Then one day my older sister did something new. She wrote an insult and beside it wrote “True if destroyed”.

At first I didn’t know what to do with this new thing. I probably went to erase the blackboard but then stopped myself. It would be as if I was making the insult true. That “True if destroyed” preyed on my mind and I finally decided that erasing it would activate the “True if destroyed” thus actualizing the insult.

To me the insult existed in a state of neither true or false, some kind of Schrodinger’s cat which was neither alive nor dead until the box was opened. So I had to deal with leaving up an insult directed at me in order to keep it powerless. I swear it was about this time that I developed a nervous tic.

I stayed strong and left these insults up. It became obvious to me that not allowing my sister to complete an insult or the “True if destroyed” part was the best solution. So I became better at catching my sister in the act.

But unfortunately she came up with the abbreviation “T.I.D.” which stood for the tic inducing phrase. Occasionally I’d stop her in time, but only some of the time. I swear my tic became worse.

But eventually my sister became unsatisfied. She was not content to wait for me to actualize all these insults. So she started putting “T.I.N.D.” up with the insult and “T.I.D.” She figured this “True if not destroyed” gave me no room to get out of the insult.

And I saw that my sister was just nasty and trying to leave me with no avenue for escaping the insult. If there is no way out, of course, there is no reason to leave any insult up. So instead of deep thinking, the solution was to keep erasing all insults. There was no more hesitation.

My sister had been winning up to this point. But with no insult left up and no deep thinking necessary, I swear any nervous tic I had went away. Not being able to stand me having a way out, my sister lost her ability to prey on my mind. To me it became one of those rare victories for the younger sibling.

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The Southwestern Ontario Elephant

Posted on 2 April 2011 by Larry Russwurm

As you can see, southwestern Ontario looks much like an elephant with a broken spear sticking out of its chest.

We can locate certain cities by their position on the elephant. Windsor is the tip of the nose or the elephant’s hand. Goderich is the back, London the neck, and Niagara Falls is the toe.

But some positions on the elephant seem to say something about the city or town. Sarnia can brag that it is the brain of the elephant. Kitchener or Brantford can argue who is the heart of the elephant. I live in Kitchener, thus Kitchener is the heart of the southwestern Ontario elephant.

There are more negative places to be. Hamilton would be the armpit of the elephant. And sadly Wiarton or Owen Sound would be the @$$hole of the elephant.  We might have to put it to a vote. And if we had a vote, the much larger Owen Sound would likely $#!+ all over the smaller Wiarton  thus proving that Owen Sound is the true @$$hole of the elephant.

And St. Thomas? It is also on the vulnerable neck of the elephant. And St. Thomas is where Jumbo the Elephant died in 1885 by being hit by a train. It is truly a vulnerable spot for an elephant.

Posted in Geography, History, Humour | Tagged , , , , | 5 Comments

Enforced Humility

Posted on 30 March 2011 by Larry Russwurm

Here is an article I found on the Internet, at the H2G2 (Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) site, that I take umbrage with. Especially the line “There is no hard-and-fast definition of a polymath; but it’s a title that should be given to someone by others, and not self-appointed.”

Of course I’m annoyed. Just last post I said I’m a bit of a polymath. So I obviously take the opposite position. I hope the title of this post sums up what I think of H2G2’s position. They are trying to enforce humility. Fake humility is nothing short of dishonest. With enforced humility, there are bound to be some fakers and thus liars.

Plus, that position leads to stealing a word from the intellectually endowed. Even Leonardo da Vinci himself would have to spend time in a dance, to get someone else to call him a polymath. That time could have been better spent coming up with a new invention.

Indeed, after seeing this position I’m even against appearing to be humble. So I’m not going to call myself a bit of a polymath but just a straight polymath.

And I like the opposite position I’m taking up. I think only polymaths should be allowed to bestow the word polymath on others. Why? Because only polymaths have the breadth of skills to assess breadth of skills.

By calling someone a polymath I don’t necessarily mean to invoke total awe in people. A straight A student would be enough or perhaps a musician that can fix every part of their car would qualify.

If it wasn’t for the first part of the quote, I would think that the author meant an acclaimed polymath like Leonardo or Aristotle who are name dropped in the article. In the case of the acclaimed polymath I can see the title being best given by other polymaths. Regular polymaths can self name.

And if you actually do go over to the H2G2 page, what is up with the “69” in the logo circle? Shouldn’t it be a 42?

Posted in Language, Wee Bit O' Humour, Writing | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments

Fallen Hero

Posted on 26 March 2011 by Larry Russwurm

I’m a bit of a polymath so of course Leonardo da Vinci has long been one of my idols. In fact the more common phrase “Renaissance man” is used instead of polymath despite its sexism. The popularity of this sexist phrase is due in large part to Leonardo da Vinci and his many, diverse accomplishments.

So I was pleased one Christmas to receive from my brother a book entitled The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci. The first thing I did was peruse the table of contents. One of the headings was entitled Comparison of the Arts. Who better than Leonardo, I thought, to contrast and compare diverse subjects. I was shocked at what I found when I turned to the section.

It begins ignobly: “How painting surpasses all human works…”. Further down it gets more to the crux of its arguments, “And if the poet serves the understanding by way of the ear, the painter does so by the eye, which is the nobler sense.”

It’s a comparison between the art of painting and the art of poetry. And Leonardo is slandering poetry heavily while praising painting. The section then gets into sculpture and Leonardo claims painting is more intellectual than sculpture. But let’s get back to poetry and painting. Leonardo went down a few notches in my estimation with his bile.

First of all I gather that Leonardo wasn’t considered to be good at poetry. So we have a chink in his armour of being totally rounded. And secondly it seems so immature to praise something you are good at while simultaneously dismissing something you are not so good at. Don’t get me wrong, Leonardo could write. The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci runs over one thousand pages, so obviously he could write. But it seems he had no place for poetry.

I’m kind of like Leonardo in that I’ve never picked up a book of poetry on its own. Still I love music and in the present age that also means a love of lyrics. You can see this leads to a healthy respect for the poetry that shaped and forms the basis of lyrics. And, indeed I think my way led me to think no art is superior to another or inferior.

I see you people who are bringing up mimes. Some fine arts have more breadth than others but I stand by the superior/inferior thing.

So probably my biggest hero has fallen. He’s not down to nothing, there are some brilliant things in this book. Like everyone else I’ve known, there is a weak spot in Leonardo where the average person can look slightly down. And here I am surrounded by fallen idols. Guess I’ll just have to continue thinking for myself. There won’t be that one magic person who I can always defer to.

Yes Pink Floyd I traded my heroes for ghosts. I thought that was safe when ghosts included the likes of Leonardo da Vinci. And now I find that today’s standards surprise, surprise, aren’t being met by these long ago heroes.

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All Psychologists are Lazy

Posted on 24 March 2011 by Larry Russwurm

Let’s look at birth order as handed down to us from the psychologists. There are two methods of divvying up birth order.

Both theories take the only child as separate and have some things to say about this position. It is of course closest to the eldest born in both theories because let us not forget, the eldest child was an only child for some time.

In the first theory, there is a distinct personality to the 2nd born, 3rd born and 4th born. Then an unexplained miracle occurs and the 5th born is exactly like the 1st born with no time spent being an only child. The 5th born can only dream of being an only child. The cycle inexplicably repeats with the 6th born being like the 2nd born and the 7th born being like the 3rd etc.

In the 2nd theory of birth order, the oldest is differentiated from the youngest and the middle children. There can be as high as 15 middle children in some extreme families, but none of these children are seen to be much different.

I think birth order psychologists are lazy and the aforementioned helps to prove this. Full disclosure, I am a 6th child and a middle child. As well I also have step family.

The first theory claims I should be like my oldest sister, the 2nd born in my family. She is no longer with us, may she rest in peace, but I don’t think any in my huge family have said I’m much like her. Comparison is more likely to be drawn between me and our 1st born or 3rd born since the three of us are heavy readers. So, I sincerely believe that when the psychologists came up with this birth order theory, they very lazily said it just repeats after 4 kids.

These psychologists could easily have said they don’t know or even that it just gets too expensive to continue the studies past 4 children because they are rare and becoming scarcer in our modern world.

But they didn’t say this so I say they are being lazy. Making all middles the same is blatantly lazy, too.

So with me being 6th, middle, and step I think psychology is saying to me I am a riddle wrapped in an enigma wrapped in a conundrum.

Not only that, but saying the cycle repeats itself as in the first theory, I think they have overzealously generalized just to ‘complete’ a theory. This is like me generalizing that since birth order psychologists are lazy, that all psychologists are lazy.

Posted in Pseudo Science, Science, Social Science, Wee Bit O' Humour | Tagged , , , , , , , | 1 Comment