This is an old bit, but it was new to me. Basically, YouTubers Rhett and Link wrote and performed a skit, then did it again but with dialog picked up from YouTube’s less-than-perfect automated captioning of the original. The result is dumb but pretty funny.
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John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight on HBO continues to do some of the most important journalism on television. Here the topic is the fragmented 911 emergency call system in the United States. Problems include outdated technology, problems staffing the centers, and diversion of 911 service fees from 911 to general government funding. As usual there’s a lot of humor to go with the serious subject matter, so the viewer ends up better informed, concerned, angry, and amused all at the same time.
by Here’s Bill Maher’s followup to 25 Things You Didn’t Know About Ted Cruz:
by In yet another report worth seeing both for the factual content and the entertainment value, John Oliver addresses some problems with science, including insufficient replication, doubtful forced results (“p-hacking”), and especially sloppy science reporting in the media, notably on morning news shows.
Incidentally, for more on the subject of p-hacking, see this XKCD comic and accompanying explanation.
The problems Oliver describes have lately been a major topic for discussion in the scientific community, and serious efforts are being made to address them, so it’s not like they’re being ignored. But it’s not necessarily clear what to do, and some in some fields it’s just inherently harder to get sound results. Research related to human beings, from health to sociology, is particularly difficult.
As Oliver suggests, one of the biggest problems with bad science is that besides simply being misleading, it can cause unjustified public doubts about really sound science. There’s a big difference between isolated individual studies with questionable results (or with results wildly exaggerate or completely misrepresented by the news media) and immense bodies of research and evidence for things such as evolution, global warming, and quantum mechanics. But for many non-scientists the distinction isn’t clear.
by In a post a few weeks ago I embedded an a video mashup combining dialog from Friends with scenes from Game of Thrones. The same talented person or persons, based in France, have done a lot of others along the same lines, including a few in English. Here’s one that combines Star Wars with Back to the Future:
by Much of the U.S. is likely to see a lot of cicadas in the near future. As you probably know, these insects have a remarkable life cycle, living for 17 years underground, at the end of which they mature into adults with wings, come to the surface, take flight, mate. And that’s the end, though on balance, it doesn’t sound like such a terrible way to go.
The 17-year cicadas due to emerge this summer were conceived in 1999 and a lot has happened since then, so John Oliver offers this brief segment to fill them in on what they’ve missed:
Mayflies, incidentally, do something similar to cicadas. While they are thought of as having very short lifespans, that true only of the last phase of their lives. Prior to that they’ve typically lived a couple of years as so-called nymphs swimming around in water (though a lot of them are eaten by fish in that time). Eventually they develop into a winged form called a subimago, which flies poorly if at all and isn’t fully mature. But very soon, after anywhere from a few minutes to a day or so depending on the species, they moult again into the fully adult stage, called an imago, making mayflies the only insects that have two winged stages.
It’s the final, flying, mating stage of the mayfly life cycle, during which they can’t even eat, that is brief. Flying mayflies live up to a day or two in some species but far less in others. In one, Dolania americana, adult females live less than five minutes. As with cicadas, their swarms can be crazy, as in this report from CNN.
by Jackie Broyles and Dunlap discuss Republicans (including Jackie) who won’t support Donald Trump. The clip runs under 2.5 minutes not counting the bit at the end where they talk about their new posting schedule.
For extra amusement, try clicking the CC button at the bottom of the video (visible while it’s playing if mouse over it). YouTube’s automatic closed captioning often has trouble interpreting what it’s hearing, but it’s doubly bad decoding a Tennessee accent.
by I don’t want this to turn into a full-time bathroom blog (though now that I think of it, somebody might want to consider starting one), but I’ve run across a couple more things related to North Carolina’s HB2 not mentioned in my earlier post today or previous ones.
First, Republican former NC Governor Jim Martin has written a sensible essay about the law that you can read here. Governor Martin is more polite about it than I am and speaks of “compromise,” but it’s pretty clear that he recognizes that HB2 is ridiculous, even for the current legislature (which some Republicans I know have been calling an embarrassment pretty much since it took office).
Second, here’s a clip from yesterday’s edition of Fox News Sunday in which host Chris Wallace points out to North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory that the problem HB2 was supposedly meant to address doesn’t actually exist in the real world:
Governor McCrory at least has the sense to more or less admit that Wallace is right, though of course he also does the expected political posturing about “federal overreach.” (How dare the Justice Department urge the state to obey the law and court decisions!) He also tries to blame the law on liberal Democrats in Charlotte, who apparently forced the Republicans to pass the law, possibly by double-dog-daring them or something.
One might hope that if even NASCAR and Fox News recognize that the law is dumb, at least a few brighter members of our GOP-controlled legislature would at least start having second thoughts. In fact, I suspect that a lot of them would happily repeal the law now they realize how completely wrong-headed and useless it really is. (In practice, the bathroom provisions are counterproductive and almost impossible to enforce as written, and by far the biggest consequence, eliminating civil rights lawsuits in state courts, was apparently a drafting error that McCrory himself has explicitly called for repealing.)
In fairness, by the way, I should note that some of the legislative votes in favor of HB2 came from Democrats. Dimwittedness is bipartisan.
Update: In the meantime, Governor McCrory filed suit to ask a federal court to declare that HB2 doesn’t discriminate and the federal Department of Justice filed a separate suit to block enforcement of some provisions of the law. WRAL television news has a summary here.
by There are a still a lot of misconceptions about HB2, North Carolina’s so-called “bathroom law.” News media have contributed to this — as I confess have I in previous posts — by not making it clear how limited and unenforceable the silly bathroom provisions actually are.
It’s pretty clear the legislature didn’t know what it was passing and the governor didn’t now what he was signing: The secretly-written bill was introduced, passed, and signed into law in less than 12 hours. Even the governor, who still pretends to think the law is “common sense,” has already called for part of it to be repealed (a part he apparently didn’t realize was there when he signed it).
Here are some of the main things people seem to miss:
It has no effect anywhere else — not in factories, office buildings, shopping malls, stores, private schools and universities, hotel convention centers, restaurants, churches, or anywhere else not actually operated by state or local government in North Carolina.
It says people must use the restroom corresponding to the gender on their birth certificate. A person’s physical appearance, genitalia, photo ID, and so on make no difference. Only the birth certificate counts. So exactly how is any law enforcement officer going to know what the birth certificate says? (Keep in mind that the person in question might have been born in another state or country.) Indeed, what’s to stop a man entering a women’s room from saying, “My birth certificate says I’m female, so I have to use the ladies’ room”? How could a case be prosecuted? Remember, burden of proof in criminal cases rests on the state, not the accused.
A previous post included a photo of a North Carolina resident who is obviously a man — facial hair and everything — whose birth certificate says he’s female. I suspect he and others in his circumstances (there are a fair number of them, both male and female) will have the good sense to ignore this idiotic law and keep using the restrooms that corresponds to their actual and apparent gender, as pretty much all transsexuals have long been doing. But what if instead they decide to obey the law? There would be transgender men with beards and other bits of male physiology using women’s restrooms, which is what the legislators mistakenly thought they were preventing. How is this “common sense,” as the law’s defenders characterize the law? (My guess is that most of them are simply clueless and confuse “transgender” with “transvestite,” and those who now realize they’ve made a serious mistake are too embarrassed to admit it.)
It might be theoretically possible that someone breaking the law might be charged with trespassing and hence fined or jailed, but the law itself doesn’t say what (if any) consequences violators should face.
And why for that matter wasn’t it passed decades ago?
Mainly because existing law already prohibits what HB2 pretends (and fails) to address. We have long had laws on the books against peeping toms, sexual assault, and so on.
Furthermore, except for occasional honest mistakes, people using the wrong restroom is pretty much a nonexistent problem in the real world anyway. In fact, most recent cases of men deliberately entering women’s restrooms have involved a few members of a religious right group “testing” Target’s restroom policy.
It’s not clear whether it was deliberate or a mere piece of stupidity — the governor seems to suggest it’s the latter and has called for it to be repealed — but a section of the law effectively eliminates the major civil rights protections in employment. These have nothing to do with the civil rights of gays, lesbians, or transsexuals (who have pretty much no such protections anyway in North Carolina). Instead, the law appears to prevent people from filing lawsuits over employment discrimination on the basis of race, religion, etc. If you’re an evangelical Christian whose boss doesn’t like evangelical Christians and fires you for it, you used to be able to sue in state court. Not any more. You can still sue in federal court, but that’s a lot harder, more expensive, and more time consuming, in part because there are far fewer federal courts that state courts.
HB2 has a number of other negative consequences, some of them described in previous posts here, here, and here. As far as I can tell, the law does nothing useful.
The whole law is counterproductive and unnecessary and needs to be repealed, preferably by this legislature (if they can work up the guts to admit they screwed up in their panic) or by the next one, which hopefully will have more traditional Republicans and Democrats and fewer panic-prone nuts and extremist loons.
What at least some GOP leaders are clearly wishing for is that the law will be overturned by federal courts, thus fixing their mistake without the need to do any work, while at the meantime allowing them to stir up their uninformed base by raving about “federal overreach” and the like. It would be a political win-win for them. In fact, one might cynically suppose that the law was passed purely to stir up GOP base voters who might otherwise stay home in November out of despair over having Trump as the nominee.
(Updated 2016 May 9 and 12 to add the last paragraph and a few clarifications elsewhere.)
by Jackie Broyles and Dunlap sadly accept that Donald Trump is almost certain to be the GOP nominee. Dunlap gets a little foul-mouthed about it.
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