Brian D. Buckley

Let’s talk about logic.

A Yahoo headline proclaims: “New study shows school sports improve grades.” The article says:

…LAUSD has discovered a striking correlation between students’ participation in interscholastic athletics and their performance in both attendance and in the classroom. According to the study, the 35,000 student athletes in LAUSD attended an average of 21 more days of school per year than their counterparts, while they also sported GPAs some 0.55 to 0.74 points higher than non-athletes.

How should we interpret this finding? The article makes it clear:

“[The study statistics] prove what has generally been assumed, that participation in high school athletics, on average, positively enhances the student’s academic progress in comparison with the rest of the student body,” LAUSD commissioner of athletics Barbara Fiege said…

(Emphasis mine.)

Simple, right? Students who play sports get better grades. So if you want to boost your kid’s GPA, sign them up for basketball.

Let’s apply this logic elsewhere. A recent study discovered a striking correlation between people opening their umbrellas, and rain falling. So if you don’t want it to rain, ditch the umbrella.

You see the problem.

Yes, it could be that sports improve grades. It could also be getting good grades makes a student more confident, and thus more likely to play sports. A third option, most probable of all, is that some extra factor (like self-discipline or strong parenting) causes both the sports commitment and the good grades.

You’d need more analysis, or more research, to find the underlying cause-effect relationship. But the article doesn’t even consider these other possibilities. It leaps straight from correlation to causation, unaware it is leaping.

This way of thinking is very common. News stories do it often. Even scientists do it. I did it myself, for a long time. The cure for this logical fallacy can be summed up in five words, which are enshrined in their own Wikipedia page:

Correlation does not imply causation.

This simple piece of knowledge will open your eyes to all sorts of misleading studies and claims. These days, writers say “studies show…” to justify almost anything, waving the phrase like a magic wand, conjuring in the name of science. Well, science doesn’t lie, but your brain is the ultimate con artist. Tread carefully.

To be fair to the media, here’s an NBC story – posted just yesterday – which is much more careful:

Over 3 hours of television a day may make kids more antisocial

British researchers…found those who watched television longer than three hours per day were more likely to develop antisocial behaviors such as fighting, stealing or bullying. […]

The study’s authors concede the link between conduct problems and television time may be indirect, and a factor of the added inactivity, sleeping difficulties or impaired development associated with too much screen time.

The findings…showed an association and not cause and effect. The researchers said more work is needed to determine a causal link, but in the meantime, they suggest a cautionary approach to heavy television use in young children.

(Emphasis mine.)

Kudos to the author of this article (Ryan Jaslow). Granted, these subtleties may be lost on the average reader, but the media can only do so much. Readers have to meet them halfway.

Yea, verily: go forth and be smart.

The Cthulhu notebook:

What hideous, eldritch runes must I inscribe in this singular tome?

Let us dare to gaze inside:

As you see: horrifying.

Meanwhile, my 8-bit fridge magnet is a hit with the ladies already:

Oh, yeah. She can’t hide that smile. Chicks dig the pixels.

Got anything cool on your fridge and/or bookshelf these days?

On Saturday, Betsy and I went to the Animarathon anime convention in Bowling Green, Ohio. We’re not especially into anime per se, but we’re sci-fi/fantasy nerds, and they had plenty of that too.

The con attracted well over 2,000 people. We explored the giant vendor room, where we bought:

• A dragon T-shirt for Betsy
• A sweet wood-grain pen
• An 8-bit Mario sprite decoration for the fridge
• A kickass leatherbound notebook with a Cthulhu-esque shape inscribed on the cover

We also went to a panel hosted by Robert Axelrod, the voice actor for Lord Zedd from Power Rangers. He answered questions from the audience and played video clips from the show, which brought back some memories I hadn’t thought about in a long, long time. He seemed very nice, and pleasantly surprised that anyone would still be interested in his Zedd role after all these years.

A big part of any con’s appeal, of course, is people-watching. A ton of the fans were in costume. Just walking around, we saw two Marios, two Luigis, a Joker, a Pikachu, an Ash Ketchum, a dude with a Portal gun, at least three Links, a Cloud (FF7), a Captain America, a Ryuk (Death Note), and dozens upon dozens of other characters I couldn’t identify. Many of them had obviously put a lot of time into their costumes, and some looked so cool that I wished I had a costume myself. (The Riddler, perhaps?) But aside from a Kwisatz Haderach T-shirt, I was pretty boring.

The con got me thinking, though. Cons are a celebration of what is, essentially, entertainment: TV, movies, comics, video games, books, merchandise. As such, they’re divided between two overlapping but fundamentally different groups: the entertainers, or suppliers of content (actors, musicians, vendors, con organizers), and the fans, or consumers of content.

Fans come because they’re in love with the entertainment. Maybe it’s just fun, or maybe it connects with them on a deep level. Through the lens of the anime, the show, or whatever, they see another world that enthralls or inspires them. But their role is essentially passive. Yes, they may make costumes or write fan fic, but they don’t have to. Their job is to watch and enjoy.

For the suppliers of content, the outlook is very different. The construction of fantasy isn’t rapture; it’s a job. They go to work whether they feel like it or not, whether they’re bored or not, and they take home a paycheck. Their role is essentially active, and disciplined. Their dedication is to the craft, to the work, and not necessarily to the character or the merchandise.

Of course, many, many people take on both of these roles. But the cultures still clash. Often the fans love a character more than the actor does, or value a piece of art more highly than the artist does. William Shatner, for instance, used to avoid Trekkie conventions:

I didn’t want anything to do with them. I didn’t want anything to do with a group of obsessives who paid to get together to talk incessantly about a TV show that had been cancelled.

These days, the two worlds are much more in tune with each other, largely because cons have gotten so popular. But there’s still some distance between them.

It’s not a bad thing. It’s necessary. But it certainly makes you think about which side you want to be on.

How was your weekend?

A solar flare, photographed on August 31, 2012. Click to enlarge.

Image source

Yesterday I bemoaned the lack of science kits at big stores like Walmart and Meijer. So last night I stopped by Hobby Lobby, bought a chemistry set, and got to work.

What kind of science went down, you ask? Let’s set the stage with a few simple facts:

• Water is made of hydrogen and oxygen.
• You can remove pure hydrogen from water by an easy process called electrolysis.
• Pure hydrogen explodes when you set it on fire.

…you can probably see where this is going.

Let’s make some magic!

As you can see, this is a high-class operation. Following the kit’s instructions carefully, I prepared my materials.

Most of this is common household stuff: casserole dish, spoon, table salt, 9-volt battery, and matches. The only specialized stuff (from the kit) is the wires and the tubes with graphite rods. The wires are just ordinary wires with alligator clips. The tubes are basically plastic test tubes (closed on one end, open on the other) with a graphite rod going through the middle. Graphite pencil lead will work too.

Now add a tablespoon of salt:

Fill the pan with water, and stir to dissolve the salt.

The purpose of the salt is to make the water conduct electricity. Despite what you may have heard, pure water is not a very good conductor.

Now we fill the tubes completely with water, making sure all the air is out. These tubes are closed on top and open on the bottom. I’ve clamped a wire to the top of each graphite rod. The tubes aren’t necessary for electrolysis, they’re just there to collect the pure hydrogen and oxygen. We’re using graphite because it conducts electricity and (unlike iron) doesn’t oxidize in water.

We’ll hook up our 9-volt battery…

And voila! Electrolysis has started, simple as that.

The oxygen is collecting in the left tube, the hydrogen in the right. Pure hydrogen is completely clear. You can tell it’s working because bubbles form around the rods, and because the water level in the tubes goes down as they fill up with gas.

Here’s a closeup:

It may be hard to see – you can click the image for a better view. The tube on the left has only a small volume of oxygen at the top, and big slow bubbles of oxygen form at the bottom. The tube on the right fills up with hydrogen much faster, and it’s already a third full. The little hydrogen bubbles fizz quickly.

Once the tube is full of pure hydrogen, there’s only one thing to do: light it!

Science for the win!

Any questions?

Yesterday, Betsy and I stopped at Meijer (local department store) to pick up a few things. On a whim, I decided to buy a science project kit. Nothing particular in mind, just something fun I could build – a chemistry experiment, levitating magnets, grow-your-own crystals, whatever. I hadn’t done anything science-y in a while, and it seemed like a cool way to spend a Sunday afternoon.

We headed to the toys section and started browsing. Meijer has a dizzying selection of toys: Legos, Barbies, action figures, puzzles, Nerf guns, aisle after aisle of everything you could imagine.

Science? Not so much. I think they had a Glow-in-the-Dark Squishy Science model of human anatomy, but that was about it.

Don’t get me wrong. I’ve got nothing against toys, and I’m not one of those people who insists on turning every kid’s playtime into a lesson. But when you’ve got hundreds of square feet devoted to toys, and nothing you can meaningfully learn from? Well, in Betsy’s words, that’s “kind of depressing.”

Undeterred, we moved on to Walmart. Same deal. Thousands of toys, nothing educational. Well, that’s not quite true – they did have a few things. But it was all for babies. Learn your colors and numbers, that kind of stuff.

The idea seems to be that learning is what you do when you’re very young, before you’re sophisticated enough for officially licensed action figures.

In fact, the book section of these stores is much the same way. Lots of romance novels, lots of spirituality and “self-help” and shallow, feel-good “Christian” books. A solid dose of inflammatory political nonsense. A handful of more literary offerings, generally tie-ins with whatever movie they’re promoting this week. But mostly entertainment.

Again, I have nothing against entertainment or movie tie-ins or romance novels. But when you have a whole section showcasing mankind’s greatest invention – the written word – and almost nothing that will open your mind? Kind of a missed opportunity, wouldn’t you say?

So we went home and mixed vinegar and baking soda and green food dye to make a St. Patrick’s Day volcano in the sink. Not that we learned any Deep Science Knowledge from that either, I suppose, but not too bad for a lazy weekend.

Oddly enough, you know the one store in town that does have a section for science experiments? Hobby Lobby. Yeah. Too bad they’re not open on Sundays. But I know where I’m headed after work today!