An engineer called George Bible (!) was seen in a documentary exclaiming ”Isn’t she lovely?” about an airplane wing.

You know that selling condoms only became legal in Ireland a short while ago, don’t you? Well, I’ve wondered what tourists had to do in pre-condom times if they wanted to have sex in Ireland. Did they raid pharmacists like others raid banks? Was there a black market for condoms? Did you have to show your passport at the pharmacist’s to prove you’re not from around here? Fascinating indeed.

In New York there have been, on average, more than one and a half bank heists a day in the first four months of 2003 (courtesy of the New Yorker) and over 12,000 tigers are kept as pets in the US (courtesy of the Sunday Times Magazine).

BMW is promoting its new car like a movie. The soft-top isn’t even in stores yet and still they’re running commercials everywhere. And they’re exactly like movie teasers: just small glimpses of the car, a new version every couple of weeks and a simple slogan, arriving 16 June (or something).

Like advertising wasn’t irritating enough already.

But most people know you won’t get SARS simply by drinking Sars. (source)

I’ve still got one more story about today’s Guardian, for it was accompanied by a wonderful little advertisement titled ”Discover Finland”. How lovely, I thought, they’re finally noticing us.

Well, yes and no. See, Finland has actually been voted the readers’ favourite European Country. Twice. In a row! Now that’s something to be proud of. I guess. Sadly the contents are nothing to go wild about. Helsinki City Tours, a quick pop to Turku and Lappeenranta (whatever, dudes), skiing in Lappi.

But there’s one delicious twist left. The pamphlet was put together by ”the Scandinavian specialist” … Norwegian Coastal Voyage Limited.

Okay, so the company is actually owned by the Guardian. But it’s still funny as hell.

A whole lot of people don’t seem to grasp what IQ is about. And I don’t even mean that defining or measuring intelligence is a bitch, but that the concept of IQ is often misunderstood. It’s not an absolute measure in the way that height or weight (or rather mass, if we’re being picky – and we are) are, but relative. It’s called ”intelligence quotient” for a reason. Failing to understand this basic premise results in sentences like the ones found in an article on gene manipulation on the Guardian Weekend (3.5.2003).

An ex-editor on Science is quoted in the article as saying If a child destined to have a permanently low IQ could be cured by replacing a gene, would anyone really argue with that? It is a short step from that decision to improving a normal IQ. Errors of this ilk are quite common but it gets worse.

A passage such as Of course, the problem is that if everyone’s adding 30 IQ points, then having an IQ of 150 won’t get you any closer to an elite university than you were at the outset shows exactly what the confusion is about. For IQ is defined in such a way that the median of all people will have an IQ of 100, meaning that if ”everyone adds 30 IQ points”, the resulting median still won’t be 130 but 100 and therefore talk of IQ points is quite useless, even misleading.

There is a possibility that this could be understood to be analogous to percentage points, but this theory can be easily debunked. Note how the author writes about adding 30 IQ points and thus resulting in an IQ of 150, not 150 IQ points. It’s the same as saying ”by adding 20 percentage points, the result is 150 percentages”, which is utter nonsense.

I’m not worried about possible mistakes I’ve made with statistical terms and concepts here, for I know I have an avid reader who’ll surely point out my possible shortcomings in no time.

My Nokia 8310i knows how to spell Freud but doesn’t recognize Faust. Does this mean something significant?

Here’s a little gem of journalistic skill I found in G2 today.

”It’s just about standards of living,” says Tremaine Bashford, herself from Priory estate, who works for the council advising local community groups and residents’ associations. ”The problem is that the government sets a basic standard of living for asylum seekers, and it’s nothing to do with the council. […] The stanrdard of living is actually better than some of the people in that area.” One might argue that if a housing estate can make asylum seekers look wealthy by comparison, it is not the asylum seekers who are the problem.

Innit so?

The magazine Men’s Health (no, I did not buy it, just leafed over it at Winnie’s) had an article called ”27 easy steps to health”. Now, if something has 27 steps, it is not easy.