While we're at it ...

2012 07 09: Update
The West Liberty construction is now finished, and the street is open again.

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Posting pictures, that is, here are a couple of screen shots to ponder. First, here's the overall 2012 satanic plot summer construction plan, as reported in A2.com and enhanced by our crack ground-truth team.

Click on it for a bigger version. The yellow lines are streets torn up, closed, or with lane closures -- or planned for this fate. Note, in particular, the damage being inflicted on East/West traffic on Stadium, Liberty, and Miller. These projects are underway now, simultaneously.

Update 2012 06 18: per ground truth conducted this morning, the Huron Parkway devastation is just about over with. There's still some work going on at the Geddes and Fuller intersection, but otherwise, it was clear sailing.

If you look very, very closely at the center of the image, you can see a tiny segment of green. That's the one block of 5th Avenue that was recently completed and reopened to traffic. In case it's too small, here's a bigger picture.


Given that it took two years to complete that one block, anyone with the ability to perform a linear projection should be able to conclude that we will never be able to go across town again. Of course, this would be unscientific, as unscientific as, say, the good legislators of North Carolina, who want to require their state government to use only linear models for climate change. But that's a totally different story, innit?

Oh, and by the way, look how badly the roof of the transit center is skewed! Hasn't anyone noticed by now? I want my money back!

A suggestion WRT the Ann Arbor Marathon

Having not sufficiently contributed to divisiveness and partisanship, not to say clan violence between the Evil Westsiders and the Righteous Sons of Liberty who dwell on the East Side (you can see how far this gone, already,)the city allowed this weekend's Ann Arbor Marathon to be routed along Main Street from the heart of downtown clear out to Briarwood, effectively preventing any traffic from getting anywhere along any east/west route.

Now, my understanding of marathons and other examples of self-abuse healthy exercise is limited, but I do know that they pose a planning problem in that the course has to be 26.something miles long, or -- and this is the key point -- it has to add up to that number, with sufficient repetition. So for next year, if there's still a city here next year, I suggest that the run be set up to utilize another inspired piece of recent traffic engineering, and that it be routed around and around and around the Maple Road traffic circles, south of Miller.

This would inconvenience the least number of residents and taxpayers inconsequential and irrelevant members of the populace, since no one in his or her right mind would voluntarily use that piece of road to operate a motor vehicle. And it would provide entertainment, as the runners became dizzy and staggered off into the surrounding countryside.



As an alternative, the race could be set up on Yost Blvd., over on the East Side, and run around the tiny obstacle traffic-calming device that was thoughtfully constructed there in the not too distant past.

2012 06 19: Update: the Mayor appears to agree.

Around and around

The Latin tag that appears at the top of this Blog is attributed to Julius Caesar, and it means, roughly, "It's easy for men to believe what they want to."

Recently, there has been a lot of talk about this same phenomenon, under the label "Confirmation Bias." Essentially, if you have some results of some kind, or some observations, or something that passes for data, you are exhibiting or can be accused of exhibiting confirmation bias if you choose to interpret that data in a way that supports your pre-existing beliefs. It is my pre-existing belief that although CB certainly takes place, perhaps more often than not, it's the act of a fool to start flinging mud on that basis, since such criticism contains a serious logical flaw.

Consider: New Scientist recently ran a story about how CB might well be the basis of all positive interpretation of results, leading to support for the reality of paranormal phenomena. People, they said in effect, interpret observations as showing the existence of paranormal hooey if they already believe in it.

Well, a reader, somebody with some physics chops (he apparently won a Nobel prize, back in the Seventies,) wrote in, saying, "Oh, yeah! Well, maybe your authors think that because they're applying confirmation bias due to their not believing in paranormal stuff." (Or words to that effect.)

To which anyone, of course, could reply, "Ha! You just think that because you have a a pre-existing belief in the possibility of paranormality!"

To which he could then reply, "Oh, Yeah? Well, what if you ..."

You get the drift. It's all just a bunch of intellectual smack-talking. Yo' mama so credulous, she believe in ghosts! Oh, yeah? Yo' mama got confirmation bias in favor of not believin' in 'em! Oh, yeah? Well, yo' mama ... and around and around we go. It isn't a useful rhetorical device.

My point, if I can be said to have one, is that this isn't the most professional way to conduct intellectual discourse. Something that seems to have gotten lost along the path is that a scientist, even a social scientist or, God help us, a psychologist, should be extremely reticent to claim results or causalities on the basis of anything less than multiple, repeatable experiments. The right thing to say is that, based on the data I collected, there seemed to be nothing happening or, conversely, something happening, or -- much more likely -- nothing conclusive was observed, but I got tenure anyway.

This is how science was done, back in the dark ages when I was supposedly being trained to do it. What's gone wrong with the world?

Gee, Mom ...

"Oh, my, my look at the time - I've got to dress for my bridge club."

"Gee, Mom, isn't that bridge built yet?"

"No, Son, and it won't be until free hands on both sides of the big ditch can push the same button at the same time!"

Firesign Theater, Don't Crush That Dwarf

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Although that bridge (you know which bridge I'm talking about) isn't built yet, Fifth Avenue is. It took two years, five hundred and sixty-eight billion dollars, and the lives of twenty-six hundred underpaid Irish laborers, but the project is finally done. Don't you feel better now?

Editorial note: two of the three statistics related to the Fifth Avenue Project cited above are incorrect and the product of a deranged mind. The person responsible has been sacked.

Law school admissions spike

Apple / Google feud heats up. Users of Apple devices to be denied mapping services. Sales of Android based devices balloon. (Ok, I made that last part up.)

Another footnote

So the wretched little hack from the 'burbs long-time Detroit area politician, Thad McCotter, who launched a ludicrous attempt on the Presidency in 2011, has exploded in mid-air, not unlike a North Korean ballistic missile.

Another example of why, despite my frequent displeasure with their antics, I almost always end up concluding that the Democrats remain the lesser of two evils -- or three, if you believe the tea baggers are not really Republicans, something the Republicans apparently would like you to believe.

Hard to believe, but ...

Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein look back and conclude that -- shock, surprise -- Richard Nixon was scum.

Their thesis, with which I heartily concur, is that Nixon was at war with the country itself, fighting five assorted battles. If you were:

• Opposed to the war in Vietnam
  
• A member of or consumer of a free press
  
• A Democrat
  
• Concerned about rampant corruption and double-dealing
  
• In a category much harder to define: those who resist the revision of history by the intellectually dishonest and personally interested
  

then you were on his enemies list, whether he knew your name or not. I'm proud to count myself in that number.

Thanks, Peter!

In memoriam, Peter Bergman.

Duluth? Fug all, you can get Tierra Del Fuego!

Update: Ray Bradbury just died, too. Jeez.

On the positive side of the ledger

All is not completely grim in the realm of justice. True, we still have Citizens United in place, and as far as we know, Antonin Scalia has not contracted an embarrassing disease of any kind, but the courts of the world do occasionally turn out a good outcome.

Par example, the International Court, whose wheels grind slowly and very fine, indeed, convicted Charles Taylor for being a vicious, corrupt little Kinglet and, by the way, fomenting war in a neighboring country during his stint as President of Liberia. He got 50 years.

And as that bout of justice-mongering ended, another one kicked off, with Andy Coulson, the former editor of News of the World, Rupert Murdoch's defunct miserable little scandal sheet tabloid, has been arrested for being a lying sack of excrement perjury.

While both of these events are laudable, there is no room for complacency, as Graham Chapman might have put it. Consider:

• Rupert Murdoch himself has yet to be charged with anything.
  
• The species-er movement, a group of people who are demanding DNA tests to determine whether Donald Trump is actually human, remains underfunded and out of the mainstream.
  
• Although the TSA nearly got him, Henry Kissinger managed to shoot his way out of an ambush and is still at large.
  

Stay tuned to the Wood Charles News Service, where we are committed to covering all the obscure news we can invent find.

All right, McLuggage, listen up

Idly glancing at the stats for this blog, I notice that since inception, it's been viewed a total of 6100 times!

Looked at one way, I'm talking to myself. Looked at another, I've managed to annoy people over six thousand times. Would I have been able to accomplish that without the magic of the Internet? Who knows. I could try, but the expenditure for travel and pies would be prohibitive.