The coldest winter I ever spent
Archive for November 2007
Today we begin a new segment called “Aljazeera or Onion?” where you decide if the headlines before you were taken from Aljazeera or The Onion…
For the answer to today’s quiz, highlight the white-on-white text between the arrows.
—>This appeared on the front page of http://english.aljazeera.net/ on 11-30-07. Truth can be so much stranger than fiction.<–
What a spectacle!
(thanks Marah!)
I hadn’t looked into who the body actor behind that groovy Golf GTI ad was. It is David Bernal, AKA David Elsewhere. Normal physics does not apply to this person!
I don’t think I mentioned this here before but the Serpent Mother made the centerfold (yes, literally the centerfold) of the November 2006 edition of IEEE Spectrum magazine. Spectrum is the Time Magazine of the professional geek world.
Want to inform people that a myth is false? You can’t do it! Merely by talking about the myth, you are reaffirming it in their minds.
Want to “make” something true? Just tell it to your audience repeatedly. Eventually, they’ll mistake being told many times by the same source as being told by many sources the same thing.
This is how advertising works. This is how political attack ads work. This is how selling works.
From On the Media’s “The Truth of False“, aired September 7th, 2007
BOB GARFIELD: Americans may or may not be as sleep-deprived as drug makers claim, but if it were a myth you could try to quash it with the truth. That’s what the Centers for Disease Control Prevention recently did. They sent out a flyer listing various facts and myths about the flu vaccine and labeled them “true or false.” But a study at the University of Michigan found that the CDC flyer actually did nothing to change people’s minds and may have even spread vaccine myths to more people.
Shankar Vedantam, a reporter for The Washington Post, explains that right after reading the flyer, people mostly remembered the false statements as false.
SHANKAR VEDANTAM: But about 30 minutes later, older people started to remember some of the false statements as true, and three days later, very large numbers of older people and significant numbers of younger people also started remembering increasing numbers of myths as true. Continue reading ‘The Truth of False’ »
Images from Ben Thompson’s merciless peep army
Here’s a couple SWARM Glamour Shots that Mark Alexander shot of Erik and myself. It’s mid-August and we’re working at the Box Shop on getting the batteries for the 6 orbs up to snuff for the playa.
I had accidentally marked several blog posts as “Private”. That made it so I could read them but noone else could. Here are most of those posts, de-privatized:
