The Butt Ugly Weblog

Just out of curiosity, I went through Helsingin Sanomat discussion board and picked a news item about how much the fight against the climate change is expected to cost per person. Of course, the discussion board was flooded with discussion on whether climate change is real, and how it's actually a green conspiracy rivaling nazism, aiming to create a new world order.

So I spent an hour and I went through each comment, and noted how many typos or grammatical errors they had, and put them in three bins: Sceptics, Defenders and Others. Factual errors or hard-to-understand sentences were not counted - only real grammar errors. Quotations were also not examined, because the errors in them would be the fault of someone else.

"Sceptics" are the people who don't believe there is anthropogenic climate change. "Defenders" were people who believed it is true. "Others" were people who were mostly just complaining about the price, saying things like "we should really make sure our war veterans are taken care of first" (neither confirming nor denying), or just so unclear it was impossible to say whether they were for or against.

As you can see, the sceptics had over 3 grammar errors/typos per comment, whereas the defenders only had an average of 1.13. Others were in the middle with 1.71 errors/comment.

While the sampling is a bit small to draw any real conclusions, the result does not exactly weaken the image of climate sceptics as uneducated people who spew thousands of comments online with their mouths foaming.

(However, it was interesting to note that the same error patterns seemed to occur even in posts by different aliases. So I suspect that some people are using multiple aliases to create the appearance that there is bigger consensus. Which would be quite normal online, and is one of the reasons why feedback should be always taken with a grain of salt. Also, thanks to Muprhy's law, it's almost certain this particular blog entry is teeming with grammar errors. Then again, English is not my native language. So there. Besides, I think my brain is bleeding internally after reading through all those comments.)

I've been doing triage on stuff found from my cupboards. Here's the stuff which I think might still be usable to people, so let me know if you need any of this stuff before I drag it to recycling.

My parents got us a present for the naming day of our son. It was a photoframe, engraved with his birthdate - the exact same kind of a photoframe that they had for me. They also gave me that photoframe, so we could put them side by side and display them proudly in our livingroom.

The thing is, the photoframe had a stock image of a generic baby, not a picture of our son, 'cos we hadn't found a good picture yet. The frame looked nice, so we put it next to the telly, and kind of forgot about it.

What was fun that every single person who saw that frame afterwards commented on how much the boy looks like me. Nobody stopped to consider that the boy in the picture looked nothing like the entity crawling on the floor. So we had to take the picture out so as not to confuse people.

Our expectations colour our perception.

(That, or I look like a generic baby.)