Regruntled.com

Freakonomics has an interesting study of TV weather forecasts in the Kansas City metro area. On average, the forecasters were 85% accurate in forecasting tomorrow’s precipitation, declining to 73% for 7-day forecasts. The problem with this that it only rains in Kansas City 14% of the time, so if a forecaster simply always predicted that it would not rain, he’d be accurate 86% of the time. And that’s not just for tomorrow’s weather! He could always predict that it would not rain 7 days from now, or 30 days from now, and he’d still be right 86% of the time.

The article goes on to discuss hiring practices at the TV stations:

When directly asked if accuracy mattered in forecasting, every station manager and meteorologist said it did. But when asked what steps they had taken to measure and ensure accuracy, they were without answers.

No meteorologist or television station kept records of what they predicted, nor compared their predictions to actual results over a long term. No meteorologist posts their accuracy statistics on their résumé. No station managers use accuracy statistics in the hiring or evaluation of their meteorologists.

I collect background images. I thought I’d try making a sudoku out of randomly chosen images, the sudoku analog of a patchwork quilt. Click the sudoku to change the images.

Reader jde alerted me to a new product in Japan: a soybean simulator. The idea is that instead of fidgeting by popping bubble wrap, one can fidget by popping soybeans out of their pod. The pods are plastic, the beans are plastic, and the beans can be popped out over and over again.

I’m not fond of soybeans, but I do like peanuts, and I do find it satisfying to open the shells. But I eat the peanuts, and I open the shells in order to eat the peanuts. I don’t eat the peanuts because I like to open the shells.

There is something perverse about separating an activity from its reward, and offering people a fake activity without the reward. It’s like teaching Pavlov’s dog to ring his own bell.

See also:

• Bubble wrap

 

Video about elusive graffiti artist Banksy:

 

Reader jde sends a link to a site with 25-by-25 sudokus, using the letters A through Y instead of digits. Personally, I find the 9-by-9 variety sufficiently challenging.

The big tubs of Country Crock are now three ounces lighter. Raise the price 6%, people notice. Shrink the product 6%, maybe they don’t.

Country Crock is famous for having a lie-to-word ratio of one. It’s not from the country, and it’s not a crock. Two words, two lies. Now the container itself is misleading.

I eat butter occasionally, but I’m not a fan of margarine. So I took a good look at the margarine section of the supermarket, and it was not pretty. There is something called “Real Margarine”. As opposed to what, fake margarine? Margarine is fake butter to begin with. To paraphrase Woody Allen, fake margarine is a farce of a mockery of a sham.

It turns out that there really is a difference between real margarine and fake margarine, or “spread”. Butter is an emulsion of 80% fat, 20% water. Real margarine is an emulsion of 80% vegetable oil, 20% water. Country Crock, a fake margarine, is an emulsion of 39% vegetable oil and 61% water. Half the fat and three times as much water as real margarine.

Regular sudokus got you down? Too tough for your feeble brain? Try a binary sudoku!