28 June 2019

Spurious - graphic propaganda

My love for graphs has a most unfortunate side-effect. I end up shouting and swearing at most news reports with line graphs, bar graphs or pie charts. Regularly. In fact, most days.

What I see are spurious graphs, and they make me angry.

Spurious means:
♦️  of illegitimate birth; bastard
♦️  outwardly similar or corresponding to something without having its genuine qualities; false
♦️  of falsified or erroneously attributed origin; forged; of a deceitful nature or quality.

Bastard, false, deceitful! Yep, they are some of the words I shout at the TV.

The figures are from real data, right? The plots and lines are mathematics, so how can you argue with them? They have a seductive power; their apparent objectivity gives us a sense of trust. 

Reserve that trust: graphs are all too often a tool of propaganda. 

Spurious graphs are aimed at deliberately fooling you.

21 June 2019

TATKOP 110

There Are Two Kinds Of People - those who think everything is a miracle and those who think nothing is (Albert Einstein).

See more in the TATKOP series.

those who think everything is a miracle and those who think nothing is (Albert Einstein).

14 June 2019

Green - another way to over-consume?

Green is such a versatile colour. 

It's my second favourite colour (after purple); it symbolises nature and the natural world. Green also represents tranquillitygood luck, health, and jealousy. It's an easy colour to live with.

Green is also a versatile adjectiveMerriam-Webster provides ten different definitions just for the adjective form of green alone. It can mean the colour between yellow and blue on the light spectrum, covered in foliage, pleasant, youthful, unripe, envious, sickly, naive, unprocessed, and related to environmentalism. 

I want to talk about that tenth definition of green:
♦️ often capitalized: relating to or being an environmentalist political movement
♦️ concerned with or supporting environmentalism
♦️ tending to preserve environmental quality (as by being recyclable, biodegradable, or non-polluting)


Being green and supporting green ideas is becoming more mainstream. It used to be a fringe ideology, adopted by hippies and drop-outs. 

As green ideas have entered the mainstream, a new phenomenon known as greenwash has emerged. 

Greenwash involves pretending to be green in order to sell more.


But how can we detect this thin wash of 'green' over otherwise unchanged ideas and products?

7 June 2019

TATKOP 109

There Are Two Kinds Of People: those who see growing up as learning about the world and those who see it as learning about ourselves.

See more in the TATKOP series.

those who see growing up as learning about the world and those who see it as learning about ourselves.