Freakonomics

This is a book jointly written by a journalist and an economist. It has one central theme, which I describe as "don't confuse correlation with causation". In other words, if two measures X and Y both move in the same direction by the same amount, you cannot infer that either causes, or even influences, the other.

If you are a person who, like me, has spent his life absorbed by and interested in numbers, statistics and politics, this book has nothing to say to you. If not, however - maybe you are more interested in words than numbers - the book has lots of entertaining examples of how this matters. And because there are lots, it becomes quite repetitive and you may well get to the point where you say "OK I get it; move on".

Which is what I did, after reading half the book.

It is pretentiously sub-titled "A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything". Don't let that encourage you. Or put you off. This is not Douglas Adams (Life, the Universe and Everything). It's a publisher's tag line.

Newspaper sub-editors often ignore the correlation/causation issue. Misleading headlines abound, even though they may be negated by the detail in the article. Do they want to encourage lazy readers? We - you and I, valued readers - know that just because the number of covid-19 positive tests goes down one day, it doesn't necessarily mean that fewer people have become infected.

Donald Trump knows: "Cases are going up in the U.S. because we are testing far more than any other country, and ever expanding. With smaller testing we would show fewer cases!"

Camel Trail 2

After a good number of non-walking, i.e. light drizzle and 13 degrees days, yesterday was dry and hot.Very hot. Too hot to go for a walk? Maybe, but I went anyway. To walk a bit more of the Camel Trail - see earlier post for details of a stretch near Bodmin.

The walk started at Wadebridge, going towards Padstow. Although not the full 5 miles. 10 miles in the heat is too much for me.

There is no car park near to the start point in Wadebridge, unless you are prepared to go into Lidl and purchase a 69p bottle of Petronas zero alcohol beer and leave it in the car in their car park for 2 hours. That strikes me as rude so I didn't do so, leaving myself with a 15 minute walk from the nearest car park to the trail start point. So I'm tired before even getting started.

The river is in sight for pretty much all of this stroll, although it was low tide. The Camel Estuary is a designated Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty and hosts a plethora of bird life. Waders on the salt marshes in winter and migrating birds such as the occasional Osprey in Spring and Autumn. The river's pièce de résistance, though, is the colony of Little Egrets. Partly because I had no binoculars with me, I sadly saw none of these beautiful birds yesterday. Those I have seen on previous occasions have been nearer to Padstow, I think, so perhaps they nest further down river. Maybe next time.

 The first exciting thing encountered was a cafe selling ice cream in scoops. Needing energy in the heat (as though I needed an excuse) I had a scoop of salted caramel and one of honeycomb. Mm, delicious.

The second, less exciting spot was a sewage works. More correctly the Water Treatment Works - an obfuscation of gentrification presumably meant to make it seem to smell less. It doesn't.

There are lots of people along the way, mostly cyclists. These vary from jovial, relaxed chaps (that's gender-non-specific, FYO) who give a cheerful "hi" to fierce, determined individuals presumably looking to set a PB and who don't even see, let alone acknowledge me. And why are they all going in the opposite direction to me? Not one cyclist has overtaken me, although that could easily be because they can't keep up with my pace. More likely, they have ridden to Padstow in the morning, had a pasty and an ice cream there and are now on their way home.

There was one jogger, who looked so hot and bothered that I wondered "why are you doing that?". She was gone before I could ask her. Just as well,  I guess.

In all honesty, my pace wasn't its usual brisk one, conserving energy in the heat. There is a fair amount of tree shade though, which helped. Other walkers panted an exhausted "hello" in response to my equally brief and weary greeting.

On the way back from my halfway point, I wrote this post. In my head. So it wasn't all a waste of time!

Red button 2

"What could possibly go wrong?" I asked in an earlier Red Button post about the option given by Sky for fans to use an app to choose spectator chants for the "fake soundtrack" for football matches without supporters.

I should also have directed that question at the offers made by many clubs of having fans' photographs made into cardboard cutouts for display on seats (because we are dumb enough to think there are real supporters in the ground).

This evening it is reported that Leeds United have removed a cardboard cutout of Usama Bin Laden from one of their seats.

All 44 clubs in the Premier League and Championship are now presumably checking their cardboard cutouts for photos of Stalin, Hitler and Genghis Khan. Which you think they might have done before.

I learned new football slang tonight

A "jigsaw" player is one who goes to pieces in the box. Never heard of it.

So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

...so said the dolphins when they departed Planet Earth just before it is demolished to make way for a hyperspace bypass. After they have made a copy of Earth, and all its contents, somewhere else. Ctrl-X then Ctrl-V.

Dolphins are supposed to be clever, yes? Cleverer than us? It sure seems like it in this case. They clearly discovered Qwerty keyboards, interstellar travel and clipboards. And how to perform and monetise acrobatics to an adoring public. P. T. Barnum, eat your heart out.

Your local chippie run out of fish? A dolphin eats around 30 pounds of fish a day and there are some one million dolphins in the world, so blame them. If they can't get enough from our over-fished seas, they will shoot over to the chippie and grab all the cod and chips. In Earth's new home we should ban dolphins, methinks.

Obviously "So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish" is also a Brexit meme. Enough.

I wish I could be a ...

...video streamer.

I get immense pleasure out of watching YouTube videos and sometimes catching live Twitch streams.

Regular readers will recall that I play the computer strategy game Civilization VI (O-oh, there go my readers - bye bye. No! Don't go; be patient, this leads to something). Without wishing to be boastful, or inversely falsely modest, I can say I am pretty good at it. I play on the highest difficulty level and beat the game more often than  not. I learned a lot by myself but also a great deal, particularly about optimal plays for higher difficulty levels, by starting to watch streamers playing the game. The best of them are also good at explaining their decision making processes.

I'm also good at explaining myself and so that's what I'd like to do - be a video streamer. I have the technical know-how (or can get it from YouTube and Twitch) to do it.

But I can't.

Why? Because I don't have the charisma that these people have. And because they are closer to the age range of their viewers so can talk the talk, using modern and youthful vernacular. The best of them show genuine interest in their followers in stream chat but more often than not balance that well with progressing their game play. They deal effectively with occasional idiots in Chat. I'm not sure I could do any of that.

Of course, I could take the non-streaming approach of creating edited videos for YouTube. But even those have comments from all and sundry. Would I care about whether those comments were supportive and constructive or downright rude? Do I have the mental strength to take it all in my stride? Well I write blog posts and encourage comments, so I suppose the answer might be Yes.

It isn't just computer games I use YouTube for - I have recently watched Mahler symphonies, modern jazz, Wynton Marsalis playing Haydn - and jazz - and a Bruckner symphony. Also fixing a problem with my Xbox connecting to WiFi. I guess if I wanted to learn about butterflies flapping their wings in the Amazon jungle (that's the real one, not where drones work packing boxes), YouTube would have a video clip for me. What a resource!

I guess it's not a bad idea to have new goals in your life, even at a ripe old age, but I'm not sure becoming a streamer is achievable. Is that sad? Move on, Nigel.