Wikipedia Calculations

This is a little write-up explaining some statistics and calculations I did for my most recent video, “Can You Read All of Wikipedia?” While the statistics from the video are all approximately correct (as I mentioned), they should have been a little more accurate. I want to explain why.

Let's begin with this Wikipedia article showing Wikipedia's word count. 

Two things should stand out: 

1. The word count here is 2.95 billion, not 2.9275 billion like I claimed, and...
2. After the word count the brackets literally say “not in citation given”

These two are both related. It was September 1st* when I last checked this page and finalized my calculations. Back then, it said that there were 2.9275 billion words and it didn’t have that bracket saying that number wasn’t in the citation. I tried to look through the edits to find this number but I couldn’t. I really remember seeing that number there (because where else would I have gotten it?) but it's seeming more and more like I pulled it out of thin air.ª

ANYWAY the point is that even if that number had been there, I didn’t verify it by checking the source. As someone who attempts to research material with academic curiosity and legitimacy, this is embarrassingly irresponsible. I will say that with virtually every other topic I’ve ever done through YT, I did verify the source, but for this one I chose not to. Maybe I trusted the source because it was Wikipedia writing about itself, or maybe because I thought this would be a short video and it wouldn’t be a big deal. Either way, I should have checked the source and noticed that both 2.9275 and 2.95 billion aren’t supported by the available data. 

The actual source links to the English Wikipedia's statistics page. Here do find a word count here...but it’s most recent count comes from January 2010. 

Since the total word count hasn't been updated after 2010, we really have no way of definitively knowing from this source what the current word count is. Yet I think I have a guess as to where the contributor got 2.95 billion. If you divide Jan 2010’s 1.798 billion by 3.1 million, the Jan. 2010 article count, then you get an average of 580 words-per-article. Now if we assume that that WpA doesn’t change over the years, then multiplying it with the current article amount of 5.1 million would give us a current word count of 2.9 billion. Not exactly 2.95 billion—we’d need an average of 590 WpA for that—but close enough that I feel comfortable saying we’re in the right ballpark.

Speaking of the 590 WpA count, I actually made my first ever Wikipedia edit to point this out. You can see me explaining what I did and also asking what methodology the previous contributor used to arrive at their conclusions. 

So we’ve worked out the number of total words. The other stat I mentioned is that Wikipedia was adding 440,000 words daily to the site. Is this number of words accurate?

Probably not, because I used the exact same methodology as before (checked it Sept. 1st, didn’t check source, used a random wiki page). So if we’re working with the 2010 WpA count, multiplying that by August’s° new article count gives us an average of 492,420 words added daily. Again, not exactly the same, but close enough that I’m okay saying my original data was approximately correct.

Looking back, I’m not sure if it would have been smarter to use 2010 numbers. Obviously they’re more accurate, but Wikipedia’s clearly grown so much since then that while the 2010 data may be more numerically accurate, it might actually be a less accurate representation of Wikipedia. 

. . . . .

I made this post detailing how a couple numbers I used were off by a certain degree. But this degree turned out to be relatively small…why did I write this, publicly announcing my (seemingly) small mistake? 

I value academic transparency and sources. I think if you’re involved in education (i.e. professing to know something others don’t) it’s your responsibility to not mislead others and publicly provide access to the information which informed you. I believe learners have a right to know where knowledge came from so they may examine it for themselves. If I make mistakes I want to explain why it happened and make sure people have access to the correct information.

However I’m okay with making these mistakes because I’m trying a lot of new things. Almost all of my videos up to this point have been simply reciting information I’ve learned. But my last two videos** haven’t been reciting information—they’ve been creating new information from scratch. No source told me how to convert video to words or to measure humans’ ability to read Wikipedia. That was my math, my thought process, my original work. 

So I’m okay with making these types of mistakes because (1) I learn from them, and (2) it means I’m trying more complex things I haven’t done before. I like that :)

~~~Footnote~~~

ªIf you’d like to look for it please be my guest :) https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Size_in_volumes&action=history

*I did think I would publish this video sooner than I did (more than three months after the research), but ultimately I should have done recalculations to check and see if the stats changed much. They didn’t change much, but as I’ve said the point of this post is to highlight my exact methodology as well as point out what I did irresponsibly and/or incorrectly. 

°Technically I’m not sure what month was used as the source for determining the article count, but I’m using August here since I collected my data on September 1st. 

**excluding the P4A one

Interpreting the Law

I found this statement of academic integrity in a study guide for one my classes. I think this statement is intended to prevent one person from e-mailing the study guide to everyone in the class, but regardless the language is way too broad: “Distributing this information in any form…in any way…is a violation of academic integrity and the student code of conduct.” This means that if I physically give the unmodified study guide to a friend in the same class who had the ability to print it for himself, that’d be cheating. And that’s ridiculous.

This makes me think of two philosophies that exist for interpreting the laws: (1) that they should be followed to the letter with no exceptions or wiggle room and (2) that the laws are meant to represent general concepts and there can be extenuating circumstances where they shouldn’t apply. (Obviously I think the study guide falls into the second interpretation.) 

Now, there are good and bad componenents about each of these interpretations. For (1), it is very clear and obvious what constitutes the law, which I think makes applying and understanding it easier. The bad thing is that it might penalize people who share an unmodified study guide even though his friend had the ability to print it for himself. For (2), the good is that it wouldn’t penalize that person, but the bad is that it can be time-consuming to decide things on a case-by-case basis and it could also be difficult to “draw the line” in terms of where the extenuating circumstances lie. Still I lean towards the second one because laws are written without the full understanding of how they might play out in the real world. If my teacher saw me hand a printed study guide to a friend, I doubt she’d even think of it as cheating.

I thought about all of this because my friend actually e-mailed me a study guide she filled out and shared it with me. I didn’t think twice of this until I realized that this was technically cheating. But it doesn’t feel like it…I mean, we could have just as easily met up in-person and read our thoughts and research for each question. If we were called into the office of student academic integrity, I’d make a good case for us.

Facing the Voice: Thoughts on Meeting Bill Nye

On Wednesday night I met Bill Nye the Science Guy!

Now you’d think that meeting a childhood idol and hugely popular science educator would leave me like this

But it actually left me more like this

Meeting celebrities in-person can be a dangerous game. Obviously it’s super cool to talk with the people who fascinate you, but you also run a big risk: knowing what they’re really like. 

Yes, we’d all like to think there’s no way this person whom we’ve grown up watching could be anything other than their awesome, on-screen persona. But notice that term, persona. A persona is a role played by an actor, and I used that word for a specific reason. In real life, celebrities might be nothing like their persona. 

This can’t be news to anyone—we’ve all heard stories about this. Even so, it didn't cross my mind when I got tickets (and backstage passes!) to see Bill Nye at Penn State.

The lecture was great and showed me every reason to love this guy: he’s funny, intelligent, fascinating, and an excellent communicator. But backstage was a slightly different story. 

It started off with a procession line leading everyone to Bill for a picture. This came off as celebrity worship and seemed a little strange, but I figured we’d see the more human side of him after it ended so I didn’t mind. 

Instead of a phone, I went up to him with my camera to ask if he’d say something for Conjecture (“brother, I’ll see you on weekday”). As I was describing it, he cut me off and said “you can’t do this, what if everyone wanted to record a video? Just take a picture” I apologized and took out my phone, but he told me I wasn’t ready and sent me behind someone in line. 

Of course I shouldn’t judge him too much from my one interaction…but he was like this with everyone, coldly telling people to hurry up with their pictures and get out of line as soon as they were done. Attempts at polite small talk were essentially met with “come on, you can’t do this now.” 

I'd already had a sour taste in my mouth from observing all this, but he did say that there’d be time for more talking and stuff after the picture line. So I waited to see the real Bill Nye.

Unfortunately, nothing really changed. After the pictures everyone did gather around him to interact in a more intimate way, but it instead devolved into a semi-formal Q&A. Genuine exchanges were infrequent and it ultimately still felt like celebrity worship. I expected to be the audience during the lecture, not while I was backstage too.

Now look, I get that everyone wanted a picture and that Bill's probably exhausted from talking to so many colleges and that he's kind of a big deal…but let’s compare this to another experience I’ve had.

At VidCon 2015 I met Vsauce’s Michael Stevens.

He was a fantastically nice dude. He was flooded with more people than Bill was and still took the time to hold genuine conversations with each individual that approached him. He only left because he was forced to, not because he wanted to. Needless to say, I was floored. In fact when I pulled this photo from my facebook, I saw a comment I wrote on July 25, 2015.

My facebook's in Italian :)

So yeah—we can make excuses for Bill Nye, but when I’m comparing his behavior to Michael Steven’s (who in many ways is more popular than Bill Nye), it just doesn't hold. 

All of this, meeting an idol and realizing they’re not as cool in person, makes me think of something I heard recently from CGP Grey on his podcast Hello Internet (skip to around 1:20:00). He was saying how seeing the faces of narrating voices like his own can actually ruin the experience for the audience. You wind up liking the narration in a such a unique way that seeing the real thing just doesn’t fit. And after seeing the real thing, the narration can no longer exist in your mind as a solely awesome creation, but rather the product of an ordinary person—it becomes less magical because you know the truth. If you don’t understand what I mean, maybe seeing real pictures of CGP Grey would help illustrate this (see footnote).

Meeting Bill Nye was like seeing that voice. Meeting any celebrity runs that risk. They might be just as you’d expect them, but they also might be something else. 

That night I traded the Bill Nye that existed in my head for this picture:

I want to trade it back.

~~~Footnotes~~~

RE: CGP Pictures...

CGP is okay with their dissemination, he mentioned that in the same Hello Internet Podcast after the section I wrote about. But remember what you just read! Think if you actually want to see what he looks like.

...

https://twitter.com/Alextigtig/status/533483252255031297
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5MVXdg6nho
https://www.quora.com/What-does-CGP-Grey-look-like

Nice Guys and Relationships

So a while back someone I knew was very drunk and complaining to me. Of course, it was about a girl.

He liked this girl, she didn’t like him back…that was really it. BUT, he was going on and on and on about how he was so nice to her and she STILL didn't like him, that she doesn’t know what’s good for herself and maybe he just shouldn’t be nice at all anymore.

Now he was intoxicated, but I still couldn’t believe the words I was hearing. This is that "nice guys finish last" thing you hear in high school!

So I'm writing this post as a sort of response to that idea, and hopefully it can help anyone else, guy or gal, who is struggling with a similar situation.

~~Let's roll~~


Ok so first off, he’s thinking that basically because he’s so nice to her, she should fall for him. This seems to kind of make sense, until you consider some things:

1. If niceness is all that makes someone attracted to someone else, then what's to stop someone from being nicer to this girl than you were? Based on your logic, this person would leave you instantly! But this doesn't happen, and that's because of the next thing...
2. What attracts us to people is complicated, and not one-dimensional (i.e. it'll never be niceness alone). I mean, you could meet the nicest person in the world and not be attracted to them for many reasons! This is because we're also attracted to elements like ambition, personality, physical attractiveness, and sense of humour. Attraction is a complex combination of so many things that one alone would never sway a person (or, at least, it shouldn't). 
3. Finally, you said “oh maybe I shouldn’t be nice in general anymore.” Okay, I’m assuming you meant you'd stop being nice just to people you're romantically interested in and not the general population, because the latter would be pretty stupid. So now that we have that established, here's the thing about this: yeah, niceness isn't the sole determinant for relationships, but girls like people who are nice!! Why would a girl, or anyone want to be with someone who’s mean?? I realize I’m not a girl here, but you gotta just trust me on this one. If a girl you like is attracted to someone who (in your view) isn't as nice as you are, it just means she sees another meaningful and attractive quality in him or her besides niceness.

So after I explained this to him, he proceeded to analogize his affection for this person: "What if you find the prettiest, most beautiful flower in the field, and you know it's the one for you and that there are no other flowers like her, but you can't have it. What then?"

There are a lot of reasons this analogy isn’t great.

1. The idea that this is the most beautiful flower you’ll ever see becomes true when you decide you’re not going to explore the field anymore! If you just stand there admiring it, of course you’ll never find anything better! There’s a whole field of other beautiful flowers to find!
2. But for argument’s sake, let’s say that this is indeed the most beautiful flower in the field, okay? Well to this I'll tell you that our personal standards of attraction change as we mature physically and emotionally. We will be attracted to different things at different points in our life, so even if that flower is (improbably) the most beautiful in the field, as you mature it probably won’t stay that way! And look, I know it’s really hard to get your mind around this and the last point when you're really into someone. I've been there. But I promise you that it always gets better with time. 

BUT OKAY let’s say it really is the most beautiful flower and you’re never going to change the way you feel (unlikely). There's still one huge problem with this analogy: women aren't flowers! You see, flowers are passive objects—they get admired and picked. But women (and people) are not!!! Except in extreme circumstances, people get their say in deciding who're they're attracted to. That’s just how relationships work.

Instead of looking at a relationship like admiring a flower, I think a better analogy is those hotel doors that connect rooms. If you’re attracted to someone, you can open your door and show it. But nothing will happen unless they open their door too, and just like in an actual hotel, they have the right not to open it.

Now when I was explaining all of this to him…well, most of it wasn’t getting through because he was really drunk. But I was also getting really angry that I even had to explain this stuff to him! But as I thought about it more, I realized something: he had never had any of this explained to him. Maybe it seems basic to you or me, but without hearing this concretely it can be a confusing and difficult concept to grasp. 

And when you view someone's actions through this lens, it becomes really difficult to stay angry with them. You just want to tell them "hey man, this is how the world works, and you’ll be happier and healthier when it sinks in." Unfortunately, I didn’t realize this in the moment and was getting incredibly frustrated with him…but yeah. Hopefully this helps some of you deal with this type of stuff. It would have been helpful to me too when I was younger.

Why I have this blog

Hey there. So most of you who read this probably know I have a YouTube channel, Conjecture. There I've uploaded informational videos and vlogs. [The word "vlog" tends to have a simple or vapid connotation, though mine are more informational like the vlogbrothers' videos.]

Though I like my vlogging, I've decided that I want to direct less attention towards them on Conjecture. There are two main reasons for this:

1. I think the informational videos are usually more fun to research and more rewarding than the vlogs, but more importantly...
2. Because I generate vlog ideas faster than informational ones, they can take over my channel. 

Yeah, the vlogs would begin to outpace my informational videos. I would have 5 vlog ideas I'm thinking and writing about but all of my informational videos would be on hold.

So because I still like a lot of the ideas but want to do more informational videos, I'm posting all of my vlog ideas here—the only real difference is now they don't have video accompaniment. The really important or personally meaningful vlog ideas will still make their way to YouTube, but I'm expecting to post a lot fewer on YT.

I also realized this site can store all the other creative, non-YT things I do (like podcasts and typewriter musings). It's all an experiment, so let me know what you think! 

New Podcast!

I started a Podcast with my friend, Will. It's all about Psychology and education and learning and improvement and happiness. Take a listen :)

https://soundcloud.com/the-brunch-podcast/hello

UPDATE: This podcast is discontinued until further notice :(

Typewriter 2

Typewriter 1

“_________ IS A STUPID IDIOT!”

Reminder: Donald Trump is a Tremendous Idiot

7 Reasons why Liberals are Incapable of Understanding the World

Whenever I see articles with titles like these, I get pretty upset. Before the piece has even begun, the author’s language has communicated that they (1) lack the basic decency required to have productive discussions, and (2) are probably too biased to understand the other side, if they’re even able to. 

Essentially, these articles serve mainly to ignite the passions behind the like-minded people who routinely read them. When our nation is the most polarized it has been in 20 years, what we need are avenues for discussion and debate that promote understanding rather than hoisting up a winning individual or ideology. 

Do you know one of the best ways to make someone close off their willingness to consider competing ideas? Insult them or someone they support. And not only is it a bad strategy for discussion, it’s just rude. I am liberal-leaning, yes, but the only reason I would ever flat-out dismiss someone is not if their ideology differs, but if they’re being a jerk and not even attempting to understand a different point of view. I simply don’t want to surround myself with people like that.

I don’t exactly know how we can begin to change this volatile climate, so I will instead leave you with a quote that is becoming more accurate every day:

To understand the workings of American politics, you have to understand this fundamental law: Conservatives think liberals are stupid. Liberals think conservatives are evil. — Charles Krauthammer

con·jec·ture | kənˈjekCHər

A while ago I was Googling "Conjecture" to see where my YouTube channel would come up in the results. The first thing anyone sees when Googling it is this:

Seeing that was…fun. I guess I knew the meaning of the word before I created my channel, but I had always interpreted conjecture as more of an educated guess, almost like a hypothesis. 

Later on, @Blackmak5 tweeted this photo at me:

A general conclusion based on facts and results? That’s way better than what Google said. But now I had these two pretty different meaning of conjecture, so I wanted to do some digging and find out what this word really means. 

Let’s start off with the etymological origins.

Here we see that the word “conjecture” comes originally from the combination of the Latin “con” (together) and “jacere” (to throw). So the word’s original verb form, conicere, literally meant “to throw together,” referring specifically to thoughts. The word's noun form, conjetura, represented the product of thrown-together thoughts: a conclusion. 

So the modern word “conjecture" should be what you get when you piece results or thoughts together. That’s how I had interpreted it, and it's the definition @Blackmak5 found in his math textbook. But that sounds very different from the current definition Google provides, "an opinion or conclusion formed on the basis of incomplete information." Somewhere along the line an additional connotation was added to the definition, that the information used to form it is inherently incomplete. That connotation may have been the Old French influence, or simply a result of the way language changes. I don’t know 

But wait, the definition @Blackmak5 found was from a math textbook…so is there a mathematical definition for “conjecture” different from Google’s general definition?


Let's take a look at Wikipedia's definition of mathematical conjecture:

"In mathematics, a conjecture is a conclusion or proposition based on incomplete information, but for which no proof has been found.” That doesn’t really bode well, either. But it goes on to say that conjectures "have shaped much of mathematical history as new areas of mathematics are developed in order to solve them.” 

So while the layman’s definition has "conjecture" as a conclusion formed by throwing together a bunch of incomplete information, mathematics interprets conjecture more like an idea that encourages the development of new science. That is the definition I want to get behind. 

Or, you know, I could just change my channel name to conjecturevlog since that’s my channel twitter and subreddit, and it’d make everything more unique, searchable and consistent. 

We’ll see. 

I Don't Like Personality Tests

In one of my classes we talked about personality tests and other related measures used for interviews. The class was boring, but the ideas we were talking about weren’t, so I wrote a lot of this post in that class (what a good example this sets). 

A lot of personality tests feature polarizing question—they’ll ask, “If you have the option of going to a party or reading a book, what would you do?” My answer for this would almost always be “it depends.” What’s the book? Am I 30 pages from being finished? Is anyone I know at the party? Is this a going-away party for my best friend? There are so many variables that play into a simple question like this, yet you’re supposed to choose either book or party, and then be judged as an introvert or extrovert off of that. Obviously, there are other questions on the exam meant to support the overall test’s findings, but so many of these questions only you to respond in this dichotomous manner. 

What I’ve found about regarding my personal levels of extroversion and introversion is that I display the defining qualities of both introverts and extroverts pretty frequently. This means I (along with many others) am considered an ambivert. What really determines how I’ll act is my mood and situation. Am I really happy that day? I’ll be more extraverted. Tired or sad? I’ll be introverted. Have I been really active and talked with a lot of people that day? I’ll carry over that energy, and continue to do that. Have I been keeping to myself that day? I’ll probably stick to that. And though most people may lean more to one side than I do, there really is no person that’s purely extraverted or purely introverted.

The ultimate point I’m trying to make here is that we as humans are complex, and though I think personality tests have promise, at this point they don’t do a great job of describing us. Here’s another example:

There’s this concept known as Locus of Control. It’s the idea that you are in control of your life, that what happens to you in life is the result of your work and actions, etc. There’s a personality test that measures LoC, and it tries to predict concepts like your level of self-efficacy and how much control you perceive yourself to have over your life. They ask questions like what happens to me is the result of my own actions and I am where I am today because of my actions. To me, these polarized questions just don’t include the complexities of real human lives. For example, I totally believe that a lot of what happens to you is the result of your own actions, but a lot of people face prejudice and discrimination that could legitimately prevent them from getting as far as they can go. I also think that I played a large role in getting my life to this point, but I would be mad to say I didn’t get help from my parents, or upper-middle class upbringing, or other experiences. 

So when I see these types of questions, I move the tool to say I agree around 50–70%. The test comes back and tells me I have moderate Locus of Control, that I feel I control some aspects of my life, but not others. From this result, employers (and perhaps the test-taker) infer that I can’t control those other things because I don’t believe in my own ability to affect change, and not because there are just so many things that others or I cannot control. And that’s where I disagree. I have high self-efficacy, high regard for my own abilities, but I also recognize that everything I’ve accomplished isn’t solely due to me, and that others may be more disadvantaged than I am. Just another example of how personality tests don’t do a great job of capturing the complexity of human attributes. 

I should say: though I’ve been railing against personality tests for not being able to capture the entire human experience, that is (1) incredibly difficult for any test to do, and (2) not necessarily the goal of personality tests. These tests are meant to provide merely a glimpse into someone’s life—there are a lot of other ways people get to know the real you, like, oh shoot what’s it called...conversing. So in a way, perhaps I’m getting bent out of shape for nothing: I’m getting frustrated because these tests aren’t serving the purpose they aren’t created to. 

BUT EVEN SO these tests could do a better job of capturing the complexity that is humanity. How can something as complex as personality be boiled down to A or B? It’s just annoying to be told that I’m either a circle or a square when I’m really a star. 

~~~Extra~~~

Here’s another paragraph I didn’t incorporate into the body

Another thing I’d like to note about personality tests is that if you know what an employer is searching for, it’s easy to answer questions in a way that makes you look very favorable. For example, if you’re taking an Five Factor Model test (“The Big Five,” or “OCEAN,” as some may know it) and you know that conscientious is correlated well across job performance, and neuroticism poorly, then you answer questions in a way that make you seem reliable, trustworthy, and emotionally stable. "Of course my room is always clean!” “Of course I’m not easily upset!" And if you want a promotion, just make sure to answer the questions about extraversion in a manner that paints as, well, extraverted. These correlations are not too hard to look into, and anyone with basic knowledge of this can manipulate their answers in a way that makes them appear more desirable than they may really be. Of course, it will be quickly apparent when doing the job what your real personality is like, but you don’t want to hire someone only to fire them immediately after. 

~~~Further Resources~~~

Popular Personality Tests (just google them)

FFM—Five Factor Model

MBTI—Myers-Briggs Type Indicator

LoC—Locus of Control

Stuff on extraversion/introversion/ambiversion came from Susan Cain’s book, Quiet.

Breast Cancer Slacktivism

Last week I noticed my friend had posted a weird status on facebook. I had seen someone else post it, so I assumed they had clicked on some bad site and it was auto-posting to their status without their knowledge. I commented and said that. I got this message in response: 

Ok, how in any way does this raise awareness for breast cancer??? It doesn’t! The status that you’re supposed to post doesn’t mention breast cancer, and the message you receive if you comment on it doesn’t say anything other than “continue the game for breast cancer awareness.” 

This is slacktivism at it’s finest, and I hesitate to use that word. Even while people denounced #BringBackOurGirls as slacktivism for not producing any tangible results, it did raise actual awareness for the issue—people knew what was happening. This status doesn't even attempt to explain what is happening until you "fall victim" to it by commenting or liking it. 

The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge also faced allegations of slacktivism, yet it is anything but. It encouraged a lot of people to actually learn about ALS. It raised $115 million in 6 weeks. And it may have helped scientists find a legitimate breakthrough in not just ALS but a host of other diseases. These nice things happened because (1) it was fun to watch celebrities dumping buckets of water on their heads, and (2) it said “do this ridiculous thing OR DONATE MONEY.” That last part is crucial. 

Back to the breast cancer status. It doesn’t encourage people to donate. It doesn’t encourage people to learn about the disease. It doesn't even raise awareness, which is the least it could do. It doesn’t do anything helpful. What it DOES do is guilt people into reposting it, for fear of being anti-fun or anti-breast cancer. And that’s why responses like this usually tend to take people back:

If you take “for breast cancer awareness” out of the original facebook post, it’s just a social media game. And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that! It’s social media, have fun with it. But don’t claim it supports breast cancer when it really doesn’t. 

Here’s a status that actually raises awareness for Breast Cancer:

Actually, the only way I think this status may raise awareness of breast cancer is that it gets a small percentage of people angry enough that they make their own post about how it raises awareness. I guess that's technically true, but it doesn't sit right with me. 

Feel free to disagree (and explain why)!

Want the Truth? Dig Deep.

I’ve recently been thinking about how difficult it can be to uncover the truth. Let me explain...

I’m writing a script for a YouTube video on electric cars. Specifically, “Are Electric Cars ACTUALLY Better for the Environment?” The totally uninformed answer is “uh, YA, we’re not burning fossil fuels!” The slightly-more-informed, yet still-not-complete answer is “well, no, because the electricity has to be generated somehow, and that’ll probably be with coal donchaknow?” 

The answer to this question (if we ever arrive at at truly definitive one) is not easy to come by because there are so many articles  and studies and professors and programs saying totally different things. Look at the results we get when we google search this question in two different ways:

Only one of the top 4 results articles is the same and the other three seem at least partially framed for the searcher. Can we trust those? And can we necessarily trust the Washington Examiner article just because it appeared in both?

HOW TO FIND THE TRUTH: You have to dig, and you’ll start by opening many (if not all) of these articles. If they cite no specific research or statistics (which some actually do), you can probably throw it out. If they cite research, look up the paper. Read the “methods” section. Contact the authors if you’re still confused. This is how you start obtaining what might be the closest thing to objective “truth” we’ll find. Sometimes this can be simple, and just one or two sites will explain away the misconceptions. But sometimes it goes deeper, deeper to the point where I start wondering how two legitimate, respectable parties have arrived at totally antithetical positions through supposedly similar methodology. 

This definitely takes a lot of time, trust me. But there are so so many instances of people fitting one study or one anecdote to a specific narrative that it can be practically irresponsible to trust just the first source you see for modern issues (This holds especially for politicized issues like Green energy…again, see that Chicago Tribune article from before). 

[From all the research I’ve done, I’ve reached my own conclusions about this specific question—if you want to read it, scroll to the bottom of this post.]

This also makes me think about politics. I consider myself politically literate even though there is so much I don’t know and can never hope to know. In fact, I (like many others) am politically literate in the same way tenth graders can read—I can digest information, but I’m not going to be able to make analyses and draw conclusions the way someone who’s studied this their whole life could. Now there are some things in which I fundamentally believe because I think they are just: people should have equal rights, people shouldn’t have to go hungry, etc. And then there are things in which I believe not because I know, but only because I take the word of people who know more than me: how our involvement in the Middle East will affect our/their future, whether trickle down economics works or not, etc. 

I’ve increasingly been thinking that it’s impossible to definitively know the answers to that second group of questions. There are literally hundreds of factors simultaneously influencing these situations, and to claim there is just one cause or effect is totally narrow-minded. And then there are people who will say what they believe, even when that belief is unjustified or unsubstantiated, simply because it feels right or makes sense. (Full disclosure, I, and probably all of you, have done this before and will continue to.)

You have to really go deep when you want to know if something is genuinely true. It’s really fun to do that, and so rewarding when you arrive at something true and concrete! But it’s possible that not everything has a concrete answer. So what should we do when we encounter those problems? Well…I’m not sure. I don’t think the answer is giving up, but I sure don’t know what it is. 

~~~My own conclusions about electric vehicles and their “cleanliness”~~~

The general consensus seems to be that if the electricity needed to charge an EV (electric vehicle) is produced with clean technology (little-to-0 C02 emissions) like solar, wind, or nuclear, then the EV is better. But if it’s produced with electricity generated by the burning of coal, then it’s probably dirtier. 

My own research has lead me to believe that even in the states with the highest percentages of electricity generation spurred by coal-burning, EVs are no dirtier than gasoline-powered cars, and may even be cleaner. If you’re interested in how I reached that conclusion, contact me!

P.S. My research is still in progress, so my opinion may shift. 

EDIT: Here are my fully-researched findings: http://imgur.com/qCN7W6w

Columbus Day

So every time Columbus Day comes around, I've noticed two distinct reactions. First, the "yay, no school/work!" crowd who couldn't care less what Columbus did to earn them their day off. The second crowd—which seems to be increasing by the day—says something like "yes, perfect, let's HONOR a man who raped and killed thousands of natives and committed a bunch of other atrocities." Now I'm not going to cite stats or accounts of what Columbus did, because they're easily verifiable. I agree with this crowd that Columbus was not at all innocent or a saint. But I do want to make a counterargument for all the people who seem immovably wedged within that viewpoint.

It's really easy to say Columbus was an awful man because of the utter destruction he wrought on the native people of the Americas. But Columbus' coming was a major reason Europeans came to America—if Columbus didn't come here, we wouldn't exist at all, or our lives would be drastically different. We might be living in another country or technological age surely behind our current.

So think about it this way: if you could sacrifice your life to change time so that those atrocities never happened...would you? I wouldn't. Maybe that sounds selfish, but I've become accustomed to living and my family and society. Changing history back would literally disrupt everything, including our very existence.

It seems natural to celebrate a person who helped create an entire culture, but does that hold even if another culture was virtually destroyed in the process? Instead of unilaterally demonizing or praising our Italian friend, we should recognize him for the good things he did for our culture while being cognizant of the legitimately horrible things he did for another.

Matt^2

A couple of my good friends are also named Matt, so when people see us together they choose different ways to greet us: "Hey guys!" "What’s up, Matts?" "Top of the morning, ruffians.” But one greeting bothers me more than all the others, and if you decided to read the title of this piece before the body (freak), then you already know what it is. Yes, I’m talking about the infamous "Yo, it’s Matt^2!”*

It’s the kind of cutesy, I-know-what-math-is way of acknowledging two people with the same name. But here’s the thing: it’s wrong.

This is what you have when you see two Matts:

Now let’s assume that instead of a pair of Matts, you’re greeting a pair of 7s.

When you say "Hey, what's up, 7^2?" you’re calling them 49.

Because when you see people together, you add them, you don't multiply them.

So when seeing us, there are two Matts and two Matts only. Saying Matt squared means you’re multiplying “Matt” by itself--that there is a “Matt” amount of Matts, which I imagine might look something like this:

So yes, it sounds cute and funny and smart and whatever, but just as 7+7 = 2*7 (or 14), so does Matt + Matt = 2Matt .

The Matt community faces a host of issues and we’d really appreciate it if you would greet us correctly. And if you are aware of this and continue to willingly perpetuate erroneous arithmetic, well, then there’s a special place in H-E-(hockey sticks)^2 for you.

~~~~~~~~~~

*I have no problems with people saying “Yo” followed by a contraction.