Letters to the Editor
Ilanin
Published Letters: 27 Editor's Choice: 10
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Changing the subject entirely...
[Read the article: King Kaufman's Sports Daily]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]King writes:
I think the Steelers could be among the elite offenses in the league if they threw more, but do they ask me? They don't ask me. What they do is mix in passes downfield to Hines Ward, intermediate routes to tight end Heath Miller, who destroyed the center of the Colts' zone, and more gadget plays than your average smashmouth, blue-collar team.
Firstly: the gadget plays are *fun*. They're a huge part of the reason I love the Steelers despite no connection to Pittsburgh at all.
Secondly, I'm beginning to agree with you on the Steeler offense. I'm also beginning to wonder if maybe Bill Cowher is, too. Roethlisberger is 43/28 Att/Comp in the playoffs, which is a whole bunch more attempts than you might expect for a guy with a supposedly injured thumb, playing for a team which has had a lead to sit on twice, and which normally runs the ball anyway. The fact that he's been red-hot probably helps, of course.
You could argue that Pittsburgh's never really had a good, reliable quarterback* in the Cowher years, but then, frankly, when you've been Coach for, what, 14 years, this says more about your priorities in constructing an offense than anything else.
*Where Good and Reliable are required simultaneously.
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The difference between Pittsburgh and Carolina...
[Read the article: King Kaufman's Sports Daily]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]...is that one is a football team and the other is Steve Smith and a very long injury list.
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Energy, and awful puns
[Read the article: Ask the pilot]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]hydrogen is obtained through use of oil.
This statement is currently true, but by the time anybody seems even relatively likely to be attempting to use hydrogen for mass transit, it probably won't be. Actually, I thought "catalyse some growth" was an awful pun on the part of the Pilot.
The problem with production of Hydrogen from water (by the photocatalytic route; other electrolytic routes aren't getting you anywhere) and also that with fuel cells as a power source is that only catalysts that produce hydrogen/energy at commercially significant rates are Platinum-based, which currently prices them out of the energy market. Hence, catalysis is the big barrier to alternative energy sources at the moment...the Pilot may or may not have known this, but I'm blaming him for punnery anyway.
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So...
[Read the article: Ask the pilot]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I sometimes wonder how many professions there are which aren't, in some way, misrepresented by journalistic misuse of statistics. Physicians, at least in the UK, are certainly on that list - for similar reasons to airline pilots; although they have less to worry about in terms of job security. Journalists will tell you that it's unreasonable to expect them to put cumulative frequency diagrams, interquartile ranges, or similar measures of the distribution of a dataset into a report, on the grounds that they take up too much space and the public don't understand them.
However, there are datasets for which a average absent other data is substantively misleading. This is probably one of them. A classic example would be a radioactive half-life - that is an average decay time, but nobody would ever call it that. Sports pundits are forever telling the "public" that, apparently, doesn't understand these averages that they're misleading; or alternatively the "public" themselves are saying the same things to the pundits in phone-ins.
This is now a serious problem in reporting. It has got to the stage where many people - myself included - dismiss any statistical evidence given in a report in the general press on the grounds of the probable ignorance of the people who wrote it. It ill becomes those who would promulgate and explain information to pretend that they are familiar with things they don't understand.
The first step to learning is admitting your ignorance. But even that step is not open to one who's would-be teachers have yet to take it.
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I don't object to having my errors pointed out, but stick to words I've actually written...
[Read the article: Ask the pilot]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I didn't say it was the arithmetic mean, crumley, I said it was an average. I picked the word rather carefully. I'm a solid-state physicist by profession, and I'm well aware of the differences between various types of average. The median isn't a mean, but it is an average. It's one used very frequently in several different areas, where the distribution is such that the mean would be misleading.
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Another view...
[Read the article: Is the British government going easy on rapists?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I'll second that. The Daily Mail is not to be taken seriously. I wouldn't even go so far as to equate them to Fox - Fox is a shill of the GOP, whereas the Mail is a way off to the right of the Conservatives (if, that is, the Conservatives under Cameron actually have any policies left, I'm not sure).
Anyway, what I was actually going to say was to link to the reaction of a British magistrate to this news, at:
http://thelawwestofealingbroadway.blogspot.com/2006/04/cautions-for-rape.html
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Further context that the Mail, unsuprisingly, didn't tell you
[Read the article: Is the British government going easy on rapists?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Courtesy of the BBC Radio 4 program Woman's Hour:
The number of cautions [for rape] has doubled in the past ten years, but the number of allegations has tripled, so a caution is actually being issued in relatively fewer cases.
Not, of course, that inconvenient facts get in the way of a right-wing journalist's desire for a good story. As I'm sure you're all well aware.
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Every dog its day...
[Read the article: King Kaufman's Sports Daily]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]There was a time, deep in the mists of history, or alternatively when you could have used the Pittsburgh Steelers as your byword for incompetence (one playoff appearance, lasting one game, between 1933 and 1972, folks...).
Let's hear it for the Clippers. I've never seen an NBA game in my life and don't intend to start now, but every franchise deserves its time in the sun and will, I trust, eventually get it.
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Correction
[Read the article: Going long for Jesus]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]About the only thing that remains to be said about this article is that Dan Krieder is a fullback, not a tight end (see Pittsburgh roster at http://media3.steelers.com/team/player/ for example).
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I feel a slight draft....
[Read the article: King Kaufman's Sports Daily]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]OK, so does this column make King the only writer who covers both the NFL and the NBA to write more words about the draft for the latter?