Pink, Blue, and Bad Science

DocDJ writes "Ben Goldacre writes an excellent column in The Guardian called Bad Science, which regularly demonstrates how poor the mainstream media are at reporting science. He recently pointed out the flaws in the reporting of research that purported to show the evolutionary basis of 'blue for boys, pink for girls'." Another Guardian writer, Zoe Williams, has an even more acerbic take on the research.

Comments

Pink is like 'pussy'

[Tribbin]

Reservoir Dogs quote:

JOE: Okay, let me introduce everybody to everybody. But once again, at the risk of being redundant, if I even think I hear somebody telling or referring to somebody by their Christian name... you won't want to be you. Okay, quickly. Mr. Brown, Mr. White, Mr. Blonde, Mr. Blue, Mr. Orange, and Mr. Pink.

MR. PINK: Why am I Mr. Pink?

JOE: Cause you're a faggot.

MR. PINK: Why can't we pick out our own colors?

JOE: I tried that once, it don't work. You get four guys fighting over who's gonna be Mr. Black. Since nobody knows anybody else, nobody wants to back down. So forget it, I pick. Be thankful you're not Mr. Yellow.

MR. BROWN: Yeah, but Mr. Brown? That's too close to Mr. Shit.

MR. PINK: Yeah, Mr. Pink sounds like Mr. Pussy. Tell you what, let me be Mr. Purple. That sounds good to me, I'm Mr. Purple.

JOE: You're not Mr. Purple, somebody from another job's Mr. Purple. You're Mr. Pink.

MR. WHITE: Who cares what your name is? Who cares if you're Mr. Pink, Mr. Purple, Mr. Pussy, Mr. Piss...

MR. PINK: Oh that's really easy for you to say, you're Mr. White. You gotta cool-sounding name. So tell me, Mr. White, if you think "Mr. Pink" is no big deal, you wanna trade?

JOE: Nobody's trading with anybody! Look, this ain't a goddamn fuckin city counsel meeting! Listen up Mr. Pink. We got two ways here, my way or the highway. And you can go down either of 'em. So what's it gonna be, Mr. Pink?

MR. PINK: Jesus Christ, Joe. Fuckin forget it. This is beneath me. I'm Mr. Pink, let's move on.

Heh

[Anonymous Coward]

A slashbot article on misrepresentation. The ironing is delicious.

Re:Heh

[Dystopian Rebel]

The ironing is delicious.

Alanis Morissette is your soul-mate. (Buy ear plugs.)

Re:Heh

[Scrameustache]

The ironing is delicious. If done right, yes :)

Global Warming vs. Number of Pirates

[Gothmolly]

That's a study I'd like to see done.

Re:Global Warming vs. Number of Pirates

[Chyeld]

While I was in college I happened to notice the following posted on the door of the office of my statistics professor.

"My dear friends, I am here to warn you of a tremendous crisis we are facing today. We all remember times when we could go to sleep at night secure in the knowledge that our homes and lives are safe. But today, this is no longer so!

Here are two charts, one showing the violent crime rate in our fair town as it has increased in the past decade, as reported via calls to 911!

The second chart shows the rapid proliferation of telephone poles that have been placed in our fair community!

Clearly, you can see that as the number of telephone poles goes from zero a decade ago to the dizzying heights we have today, the rate of crime being reported via 911 has drastically risen as well!

The answer is clear! To protect our town we MUST cut down the telephone poles!"

I remember

[$RANDOMLUSER]

Getting up at 4:00 AM or so to watch the first shuttle launch.
Dan Rather, new at the job of anchoring liftoffs, said: (I am not making this up)
"The skies are clear this morning, so we should be seeing some spectacular entrails...."

Re:I remember

[Cajun Hell]

I think what he meant to say, was that the entrails predicted spectacularly clear skies. Stupid anchormen, getting their scientician terms mixed up. But don't let some idiot's malapropism get you down. What's important is that shuttle did get off, and deployed a telescope which has done wonders for astrology.

pure guesswork on my part..

[middlemen]

Maybe it is because pink might have a higher wavelength than blue since it is closer to red. So males can see a woman, if dressed in pink, from far away and get ready to show off or think of instant one-liners, whereas if men are dressed in blue, then women cannot see men approaching from far away and might not have their guard up on time to hear the shitty one-liner from the guy...

Re:It's like driving on the left

[flyingfsck]

Well, yeah, it is due to Evolution. All the people predisposed to driving on the right are quickly removed from the gene pool.

What... is your favourite colour?

[BobNET]

Blue! No, pink [SPROING] Aarrgghh!!

Re:You don't think it hurts anyone?

[Anonymous Coward]

Really? There's officially 163,000 homeless households in the UK and this research like virtually all research in the UK is government funded. Homeless - sans house
Household - with house

Me thinks you need to stop with the conspiracy theories.

Re:The REAL lesson is the media is bad at everythi

[grassy_knoll]

Wait...

A degree in journalism doesn't teach you much about the real world.

You mean a liberal arts degree doesn't have anything to do with the real world?

I'm shocked... SHOCKED I say!

Well ok. Not that shocked.

[snicker]

What an absurd hypothesis!

[0xdeadbeef]

Everyone knows that men prefer blue because it stands out against the red Martian landscape.

Women prefer pink because the thick Venusian atmosphere blocks the higher wavelengths of light.

Re:Science Journalism - Thumbs Down

[HTH NE1]

There's nothing that makes me angrier than "New fossil rewrites human evolutionary history" and then when you actually go and read the source, it does not such thing. So it wasn't a fossilized time machine?

Re:The REAL lesson is the media is bad at everythi

[AvitarX]

and when I hear the term "journalistic ethic" I cringe.

And coming from a lawyer it really drives the point home how bad journalists are.

once upon a time...

[penguinbroker]

a professor i work with on autonomous modular robotics was interviewed a couple years back on the future implications of his research. generally our goals are search and rescue missions and possible space missions (reconfigurable robots are just so much more space-friendly) and the majority of our work has been towards these two milestones. the journalist, however, arrived at the interview with the fantastic vision of shrinking down these robots to nanoscale sizes and continuously (about a dozen times) asked if these robots would one day be able to enter the human body for medical purposes...

as you can imagine, my professor wasn't too amused but eventually gave in after the twelfth time being asked the question with an emphatic 'sure, why not.' and what do you know, the headline that week was something along the lines of 'Scientists creating robots to enter the human body.' we still haven't heard from any doctors yet....

Re:It's like driving on the left

[throup]

I did hear a suggestion once that, here in the UK, we should begin to drive on the right to bring ourselves in line with the rest of Europe. Obviously, there is bound to be opposition to any such plan, so the suggestion was to start with heavy goods vehicles only and see how they get on. :-)

Re:China prefers Pink

[rabiddeity]

Ahh, now that's a horse of a different color!

Re:China prefers Pink

[fractoid]

That would be par for the course.

This being Slashdot and all.

Re:Science Journalism - Thumbs Down or Up?

[Sj0]

Well said.

Re:Who knew?

[uglydog]

You guys are all doing computer science, but I was thinking math too. So, let e>0: (3-e)+(3-e)=6-2*e now take the limit as e goes to 0. Course, the right left side terms become 3, but now let's turn to the magic of floats and doubles (C++, which I'm pleased to see you guys using too. If you're a geek, you know what I mean. And since you guys replied, clearly geeks.) for(double i=1;i>0;i/=10) printf("%f\n",i); Through out the loop, i>0, yet the result is 6. (Didn't check if it compiled. hope hope) Just a thought experiment, really. I'm typing this from my parents basement. :-(