Katie Joseph’s Blog

One of my advisors in college wisely told me, “More math will never hurt you.”  Even though they made me crazy, nearly ruined my GPA, and seemed to be taught by different versions of the same person, I’m glad I took all those stats classes.  While I don’t run chi-squared tests on a daily basis, I do have a pretty finely-honed bullsh*t detector.  Take, for example, data contained within the Mothman Prophecies:

I was in the mood for a little light reading, so I picked up this 1975 gem on unexplained phenomena. Perhaps it’s all the Penn & Teller I’ve watched, but whenever someone in a “woo-woo” field cracks out data, I just have to look under the hood.

I do give Keel credit for actually taking a crack at being scientific and keeping data. He seems reasonably objective and who knows how I’d think if faced with the Mothman itself. That said, relying on straight-up percentages can get you in trouble.

On page 144, he displays a table of distribution of UFO reports in 1950 and concludes, based on percentage of total observations, that UFOs are more likely to be reported on Wednesday than any other day of the week, since 18.8% of observations reported were on Wednesdays.

It’s been at least eight years since I’ve run any kind of statistical test, but I just couldn’t help myself. Wikipedia made un-sticking the gears a relatively painless procedure, and I was soon using Excel to run a chi-squared test (which I think was the right one to use).

Result: I reject Keel’s hypothesis and find that a UFO is no more likely to be reported on Wednesday than any other day of the week.

And that is why I only went on four dates in college.

A couple of days before Christmas, the mister and I headed over to the local grog & burger joint for dinner.  It’s right next to a Salvation Army and the lights were on, tantalizing me.  “There might be cashmere in there,” said my sense of false hope.

There was no cashmere, but there were ducks — many of them, and in formation no less.  It made me a bit uneasy.  No finds that night, either, other than this photo.

On an unrelated note, we’re loving this recipe (it’s comfort food weather, after all).

One of Amos’s newer hobbies is beer-brewing.  Actually, “hobby” may not be the right word here.  For Amos, hobbies are not casual pursuits, but take on shades of obsession.  When he got interested in electronics, a kit here and there wasn’t enough to satisfy.  He had to make his own circuit boards, modular synthesizers, and eventually design his own projects.  When he rediscovered arcade games, he didn’t just load up an emulator on our entertainment PC, he got a cocktail-style cabinet and filled it with its own computer and an actual honest-to-Pete arcade monitor.  He’d mentioned wanting to brew beer in the past, so it didn’t surprise me that when he took it up, it wasn’t with a casual Mr. Beer kit.  He found the country’s best home brew supplier (free instructional DVDs!), ordered up one of their nicer kits and almost immediately started scheming for a kegerator.

If my count is right, this will be his fourth batch of beer.  Since a watched wort never boils, he’s enjoying some Buffy the Vampire Slayer on his laptop (headphones necessary due to the noise of the kitchen fan.) His first batch is on the cusp of being ready for consumption; the sample I had on Wednesday night was delightful if a bit under-carbonated.

I fully support this hobby and not just as a loving spouse.  I do enjoy our project nights (making our own tonic and bottling beer being two recent examples), but the real reason for my enthusiasm is that homebrewing produces a microbrew-quality product at a Pabst Blue Ribbon price.   I don’t even mind the mildly Vegemite-y smell it produces, or sharing my kitchen workspace with Amos.

In other news, hosting Thanksgiving was a success thanks to lots of help and advice from my friend Neal.  The man peeled ten pounds of potatoes and probably half as many carrots for me on Wednesday night and loaned me a wide assortment of Star-Trek-weapon-like specialty utensils.  We had a total of fourteen people over including four adorable kids ranging from a couple of months to five years old.  The cats are only now recovering.  Between you and me, Internet, I love it when my  house is full of warm and fuzzy chaos.

We receive several catalogues at the Joseph household, and the holiday season has brought a bounty of weirdness to our doorstep.  First up is J. Crew.  I’m not sure why I turned out this way — mom, it’s not your fault — but I watch typography like a hawk, and this one has me wondering:

Some letters in italics, some not, and there’s no recognizable pattern.  Is it Morse code?  Is it Morse code plus a cipher?  I don’t know.  But I do know that someone is trying to tell us something.

Second up, which you may have predicted, is something that caused me to draw my trusty Sharpie from its holster:

And last but not least, [cue the smarmy voice] something for the ladies:

Cheaper Than Dirt is one of my very favorite catalogs for casual browsing.  They peddle lots of military surplus (you too can own a used-in-good-condition Israeli army gas can), and lots of things to add to your gun to give it a “tactical appearance,” which means that it will make things so much more realistic when you pretend to be on the SWAT team.  And just in time for the holidays: your very own pink taser.  What more could a girl want, besides a few replacement cartridges?

People.  “Gift” is not a verb unless you’re referring to a method of transfer with respect to the tax code.

We already have a word for transferring something to another person and expecting nothing in return.  It is “give.”  Past tense is “gave.”  Not “gifted.”

I know language evolves and I’m all for that generally speaking.  This is going too far — it is redundant and results in a loss of specificity.  And it sounds bad.  I will fight this tooth and claw, using vigilante methods where necessary.  I go forth, red pen in hand.

For those of you in Nebraska, today is your last chance to register in person to vote on 11/4.  Details on how are at http://maps.google.com/vote.

I’m going to visit Julee at the end of the month.  It’ll be the first time I’ve flown in over a year, and I’m dreading airport security.  It’s a generally unpleasant experience, but this go-round I’ll have to negotiate a long line, juggling my carry-ons, and removing and replacing my shoes with an ankle that’s still rather delicate.  I may revert to the boot or borrow a cane just to be on the safe side.

I wouldn’t mind the hassle and the invasion of my privacy if airport security actually worked, but the sad truth is that it’s a complete joke.  I’ve been reading Bruce Schneier’s blog for a while now, and the TSA is one of his favorite targets. He recently helped a writer from the Atlantic Monthly evade security (The Things He Carried on the Atlantic’s website).  The article reminded me of our airport experience in semi-rural Brazil.   I’m pretty sure they x-rayed our checked luggage, and they did run our carry-ons through a scanner, but aside from that, security consisted of them asking, “Do you have any bombs?  No?  Well then, have fun on the plane.”  No repeated ID checks, no taking off one’s shoes, no confiscation of liquids.  It was downright pleasant, and a stark contrast to the Lincoln airport (a place where you almost need a court order to get photographic film inspected by hand.  Because, you know, somebody might try to sneak extra lotion in using film canisters, and there’s nothing more dangerous than a set of properly-moisturized hands.)

I’m all worked up now.  Lest I begin a rant on how we’ve gradually ceded more and more of our privacy for a false sense of safety, I’d better hang this one up.  I wonder when the CLEAR program will come to Nebraska…

I’ve been having so much fun on my work blog lately, I’ve decided to start a personal one.  It will contain: pictures of my pets, food-related content, craft-related content, and other things that don’t quite belong on the work page.

The site is named dainto.org after my childhood imaginary friend, Dainto.  My mental image of him came from the Fisher Price Little Person shown in the masthead.  What was the appeal of this grumpy-looking Little Person?  He looked mischievous, like someone upon whom I could blame a broken vase or mud tracked into the house.

This will be a photo-heavy blog (especially once my new Canon Powershot G10 arrives), and in that spirit, here’s a picture.  I  have a dwarf umbrella plant in my office (not toxic to cats — I checked), and Boy George  loves to crawl around it to stare out the window.  I think it makes him feel wild.