Back in the day, the statistics used in baseball games were pretty mundane and onbviously useful. Interesting to know which players made a lot of errors and ribbies. These days, the announcers and contract negotiators quote far more dubious “statistics” that make for useless trivia – number of doubles during away games when pitched to with a 3-2 count, that sort of pap.
People like numbers. Like repeating useless numbers to their buddies. People know squat about stats, and all of these people seem to be on the Atkins diet.
So I’m watching the weather channel while waiting for the Simpsons to start. They start by telling me the ceiling is unlimited. Great! News I can use! Then they have a commercial sponsored by Flu-Be-Gone showing that every Canadian city not having a full fleged “Flu Epidemic” is in the middle of a full-fledged “Flu Pre-Alert” despite the fact this year has one of the lowest flu rates in years, asking people to go to their doctor if they have signs of flu like mild cough or stuffy nose.
Then they show a UV report. They take great pains to explain all of the meanings of the scale from 0 to 9 (thermonuclear war) before concluding today’s UV reading is 0.8 – not a lot of sun this time of year in Eastern Canada what with all our recent snowstorms, and this will be maximal at 12:31 pm today. This isn’t the Bahamas, here.
Then they get to the nitty gritty and start talking about how cold it will be with wind chill. I’m aware of how engineers use wind chill to correct for the time exposed flesh wil freeze, I guess. But I don’t have a lot of faith in the statistic, and think it’s there primarily to impress Canadians into thinking they are tougher than they are. "Sure, its -4 today, but -27 with “wind chill”. No one else I know has any faith in this statistic either.
So isn’t the weather report basically a bunch of useless crap? Who needs this stuff?