Profiles in Surbage

I followed a link left by commenter "Andy Vance" at Surb's place and found this, the Thumb Puppet of Civility:



How the hell did this slip past me? It seems that Don took The Editors to task a while back for driving tens of millions of potential readers away from blogs because of a post they wrote about Tony Snow's gigantic head. It's true, that type of juvenile humor has no place on the internets, and it certainly doesn't meet the high standards set by Don Surber:



Those images were collected from Surber's blog as part of a little research project I conducted a while back. So, if you're following along at home, according to the Surb Standard:

gigantic heads = internet dreck
gigantic boobs = well-reasoned commentary

(Sadly, the T & A blogging had to stop when he moved his blog to the Daily Mail's site.)

Perhaps I'm being unfair. After all, Don's point wasn't that his blog was better than The Editors', but that their blog is crap compared to what you find on the editorial pages of your average newspaper. So let's see what Don thinks is worthy of Charleston's afternoon fishwrap.

He once devoted an entire column to Fark.com. [Link is to the blog where he "cross-posts" all of his print columns, since the DM makes you pay for its archives.] In that column, he quoted such well-respected sources as Programmer Cat and Zeppo Nightshade. Journalism at its finest. And I guess the latest happenings at Fark are of such concern to the residents of Charleston, West Virginia that he devoted a second column to Fark last month.

The Farkers returned the favor by linking to Don's column and having a little Photoshop battle. (Unfortunately, I didn't save the Beaker ones.) There's just something about Surb's photo that invites this sort of thing.

Thanks Andy Vance!

The Daily Mail Pays Don Surber to Make Shit Up

I don't know how much money Don Surber makes, but it's astonishing that he can make a living writing two short columns a week and maintaining a blog. How does that fill up 40 hours a week? He certainly isn't spending any time on research.

Today, Don blogs about a New York Times article that discusses the disproportionate impact of global warming on poorer nations, when it's the wealthier nations who contribute far more to the problem. A research fellow from the Hoover Institution analogized the situation to the sinking of the Titanic:

“Like the sinking of the Titanic, catastrophes are not democratic,” said Henry I. Miller, a fellow with the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. “A much higher fraction of passengers from the cheaper decks were lost. We’ll see the same phenomenon with global warming.”

Don, in his infinite wisdom, responds:

Actually most of the rich men aboard the Titanic went down with the ship. The reason more people died in steerage is that, well, there were more people in steerage.

D'oh! Either Don can't grasp such simple mathematical concepts as fractions and percentages, or he can't read for shit. Either way, he's getting paid for this crap.

Yes, there were more lower class passengers on the Titanic than 1st class passengers, so in raw numbers, more of them died. But, a disproportionate percentage of the lower class passengers died compared to the 1st class passengers. 70.6% of the 2nd & 3rd class passengers died, but only 39.5% of the 1st class passengers died. Put another way, most of the 1st class passengers survived, while most of the lower class passengers perished. This was the research fellow's point: "A much higher fraction of passengers from the cheaper decks were lost."

Did "most of the rich men" go down with the ship as Don says, in a failed attempt to contradict Miller's point? Well, yeah, but most of the poor men went down with the ship too. However, a larger fraction of them died. 68.8% of the men in 1st class were lost, while 88.3% of the men from the cheaper decks were lost.

Among the women and children passengers, the class differential was even more striking. Only 7.1% of the women and children in 1st class died, while 40.6% of the women and children from the cheaper decks died.

All of these and more fun facts can be found in the U.S. Senate Inquiry into the Titanic disaster, which is available online. (Pssst, Don -- this is what's known as a "source.")