[geeks] What desk toy or "tchotchke" says "geek" to you?

[Mike Meredith]

On Fri, 31 Mar 2006 16:21:03 -0500, Charles Shannon Hendrix wrote:
> Fri, 31 Mar 2006 @ 17:01 +0000, Mike Meredith said:
> > Then perhaps you shouldn't make unsubstantiated and insulting claims
> > about other countries. 
> 
> I didn't do that.

No? Well I see it a little differently, and to demonstrate I quote from
an earlier mail by you (no rephrasing, no clever snipping) :-

On Mon, 27 Mar 2006 01:21:31 -0500, Charles Shannon Hendrix wrote:
> Mon, 27 Mar 2006 @ 14:54 +1100, Chris Petrov said:
> 
> > Can't say that I disagree in general apart from the fact it seems to
> >  
> > be an awful lot of people (certainly compared to other
> > industrialized   countries) 
> 
> Keep in mind, other countries often have a habit of lying about their
> stats.
> 
> The US is one of the most open and honest countries in the world.

That seems to me a clear indication that you believe that crime stats
from the US can be trusted to have honest crime stats, but 'other
countries' can't. As 'other countries' includes the UK, I'm somewhat
irritated by you unsubstantiated claim.

> > And the average policeman has an accurate figure for the number of
> > arrests she's made in the past year ? Not very likely is it ?
> 
> Yes, he does, because it is required by law.

No she doesn't. She can probably lookup the figures in a database
somewhere, but that doesn't mean she has an accurate figure in her head
in case she's buttonholed in some bar somewhere. 

> Elementary statistical groundwork. If you ever read a report where
> they didn't account for this, then they didn't know what they were
> doing.

Sure, but with even with the best groundwork you can't do more than come
up with a flimsy hypothesis about the level of crime in an area based on
the number of arrests.

Which is why in the UK, crime statistics are based on the number of
recorded crimes reported by the police.

> The bigger problem is crimes that don't result in an arrest, often
> because of technicalities that shouldn't exist.

More commonly because the police don't know who the criminal is. After
all unless you catch someone dripping with blood, catching criminals is
a pretty difficult job.

> > There is no direct correlation between the number of crimes and the
> > number of arrests.
> 
> Which is why people who do things right don't make them.

So why does it seem that's exactly what you're doing ?

> > A politician lied ? Oh dear! Well it's hardly new, and has no
> > relevance on crime figures.
> 
> I didn't say it did. It was an example of how a government can care
> little for what its own numbers say.

No it's an example of how a politician doesn't care for what the figures
say. I don't know about the US, but the UK government isn't a monolithic
mass of politicians. Statistics are gathered by government departments
staffed by career civil servants who are supposed to be politically
neutral. Could the Home Office ministers cook the figures ? Possibly,
but it wouldn't stay secret for very long.

A UK politician who lied about the statistics would be laughed at even
harder than the ones who come up with daft conclusions using the real
figures.