The Formula for the Perfect Night Out: An attractive girl and some Vodka

I haven't had a 'formula' story for a while. Actually, I don't think I've written anything for a while, but anyway, I recently came across this from the Yorkshire Evening Post (well, more specifically, from the advertising department of Vodka Kick, but it was printed in the YEP). Apparently, Phillippa Toon, the new expert 'VKendologist' has come up with the formula for the perfect night out.

What really impresses me about this story is not the total inanity of the formula (I'll get to that in a minute) but the sheer brazenness of the advertising campaign. They picked an attractive girl who happens to be studying science at university, appointed her a 'vkendologist' and then gave an exceedingly dodgy survey to lots of drunk people, before collating the answers to give a completely meaningless 'formula' (I'll get to that in a minute). They don't even try to pretend that the formula is useful - the text of the 'article' directly contradicts what the formula itself would predict, but it's accompanied by a picture of a pretty girl in a labcoat, so that qualifies it as 'science'.

Why do they print these things? Well, I know the answer to that, it's cheap copy for the newspapers, it's a few free drinks and some publicity for Ms. Toon and it's free advertising (which, incidentally, doesn't need to be checked by the ASA) for VK. Maybe the fact that they have had to use a student for this story is a good sign, indicating that real academics are less likely to put their name to this sort of thing than they used to be or (and I think this is more likely) maybe they just advertised the job of 'VKendologist' to students so they were more likely to find a girl who fit their profile (or whose profile fit their profile...).

As for the formula itself. Apparently:

(attractiveness + spontaneity) x (number of friends + venue + timing + the fun time) x (end of the evening factor)

You have no idea what any of that is supposed to mean, don't worry, we're given an explanation later. The fun time, for instance is translated as 'how much fun they have'. I assume this 'factor' in the equation came from the question from the survey:

What is the optimum time of fun on a night out? (For example 10pm to midnight)

So we're multiplying by a time period. I have literally no idea how we're supposed to do that. In fact, so far as I can work out the dimensions of this particular sum are "people + bar + period of time". I'm not sure what units we're supposed to measure 'venue' or 'attractiveness' or 'spontaneity' in - I'm also not quite sure whether being more or less spontaneous is supposed to be better.

In fact, I give up. This isn't even an attempt at a formula, it's an attempt to get the words 'VK' and 'perfect night out' into a newspaper accompanied by a picture of an attractive young woman. It's a total success. This is not entirely the fault of the VK advertising department, or of Phillippa Toon, or even of the Yorkshire Evening Post.

This is an excellent sentence (fragment)

so the fourth Ackermann number is quite large.

From the wikipedia article on the Ackerman function. You really have to have a special interpretation of 'quite' for this sentence to be true.

I used to think Steven Colbert was a parody..

This is possibly the scariest/funniest thing I've ever seen. This guy seems to be genuinely claiming that universal healthcare leads directly to terrorism. I thought that "evil and Orwellian" were going pretty far, but this is insane.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2c-JEx-Kfvc#t=3m30s

This literally doesn't seem to add up

How tall is Nelson's column? Apparently until recently, no-one knew the answer to this question.

I realise this is hardly news, as it happened about three years ago, but it's one of the most confusing things I've ever read, I genuinely have no idea how it could be true. Apparently, before someone got up there and measured it, we'd all been massively overestimating

To quote the story:

As part of the most thorough cleaning and restoration of the world-famous monument in its 163-year history, a laser survey was carried out to establish exactly how tall it was.

And the discovery which will render countless school textbooks out of date was that it measures 169ft from street level to the top of Nelson's hat - compared to an official height of 185ft.

I'm supposed to believe that the 'official height' was out by about 16 feet? That's 10% of the actual height. I could make an estimate that's within 10% of the actual height just by holding my finger up against it and squinting. Had no-one tried measuring the thing's shadow? Or dropping something off the top to see how long it took? Or counting how many of those ring-like things there are round the outside? Or giving a barometer to the janitor?

I genuinely find this utterly implausible, but no-one in any of the newspaper stories I can find from the time seems to have questioned it. Lazy reporting? Or am I over-estimating the numeracy of the nation?

Shops cut prices

I'm not really sure if this qualifies as an inane newspaper article, but it was by far the most interesting thing on the Sun's news page today:

A NEW price war was hotting up last night after Britain's biggest pharmacy chain slashed the cost of a bottle of suncream to £1.

I can't really figure out why this is supposed to be news. Presumably it's some sort of 'credit crunch' story, but it seems more like good old-fashioned competition to me. I was surprised that Lloyd's is Britain's biggest pharmacy (do Boot's only operate in big cities?) but I don't have much more to say.

Even The Sun can get some things right

There is new legislation in the offing regarding the regulation of complementary medicine. This is a bit like having legislation regarding the practice of sorcery: it just doesn't make any sense, and tends to encourage the view that 'alternative' medicine has some legitimacy.

Professor Ernst (whose book I still haven't gotten round to reading) is quoted in the Sun as saying:

If you regulate nonsense, it is still nonsense.

When even the Sun's columnists can make more sense on a topic than the government ministers in charge of it, I think it's time to be worried.

Government Advisors don't understand economics

I'm slightly worried that anyone who reads this blog is going to start to think I get all my news from the Sun: actually I was pointed to this story by Ben Goldacre, but since he was just commenting on an article that appeared in the Sun, I think I'll quote it stight from the horse's as... mouth.

MORE than seven million Brits use illegal downloading sites that cost the economy billions of pounds, Government advisors said today.

Now, I am not an economist, but there is one very simple principle that I have managed to gather from reading only the very basic popular economics literature: a transfer of wealth is not an economic cost.

If I steal £100 from you, I have not cost the economy £100 - you have £100 less, but I have £100 more, so the economy as a whole is just as rich: all it has lost is the opportunity cost of the time I spent stealing the money instead of doing something more productive (and of the time that you spend trying to prevent me from stealing money, etc.). I would have thought this was even more obvious in the case of downloading music: when a track is downloaded one person gets richer (they own a track they didn't own before) and no-one gets poorer; some people who might deserve to get richer don't, but this is not an immediate cost to the economy.

People downloading music without paying the artists might cost the artists the net retail value of the music (although this is debatable): it certainly doesn't cost the economy that much. Goldacre's article points out that the numbers involved are utterly implausible, and that in fact they have been misreported by a factor of 10, but that's not the point: the numbers are not just implausible they are irrelevant.

A proper cost-benefit analysis of internet piracy would take into account the pleasure that people get from listening to downloaded music as well as the cost of failing to incentivise musicians to make more: people who download music are people, and their economic gains are just as real as those of record companies.