Skip to main content

Annual Dilbert [Headlines] Post

Szczekociny festival poster 

Scott Adams, the cartoonist who created Dilbert, has said that there are only nine news stories, constantly re-written.

Every year at about this time I like to check the newspaper with his list in mind, to see if he is right. I'll start with his wording unmodified by examples.

1. EXTREME WEATHER BATTERS SOMEPLACE
2. IDIOTS KILL INNOCENT PEOPLE
3. POLITICIAN DOES SOMETHING ILLEGAL
4. PRIMATE ATTEMPTS INAPPROPRIATE SEX
5. EXPERT WARNS OF FINANCIAL CALAMITY
6. BIG COMPANY BUYS ANOTHER BIG COMPANY
7. FAMOUS PERSON DOES SOMETHING INTERESTING
8. A SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY MIGHT BE USEFUL IN TEN YEARS
9. GOVERNMENT FAILS TO ACHIEVE A GOAL

I surveyed the news on one day (a few days back as it happens). Just by convenience, these headlines are all from January 19th. Well, actually, I cheated a little with one of them, but I'll let you dear reader do the work of figuring out which one that is. Without further ado....

1. EXTREME WEATHER BATTERS SOMEPLACE

Catastrophic flooding in southern Africa.

2. IDIOTS KILL INNOCENT PEOPLE

Jury selection gets underway in the trial of a classic in the annals of such idiocy.

3. POLITICIAN DOES SOMETHING ILLEGAL

Parking in a handicapped spot. Not the worst of crimes, but a pretty blatant one.

4. PRIMATE ATTEMPTS INAPPROPRIATE SEX

Orangutans "make calls that often include sounds like kisses, squeaks and grunts." Gee, I know what inspires such sounds among humans....

5. EXPERT WARNS OF FINANCIAL CALAMITY -- "The Scale of the Chinese Real Estate Crash is Terrifying" even from the seemingly safe distance of the other hemisphere. Business Insider

6. BIG COMPANY BUYS ANOTHER BIG COMPANY -- General Electric to buy French engineering group Alstom.

7. FAMOUS PERSON DOES SOMETHING INTERESTING -- Pope Francis continues to fill this particular news niche.

8. A SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY MIGHT BE USEFUL IN TEN YEARS

This one involves potential improved treatment for diabetics. that's the 10-years-later use. The actual discovery involves the cone snail. It fits the template perfectly.

9. GOVERNMENT FAILS TO ACHIEVE A GOAL.

The goal of the government in Greece, until recently, was keeping the promises it had made to the troika by which it was bailed out not long ago. Not gonna happen. The second graf of the story to which I've just linked you reads, "leftist Syriza leads the opinion polls and is intent on cancelling the austerity terms of a bailout from Europe and the International Monetary Fund and also wants a big debt write off." Okay, so that means "we've failed to achieve the goal, and now we want to forget we ever set it."

Adams is right. We're all in a loop.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.   We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...
9 comments
Read more

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere.  At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...
17 comments
Read more

Recent Controversies Involving Nassim Taleb, Part I

I've written about Nassim Taleb on earlier occasions in this blog. I'll let you do the search yourself, dear reader, for the full background. The short answer to the question "who is Taleb?" is this: he is a 57 year old man born in Lebanon, educated in France, who has been both a hedge fund manager and a derivatives trader. He retired from active participation from the financial world sometime between 2004 and 2006, and has been a full-time writer and provocateur ever since. Taleb's writings for the general public began where one might expect -- in the field where he had made his money -- and he explained certain financial issues to a broad audiences in a very dramatic non-technical way. Since then, he has widened has fields of study, writing about just about everything, applying the intellectual tools he honed in that earlier work. As you might have gather from the above, I respect Taleb, though I have sometimes been critical of him when my own writing ab...
4 comments
Read more