Fail Quotes

[Altimadark]

So this bit of fail from Conrad Hackett got retweeted to me:

Blue states have more people in college housing, red states more people in prisons & jails
Source: http://www.vox.com/2015/1/21/7865887/map-prison-college


So, let's ignore for a brief moment that college housing and incarceration aren't really comparable. Did you notice that, for example, heavily democrat California is a Red State before I just mentioned it? Yeah, the red and blue on this map don't indicate political leaning at all -- red = more ppl in jail, blue = more ppl in college housing. To its credit, the source Hackett cites even says as much.

Hacket, however, is clearly trying to make a political statement, given that his twitter feed looks like nothing but the "statistics" rank-and-file democrats (among others) use to support their arguments.

[R.E.H.W.R.]

https://app.actionsprout.com/opengraph/action/6482?fb_action_ids=10203301693892330&fb_action_types=actionsprout%3Asign&fb_ref=as_action%3A6482

[AnCap Dave]

[Ibrahim90]

uh...how? both sides agreed to it, so where's the problem?

[AnCap Dave]

>all of this

Does she even listen to herself?

[Travis Retriever]

...
#BroDoYouEvenBasicFuckingLogic #BroDoYouEvenDictionary

[R.E.H.W.R.]

http://uk.businessinsider.com/what-is-blue-and-how-do-we-see-color-2015-2
We couldn't see blue until modern times?!? Really?!?

[evensgrey]

http://uk.businessinsider.com/what-is-blue-and-how-do-we-see-color-2015-2
We couldn't see blue until modern times?!? Really?!?

Notice this is from a group of islands famed since ancient times as the place where there are people known as "The People Who Paint Themselves BLUE", and for centuries (starting in the Middle Ages and going right through to the development of synthetic dyes) was one of the principle sources of natural indigo dye, and was during Tudor times wool dyed with it was one of the main exports of the UK.  A brief bit of research shows that woad has been found in use as a dye source for just about as long as there have been records of dyes, and the plant was clearly being cultivated well back into prehistory in Europe.

[AdeptusHereticus]

Yeah something's funny in this article ...

The part about the experiment with the Himba sounds kinda stupid to me. The hypothesis here is that the Himbas consider the blue as part of the green spectrum. Which is a reasonable conclusion to the fact that they can't decide if one square is more different than the others when there are 10 different greens and 1 blue. But the fact that they are better at discriminating between very close shades of green is irrelevant to the purpose of the experiment and to the article ...

And it still doesn't explain why Homer uses weird colors to describe the world of the Odyssey. Because even without the blue, the colors are all wrong. The yellow is in the light green-strong red spectrum so the honey should still appear yellow for someone who can't see shit in the blue spectrum. The wine-dark color of the sea doesn't necessitate any other color than red ... And the sheeps ... Well, who the fuck will crack that riddle lol. For all we know he changed the colors on purpose.

Add to that, as Evensgrey says, that the blue color have been found in a lot of ancient places ...

The whole argumentation of the article is, let's say "off-balance".

[MrBogosity]

We've been able to see blue since our aquatic ancestors. Red was the holdout; we didn't get that until our ancestors evolved into primates.

[evensgrey]

And it still doesn't explain why Homer uses weird colors to describe the world of the Odyssey. Because even without the blue, the colors are all wrong. The yellow is in the light green-strong red spectrum so the honey should still appear yellow for someone who can't see shit in the blue spectrum. The wine-dark color of the sea doesn't necessitate any other color than red ... And the sheeps ... Well, who the fuck will crack that riddle lol. For all we know he changed the colors on purpose.

I think I know the answer to that, and it's basically the same reason why characters in anime have wild, and often impossible without dye, hair colors:  The form is highly stylized.

While a lot of the stylism in Anime is more or less because that's the way it's done (and got borrowed from kabuki theater because it was both familiar to the primary audience at the start of the form, it looked like the manga that were the source material, and, possibly most important of all, it was cheaper to use many of the stylisms than not to), Homer had a practical reason as well:  The poems were originally recited from memory, so the way things were said was stylized so that the story could be kept in more or less the same form from telling to telling.  This meant that much of the wording is made up of stock phrases that are easily fit to the meter and rhyming scheme IN GREEK.  Perhaps the Greek word for blue didn't RHYME with anything, while the word for violet happens to rhyme with a word that often shows up in association with sheep.

I took a classical literature course in university that covered The Illiad, and this was the given explanation for why the phrasing is often really weird, with many characters being given a stock epithet that doesn't always fit into the situation being described.  (Incidentally, this is a large part of why you go to university if you do go, because you get a chance to take weird courses like that.)

[AdeptusHereticus]

We've been able to see blue since our aquatic ancestors. Red was the holdout; we didn't get that until our ancestors evolved into primates.

What ? So late ? Damn.

[AdeptusHereticus]

I think I know the answer to that, and it's basically the same reason why characters in anime have wild, and often impossible without dye, hair colors:  The form is highly stylized.

[...]

Well that makes much more sense.

[evensgrey]

What ? So late ? Damn.

Well, we didn't get red BACK until our ancestors evolved into primates (most of whom have fruit as a major dietary component, and fruits often signal being ripe by changing to a color like red).

See, mammals went through this long nocturnal phase and we lost color vision in favor of low-light vision.  Once the dinos were gone, we were able to come out into the light again.

[Dallas Wildman]

Wow talk about the most ridiculous reducto ad absurdium.