I was getting the latest U.S. unemployment figures for a project, and rather than use news reports I went straight to the source: The Bureau of Labor Statistics. The first quick scan seemed to indicate an unemployment rate of 5.0 percent.

But then I actually read the report.

That 5.0-percent figure, which is what most newspapers will, incorrectly, cite, is based on there being 7.63 million unemployed people.

But you have to read past the top of the report. Because that figure doesn’t include some very important people: so-called “marginally attached workers.”

Who are they? They are, the BLS says, “persons who currently are neither working nor looking for work but indicate that they want and  are available for a job and have looked for work sometime in the recent past.”

They include people who have run out of unemployment benefits (”discouraged workers”) and those who “want and are available for full-time work but have had to settle for a part-time schedule.”

So that 5.0 percent figure only counts people who are getting unemployment benefits. When your benefits run out, you’re not considered unemployed.

Thankfully, the Bureau of Labor Statistics also gives the actual unemployment numbers (albeit in an easy-to-miss addendum to the monthly labor report called “Alternative measures of labor underutilization“). 

The actual unemployment rate in the United States in April 2008 was 9.2 percent.

Something worth thinking about.

Yippee — Pro-Keds are still around, and still made by a small company!

In response to criticism of his continued and unapologetic use of the word “gooks” to describe his North Vietnamese captors, John McCain had this to say:

“I was referring to my prison guards, and I will continue to refer to them in language that might offend some people because of the beating and torture of my friends.”

Which begs the question: If you hate them so much because they beat and tortured your friends, how the hell can you support the United States continuing to use and support torture, you hypocritical, senile, flip-flopping un-American jerk?

Answer:

Either A) the torture you claim to have undergone wasn’t all that bad, or

B) You’re a racist and sadistic creep who has no business being President

How do I know? I’d say this is pretty much crossing the line between “enthusiastic users” and “freaky mind drones”: 

Yes, that’s an eBay auction for a piece of an Apple sign. And it’s up to $202+ already. (The money is going to charity, btw, which I think is great.)

Here’s a closeup. [sniff] I would be [sniff] proud to hang that in my home.

With little fanfare, Skeptic magazine has thoroughly debunked Ben Stein’s anti-science propaganda film, “Expelled,” which purports to expose that educators across the land are being attacked for being creationists.

There are, in fact, several articles on the subject of “Expelled,” and they share a common theme: Showing how the filmmakers, including Stein, were forced to resort to a variety of distortions and, basically, outright lies to make their points.

For example, there’s the case of one Guillermo Gonzalez, who the films claims was denied tenure at Iowa State University for being a creationist. But, Skeptic points out

…filmmakers neglect to bring up the fact that in all his years at Iowa State Gonzalez had only brought in only a tiny amount of grant money when compared to the funding brought in by his colleagues. Nor do they mention the fact that Gonzalez failed to mentor a single one of his students at Iowa State through to their Ph.D. Nor does it tell viewers that while initially his publication record was terrific, during his years at Iowa State, it had significantly dropped.

That kind of “forgetting to mention the salient facts” is typical of creationists.

For example, in Caroline Crocker’s case, she claimed that “[My supervisor] said ‘nonetheless you have to be disciplined’, and I lost my job” at either George Mason University or Northern Virginia Community College (it’s not clear which she’s referring to). Skeptic, however, puts her claim in perspective:

Although in interviews and trailers for Expelled Dr. Crocker and her documentary host Ben Stein repeatedly claim she “lost her job,” the facts show that, less dramatically, her contracts at both GMU and NVCC were allowed to continue through their natural terms and were simply not renewed. Although this indeed must have been disappointing for Dr. Crocker, it is certainly not uncommon: about 70 percent of instructional faculty members at U.S. universities work on term contracts, many as “visiting” or “adjunct” professors as Dr. Crocker was, without any long-term guarantees.

In fact, the magazine points out, students in her cell biology classes at GMU had complained about Crocker because she was teaching nonsense, and they knew it — this was reported in a Washington Post story about her.

For instance, in the Washington Post article Crocker is described as initially telling the reporter she would discuss “the strengths and weaknesses of evolution,” then proceeding to unleash on her NCVV students a barrage of Creationist talking points. Finally, following the reporter’s remark at the end of the lecture that she did not introduce any existing evidence in favor of evolution, Crocker volunteered that she doesn’t believe there is much, and that she doesn’t think it is necessary to teach any at all.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: When you have to distort facts (or simply make them up) to support your argument, there’s something seriously wrong with your argument in the first place.

Liz Trotta from Fox “News” says it would be good to kill Barack Obama. Oh, it was just a joke.

“And now we have what some are reading as a suggestion that somebody knock off Osama, er Obama,” she said, then laughed. “Well both, if we could.”

Ha ha. Considering how we all know you’d react if someone suggested killing McCain, that’s a lot of class there, Liz.

I think I’m breaking my computer, but I could be wr

Back in March I wrote about Todd Davis, the CEO of LifeLock, who put his Social Security number out there for anyone to see. LifeLock, you see, protects against identity theft, and Davis was showing his confidence.

Well, oops. Now LifeLock is being sued because customers say the service doesn’t work — and they discovered that Davis himself had that Social Security number used against him.

Attorney David Paris said he found records of other people applying for or receiving driver’s licenses at least 20 times using Davis’ Social Security number, though some of the applications may have been rejected because data in them didn’t match what the Social Security Administration had on file.

[snip]

Davis acknowledged in an interview with The Associated Press that his stunt has led to at least 87 instances in which people have tried to steal his identity, and one succeeded: a guy in Texas who duped an online payday loan operation last year into giving him $500 using Davis’ Social Security number.

I don’t think Dave Barry, Tom Shroder, and Gene Weingarten set out to create a wonderful demonstration of the difference between knowledge and intelligence, but they sure did — at least for me.

This Sunday I drove up to Washington, D.C., for the first (annual?) Post Hunt — a giant, public, puzzle game held all over downtown D.C.

“Puzzle game.” Let me explain for those who aren’t familiar with the Miami Tropic Hunt, which this is based on. (Or, for you grammarians, “upon which this is oh go screw yourselves.”)

Thousands of people play. You go to the starting point, as explained in that week’s Post Magazine. You are given five locations on a map of the downtown. At each of those five locations is a puzzle waiting for you — a large, public puzzle. The answer to each puzzle is a number, and the number leads you to a phrase in the magazine.

The magazine lists lots of numbers and phrases, but only five will mean anything. The rest are red herrings.

So you might solve a puzzle, get an answer of “12,” and then know that phrase #12 is important.

When you get all five phrases, you go back to the starting point at 3:00 where you are given a final clue that you use in conjunction with those five phrases to unravel another location with another puzzle. Solve that first and win the prize. (Actually, there are prizes for first, second, and third.)

The puzzles are neat. They were smart but not too smart — good enough to weed out the posers, but not so tough that only dedicated puzzle people would win.

That was important to me, because I was with a group of members of the National Puzzlers’ League, having been invited by my friend (and NPL member) Eric. I felt like I was playing a game of touch football with the NY Giants.

When it comes to puzzles, these guys are the best. Several were featured in the movie Wordplay, for example, including at least one of the three others on my team. (There were 15 NPLers in the group, divided into four teams.)

So I hoped against hope to make some kind of contribution to my team.

I won’t go into details of all the puzzles — Eric does that on his blog — but I’ll share one example.

We went to a museum. In front were three signs (the photo below shows other hunters staring at them):

13 ?

14 ?

15 ?

Hmm. We remember that this same building was the subject of a puzzle in the Post magazine — one of those “find the differences” things. You had to find 12 differences.

“So,” said Eric, “There must really be 15 differences. We just have to find the other three.”

Problem 1: If you found 15 differences, how would you know which three were the ‘additional’ ones?

Problem 2: If you found three differences, how would that make a number?

We stared at the puzzle in the magazine, finding the 12 differences. Some involved numbers, most didn’t.

Then I said, “Hey, in the magazine the U’s are U’s, but on the museum they’re V’s.” That is, in person it’s a MVSEVM, but in the magazine photos it’s a MUSEUM.

Eric immediately jumps. “That’s it!”

Huh? I thought it might be important, but didn’t get how. Apparently Eric did. He realized immediately that there where three V’s that had become U’s. Therefore differences number 13, 14, and 15 were V, V, V — or 555. Which was the answer.

Knowledge vs. intelligence. I had one, but not the other. In fact, it took me a minute to get it; I even stopped Eric and said, “Wait, what? Explain it.” Then it was obvious, although Eric thought it was funny “to have to explain the answer to the guy who found it.”

Which was the point — I found the data that others had missed, but data are useless without someone with the intelligence to use it.

A similar thing happened at the end game — the final puzzle, where I finally got to contribute again. The clue my teammates finally figured out (and don’t ask me to explain) was FORMER NAME CAPS HOME.

To me, that was obvious: What was the former name of the home of the Washington Capitols hockey team? (Now they play at the Verizon Center.) I convinced Eric to bug his wife at home. She Googled it — it was the MCI center.

Then I screwed up. “No, no, before all the corporate naming stuff.” But that was a dead end and we were stuck.

Then, off-hand, I said, “MCI is also a Roman numeral. What is it, 1,101?”

And Eric says, “That’s it! That’s it!” He remembered that a building on the cartoon Hunt map was number 1101. We raced there, but too late.

And again, it was a case of knowledge vs. intelligence. I had the data — I knew “CAPS” meant the Capitols — but I simply wasn’t smart enough to realize I had the answer in “MCI.”

I felt like the little kid in the movie who says off-hand to the hero, “Yeah, my  dog barks at night a lot” to which the hero shouts, “Of course! He must hear the screech of bats! The criminals are in the belfry!”

So I felt helpful, but boy I wish I could have made that extra leap to know what those data meant.

There’s a lesson in team-building there, though. You need a mix of people — those who know a lot, those who are smart enough to run with the data, and some who are good enough to bring them together.

(Right: Four presidents and a “buck” prepare to race. The answer to this puzzle turned out to be ‘A buck, plus a quarter (Washington), plus a penny (Lincoln)’ — $1.26 or simply 126. I didn’t get it.)

Eric poses at the main gathering place for the Hunt, about 15 minutes before it began.

Rain, schmain — at the endgame there were still thousands of people waiting for the final clue.

I took this on the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge:

Fight like the Repubs do — get everyone on message for starters, and get them using the same talking points.

On talk shows, when interviewed, whenever — they should start drilling these phrases into people’s minds right now to give them a good chance of catching on.

1. “Republican economy.” Use it all the time to remind people who created this mess. Ex.: “Until we start to get out of the Republican economy, I think gas prices are likely to rise” or “In this Republican economy, I think people need to think about whether they can afford a larger home.”

2. “Old man.” McCain turns 72 on Aug. 29 — that’s three years older than Reagan was in 1980.

3. “Frequent memory lapses.” When McCain either makes up facts or distorts them, don’t argue on a factual basis. Ex.: “When he said that Reagan didn’t negotiate with terrorists, Mr. McCain was having another of his frequent memory lapses” and “Hopefully as president McCain wouldn’t have one of his frequent memory lapses.” Considering how often he’s flip-flopped on issues, this could be a popular phrase.

4. “McCain moment.” When a politician forgets something or misspeaks, refer to it as such. Equate being senile with being McCain. Ex.: “I meant to say that we have 2000 soldiers on the ground, not 2 million. I must have had a McCain moment.”

5. “100 years of war.” Remind folks that it was McCain who suggested that would be fine by him. And tell them that this time women might be drafted, if the law was interpreted the right way. That would mean your grade-school kids might end up fighting McCain’s war.

Finally, they should begin to call into question exactly what happened to McCain when he was a POW. If he’s willing to endorse torture now, either A) it didn’t happen to him, B) it happened to him and he knows it works because it got him to talk, or C) he’s a sadistic, bitter old man.

Hey, if the Repubs could call John Kerry’s service into question over a draft-dodger like Bush, McCain’s time in a POW camp is certainly fair game.

Oh, and point people to this wonderful nugget of a video.

…this appears in her store:

Yes, it’s apparently real.

There’s got to be a catchy word for this — when people get together to write glowing reviews for a product that clearly doesn’t deserve it.

http://www.birkoph.com/Wolf_tshirt.htm

“[President Reagan] didn’t sit down in a negotiation with the religious extremists in Iran, he made it very clear that those hostages were coming home.’’

Well, except for that little Iran-Contra, arms-for-hostages deal. A minor thing, I guess.

You think maybe Mr. McCain is losing his memory in his old age?

(Well, a few days ago. I just saw it.)

“Senator Obama’s support . . . among working, hardworking Americans, white Americans, is weakening again.”

Gosh, it’s a good thing he’s got all those lazy blacks supporting him, huh? [roll of eyes]

Trapped in a South Park episode: I had no Internet all day!

This makes it bearable to think about again.

Whew. New spark plugs — fancy ones. A clean mass air flow sensor, too. Tomorrow, I find out if I killed my car.

Just a thought: If you run a biotech company, it might help if your last name wasn’t Moreau.

One week till the 2008 (Washington) Post Hunt!