Jules: They speak English in What?
Brett: What?
Jules: English, motherf*cker, do you speak it?
– Pulp Fiction (1994)
Qui non intelligit aut discat aut taceat
(Who does not understand should either learn, or be silent.)
In the followup to this post, Stephen has this one up, discussing the poll numbers I used and some of the logic on the pro-gun side. But the quote I want to hit on is this one: “Do a google on about any gun control issue (at least the ones I’ve tried) and the majority of the first page hits will be for pro-gun sites/topics.”
I’ve had the basics for this post (the title, and the two opening quotes) around for a while, looking for a time to use them. Basically, I’ve been trying to find a way to express my disbelief in the fact that most of the leftists on the Internet seem to be unable to use Google. I mean, while the logic behind Google (Boolean logic, search theory, satisficing, and a bunch more) can be deep, the box itself is… well, it’s pretty foolproof.
Now, I now that my background makes me a search geek. I grew up consuming information (I was on a first name basis with most of the librarians in the area.*), and I got very, very familiar with this interface. That is the user interface for a Follet Circulation Plus/Catalog Plus search engine.
Except when I learned it, it was the Winnebago CAT system. And it was DOS based. And you had a 25 character limit per box. And you had to know the keyboard shortcuts. But, barring those differences, it’s the same system. I learned to use that system because the card catalog (yes, even in the late 1990s, my library used a card catalog) was dominated by the older patrons. So I, being all little and geeky, had to learn to use The Library Search Engine From Hades. Which of course had no true help system and none of the librarians knew how to use it.
This long (dreary) aside brings me (meandering) back to my main point– searching isn’t that hard. Sure, knowing the theory behind it helps out, but the basics are easy to grab hold of. For instance, let’s find some statistics of causes of death, both worldwide and in the United States. (Instead of trying natural language, I always use a Boolean search with key words in quotation marks. Winnebago is a jealous mistress.)
“statistics” “causes of death” “worldwide”
There are 103,000 results. The first is this Wikipedia article, and next is this article by the “UC Atlas of World Inequality.” After this, the results tend to be more towards babies, cars, and suicide. (Of course, we could add [ -"babies" -"cars" -"suicide" ] to our search string, but we’ve “satisficed” our needs here.)
“statistics” “causes of death” “United States”
654,000 results (why does the Internet hate the rest of the world?), with the second being this CDC page, and at 9th, this NIH page.
Taking the data from these two searches, you find that– 1) [Wikipedia article] almost 30% of worldwide deaths are from cardiac disease, while less than 3% are from “Intentional injuries,” 2) [NIH article] the “fast living” combo (tobacco, alcohol, food, sex, cars and drugs) killed about 900,000 people in the U. S. in 1990 versus 25,000 gun deaths, and 3) [CDC page and PDF page 89] in 2006, over 34,000 people died from Septicemia (sepsis), while less than 31,000 died from all firearm-related causes (including suicides, accidental deaths, and police shootings).
Reflecting on this, you can make the assumptions that– 1) if things were balanced, for each anti-gun organization, there should be 10 anti-heart attack organizations, 2) “sex, drugs and rock n’ roll” are 36 times more likely to kill you than guns, and 3) the blood in the streets will be filled with bacteria.
Of course, it’s not just guns where the power of Google could be brought to bear. Some of my pet peeves:
“There’s no historical evidence for Jesus.”
[ "historical evidence" "Jesus" ]
Wikipedia disagrees with you. Of course, with the above search, you also get some odd results, but even those odd results can lead to other questions, which lead to others, which lead to others…
(Problem: all ancient texts and sources might have been edited at some time between their writing and the present. Hypothesis: texts with the longest record of unedited existence and an earliest manuscript closest to the event in question are the most likely to be unedited. Application: manuscripts of the Gospels and Pauline letters are known to date from the mid to late first century, which makes their being edited highly unlikely.)
“Unemployment fell in all but one year of FDR’s pre-war Presidency!”
[ "Unemployment" "FDR" ]
Per the Wikipedia article, you find that that’s technically true. You also find that that “one year” was 4-5% jump, the year after the second “New Deal” started– which included Social Security. A look at some of the issues is in this Cato article. Pretty much, this one gets tossed back and forth. Democrats throw it around as “look, government WORKS!” and Republicans throw it back as “yes, when a world war is driving the economy!”
Well, that’s it for now. Now, if you excuse me, somewhere there is a patron is in distress.
Dixie rips open his shirt, revealing a turtleneck sweater and tights underneath– the sweater is emblazoned with a red D on a yellow background. He pulls his glasses off and lets them hang on their chain, the points both fists skyward and flies away.
