Singh Vindicated

1 April 2010

Earlier I wrote about the libel case against author Simon Singh. The British Chiropractic Association sued him for libel when he called chiropractic treatments “bogus” in an article in the Guardian.

Today, the appeals court handed down its decision, vindicating Singh. Language Log has a summary of the decision.

The decision, which also includes a quotation from Milton (!), quotes a decision by the Seventh US Circuit Court of Appeals, Underwager v Salter 22 Fed. 3d 730 (1994), that aptly sums up the conclusion:

[Plaintiffs] cannot, by simply filing suit and crying “character assassination!,” silence those who hold divergent views, no matter how adverse those views may be to plaintiffs’ interests. Scientific controversies must be settled by the methods of science rather than by the methods of litigation. […] More papers, more discussion, better data, and more satisfactory models—not larger awards of damages—mark the path towards superior understanding of the world around us.

Supersizing the Last Supper

28 March 2010

Okay, this has nothing to do with language or word origins, but it is an example of the pitfalls one can encounter when dipping your toes into areas about which you know little and why having a “Ph.D.” after your name doesn’t necessarily mean that you know what you’re talking about. And it’s about things medieval, which piques my fancy.

Brian Wansink, the John S. Dyson Professor of Applied Economics at Cornell University, and his brother Craig Wansink, a religious studies professor at Virginia Wesleyan College, have written an article on the growing size of food portions in depictions of Christ’s Last Supper over the centuries. Brian Wansink gives a summary in the Atlantic. Evidently, the Wansinks have determined that the relative size of the portions in artistic representations of the Last Supper have grown over the last 2,000 years and this has some sort of relevance to modern rates of obesity.

But Carl S. Pyrdum over at the Got Medieval blog does a fairly effective take down of how the Wansinks’ methodology is utterly wrong headed. The Wansinks really should have consulted someone with a smattering of knowledge of art history.

 Update: The Onion puts in its two cents..

(Hat tip to Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish)

End of Publishing?

20 March 2010

This ad, prepared for DK Books, is a very clever use of language:

The concept, however, is not original. It dates back to an Argentinian political ad from 2005. (Why the ad is in English, I have no idea.)

(Hat tip to Andrew Sullivan’s The Daily Dish)