Your eyes can be tricked.

It's kind of a Public Service Announcement of sorts, I suppose, but I'm not sure about the wisdom of this recent optical illusion painted on the road of a British Columbia street. It is supposed to "drive" home the message about watching out for kids on the street. I appreciate the intent, but am not so sure it won't actually cause accidents rather than prevent them.



On the other hand I kind of love this PSA - for a number of reasons I suppose. First off is the soft spot I have in my heart for Jason Bateman, given his involvement in this.  Second, I love the demonstration of how things have changed. Make that about cellphone usage nowadays and it might fit - but the idea of lugging around a huge boombox, well, no more.

 

Public service announcements don't always work. I'm not sure if Jason Bateman's plea to politeness had a noticeable effect on boombox noise pollution in the late 80s, but certainly various campaigns have resulted in shifts in public awareness. For example, one of the most famous - the Back to Sleep campaign - resulted in a 50% reduction in the number of infants suffering from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. On the other hand, public service campaigns geared towards changing the public's conceptions of how often oil should be changed in a car haven't resulted in any changes, and some, like the funny but unfair (and rightly critiqued) breastfeeding PSAs might have actually led to a backlash.

Which public service announcement do you remember from your childhood?  Did they work? Why or why not?

Theory Shmeary

So you know how sometimes people complain about theories being just a theory?  You know, as opposed to a law?  Ever wondered what that really meant?

Theories are organized sets of hypotheses, organized sets of whys laid out in an attempt to understand some group of facts that have been observed. In scientific terms at least, theories have stronger support and explanatory power than laws.  Good theories are testable, they can be shown to be wrong, or if we are lucky good and careful scientists, perhaps on the road to right. So theory schmeary and all that.

And, in scientific terms at least, "law" doesn't mean quite the same thing as in everyday speech.  In everyday speech, laws are rules we are supposed to obey - things we have to do but sometimes don't or things we get in trouble for doing.  By contrast, in scientific terminology laws are descriptions of things that happen.  They are primarily observatory in nature, meaning they tell us what happens under a certain set of circumstances.  Apple rolls off head, apple falls.  It tells us the what of what happened.  But - and here's a crucial part - it doesn't tell us the why, and that's because we generally don't understand why they happened, we just know that they do. So in terms of evidence and explanatory power, theories are the better bet.

However, in the spirit of internet memes, let me pass on for you a PSA recently forwarded to me about a law you should follow.

Because seatbelts?  Not just a good idea.  The LAW.