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May 7th, 2025 (Permalink)

"Versus" Vs. "Verses"

I found the following sentence in a book I was recently reading: "Paul Krugman tweeted that 'since Trump seems to have decided that stocks are proof of his success, here's US verses euro stocks over the past year.'"¹ Do you see what's wrong with this sentence? The title of this entry gives it away, but I couldn't resist.

Though the words "verses" and "versus" are pronounced identically, and differ in spelling by only one letter, they do not even belong to the same grammatical category. "Verses" is the plural of the noun "verse"², which usually refers to a line of poetry, a section of a song, or a sentence in a book such as the Bible; whereas "versus" is not a noun but a preposition used to link two nouns that denote opponents in a sporting match, a trial, or some other competition³. In the context of Krugman's sentence, the two noun phrases that should be linked by "versus" are "US [stocks]" and "euro stocks". Also, it's "versus" that "vs.", or just "v." in legal contexts, abbreviates.

Krugman's "tweet" spelled the word correctly⁴, so the incorrect spelling was introduced in the book and not caught by a spell-checker, whether human or automated. Since both spellings are legitimate English words, a spell-checking computer program that simply checks the words in a passage against an English lexicon will not catch the misspelling; but, because the two words belong to different grammatical categories, a program that parses the sentence may flag it.

I tried the sentence in a few free online spelling and grammar checkers, one of which did correct "verses" to "versus", but others found no errors. Turning from spelling and grammar checking programs to supposedly artificially intelligent ones, Grok spotted the error but, as was the case previously⁵, the answer it supplied was unnecessarily long though its advice was not technically wrong.

I don't think the confusion of "versus" and "verses" is common since none of my reference books mention it, but a short web search did turn up the following headline:

Roe v. Wade verses Corporate America⁶

So, it's not as uncommon as it should be.

Notes:

Matt Palumbo, Debunk This!: Shattering Liberal Lies (2019), p. 433
"Verse", Cambridge Dictionary, accessed: 5/2/2025
"Versus", Cambridge Dictionary, accessed: 5/2/2025
Paul Krugman, Tweet, Twitter, 10/11/2017
Pedaling Lies?, 4/5/2025
William Schmick, "Roe v. Wade verses Corporate America", Valencia County News-Bulletin, 5/26/2022

May 4th, 2025 (Permalink)

Crack the Combination IX^*

The combination of a lock is three digits long and each digit is unique, that is, each occurs only once in the combination. The following are some incorrect combinations.

7 3 1: One digit is correct but in the wrong position.
4 2 1: Two digits are correct but neither is in the right position.
9 0 2: One digit is correct but in the wrong position.
1 4 3: One digit is correct and in the right position.

Can you determine the correct combination from the above clues?

^*Previous "Crack the Combination" puzzles: I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII.

May 2nd, 2025 (Permalink)

New Book: An Abundance of Caution

Quote: "School closures…don't only affect children. … Their closure en masse was the rarest of public policies, one that knocked society off its axis, and the decisions that set it in motion were made incredibly quickly―and without a notion of their impact or when things would return to normal. This book is an anatomy of that historic decision-making process and the many that would follow in its wake regarding schools during the coronavirus pandemic. … We see how incentives that were misaligned with the interests of the public often drove decisions. We see how authority figures' influence was channeled through the media and, in turn, how the media influenced the authorities and regular citizens. We also see how the nature of news, and the muddling effect of the media's penchant for anecdotes and the spectacular, obscured mundane and nuanced reality. Lastly, we witness how ideological tribalism and groupthink overrode long-established values…."¹

Title: An Abundance of Caution

Subtitle: American Schools, the Virus, and a Story of Bad Decisions

Comment: The subtitle and excerpt, above, indicate that the book is entirely, or at least primarily, devoted to the bad decisions during the pandemic that related to American schools. Since some of the worst decision-making at the time was that which affected children, this limitation may actually exaggerate how bad decisions were in general, though they were certainly bad enough.

Author: David Zweig

Comment: Zweig is one of the few mainstream journalists during the pandemic who didn't swallow the government's propaganda line, including hook and sinker, and I recommended two of his articles at the time². He was also one of the journalists given access to the Twitter files³.

Date: 2025

Summary: The book is divided into four parts and, since I haven't read it yet and Zweig doesn't explain the book's structure in the preface or introduction, I'm going to have to guess, based on the titles of the parts and their chapters, what they are about:

"Seductive Models": I don't think this part is about Heidi Klum and Kate Moss, but I could be wrong. Rather, I think it's about the computer models, such as that of Imperial College London (ICL), which influenced early decision-making about how to respond to the pandemic⁴. The second chapter is entitled "GIGO", which is an old computer science acronym for "Garbage In, Garbage Out". Applied to computer models, "GIGO" means that the predictions produced by a model will be only as good as the information they are based on⁵.
"The Illusion of the Precautionary Principle": It's difficult to say exactly what the Precautionary Principle (PP) is, which is partly due to it not being a single principle but a family of related ones⁶. However, the fundamental idea is that one should avoid acting unless the action to be taken is known to be harmless, or at least less harmful than not acting. As such, the PP is a generalization of such common sense principles as the ancient medical precept of "primum non nocere"⁷―"first do no harm"―and slogans such as "safety first", "better safe than sorry" and "look before you leap".
I'm unsure what Zweig has in mind in this part of the book, especially by the reference in the title to "the illusion" of the PP. If the PP had been consistently applied during the pandemic, many things that did happen would not have happened, such as the shutting down of schools. There was no evidence that shutting down schools for an extended period of time, such as a school year, would be harmless, or even less harmful than the tiny risk to children from the coronavirus. In addition, if the so-called lab leak hypothesis is correct, the PP surely should have ruled out the "gain-of-function" research that may have created the specific coronavirus that leaked from the lab, in which case there would have been no pandemic at all.
"Tribalism, Public Health, the Elite, and the Media": It seems clear what this part is about, namely, the way in which people during the pandemic were forced to join certain "tribes". One of these tribes is identified in the title of the first chapter in this part: "If Trump is for it, then we're against it". Of course, there was also an "if Trump is for it, then we're for it" tribe. Tribalism and "Groupthink"―the title of chapter 15―no doubt contributed to bad decision-making during the pandemic since certain policy positions became political. As a result, you could usually predict a person's position on pandemic policies based on which party they supported; that this is a bad way to make decisions about scientific and medical matters ought to be obvious.
"Progressive Dogma and Narrative Control": I'm even less sure what this part is about than part 2, though perhaps "narrative control" refers to the propaganda put out by the progressive media. Possibly it also denotes the efforts at censoring critics of the government's response to the pandemic undertaken by the Democrats after Biden's election gave them control of that response.

The Blurbs: The book is blurbed favorably by Marty Makary⁸, Nate Silver and Matt Taibbi.

Disclaimer: I haven't read this book yet, so can't review or recommend it, but its topic interests me and may also interest readers. The above remarks are based solely on a sample of the book.

Notes:

"Introduction", pp. 2-3.
See: Unmasking the CDC & Manufacturing Fear, 12/28/2021 and Rigging the Debate & Over-counting the Dead, 1/31/2023.
David Zweig, accessed: 5/2/2025.
See: Stephanie Glen, "What Went Wrong with Pandemic Modeling?", Data Science Central, 8/23/2021.
Herman & Leo Schneider, The Harper Dictionary of Science in Everyday Language (1988).
Tanja Rechnitzer, "Precautionary Principles", Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, accessed: 5/2/2025. Everything you wanted to know about PPs, and then some.
Eugene Ehrlich, Veni, Vidi, Vici: Conquer Your Enemies, Impress Your Friends with Everyday Latin (1995).
See: New Book, 3/27/2025.

April 30th, 2025 (Permalink)

Presumed Guilty Syndrome

Jennifer Block, "The Junk Science That Gets Parents Convicted of Murder", The Free Press, 3/17/2025
The Innocence Project has taken up the cause of exonerating Robert Roberson, a man who has spent more than 20 years on death row in Texas―mostly in solitary confinement―for the 2002 death of his 2-year-old daughter, Nikki.
Gretchen Sween, Roberson's attorney since 2016, took his case after Texas passed a law allowing courts to revisit prosecutions based on "junk science." … If Texas executes Roberson, he will be the first person put to death for a conviction linked to the shaken baby diagnosis.
His case has attracted a high-profile group of supporters… [who] are working to expose how bad forensic science gets so embedded in the medical and criminal justice systems that actual innocence becomes almost impossible to prove. With shaken baby syndrome [SBS], the last adult with the child is essentially presumed guilty.

You're not supposed to have to prove your innocence.
"Over the last two decades, extensive scientific research has discredited SBS," wrote [Barry] Scheck. But "because misinformation and misconceptions about SBS persist, Mr. Roberson is still at risk of execution for a crime that never occurred."

Horrible details of the daughter's illness and death omitted. Read the whole thing at your own risk.
It was research into the potential harms of motor vehicles that led to the shaken baby hypothesis…. British neurosurgeon Norman Guthkelch had read about whiplash experiments on monkeys, which demonstrated that sharp back and forth motion alone could cause brain injury without direct impact. He theorized that caregivers, who shook children in frustration or anger, could cause the same damage.
Of course, when a baby or young child unexpectedly falls unconscious or dies, society rightfully wants to know why. But sometimes there is no obvious cause, no visible injury, no immediate explanation. [SBS] provided one. …

Throat clearing omitted.
In the U.S., John Caffey, a Pennsylvania pediatrician, took Guthkelch's suppositions further and published a template for signs that a baby had been shaken: bleeding between the brain and skull, in the back of the eyes, and swelling in the brain. This "triad," as it is known, was swiftly accepted as definitive and became standard in the worlds of both medicine and criminal justice. …

Detour about the "Satanic panic" omitted.
By then, prosecutions for [SBS] were proving highly effective, frequently winning convictions against the accused. In these cases, typically the defense asks juries to accept that we may never know how or why an infant died. Signs of damage to the brain, juries are told, can have numerous causes, often completely unrelated to abuse. The prosecution, on the other hand, offers certainty. Prosecutors call on expert witnesses―specialists in child abuse―who confidently assert that a child's caregiver delivered mortal damage.
As convictions based on [SBS] rose, so did questions about the reliability of that diagnosis. In 2001, seminal research on playground accidents by a Minnesota forensic pathologist and medical examiner demonstrated that a fall from even a short height, or an object falling on a child, could generate brain swelling and bleeding. The pathologist, John Plunkett, began testifying in court on behalf of defendants accused of [SBS]. As a crime reporter for The Washington Post put it, "Plunkett was now a threat to SBS cases all over the country."
Pediatric radiologists were also raising alarms. Dr. Julie Mack was in practice in the early 2000s in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and had pronounced many shaken baby diagnoses after reviewing CT scans. "In med school everybody was taught" that if you couldn't readily explain the cause of brain swelling and bleeding, "the parents must be hiding something," she told me.
To address her growing doubts about this dogma, she explored the anatomical literature and had a breakthrough. She found that the dura, the membrane between the skull and the brain, can bleed without trauma―resulting in a "subdural hematoma"―one of the supposed key markers of SBS. Mack co-authored a widely cited paper with Dr. Waney Squier, a British neuropathologist who specialized in infant brains.
Squier also dove into the literature and found that subdural hematomas are a common artifact of childbirth. Around half of babies have them and they can last for several months. Furthermore, bleeding in the dura and behind the eyes can be triggered by an infection, a genetic disorder, diabetes, cancer―the list of conditions that share these symptoms is "ever expanding," said Mack.
Squier told me she "became completely convinced there is no good evidence" to support the [SBS] hypothesis. … When Guthkelch came to understand what had been spawned from his original hypothesis, he devoted his retirement to assisting people accused of criminally shaking a baby. Shortly before his death in 2016, he told a journalist: "I am frankly quite disturbed that what I intended as a friendly suggestion for avoiding injury to children has become an excuse for imprisoning innocent parents." …
At Robert Roberson's murder trial in 2003, the jury was told that Nikki's symptoms could point only to one thing: that she'd been violently shaken. … Last September, Roberson's attorney Gretchen Sween filed a petition for clemency that includes several new, exonerating findings. For instance, Nikki had been prescribed a drug that combines an antihistamine and a narcotic. Today the Mayo Clinic warns the medication "is not recommended in children… [Ellipsis in original.] because of the increased risk of respiratory depression." …
Even the detective who helped convict Roberson, Brian Wharton, has since recanted. "Our bedrock accusation, 'Shaken Baby Syndrome' as used in Robert's trial, is junk science," he wrote in a letter to the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles. "There is no evidence of a crime, much less a capital crime."
On October 17, 2024, Roberson was scheduled to die, but he was saved by a bipartisan group of state legislators who issued a subpoena asking him to testify before them, which led to the Texas Supreme Court delaying his death. There is currently no execution date. But Sween says that could change at any moment.

It's bad enough that Roberson has been in prison for over two decades, but he shouldn't be executed for a possibly non-existent crime.

The following podcast also concerns SBS.
Jerusalem Demsas, "The Scientific Controversy That's Tearing Families Apart", The Atlantic, 3/11/2025

Disclaimer: I don't necessarily agree with everything in this article and podcast, but I think they're worth reading or listening to as a whole. In abridging the excerpts I may have changed the paragraphing.

April 28th, 2025 (Permalink)

One More Cup of Coffee

During a recent visit to my favorite coffee shop, I noticed that some of the customers put only milk in their coffee, some took only sugar, some used both, and more than one drank their coffee black. In fact, eleven customers took milk and nine took sugar, but three times as many put both milk and sugar in their coffee as drank it black.

How many customers visited the coffee shop while I was there?

Disclaimer: This puzzle is a work of fiction.