How to Lie with Computers

Back in the early days, when the only output device on my computer was a line printer with a single monospaced font, I was thrilled to discover in a Cambridge University Press book on non-numerical uses of Fortran, how to create a simple bar chart by solving the equation

x/maxValue = p/chartWidth

where, of course, x is a data point to be plotted and p is the width of the chart for that point.

Solving for p, of course, we get the formula we can code:

p = chartWidth * x/maxValue

The only complication is when the MINIMUM value of x is much larger than zero or negative, but here we replace maxValue by the greatest span, between maxValue and minValue:

p = chartWidth * (x-minValue)/(maxValue - minValue)

Duck soup: potage du canard.

Which is why it has always puzzled me to find installed enormous "tools" either bought or stolen, which can create a vast diversity of far more advanced charts and which freight the install procedure and the delivered software with unused nonsense...which nonetheless has to be treated by the maintenance programmer as an Eleusinian mystery, and has has to treat nonsense bits with holy dread.

Connected to this technical problem is the way that businesses, governments, and monstrous combinations of business and government LIE with charts.

In 1998 there was a fad among the anti-global-warming people, who may be up for charges by 2010 when the genocidal results of their influence on the Bush administration's refusal to sign off on Kyoto become apparent, for presenting *disinformat* in the form of charts that "proved" that the earth was getting cooler, actually.

Their Big Lie was to select, in most cases, data points starting with 1980, which dovetailed neatly with their hatred and contempt of the 1960s and for Jimmy Carter in some subconscious way, as well as appealing to infantile Romanticism, which tells the subconscious that "history is bunk".

For example, in 1996, two clowns writing for an oil company front in the Wall Street Journal used Excel to show this downward trend.

However, they made a mistake which many Bush administration sites today are careful not to make today.

They posted numbers; in many cases, scientific sites under Federal government control are now placing numbers, copyable to the clipboard by any geek like me using control-C, in PDF files or bit maps, apparently as a matter of top-down policy, so that the ordinary slob cannot test their BS.

I copied the Wall Street Journal numbers and then obtained the numbers for 1979 from the primitive Web.

The downward sloping trendline REVERSED DIRECTION when 1979 was included, because this is what small data sets DO.

I then downloaded the only responsible data set applicable when we're talking about a geological process which is what global warming happens to be: since the beginning of world temperature measurements in 1860.

Not only was there a clear upward trend, its rate of change as it is today.

What was really rich was that the clowns who wrote the Wall Street Journal op-ed included a phillipic against "unscientific" believers in global warming, characterized vaguely as sandaled hippie grandma English teachers, French *flaneurs* and other wacks, deploring the lack of "scientific literacy".

This, when the Excel chart they used made an error out of Statistics for Boneheads.

I would like to suggest that there is a technical psychology common to accepting the nonsense in the Wall Street Journal, which is potentially genocidal given that inhabited Pacific islands are being destroyed by global warming and a city-sized iceberg calved last week, and using a third party tool for a simple chart.

It is an authoritarian, normalizing personality.

At the heart of anti-global-warming psychology lies the hope and expectation that a comfortable, SUV-transported, air-conditioned life will continue as before.

That "the American lifestyle is not negotiable" (Cheney).

That American programmers will as of old shuttle between work, where they mindlessly buy or steal unknowable "tools", and Barnes and Noble in their SUVs, secure in the knowledge that management needs them...whether to do actual work, or to actually conceal the truth (replacing the link to an HTML which can be reused, by one to a PDF that cannot).

That all they have to worry about is their "marketability" to the highest bidder, even if it is Halliburton.

The authoritarian and normalizing personality is likewise and in a less important way a hater of good code, in my experience, that can make a simple chart without bit bloat.

I am fortunate to live where I have no heat in winter and must cross the sea to work because it teaches me to expect a little less. Like most Americans I have normalized and Respected Authority too much.

It told us that because "a rising tide lifts all boats", the only way to economic justice was to increase both the average and the standard deviation of income.

It failed to tell us that this would trigger a globalizing race for wealth that would, starting when Reagan took office, significantly add to pollution and global warming.

Nay-sayers were called "unscientific" by science-worshippers whose command of actual mathematics and science was strictly rhetorical, and for sale again to the highest bidder.

Progress became a noun, and not a verb. It wasn't something we could actually participate in: one thing I noticed about the SUV-driving programmers was how averse they were to something they called "reinventing the wheel": they prided themselves on being hyper-specialized insider-trading installers, hackers, and tweakers.

It made no nevermind in 2000 when it became apparent that even in the mature American auto industry, financial arrangements can perniciously trump safety: wheels in that year, in need, presumably, of no reinvention fell off the Ford Explorer because in the 1930s it suited investors to have two entirely separate industries. Automobile engineers who called for INTEGRATION of the tire and the vehicle were savagely disciplined in Henry Ford's very American engineering culture, and in Alfred P. Sloan's equivalent culture at General Motors, because this would have disturbed the golf game of the tyre magnates down in Akron.

It was found that in fact the Explorer was poorly integrated with its wheels, and the results included rollovers and deaths.

In software, likewise, Microsoft's financial power means that its only competition for Office can come from open source, where there is no one business to destroy as was the case for Wordperfect.

Well, the bill for 20 years of this thinking is coming due. Vista is late because having conquered the desktop like the US conquered Iraq, Microsoft now has to manage guerrilla conflicts between thousands of device drivers, which war with each other over an absurd addressing scheme that someone on drugs dreamed up in 1981. The American auto industry is on life support, NOT because of retirees but because it can't make safe and fuel-efficient cars.

And, the rising tide that lifts all boats is the sea level.

I regret to say that computer power, during this interval of time, an interval of time which contains not a few points of no return, was NOT used to get the truth but to manufacture reassurance.