It is Christmas, so I will refrain from making too much of Megan McArdle (of all people) criticising anyone for factual inaccuracies and distortions:
The reservoir of this disease of erroneous infographics is internet marketers who don’t care whether the information in their graphics is right … just so long as you link it. As a Christmas present to, well, everyone, I’m issuing a plea to bloggers to help stop this plague in its track.
However, I can’t help but note, dear Megan, that referring to Andrew Sullivan as:
like Patient Zero for many of these infographics
might, just possibly, if one were so inclined, be considered a tiny bit insensitive.
srv
She accidently the Irony. And couth.
wolverina
Like Prisoner Zero? Happy Who Christmas! Megan an Almost People lol.
Wolverina
Schlemizel
She displays a fine mind, unsullied by thought unburdened by concern.
Yutsano
I see what McSuderman did there. Rather poor taste on her part too.
Villago Delenda Est
Indeed, the irony here is screaming from the rooftops. Ms. “Kitchens were stone knives and bearskins before the 1990’s” is upset about “inaccurate information” on graphs?
What, she checked all these with her calculator of fail?
MikeBoyScout
McMegan gives a Ho Ho Ho Christmas gift with this little blurb
Math typos. Priceless!
srv
LOLs, same post:
Sarah, you’re pretty funny, but Megan manages to always be hysterical without even trying.
Commenting at Ballon Juice since 1937
I was peeling butter nut squash this morning and thinking, I wish I had McMegan’s number, because there is probably a machine for doing this.
Trentrunner
One is almost tempted to make a snide remark about girls and math, but that would be mean, wouldn’t it?
Not unlike, say, likening someone who very publicly has HIV with “Patient Zero.”
I wish there were a non-sexist word for c*nt, because she’s it.
Comrade Javamanphil
FAUX PAS! (Hey Atlantic, Worst Hire Ever. Congrats.)
Valdivia
Math typos has to be part of the lexicon stat. OMG. Can students say that in exams?
Soonergrunt
Oh, my God. I should hope that her parents are embarrassed, but very few people get to be the way she is without being the products of entitled assholes themselves.
Seriously–that has to be what the fuck is wrong with that woman, because her vapidity, self-reverence, emotional and social incompetence and insensitivity are systemic with her. They never change. She was raised this way. And the hell of is that parents responsible for somebody like her can never see what a damaged person they’ve produced.
different-church-lady
Wow. So Megan’s just figured out that pictures can be sloppy and wrong and used for propaganda instead of only words.
She really doesn’t seem to understand that her columns border on verbal rendition of those kinds of graphics, does she?
dmsilev
So, I guess by analogy she should be known as the Typhoid Megan of innumeracy and overpriced kitchenware.
dmsilev
@Commenting at Ballon Juice since 1937:
I was in some store, probably a Bed Bath and Beyond, and I saw the perfect McMegan kitchen widget, an electric cookie press. On closer inspection, it appeared to be a device for people who find cookie cutters too difficult to use.
RSA
I guess I read a different brand of blog–I’ve never come across these sorts of graphics, at least as far as I’ve noticed. Does Sullivan really post them?
Ian
She started her post by conceding Obama’s dog has won the war on Christmas.
Meaning she really thinks there is a war on Christmas, and the dogs of the Democrats have won it.
FlipYrWhig
@Soonergrunt: As TBogg has immortalized in his tag for McArdle posts, she has said that she comes from a family of academics who are academically intimidating. They must be mortified.
DFS
Peering at her demented holiday gift guide, I reflected that if I ever used a machine to separate eggs for me, I would never be able to look my mother in the eye again, not in this world or the next.