I've been meaning to check in with my blog for more than two months. At some point I will clear the backlog but I had to report this little incident. Long story short I wrote a letter to the editor and they actually put it in print.
I was reading the Globe and Mail (Canada's self-proclaimed national newspaper) and came across a letter to the editor responding to some favorable coverage of American Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor with a criticism that more than 60% of her decisions were reversed. I immediately thought this was a silly criticism and so as I worked on unraveling the history of the determination of Pluto's mass, I did a bit of digging on the web I wrote the following letter to the Globe and Mail editors:
Paul Ranalli suggested in his letter to the editor that a 60 percent reversal rate for judge Sonia Sotomayor was unacceptably high for a private business. However, such rates are relative. In major league baseball such a rate would be a .400 batting average, worthy of the Hall of Fame. On average the American Supreme Court reverses more than 60 percent of the cases it rules on.
Also, these reversal rates only apply to the small number of cases the Supreme Court selects to rule on, of the over 200 cases she wrote the opinion on as an appelate judge only 5 went before the Supreme Court.
Yours Truly,
Allan Olley
Note the published letter is just the first three sentences of this.
Despite being curtailed all my missing points were made but more accurately and precisely by another letter writer and my analogy became the title for the letters on that topic. I had to look up Sotomayor's record and look up what the at bats to run ratio thingy was called and make sure that indeed 0.4 was an impressive batting average, actually almost superhuman as a career average. I was hardly the first to make this analogy (example), but I claim independent invention. I've just discovered that Sotomayor also ruled on the baseball strike of '95 making the analogy even more apt. Of course all this is of little concern to me, but I find such fallacious arguments troubling.
Anyway, I guess I've taken my first step to becoming a full fledged crank who writes to the newspaper.
I was reading the Globe and Mail (Canada's self-proclaimed national newspaper) and came across a letter to the editor responding to some favorable coverage of American Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor with a criticism that more than 60% of her decisions were reversed. I immediately thought this was a silly criticism and so as I worked on unraveling the history of the determination of Pluto's mass, I did a bit of digging on the web I wrote the following letter to the Globe and Mail editors:
Paul Ranalli suggested in his letter to the editor that a 60 percent reversal rate for judge Sonia Sotomayor was unacceptably high for a private business. However, such rates are relative. In major league baseball such a rate would be a .400 batting average, worthy of the Hall of Fame. On average the American Supreme Court reverses more than 60 percent of the cases it rules on.
Also, these reversal rates only apply to the small number of cases the Supreme Court selects to rule on, of the over 200 cases she wrote the opinion on as an appelate judge only 5 went before the Supreme Court.
Yours Truly,
Allan Olley
Note the published letter is just the first three sentences of this.
Despite being curtailed all my missing points were made but more accurately and precisely by another letter writer and my analogy became the title for the letters on that topic. I had to look up Sotomayor's record and look up what the at bats to run ratio thingy was called and make sure that indeed 0.4 was an impressive batting average, actually almost superhuman as a career average. I was hardly the first to make this analogy (example), but I claim independent invention. I've just discovered that Sotomayor also ruled on the baseball strike of '95 making the analogy even more apt. Of course all this is of little concern to me, but I find such fallacious arguments troubling.
Anyway, I guess I've taken my first step to becoming a full fledged crank who writes to the newspaper.
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