The Oxford Comma is Bullshit

There are exactly four things a “correctly” placed comma can do to a sentence:

1. Improve clarity
2. Increase ambiguity
3. Have no effect on clarity; and
4. Have no effect on ambiguity

I’ve put quotation marks around “correctly” because I would argue that using a comma in any way except #1 is technically incorrect, but I wanted to distinguish these placements from out-and-out incorrect placement arbitrarily in a sentence.

I’ll start at the end of the list and work backwards.

No Effect on Ambiguity

Consider this sentence: “I went to the shop with Jim, a chef and a metalsmith.”

Jim appears to have two professions. But I may have gone to the shop with three people: Jim, another person who’s a chef, and someone else that’s a metalsmith.

With the help of the Oxford comma: “I went to the shop with Jim, a chef, and a metalsmith.”

Now Jim is a chef, and the metalsmith appears to be someone else, but it’s still possible that I intended to say that I went to the shop with three different people.

So the Oxford comma is useless here.

No Effect on Clarity

Here’s a picture that I saw the other day, trying to defend the serial comma.

Fig 1. The stupidest fucking defence I’ve ever seen.

This is without a doubt the most moronic defence of this punctuation mark I’ve ever seen. Here’s how you can tell it’s stupid: go up to a friend today and tell them that you had eggs, toast and orange juice today for breakfast. They will not grab you by the shoulders and shake you, screaming, “HOW DID YOU CREATE THE UNHOLY CHIMERA OF TOAST AND ORANGE JUICE COMBINED,” I promise you.

It’s far more likely that they’ll call you a lucky bastard and say they only had time for a cup of coffee, what with traffic on the way to work being so bad these days and anyways eggs give them gas.

This use of the comma has precisely zero effect on the clarity of the sentence. If you wanted to indicate that you had some sort of juice-toast hybrid, you’d use a hyphen.

“This morning for breakfast, I had eggs and toast-juice. Or juice-toast. I dunno, I was pretty drunk.”

Here’s another image, which I’m including so people stop trying to use it to justify anything.

Fig 2. Only marginally less stupid than the first example, but more annoying

This image correctly indicates that placing a comma changes the meaning of the sentence, so it is slightly less asinine. But both sentences are correct; the second one is not any less grammatically valid than the first.

The problem is that, absent of context, NONE OF THIS MAKES ANY FUCKING SENSE. Since the creator is obviously trying to defend the Oxford comma, the implication is that inviting two strippers, an assassinated President and a dead fucking mass murderer to your party is LESS OUTRAGEOUS than inviting two strippers who have stage names of a famous playboy and a guy whose name translates to “Man of Steel”. Are you fucking kidding me?

In the absence of clarifying context—say, whether this is a line from a zombie novel or something—the only reasonable interpretation that I can make is that the strippers ARE named JFK and Stalin. Either that, or I’m going to the wrong fucking parties.

Either way, stop promulgating this bullshit.

Introducing Ambiguity

The Oxford comma, like any other comma, can introduce ambiguity into a situation. To wit:

“I went to the party with Irene, my best friend, and a six pack of beer.”

Versus

“I went to the party with Irene, my best friend and a six pack of beer.”

The first sentence is unclear because we don’t know if Irene and my best friend are the same person or different people. The Oxford comma has put “my best friend” into apposition with “Irene”.

Fig 3. This schlock as my best friend? I think not.

The second sentence is more clear, because you’d have to believe that Irene was both my best friend AND a six pack of beer, which is hugely unlikely. If I made friends with inanimate containers of alcohol, obviously my best friend would be a bottle of vodka.

Adding Clarity

Okay, this is the last case, and after I’ve spent the rest of the time beating up on the Oxford comma, we come to the point where I admit that it can make a sentence clearer. In fact, since we all agree that this is possible, I’m not even going to come up with an example.

But now we’re left with the situation where out of four possible use cases, the Oxford comma either does nothing at all or makes things worse in three of them. You could, conversely, argue that the Oxford comma does nothing or makes things BETTER in three cases, except that that runs counter to the notion that one should use as little punctuation as needed in a sentence to make things clear, but no more than that. This is why in literature, you never see four question marks to indicate incredulity, or six exclamation marks to really, REALLY show that someone is excited. (No, furry slash fiction doesn’t count as “literature”.)

Using the Oxford comma as a matter of style is as pointless as using two spaces after a period. It brings no grammatical utility, but a bunch of us were taught to do it by rote by teachers who only had the vaguest understanding of why they were teaching us these things.

If you use the so-called Oxford comma, use it because that’s where a comma goes to make things clear, the same as ANY OTHER COMMA. It really doesn’t deserve its own term or notation, because it’s not doing anything different.

And if your sentences are delivered without context and they suffer from some sort of problem where people can’t tell what the fuck you’re talking about, re-write the fucking sentence or give some edifying information before or after. Shoehorning in a bunch of commas isn’t the way to solve problems with your grammar and diction. Just how lazy are you?

On Sample Sizes

Recently, there was a study ‘proving’ that men are better at parking than women. It was done in Germany. People were ‘randomly’ selected.

This is largely irrelevant; the selection bias is enormous:

1. A study like this recruits people. Only people that feel they have the time will show up. Busy mothers are out, for one thing.
2. This data will only apply to people in Germany.
3. This data will only apply to the people in Germany close enough to the test site to agree to it.

Germany has a population of 82 million people. A quick Google search reveals that the voting population is about 62 million people. Conservatively, let’s assume that the driving population is 31 million people. Using this handy sample size calculator, let’s plug some numbers in.

Test 1:

Margin of Error: 5%

Confidence level: 90% (this is actually pretty sloppy; makes the sample size smaller)

Response Distribution: 10% (this assumes that we know a lot about the expected values and that we expect them to fall very close to one another)

Calculated Sample Size: 377

Test 2:

Margin of Error: 5%

Confidence Level: 95% (more common — this is the 19 times out of 20 thing you hear during polling numbers)

Response Distribution: 50%

Calculated Sample Size: 385

The sample size used in the study was 65. What do you get with a number like that? Well, if you leave everything the same as Test 1, your margin of error is 6.12%. If you leave everything as in Test 2, your margin of error is 12.16%. In this study, the men were 5% better at placing the car than women. This is within the margin of error. In the population at large, then, this means nothing at all. There wasn’t even a control group (i.e., people that don’t drive attempting to park cars).

If you’re going to do studies, at least set them up properly.

Consider the Weather

Consider this: if you take a human born in the middle of Africa – descended from Africans – and swap them with someone born and descended from people living in the Northern Hemisphere for many generations, both humans are capable of surviving in their new climate. A dark-skinned African with a coat is essentially as effective in the cold as a light-skinned Swede in a coat. And in the hot climate, the Swede would acclimate to the situation in short order. Their skin would darken and they would sweat effectively enough to maintain a stable core temperature.

Now, further consider that this capacity is not only in-built in every human, but likely has been since BEFORE humans started migrating. Our African thought experiment may well be descended from humans that have been in that area of the world for dozens of millennia. Before humans were subjected to wildly varying climate, they were able to rapidly adapt enough so that they might be ABLE to travel to completely different climate zones without speciation. Humans the world over are still, obviously, completely biologically compatible.

This is the human trait that can be claimed to set us apart from other animals. We can’t prove we’re the smartest – dolphins show remarkable intellect, for instance, and it may be impossible to measure them on the same scale that we measure ourselves – but we CAN claim to be one of the most adaptable (multi-cellular) creatures to ever show up on Earth. This is the key to the species’ current success. With any luck, it will get us out of more trouble than it has gotten us into.

Dragon Age: Origins — 100 hours in

Disclaimer: I work for EA, and I used to work for BioWare. My opinions are my own.

Disclaimer 2: I think you should go out and buy this game right now. I’m going to say a lot of critical things about it, but if you have or have ever had any love for RPGs, just go buy it. Nothing that I say should keep you from playing it.

Dragon Age: Origins is an odd game in that I don’t think you can rate it on just one scale. On the one hand, the metacritic score on PC is 91 (and 88 on consoles), which speaks to how good the game is. It’s a classic RPG in the same vein as Baldur’s Gate. There are multiple dialogue options, conversations between the followers, magic, swords, dragons, good, evil and everything in between.

On the other hand, I find it hard to reconcile the 91 rating with the fact that every 4 seconds I have a new bug or complaint about it. I’ve played it for approximately 100 hours between two platforms — XBox 360 and PC — so it can’t be a BAD game, but there are so many things wrong, I find myself wondering how they couldn’t have caught this one flaw, or why they decided something was a good design decision when it obviously wasn’t. Dragon Age, then, needs a rating of how BAD it is as well; how likely it is to make you want to throw your controller, or say, “Really BioWare? REALLY?” On that scale, I figure it’s running a good 75, because I’ve uttered that phrase more than once…though I’ve yet to throw my controller.

I’m going to list thing things that I can remember that drive me crazy about the game. This may seem nitpicky or pedantic, but I honestly feel that if BioWare put enough time into the game to try and make it a rich gaming experience, it’s only right that I pay enough attention to the details to notice what’s bad about it. Honestly, I think it would be worse for me to shrug my shoulders and walk away from it; it would have meant they didn’t make any impression on me at all.

Everything after this point is likely to be a spoiler. Don’t read it if you don’t want certain plot elements to be revealed to you.

There’s no particular order to these, just how they came to mind.

The Law

When thinking about diet and exercise, there’s really only one thing to be mindful of: the First Law of Thermodynamics.

The First Law of Thermodynamics tells us that energy changes forms, but can never be created or destroyed. This is the defining characteristic of all systems that use energy and do work; it is inevitable, inescapable and probably lots of other things starting with ‘i’. But it’s the only thing anyone needs to know, and everything else follows after that.

It is the case that for 99% of the population, counting calories is all the work you have to do if you’re concerned about your weight. Measure your food, measure your energy burn during the day, and you’ll see right away if you’re losing weight, gaining weight or maintaining equilibrium. Some people — very smart people, it’s worth noting — believe this isn’t true, for various reasons of biology or endocrinology, but they’re wrong. Or, at least, they’re less correct than they could be.

Let’s start with the equation form of the assertion:

ΔE = E(in) – E(out)

Where E(in) is all the food you’re eating, and E(out) is all the calories you’re burning.

If  ΔE < 0, you’re losing weight. This is true. This is an inarguable fact. Why? Because of the First Law.

Because energy isn’t created or destroyed, only converted, it means any energy you lose through your normal day-to-day processes has to come from somewhere. E(out), ideally, would be a measured value; the number of calories you’re burning as a combination of normal respiration as well as all the exercise you’ve done. This value for E(out) can be estimated fairly accurately by various methods. If you belong to a gym or health club, they may be able to do this for you for free or a small fee. You can also try calculating your own Basal Metabolic Rate and using various other web-based resources to calculate how many calories you burn through exercise.

E(in), then, should be an easy enough value to calculate and monitor to ensure healthy weight maintenance of any kind.

It really isn’t, though. E(in) is difficult to measure. The numbers are on the package, but those values aren’t entirely accurate.

Calories are typically calculated using a device known as a calorimeter. You put food in, it burns it, and measures the energy released (in a variety of methods, depending on the calorimeter). All food, naturally, has a positive caloric value, according to devices like this. However, humans aren’t calorimeters. We don’t burn calories the same way. Digestion itself takes energy, and there are kinds of materials that we just can digest, irrespective of their actual caloric value. Food labelling attempts to take these things into consideration by excluding calories from the stuff that we can’t digest, but these are estimates, and are subject to a measure of inaccuracy.

The old saw about celery being negative calories because it takes more work to eat than it gives back to you is particularly apt (regardless of the veracity of the statement). Certain calories are more available to us than others. Food is not all created equal. This seems like a complicating factor, but it really isn’t. It makes things a lot easier to tailor your diet for what you want to do.

There are a lot of diets out there that claim to reduce weight, though almost all of them require significant jumping through hoops. However, almost all of them have one thing in common: the restriction of simple carbohydrates. All of them limit or remove the source of the most bio-available calories in our dietary repetoire. This serves two functions:

1. It increases the delta between stated calories and actual calories. That is, when you eat a spoonful of sugar (to make the medicine go down) the number of calories on the package is going to be very close to the number of calories that you get. By removing these items, you’re guaranteed that all the foods you eat have a more significant buffer, which is going to give you a bit of an edge when it comes to losing weight.
2. Carbohydrates break down into simple sugars and promote spikes in blood sugar. Blood sugar spikes are countered by the body releasing insulin, but the body usually overshoots a bit, just in case. This tends to make you crave more sugar, so you eat more, which means there’s more insulin, etc. You end up in a small feedback loop that can make you eat more than you originally intended.

Systems like the Zone or Paleo diets will claim to help you lose weight, even if you eat the same number of calories, but that’s really just a bit of sloppy marketing to get you to buy in. Again, humans aren’t calorimeters. Both Zone and Paleo encourage eating things that aren’t very calorie dense and have a lot of extra roughage that fill you up. Five-hundred calories worth of celery isn’t any different from five-hundred calories of potato chips on paper, but almost no calories actually make it into your system if you’re eating all that celery, whereas almost ALL the calories in the chips go straight to your ass. (Incidentally, 500 calories of celery is approximately 5.5 kg worth of the stuff.)

The Atkins diet, for all its vilification, wasn’t as meat and fat centric as it appeared, though it was still of dubious health value for people who weren’t dangerously overweight. The diet tried to leverage an important property of fat — it makes us feel full — as well as so drastically reducing carbohydrate based calories that the body would be tricked into thinking it was starving. This state — ketosis – is something the body does when it doesn’t have enough sugar calories to feed the brain. It switches over to burning fat as much as it can for energy, which is why people often saw rapid weight and fat loss while using Atkins. The diet was otherwise fraught with too many pitfalls for someone to reasonably consider without the supervision of a doctor, however, which is why it has badly fallen out of favour in the last few years.

(To be clear, the Paleo diet can also lead to ketosis if carbohydrates are sufficiently restricted. This does not seem to be a property of the Zone diet.)

In the end, anyone can construct a diet plan that has the desired effect on their weight. It’s more important to adjust for nutrients than specifically exclude or include various types of food. If you’re mindful that not all foods relinquish their calories to you in the same way, you can adjust your intake accordingly. Increase the number of calories over what you burn for weight gain, and reduce the number of calories below what you burn for weight loss. If you’re still gaining weight when you want to be losing it, you simply haven’t accounted for something in the equation correctly. Either you’ve overestimated your burn, or underestimated your intake. If you don’t have any overriding medical issues, (e.g., thyroid problems), this will work for you, 100% of the time, guaranteed.

It’s the Law.

The Title

George Alec Effinger wrote a book called “When Gravity Fails”. I misread the title of the book for years, but I always liked my version better.

What DO you do when gravity falls? I don’t know.