From the ashes comes baby Nessie fossil - CNN.com

The bones of a baby plesiosaur have been recovered from an Antarctic island, scientists reported Monday.

Very cool, very cool indeed. not only that, but a very intact skeleton. But then the Associated Press goes and prints this:

In life, 70 million years ago, the five-foot-long animal would have resembled Nessie, the long-necked creature reported to inhabit Scotland’s Loch Ness. (emphasis mine)

Reported to inhabit? Reported by whom? AP? Loch Ness locals? Ghouls that knock at your door on windy nights?

Let’s try that one again,

In life, 70 million years ago, the five-foot-long animal would have resembled Nessie, the mythical long-necked creature [once] believed to inhabit Scotland’s Loch Ness. (you could take it with or without the bracketed word depending on the context.)

Loch Ness is a modern myth, and and interesting phenomenon to study, as it has perpetuated without eveidence for years upon years, and now has institutional support in the form of tourism to keep it alive. The myth may have begun when someone spiked the punch with a little more than plain ol’ meade, or perhaps someone once found a fossilized pleiosaur and thought that it must have been a recently living creature. I mean, what else were people supposed to make of pleiosaurs before they knew how to tell the age of the fossils? There are quite a few dragon-like myths around the world, you know.

“Some people say” and “reported to inhabit” are wishy-washy ways of making declarations without having to turn on your brain and evaluate them. They have their uses, and this is not one of them.

I would have thought that CNN might catch a flaw such as that and not just reprint the article.

That was before I read/watched this piece from CNN. I discussed it on the Mindcast, (episode not posted to podcast yet), on a study about sex differences between men and women. (transcript)

GUPTA: Rushton’s bold conclusion that men have higher I.Q.s is based on his study of the SAT scores of 100,000 17- and 18-year-olds, 50,000 male, 50,000 female. Now, if you think one sex would naturally do better on math or verbal, Rushton says forget it, that he factored out the bias, finding men on average outscored women by nearly four I.Q. points.

Wrong. They totally missed the problem with the study. (LiveScience)

The study did in fact include about 10,000 more females than males.

This introduced a bias into an otherwise well-done study. There was a measured difference between the two groups, but the two groups were skewed. I’ll put a link here when I post this episode, because I skewered CNN.