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Saturday, August 07, 2021

It's The Mail-in Voting Of Bathroom Scales!

My position on the validity of the 2020 election is that, due to the unreliability of mail-in ballots, the outcome of the election will never be known. Since, for mail-in ballots, you don't know who cast the vote in any given person's name, you have no idea what that person wanted. The data is so tainted as to be worthless.

Our bathroom scale has gone mad. It may give me different numbers from day to day, but always the same ones. Its readout says it's accurate to 0.2 pounds, but there have been times where it says I weigh the exact same thing three days in a row. Further, in the last two weeks, there have been only 4 different numbers it has reported. I know enough probability and statistics to know this is practically impossible.

And so The Great Scale Safari of 2021 began this morning. Healthline gave me their recommendations for the 8 best bathroom scales and I stopped at the first one and bought it. And so The Great Scale Safari of 2021 ended later this morning. It really wasn't all that great of a safari when you think about it, but the 'Post's marketing department insisted on the title, so what are you going to do?

Anyway, here are the details on the scale I chose.

All that matters is accuracy. If there's another with all kinds of features, but it's less accurate, what's the point? The thing only measures one piece of data, your weight. If that data is tainted, then all the ease of use and calculational features are pointless. I dismissed all of the other "best bathroom scales" because they offered nothing of value. They're the mail-in voting of bathroom scales.

What can you do with untrustworthy data?

4 comments:

  1. Q: “What can you do with untrustworthy data?”

    A: Prove anything, but learn nothing.

    ReplyDelete
  2. You also want a calibration weight. I was having the same issue with my scale not acknowledging that my weight changed. Now, I have a weight next to the scale that I determined weighs 25.8 pounds. So I plunk that down on the scale periodically to make sure it is coming out right.

    I think our electronic scales have a stabilization feature, where it will average readings over a few seconds and then "lock on" to the value. The problem is that if it doesn't clear the memory, it will just display the same weight until a new weight is applied that is sufficiently different from the previous weight to prompt a recalculation. My calibration check weight provides that different weight.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Tim, I thought of doing that, too. I've got a pair of 20# dumbbells which I could use to calibrate it. Still, the current one has got to go. There's no way that my weight has been one of only 4 numbers, accurate to within +/- 0.1 pounds, over the last 20 weigh-ins covering 14 days.

    ReplyDelete
  4. =="What can you do with untrustworthy data?"==

    Justify any number of political scams and power-grabs.

    ReplyDelete