{"id":2732,"date":"2008-07-10T07:56:49","date_gmt":"2008-07-10T07:56:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2008\/07\/10\/how-to-lie-with-incompetent-ph\/"},"modified":"2008-07-10T07:56:49","modified_gmt":"2008-07-10T07:56:49","slug":"how-to-lie-with-incompetent-ph","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2008\/07\/10\/how-to-lie-with-incompetent-ph\/","title":{"rendered":"How to Lie With Incompetent PhotoShopping"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Via <a href=\"http:\/\/matthewyglesias.theatlantic.com\/archives\/2008\/07\/rapid_bus.php\">Matt Yglesias<\/a>, the following pair of pictures purports to show that &#8220;an equal number of people can fit into a <i>vastly<\/i> smaller space if they&#8217;re riding a bus than if they&#8217;re in single passenger cars.&#8221; See if you can spot the problem:<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/wp-content\/blogs.dir\/467\/files\/2012\/04\/i-cc074262e520560343ea8dbc100912a5-busvcar.jpg\" alt=\"i-cc074262e520560343ea8dbc100912a5-busvcar.jpg\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Answer below the fold:<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>The bus picture is on a <i>vastly<\/i> different scale than the car picture, greatly exaggerating the size of the effect.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m not denying the effect, mind&#8211; just lamenting the deceptive photo editing used to make it look larger than it is. And the hell of it is, it&#8217;s <strong>pointless<\/strong> stupid photo editing. The same point would be made by properly cropped and scaled photos. But whoever made it (Yglesias doesn&#8217;t say where he got it) wasn&#8217;t satisfied with the truth, and decided to jazz it up a little in a transparently obvious way.<\/p>\n<p>This is what makes politics so depressing&#8211; even people I basically agree with are <strong>so frickin&#8217; stupid<\/strong>&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>(I will note that while I like public transit in principle, I&#8217;m not a big fan in practice, mostly because I&#8217;m significantly bigger than the average person. I&#8217;m basically never comfortable riding buses, particularly those with forward-facing seats. Trains tend to be a little better, but not much.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Via Matt Yglesias, the following pair of pictures purports to show that &#8220;an equal number of people can fit into a vastly smaller space if they&#8217;re riding a bus than if they&#8217;re in single passenger cars.&#8221; See if you can spot the problem: Answer below the fold:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2732","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2732","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2732"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2732\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2732"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2732"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2732"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}