One of the hurdles Michael Mann has to overcome in his lawsuit against NRO/Steyn is the tenet that public figures are expected to have a higher level of tolerance when it comes to ridicule, satire, and defamation. For that reason, because I myself am a public figure in the climate debate, I’d have little success in prosecuting a defamation claim over an article that says I have sex with farm animals (see “corrections” at bottom of linked article).
After Mann’s libel case against the National Review Online and Mark Steyn was filed, he’s recently been whining that he’s a “reluctant public figure“, perhaps to somehow shift the lawsuit in his favor.
Now, thanks to an opinion piece by Mann in the Guardian, he’s pretty much blown his own argument out of the water while managing to make a ridiculous and easily falsifiable claim about typewriter technology in an analogy on “path dependency”.
Here, Mann uses his familiarity with what “the science tells us” to effect change in public and political policy, going even so far as to challenge president Obama:
If the president won’t protect us, who is he protecting?
That challenge pretty much places him in the realm of public debate, and being a “public figure”, even if he claims it was reluctant or involuntary:
A person can become an “involuntary public figure” as the result of publicity, even though that person did not want or invite the public attention. For example, people accused of high profile crimes may be unable to pursue actions for defamation even after their innocence is established…
Source: Aaron Larson: Defamation, Libel and Slander Law. Expertlaw.com, August 2003
Mann often claims he’s been “cleared” of any wrongdoing related to his world famous “hockey stick” in later investigations. So, like “people accused of high profile crimes may be unable to pursue actions for defamation even after their innocence is established” he may be unable to make any viable defamation argument after his hockey stick became a sensation not only for the initial press, but the questions and ridicule that followed.
As a humorous aside, Mann really doesn’t know what he’s talking about with this analogy in the same Guardian article, bold mine:
A classic example is the “qwerty” keyboard layout. Even though this layout may not be the most efficient, it was the first one, and so it became the standard.
The omniscient Dr. Mann, who often positions himself as an expert in everything, botched this example badly. The QWERTY keyboard was not the first keyboard layout, and it was designed on purpose to be inefficient, to prevent a mechanical jam that frustrated early experienced typists:
The first model constructed by Sholes [4]used a piano-like keyboard with two rows of characters arranged alphabetically as follows:
- 3 5 7 9 N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
2 4 6 8 . A B C D E F G H I J K L M
The construction of the “Type Writer” had two flaws that made the product susceptible to jams. Firstly, characters were mounted on metal arms or typebars, which would clash and jam if neighboring arms were pressed at the same time or in rapid succession.[1] Secondly, its printing point was located beneath the paper carriage, invisible to the operator, a so-called “up-stroke” design. Consequently, jams were especially serious, because the typist could only discover the mishap by raising the carriage to inspect what he had typed. The solution was to place commonly used letter-pairs (like “th” or “st”) so that their typebars were not neighboring, avoiding jams. Contrary to popular belief,[2] the QWERTY layout was not designed to slow the typist down,[3] but rather to speed up typing by preventing jams.
- Rehr, Darryl, Why QWERTY was Invented
- http://www.maltron.com/media/lillian_kditee_001.pdf
- http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/221/was-the-qwerty-keyboard-purposely-designed-to-slow-typists “…at least one study indicates that placing commonly used keys far apart, as with the QWERTY, actually speeds typing, since you frequently alternate hands”
- US 79868, Sholes, C. Latham; Carlos Glidden & Samuel W. Soule, “Improvement in Type-writing Machines”, patent issued July 14, 1868
A few seconds with Google and Wikipedia as I did to verify what I believed I knew, would have helped him avoid this silly blunder, but he comes across almost always so full sure of himself, he probably thought he didn’t need to.
Dr. Mann now can add “failed typewriter expert” to his long list of curriculum vitae claims, along with being a “reluctant public figure” and Nobel Prize Winner.
h/t to Barry Woods for the Guardian link
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Never gets old……… http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WMqc7PCJ-nc
MM and the qwerty story makes one wonder what other studies, theories or “settled science” is so much bovine excrement.
In Mikes world up is down and left is right. His off the wall, blue-sky thinking is just the physical manifestation of the similarity of intellect that propelled Einstein from a lowly patent officer to one of the most revered and recognizable public figures of the twentieth century.
Forget Dvorak and Qwerty, this is the Age of Garbage Muzak, Ytrewq, Tiljander and DendroThermometric cybernetics with a sprinkling of what Steve McIntyre admiringly coined as Mannian Mathematics.
A huge step for us is but a barely noticeable, toe-twitch for Dr Mann .
His ability to shrug off the well-funded, vitriolic and anti-science attacks by the forces of darkness is legendary even by his own high standards. I, an ordinary mortal, can barely comprehend how thick-skinned and impervious to criticism he has proven to be. And all on his own miserable, academic stipend-funded dime, too!
If I was Obama, whom I believe has no PhD after his name but only the suffix POTUS, whatever that stands for, I would be quaking in my boots that the eye of SourOne was fixed disapprovingly on my miserable hide – never mind the alkaline tears of the Great Bill McWeeper himself in the chorus.
Yes, Mark Steyn, him of the same racial ethnicity as Donna L and the hitherto mentioned Gadfly, StMc, may claim that St Michael is a public figure and is fair game for their clever play on words thus rendering his necessary defence of his Noble, Nobel nature, moot.
I have every faith in the US legal system and know that DC will do the Right things, right.!
It might take every penny of someone else’s money but free speech is unimportant and must be attacked whenever libertarians attack those few principles which are left to us.
If I’ve offended anyone then I’m sorry so let me apologise, in my heavy-handed way by saying sorry in 21st Century new speak.
/s
(is that correct?)
Mann is a public figure. And he has both abused and overstayed his 15 minutes.
PS-I’m a plumber
garymount says:
February 1, 2014 at 4:05 pm
In 1976 my good friend Richard elected to take typing in high school. We joked that he was just looking for a girlfriend. He countered that computers were coming and the keyboard was the future. We all laughed.
In 1981 I visited my friend at Waterloo University where he was studying computer science. “I told you” he said “that I wasn’t looking for a girlfriend. Computers are the future. Take my advice and learn how to program”. A few hours later his girlfriend showed up. “Hey” I said. “Wasn’t she in your typing class?”
I took his advice and learned a number of programming languages and by 1987 was developing and selling scientific software to Canadian universities – hunting and pecking my way on the keyboard line by line.
kadaka (KD Knoebel) says:
February 1, 2014 at 2:57 pm
We’ll have to add those to the “queue.” “Power up!”
If we let cause and effect go bad, then Mad magazine’s “poiuyt” (what some
others call a three pronged blivet) would count too.
http://www.affordablehousinginstitute.org/blogs/us/Poiuyt_small.jpg
Probably his time with the magicians was to learn how to hide the decline and make the
MWP, Roman Optimum, and other previous warm periods disappear….
Funding? Probably big oil, aka Soros or Buffet…
Dunno if anyone has clicked on this yet but Mann says he is a “reluctant public figure”, hence he is one. Steyn win. ~~~~
This May 3, 2013 Smithsonian article says that it was the telegraph (Morse code) operators who asked for the QWERTY keyboard change, and cites a 2011 paper by Kyoto University Researchers Koichi Yasuoka and Motoko Yasuoka (On the Prehistory of QWERTY) who investigated the matter.
The layout was first in the sense of being the most popular at the time the US was shifting from mechanical typewriters to electronic typewriters to PCs ? So the computer people chose to conform rather than create an inconvenience for customers ?
Reluctant public figure, yet quite happy to sue anyone and everyone at the drop of a hat and more than happy to write crappy articles in national newspapers.
I’m guessing that his keyboard is missing the letters I,R,O,N and Y.
Heh! me vinair slipped one or two by until further notice.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jan/31/keystone-xl-pipeline-obama-state-department-impact#comment-31458591
He could get out of it easily, by saying more recent data suggests that the variables in the warming are now different, and it appears the planet is cooling overall, except the Gobi desert.
He’s a wanker, and deserves everything he gets. Talk about egotism gone crazy, he has lost all credibility or will in the academic world, and so be it.
There is a very interesting legal question here. Mann sought publicity in many ways. But lets set that aside and just focus one aspect. Mann claimed on many occasions to be a Nobel Prize winner. Many people believed that he was a Nobel Prize winner, after all, he seems like an earnest fellow and Nobel laureate are men of unquestionable integrity so who, in their right mind, would challenge the truthiness on a Nobelist. But did this claim, how ever false, make Mann a Public Figure.
Imagine that I claimed to have been the Pope of the Catholic Church between the years 1996 and 2003. Popes don’t lie and therefore journalist (particularly at NPR and the BBC) believed my claim without question. As a result of my claim, I was invited onto news broadcasts to talk about my life in the Vatican and these appearances made me a celebrity. Later, it turns out that my claim of being a Pope was … hmm, what’s the word I’m looking for … fraudulent. Obviously the Pope is a public figure. And on the surface, someone who merely claims to be a Pope is not a public figure. But, if my false assertion of being a Pope was believed by a large number of people and that assertion helped me to become a celebrity, then It would seem that I could not claim that I was reluctant in perusing celebrity. My false claim would invalidate the assertion of reluctance.
Bill Illis
February 1, 2014 at 3:25 pm
says:
‘One of the questions is who is paying Michael Mann’s legal bills.’
I would suspect the law firm works on contingency. If Mann doesn’t win he pays nothing to the firm. If he does win the law firm representing him takes one quarter to one third of the final settlement. The law firm, therefore, takes the case because they have a fairly high expectation of winning and they expect the defendant to have deep pockets. Or, it’s a high profile case that may be beneficial in securing clients in the future.
My information may be a bit rusty on all of this though. I do think the tort system in the US is somewhat unfair to the defendant and also to the little people. Law firms routinely reject legitimate cases if not a lot of money is involved since not a lot of money is, well, not a lot of money. So, a little person, on personal damages, is oftentimes unlikely to get representation. In this situation the case against Mark Steyn certainly does not seem compelling, yet he has fairly deep pockets so a law firm, on contingency, can expect a fairly large payout if they win. The defendant, in this case Steyn, have to shoulder their defense costs on their own. You can rest assured, if Michael Mann had to reimburse Steyn’s defense costs if Mikey loses, he would not proceed with this case.
I’m quite open to correction on any of what I’ve written.
Michael Mann destroys his claim that he does not consider himself a public figure with his first sentence:
“I have made my position on the Keystone XL pipeline quite clear.”
No introduction of himself, no need to say he is a “climate scientist”, that he “shared the Nobel Prize”, that he created an iconic graph; he takes it for granted that the readers understand that he is the eminent Dr. Mann, and he is speaking from authority.
(Doesn’t that opening statement sound like something your parents might have said when you were a rebellious teenager?)
A pompous opening to say the least!
Mann’s Qwerty blunder is revealing in another way. A teenager, lacking experience in the world, is forced to argue using a priori reasoning – one that doesn’t need science (empirical knowledge). A bright teenager can get a lot of mileage out of a priori argument, analogy, and the like, but, where the argument is pressed in an empirical direction, he has to get creative and “reason” out, as best he can what the empirical “must be”. If the arguer is full of himself, he tends to feel confident in this dangerous area. Not knowing the background for QWERTY, Mann makes an assumption that the inventor of the typewriter was basically clueless about “wise layout”. This is tranference – he would have been clueless about wise keyboard layout. As a real scientific researcher with the care and attention that that appellation is supposed to subsume, he should have “researched” the Qwerty answer and not let hubris give him this knowledge. Sloppiness here makes for sloppiness there.
Mann’s Penn State website profile page has a link to a whole other page dedicated to himself IN THE NEWS. He was not reluctant to point that out.
I will refrain from making fun of Anthony because the (in)justice system is random, and I choose not to subject myself to a system founded on corruption. Never forget, the judge and prosecutor work for the same organization. For every law, there’s a counter-law. For every reasonable argument, there’s an emotional counter-argument. For every concern for justice, there is an overwhelming incentive for conviction by the state employees who control the process.
ba says: @ur momisugly February 1, 2014 at 2:51 pm
.. When the dust eventually settles, I think Mann will have done far more damage to Penn State and real living breathing persons in aggregate than Jerry Sandusky.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
You can start with the UK and 30000 excess winter deaths in 2013 due to fuel poverty.
Mikey’s latest in the the Guardian shows he is partly responsible.
i’m typing this on an azerty
not sure whether it’s english, french, belgian or swiss
où est le shift key?
merde!
More OT on keyboards:
In 1935 Marius den Outer invented a mechanical chord keyboard, named Tachotype; and another improved version named Velotype in 1938.
Thereafter Den Outer and linguist Nico Berkelmans made further improvements based on frequencies of letter combinations in words.
Den Outer and my parents became close friends. In the years around 1970 a prototype of Velotype (he called it “Outertype”, then) was stored in my parental house. It was a wooden dummy box with buttons on metal pins that rebounded on foam plastic; Den Outer demonstrated a few times to me (a young boy then) how I would be able one day to type words with this. In the 1980s an electronic version came into production, but it was commercially a flop.
Since 2011 there is a new attempt to commercialize Velotype. I fear the price tag is too high (at least for me).
Here you see this new Velotype in action.
Here an old version in use for subtitling the evening news.
The Dutch Wikipedia page on Velotype (use Google Translation; it will be better than the English wiki page)
Some other text in Dutch and photographs
Some text in English
US Patent 1946
US Patent 1986
Jimbo says: @ur momisugly February 1, 2014 at 3:11 pm
…Their main aim is the DE-INDUSTRIALIZATION OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA….
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
With John Holdern as Obama’s ‘Science Czar’ it is kind of hard to miss. See it is the smaller lump over there to the left where the MSM and Obama is trying to hide everything else. IMAGE
Looking forward to Mann bankrupting National Review et al.!