Nuggets Parade Day!
I'll be broadcasting live from Mercantile Dining and Provision at 1701 Wynkoop St near Union Station. Lots of great folks joining the show including Ryan Edwards and the legendary Jerry Bell and John Morrissey. Yes, John will be up in the chopper and KOA will be the only radio station covering the parade from the air as well as on the ground.
We're going to have some fun today...it won't be all sports but we'll definitely cover some of the parade (including with some things that might not be 100% true) because even if you're not a big sports fan or big NBA fan, this is Denver's first NBA championship in 47 years of the Nuggets and 56 total years of a professional basketball team in the city. It's a BIG DEAL.
Oh, wait, those are the wrong nuggets...here you go:
Just One Thing: Spurious Correlations
This is definitely not the most important thing I will share with you today but it's almost certainly the best. Hat tip to the great Scott Lincicome for sharing in his most recent "Capitolism" note a link to this brilliant thing: Spurious Correlations (tylervigen.com)
Now to be fair the site has some technical issues that makes it frustrating to click through lots of charts but even just looking at the first page will make any one who's even slightly a data nerd chuckle. And it fits perfectly into my frequent topic of "data abuse" which comes in many forms.
One form showed up in Tay Anderson's ridiculous answers to my colleague Jeana and Marty's excellent questions on Wednesday. At one point, in trying to argue against having police officers in schools (School Resource Officers or SROs), he said that schools with SROs had 2.8 times as many shootings (I think it was...maybe it was a broader category of violence) as schools without them. I guess we're supposed to think that SROs cause violence at schools or at least don't reduce it. Now the latter could be an interesting question although I suspect the presence of an armed officer would tend to at least slightly reduce the chance of someone committing a crime with a weapon at that location. But the obvious answer is that SROs would tend to be assigned by the district to schools where violence is most frequent or likely. In other words, it's possible, maybe probable, that without SROs the ratio would be higher than 2.8.
Anyway, I like calling out data abuse wherever I see it, and these "spurious correlations" are a wonderful example of another form of data abuse: treating two series that move together as if they have a causal relationship. (Whether A causes B or B causes A or some other thing C causes both A and B.) A couple of examples of data sets that have strong correlations: The number of lawyers in Wisconsin and US spending on space, science and technology. And honey-producing bee colonies in the US correlating with legal executions.
You get the idea. Never forget: if you torture the data enough you can always get it to say what you want it to say.
Today's Guests
US Navy CAPT Brett "Chopper" Crozier is a helicopter pilot, a fighter-jet combat aviator, and a former commander of a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, the USS Theodore Roosevelt. Chopper was relieved of command of the Roosevelt after someone leaked to the media a letter he sent to his chain of command asking for help as COVID had arrived and was spreading among his crew. You may recall that the interim Secretary of the Navy who fired Crozier made a boneheaded statement/insult of Crozier and was then forced to resign. Brett is out with a new book, "Surf When You Can: Lessons in Life, Loyalty, and Leadership from a Maverick Navy Captain." (see links below)
Brett Crozier, ‘maverick’ fired as carrier CO, wouldn’t change a thing (yahoo.com)
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Col James Watts is a US Army cardiologist. He joins us to let members of the US Army know about important new mental health and counseling services available to them through "Mission 100". It started with Alaska but is expanding nationwide. I thought it would be useful to some folks to get this info on the show given the very large Army presence in Colorado, not least at the massive Fort Carson.
Army seeks to rein in suicides by connecting with soldiers one by one | Stars and Stripes
As a part of Mission 100, all Soldiers will soon have access to mental health and wellness screenings with a licensed counseling provider.
All Soldiers also have access to expanded counseling services and significantly reduced wait times, as well as health professionals and chaplains trained in pastoral care counseling.
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Other Stuff
Frankly, I have no real idea what else we'll be doing on the show today as we work around coverage of the Nuggets celebration parade, but here are some possibilities:
There’s a new story from the Washington Post that’s both surprising and not, about the saga of Donald Trump and the classified documents: Early last year, one of Donald Trump’s attorneys suggested to the former president that he, the lawyer, could “quietly approach the Justice Department to see if he could negotiate a settlement that would preclude charges.” But Trump, who was listening to other lawyers while lying to them, and also listening to bad advice from Tim Fitton of Judicial Watch, wanted to keep the papers in part, it seems, in the same way that a toddler likes to cry, “but it’s mine.” Mr. Trump faces some real legal jeopardy here due to his own stubbornness and America faces another 18 months of his campaigning on grievance rather than on what this nation actually needs.
Trump rejected lawyers’ efforts to avoid classified documents indictment (msn.com)
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Satellites Keep Photobombing Space Images. Astronomers Need a Fix | WIRED
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Modelo overtakes Bud Light as top US beer seller (pressrundown.com) (but they have same parent company, so Bud wins either way)
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I have long thought that Denver could be a better food city than it is. And maybe that's happening, if this is a clue: The Michelin Guide plants its flag in Colorado :: Michelin North America, Inc. (axios.com)
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10 Colorado companies on the 2023 Fortune 500 list - Axios Denver
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Today's Videos
Yes, it's a baby turtle
This is incredible...both the audio and the electronic device he's working with