News You Can Bruise for 2000 February 23

You know how when a piece of research confirms or purports to explain some piece of common knowledge, it gets reported as "Hey look, the eggheads finally discovered that aspirin relieves pain!" or "Professor Newton's learned theory demonstrates to the unwashed masses that, should one drop a coin or a ball, it will unfailingly strike the ground without undue delay." Boy, that steams my toast. That's not really the point of this entry. The point of this entry is that if research really worked the way it gets reported, we'd see papers like my new Segfault story, What If Linus Torvalds Gets Hit By A Bus? -- An Empirical Study.