Pi-Consulting

ABC News recently revealed the results of a series of opinion polls which imply that some eighty million Americans believe that extra-terrestrial beings have visited the Earth from outer space. Over 40 million claim to have witnessed or to know someone who was present at one or more UFO sightings. 20% of Americans profess to believe in alien abductions. Others are more skeptical, as witness the song penned by ex-Eagle Don Henley, “They’re not here, and they’re not coming”:

…Anxious eyes turned upward
Clutching souvenirs
Carrying our highest hopes,
And our darkest fears

You may see the heavens flashing
You may hear the cosmos humming
But I promise you, my brother
They’re not here, and they’re not coming

Henley seems to have tapped into one of the great truths of human existence and belief: everything is really about something else. (Sources: The New York Times, Wisteria Music, Pi Market Research)

Turn on your TV and tune to any news service. Within three minutes on average, an “expert” will be telling you what will happen next on this or that big issue of the day. The news and information media industry has gotten so big that it can no longer subsist on ‘what already happened’ and ‘what is happening now’ alone. It requires a steady output of ‘what will happen in the future’. What started as the fanciful musings of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells has become the serious Business of Forecasting.

So how good are forecasters at forecasting? The writer and self-styled intellectual historian Louis Menand, writing in the New Yorker magazine, has answers. (more…)

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. And, while much of western civilization continues to define ideals of beauty in terms of willowy, sylph-like blonde girls, America’s publishing and entertainment industries are discovering that, to many enthusiasts, beauty consists in… okay, say it loud and say it proud: a Big Behind. As publications like King and Smooth have seduced readership (or voyeurship, perhaps?) away from the likes of Maxim magazine, analysts comment that “the magazine industry has hitherto largely ignored the young black male reader” and other enthusiasts of the… well, call it the ‘stirring stern’. Says Sean Cummings, Smooth’s launch editor, “These books allow us to celebrate the beauty of our women without compromise. For years, FHM, Maxim and Stuff showed you their idea of beauty — a blonde, blue-eyed 110-pound woman. Now we’re showing you ours”. Ideal vital statistics? 36-24-38, at the very least. Bring on the badonkadunk. (Source: The New Yorker)

“C’est pas normal, ça”. The phrase means “That’s not normal”, in a pejorative sense. The French say it all the time. It is a measure of the cultural and attitudinal divide between Britain and its continental neighbor that there is absolutely no equivalent colloquial phrase in English.

Now here’s something weird. When a British person says “That’s weird!”, it is often with a barely-hidden undercurrent of sneaking admiration. Ever since the UK unleashed the Monty Pythons on an unsuspecting world, Britons have sniggered at ‘normality’ as something rather sad. In Britain, it seems, “weird is good”. (more…)