They say to never read the comments. Or at least they do to those of us who put words on the internet for a living and want to preserve our sanity. I generally abide by this maxim, save for one major exception: Recipes. On recipe sites with robust comment sections, you’ve just got to wade in there. For me, it is mandatory. The recipe you are endeavoring to cook is, in fact, incomplete until you have read and digested the comments.
You may have noticed that all of these choices date from the growing-up years and that’s because of a phenomenon known as the “reminiscence bump”: the fact that people over 40 remember more from their adolescence and early adulthood than they do from any other part of their lives. It’s a time when our bodies are changing and we are shaping our identities and learning to express that through what we wear. It’s not always a smooth handover from being dressed by our parents to dressing ourselves, and many of us will remember a hormonal showdown over a particular item of clothing – often a miniskirt or a pair of high heels, but today just as likely a piercing or a tattoo.
You know how sometimes you think you’ve had a brilliant idea, then it bites you in the bum like an athletic but mean jack russell? Suggesting I could “live like a dog for a day to see if they’re happier” turned out to be one of those.
Spiegelhalter is one of the country’s most distinguished statisticians, but he’s also one of academia’s best communicators (he’s professor of the public understanding of risk at Cambridge). His aim in this book is to impose some intellectual order on a subject area that is rife with incomprehension, imprecision, contradiction and creative obfuscation.