Goat report, 11/15/09

Goats and kittens will help you learn how to use an apostrophe.

Better spell it out for them!

Saw the pilot for the "V" re-launch and found it somewhat laughable although it had some good points (very creepy villain and new sleeper-cell plot). The math teacher in me was very upset with one scene: an FBI agent is telling her partner about how terrorist chatter has all decreased since the aliens arrived save for one group, whose chatter has increased significantly. We get a view of her laptop screen and sure enough, most of the graphs trend downward steeply. But one graph has increased and to make sure ALL OF US IDIOTS understand this, somebody added a little caption to the graph on the laptop screen saying "SIGNIFICANT INCREASE". Check it out:

There's a lesson in the math book I teach out of that involves reading graphs to tell if there's an increase, decrease, or no change. I usually skip that as it's a joke and most of my students will tune out at its simplicity. Nice to see that TV creators think more poorly of their audience.