An example of a horribly misleading graph

Everyone knows the housing market is collapsing and everyone seems to think that their house is no longer worth anything and not selling. BBC posted this graph a while ago which shows the percentage that housing prices are changing.

Lets interpret: For the first 5-6 months of 2007, prices went up about 11% a month.

By the end of the year, housing prices were still rising by 5%, which on average, shows that over the whole second half of 2007, prices were still rising by 8%.

For the first 3 months of 2008, housing prices were (still) rising, but by not as much.

Only the last 4-5 months of the graph actually show prices falling. on an average of about 5-6%. (I shall say 5 months at 6% to be fair).

Let’s use some real numbers…

The BBC article says that the housing market has dropped 10.5% in a year. Which is technically true, but only at the most extreme case from August last year to August this year.

So, say I had a £250,000 house in 2006. In August 2007, it went up by 11%, so it is now worth £277,500. In August 2008, it has dropped 10.5%, so it is now worth £251,100, which is still more than 2006.

I’m not saying the housing market isn’t going down and that it’s all media hype. It is a considerable difference to that of a year ago, which is unfortunate for people trying to move, but they shouldn’t be put off.

What I’m saying is, LOOK AT THAT GRAPH. It gives the impression that the housing market is plummeting downwards at a frigtening speed. Which is not true, even at it’s worse case scenario, it still shows a small increase in value on property over a 2 year period. By using the “year change %”, it makes it look a lot worse that it is.

A quick doodle of what the graph really should looks like, showing increase in prices, then the fall in prices starting a couple of months ago

I own 4 domains, they all point to the same hosting space. So, each domain would load exactly the same pages. I.e, example1.com/home/ is exactly the same as example2.com/home/

I’ve searched forever to find a .htaccess script to do this, and I finally have it.

Here is the magic code (replace example1.com with yourdomain and example1/ with your directory for that domain):

RewriteEngine on
RewriteOptions MaxRedirects=1

#Website 1
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www.)?example1.com$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/example1/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /example1/$1

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www.)?example1.com$
RewriteRule ^(/)?$ example1/ [L]

The above forwards any requests for example1.com (or www.example1.com) and silently loads the directory “example1/”.

I.e, the address www.example1.com/test/ will actually load up www.example1.com/example1/test

But, the address in the address bar will not change.
For multiple domains, copy the code from the “Website 1″ comment downwards.

The Flat Earth

I was reading this article (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/7540427.stm) the other day on BBC.

I generally think that people who believe in conspiracy theories are nuts but this group of people genuinely believe that the world is a flat disc…

It is similar to other conspiracy theories because they believe that there are hundreds of people being paid to keep quiet. Why didn’t the people who started these conspiracy theories ever get offered money also? Simple, it’s not true. If the government has the resources and power to pull off these kind of conspiracy theories, then they would be able to shut up some nerds making documentaries in their basement.

And secondly (but most importantly), I’m struggling to see why anyone would go through such extreme methods to make everyone believe the earth is round. How the hell would someone benefit from the earth being round? At least other conspiracy theories have a motive (even if its imaginary), but this one seems to have absolutely no reason for the conspiracy…

I worry for our species some times… go think about something useful and stop watching so much TV.

Stay tuned