Some people who have been crunching the numbers came up with some good statistics. My personal favourite, and a small consolation for not winning a seat I didn’t expect to win, is that the Labour to Tory swing in Maidenbower was over 19% and therefore the highest in the town and one of the highest in the country. I haven’t checked just in case the maths is wrong.

I did have a little look at the old Maidenbower results though. In 2010 (which had a high turnout obviously) Peter Smith got Labour got 1289 votes for Labour, so there are at least 1289 people there who would consider voting for us. If only we knew who they were and got them out to vote this year it would have been enough to win!

Another interesting statistic was the overall vote. In the past the Tory leader has always taken great pleasure in pointing out that the total Tory vote was higher then the total Labour vote. Meaningless in local elections really, and distorted during elections by thirds depending on which 2-seat wards didn’t have an election that year. This year the total Labour vote was nearly 900 higher than the total Tory vote. Still meaningless in my opinion, but at least it is meaningless in the right direction.

These results don’t help predict which county seats are most winnable next year because the county seats are not just combinations of borough seats: some are combinations of parts of borough seats. There are a couple of pleasing direct comparisons though.

Broadfield. In the last county elections the Tories won 1367 to 963. Add together this year’s Broadfield North & South results and you get Labour ahead by 1383 to 802 so that is looking good for next year.

Tilgate and Furnace Green. Assumed to be safe by the Tories. In the last county elections they won by 1600 to 871. Add together this year’s Tilgate result and last year’s Furnace Green result (there was no election there this year) and you get Labour on 1600 and the Tories on 1518 – and remember that a lot of that is based on last year’s Furnace Green result before the coalition really fell out of favour. It could well have been worse for them if they had an election there this year, so that seat could well be winnable too.

Since the last county elections Labour have won seats back in Ifield, Northgate and Gossops Green and shrunk the gap in Three Bridges so we could have our eye on the Gossops Green + Ifield West seat and the Northgate + Three Bridges seat. At the moment Labour only have two seats on the whole of the county council so having four potential targets in one town is very encouraging. The fact that some of those seats are occupied by this blog’s least favourite Tories is just a bonus.

Best of all, it is possible the Tories were faloling into our old trap of feeling over-confident or complacent. At the very least they may find themselves having to work hard to try and protect seats they may have taken for granted before. If that means they are not able to concentrate a lot of their resources on Southgate like they seem to have done this time, maybe we will finally crack that nut as well.

There were more B-24s made during the Second World War than there are currently large passenger jets in service in the whole world today!

I think so anyway. I looked at figures for production and numbers still in passenger service for all the Boeing and Airbus jets, plus a few others like the Tristar, DC-10, MD-11, Embraer E-Jet, Ilyushin, and ignored all the small and regional aircraft.

In just over 50 years there have been a total of about 22,700 large passenger jets made of which about 15,700 are still in service as passenger jets – a few thousand short of the number of B-24s built during the war.

Of course, bombers during the war were lost a lot quicker than airliners are for obvious reasons so there were nowhere near 18,000 B-24s in service at the same time, but that was only one model.  Add in the B-17, B-19, Lancaster, Halifax, and Stirling and you have at least 51,000 US and British heavy bombers built during and just before the war.

The most-produced civil airliner is the Boeing 737: 6687 built in 44 years, and 4500 still in service.  In 6 years we build nearly as many Halifax bombers (6178) and even more Lancasters (7377).    When it comes to the American bombers, there were more B-24s built between 1940 and 1945 than all the Boeing 707, 720,717, 727, 737, 747, 757, 767 and 777 planes ever produced between 1958 and today by a considerable margin.

Wow.  We talk about our crowded skies, and living next to Gatwick we see a lot of jets but during the time of WWII there were more than twice as many big military planes built as there have been big passenger planes built in all the years since – and bear in mind that the current fleet is truly global: at any time a lot of them are criss-crossing the Atlantic, doing coast-to-coat US flights, in South America, the middle East, Australia, etc.  During the war most of the big planes were probably in Europe or Japan.  OK, so the big bombers weren’t as big as some of our big airliners, but I find those numbers hard to imagine.

It really makes you think about the scale of manufacturing at that time – at the peak there were more B-24s produced in three months than there have ever been Boeing 747s!  We think the 747 is quite a common plane, but there are a few less than 800 in service right now.   On the first night of the Dresden raids there were two waves of Lancasters. 770 of them in total!

So in one night a single city was bombed by nearly as many Lancasters as there are currently 747s in service in the whole world.   I am finding it hard to get my head round that.  On the same night, a further 360 Lancasters and Halifaxes bombed Bohlen so we had 1110 heavy bombers over Germany in one night.  That is what you call crowded skies. Try to imagine every 747 in the world in one place and you more or less have Feb 13th 1945. Not our finest hour in retrospect.

The data is available as a Google Doc here and you can download it all to your own computer to pull it about in Excel.¹One reason I was pleased to see it was that it gave me a chance to play with Excel 2010.  I installed it the other day, having bought Office 2010 Professional for the bargain price of £8.95 but haven’t had a reason to use it before now.

The reason for my surprise was to do with just how much informatin about the party is contained in it.  The spreadsheet effectively gives the membership of every constituency party in the country!   I know the party is gloating a bit about how many extra members have joined this week, but I’m not sure that, say, Banff & Buchan CLP really want it know that their membership is lower than that of Broadfield.

According to the figures, there were 178 ballot papers sent out in Horsham.  It might not sound like a lot, but I reckon that when I was selected there were fewer than 150 members so a 20% increase is good to see, especially in a constituency where there has never been an MP or councillor.

A few thougths about the voting and the results, illustrated by charts, because I wanted to play with charts.

There has been a lot of talk about ‘the unions’ winnng it for Ed Miliband.  This gives the impression (deliberately? or just conveniently for those in the media with their own agenda?) that there is still the old-fashioned block votes.  Of course, as anyone involved should know, the union section of the electoral college is based on one-member-one-vote, which does not blindly follow whateverthe union leaders say anyway.  I’m pretty loyal to my union, but still voted for Ed Balls despite their endorsement of Ed M.

The weird thing is that if there is anything remotely resembling a block vote now it is in the MP/MEP section, where each individual’s vote carries as much weight as hundreds or thousands in the other sections.

Anyway. Time for a chart:

Actual votes in the leadership ballot

This shows the actual votes cast, without any sort of weighting for the three sections.  It shows the first preference votes, where Ed M had something like 11,000 more votes than David M in the first round.   Another way of looking at it is in percentage terms:

First preference votes as a percentage

The blue columns show the results of the first chart with the percentage of actual votes cast.  The red columns show how the percentage actually used in the ballot.  The difference is mainly because the tiny green slivers in the first chart, which represent the MP/MEP votes actually count as much as the other sections.

None of this proves anything really, just that making charts in Excel is easy and fun.  It does show that whichever way you look at it, the race between David and Ed was close.  Neither candidate was particularly unpopular in any section of the electoral college.  The spreadsheet lists the individual preferences of all the MPs and MEPs so you can see how a lot of them who had Ed 1st had David 2nd and vice versa.

I do think there is something wrong with the way the weighting is done though, and not just because the MP section is worth a third of the vote even with only 266 members.  That would not be so bad if it was a secret ballot on their part.  I think that must skew the results a lot.  Maybe I am being unnecessarily cynical, but if everyone knows how you voted and you might want favours from the new leader, wouldn’t it be tempting to vote for who you think will win rather than who you want to win?  (Granted, the two might be the same.)

I will leave it to somebody with more time on their hands than me to work out whether all those who are likely contenders for shadow cabinet positions just happened to vote for the person who looked most likely to win for the last 4 months…

I think that is my main conclusion: the MP section should certainly be a secret ballot and should probably have a reduced significance.  Yes, I know all the arguments about how the MPs will know the candidates better and have a more informed opinion, and how they have to work with the leader, but is does that outweigh the principle of democracy?

The other stunning statistic from the mass of numbers is the turnout in the affiliates section: just 9%.   The highest turnout from a union was ASLEF with 25%, but the larger unions all had a turnout of around 10%.

My own union had nearly 950,000 voted not used.  Back when there were block votes those votes would have all been cast on our behalf, and not necessarily the way we would have wanted them cast, which was recognised as unfair.

There is a bit of irony in all this.   A union could have ballotted its members and then thrown its whole block behind whoever the most members wanted, even though in a 5-horse race like this it could have been nothing like a majority.  Unfair? Certainly, but it is just like first past the post when you think about it, and I suspect that those who objected most loudly about it are those who are the most enthusiastic supporters of FPTP in other areas like general elections.

What occurred to me was that the unions didn’t really win it for Ed, but if they had really put their minds to it all those members could have won it for whoever they wanted to.  What is all the 91% or non-voters in that section had all voted for Diane Abbott?

I’m not saying they should have done, but it is a bit like the country as a whole – there is a huge mass of people who have the power to decide who is in charge and they never take advantage of their numbers.

1. or Open Office of course

The most listened to artists are:

1. Dr. Feelgood
2. Primus
3. Gang of Four
4. Kraftwerk
5. Genesis
6. Manu Chao
7. Depeche Mode
8. Mano Negra
9. Les Negresses Vertes
10. Pet Shop Boys

Followed by Santana, Talking Heads, Angelique Kidjo, Erasure, Yes, David Bowie, Thin Lizzy Stevie Wonder, Rachid Taha and Fleetwood Mac.  It makes some sort of sense – a mixture of artists I like a lot and artists with huge catalogues.

Going a bit further down the list is where it all gets less predictable.  I have used Spotify in a few main ways:  to discover music that is new or new to me, to fill in gaps in my knowledge, and to listen to things that I know well, having got them on CD or vinyl.   That has led me down paths I had not expected, like listening to early Bee Gees (19 plays) and Chicago (32 plays).    Some artists that I had never heard of before Spotify have had a lot of plays, the most being Tanzwut (69 plays) and Premiata Forneria Marconi (58 plays).

Over such a short timeframe the list is obviously weighted a bit towards people who have released new albums in the last year or two.  Although I like Pet Shop Boys I am sure their high position is largely down to them having released two albums since I started Spotifying.  I still can’t understand how I have listed to Simian Mobile Disco more than Black Sabbath though.  I’m sure I like Black sabbath a lot more.

As far as top tracks go, I think that is a bit of a lottery.  All very good tracks but certainly wouldn’t be my desert island discs – although I can’t quibble with the number one most-played track which surely is the best single track ever made.

1. Green Onions / Booker T and the MGs
2. Down at the Doctors / Dr. Feelgood
3. Pendant que les Champs Brulent / Niagara
4. Don’t Believe a Word / Thin Lizzy
5. Sir Duke / Stevie Wonder
6. Clandestino / Manu Chao
7. Roxette / Dr. Feelgood
8. Thou Shalt Always Kill / Dan le Sac v. Scroobius Pip
9. Epic / Faith No More
10. Hong Kong Garden / Siouxsie & the Banshees
11. Not Great Men / Gang of Four
12. Excremento / Tanzwut

Actually, come to think of it, I can’t argue with No. 2 either – one of the most beautiful songs I know and one that I played a lot on CD/walkman back in the pre-Spotify days.   No way is Sir Duke my favourite Stevie Wonder tune though, nor is Not Great Men my favourite Gang of Four track.

Still trying to work out how or why I managed to listen to Head to Toe by Lisa Lisa & Cult Jam a whole eight times though…

Perhaps the biggest surprise is seeing how many different artists I listened to – 3,715.    That must be a result of clicking through to a lot of the ‘related artists’ to see if they appeal to me, where the answer is often ‘not a lot’.

I’ll have to return to this after another 20,000 tracks to see what it looks like then.

With all that, there are still protests and campaigns to have more hospitals and more services.  Meanwhile in America, using the example of Texas from the BBC story, about a third of the population have no medical cover and a fifth of children have no medical cover.  If they get sick or injured there is no guarantee of treatment and yet they seem to have even bigger protests because Obama wants them to have the sort of access to medical facilities that we have.   A rational person would expect them to be dying of envy for us, but instead they are fighting to remain deprived.

So here in the UK we find it hard to understand why Americans protest about the prospect of having what we protest about not having enough of – with the exception of the Dan Hannan tendency who would prefer us to move to the US model – but the BBC story, drawing from some recent books and theories tries to explain why that could be.

It seems to boil down to a basic human trait of paying more attention to narrative than to facts.

How I understand it is that, collectively, we act like contrary teenagers.  If our parents tell us we should do something because it is better for us we are against it because it our parents telling us.   We have our own minds, how dare they have the arrogance to decide what would be better for us just because they know more?  I think we have all been there, and probably found ourselves ten years later wishing we had listened, and ten years after that getting the same reactions from our own teenagers.

The worrying aspect of the story is that you can see it happening here to an extent.  The recent fuss about ‘dodgy statistics’ on crime is a great example. On one side of the fence we have statistics gathered to show the drops in different types of crime.  On the other hand we have the Tories with a catchphrase of ‘broken Britain’, backed up by anecdotal evidence and a distortion of the statistics.  Guess what?  Lots of people hear the ‘broken Britain’ catchphrase but don’t want to hear all the real statistics, whether that is because of a natural mistrust of official statistics, or anything official, or our famously reduced collective attention span or some other reason entirely doesn’t really matter: the bottom line is that the broken record wins over any reasoned argument.

Ironically, it is hardly necessary for the Tories to keep misrepresenting the crime figures, except as a hook to get the broken Britain message back on the front page of the Daily Mail – nobody is paying any more attention to their mendacious interpretation of the statistics than to the proper interpretation.

The reason why this is depressing is that, even knowing why Tories get their arguments across better (style having greater impact than substance, complicit media, etc.) does not help.  There are certain character traits ingrained in the left that will not be overcome:

For Mr Westen, stories always trump statistics, which means the politician with the best stories is going to win: “One of the fallacies that politicians often have on the Left is that things are obvious, when they are not obvious.”

So true.  But I can’t see us abandoning our facts for rhetoric. It just feels wrong, despite the Labour Party’s reputation as being masters of spin (if only that was true).  I’m sure we will continue to counter emotive, baseless, but effective soundbites with reasoned argument that just turns the voters off, because at the end of the day we on the left are no more able to control our instincts than the poor Americans without healthcare who are voting to stay that way.

He [Thomas Frank] believes that the voters’ preference for emotional engagement over reasonable argument has allowed the Republican Party to blind them to their own real interests.

That is the challenge right there.  How do we find a way to compete on emotional engagement without abandoning our quaint, self-destructive preference for reasonable argument?

Sorry about that rare diversion into dull theory. I’m sure I’ll be back to trivia again soon enough.

1. Andy
2. Steve
3. Paul
4. John
5. Dave
6. Christopher
7. and so on…

Now I am too lazy to do any research or anything for something as trivial as this, but I would not be surprised to find that Andy, Steve, Paul, John, Dave, and Christopher are amongst the most common names in the workforce so the fact that they call in sick the most (from the sample used) is not really something especially noteworthy.

Wouldn’t you need to find the percentage of people in the workforce with a specific name and then find the percentage of sick calls made by people with that same name to be able to draw any sort of conclusion?    You can’t just ignore the general population and draw conclusions.  It would be like seeing how many dentists died last year that were men and how many that were women and then concluding that male dentists are more likely to die because there were more of them, without taking into account the gender imbalance in the dental profession.

This is just a piece of fluff, regurgitating a press release from Viva entertainment channel, based on a survey, as so much news now seems to be, and nothing to worry about¹ but it is a worry that the same journalists who produce this sort of thing might also be producing headlines about more significant matters, relying on skewed data from special interest groups without giving it, or even being equipped to give it, any sort of validation or basic sanity check.

And this is from one of the serious newspapers. Imagine how much worse it is in the Daily Mail!

For a near-perfect example of the same fallacy being applied to more serious matters I can recommend Don Paskini’s thorough fisking of an ipsos-mori report on local authorities.  To summarise it enormously, a report found that although Labour only control about 10% of councils, various lists of the top-performing councils had over 20% of them (up to 35% for some lists) being Labour.  The summary of the report, which is what a lazy and/or innumerate journalist would print as a headline, was that Tory-controlled councils are better because there are more of them in the top ten, or twenty or whatever.

That is a bit like saying that the British are better long-distance runners than Kenyans because there are more British runners in the London Marathon.

This week’s book recommendation: A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper by John Allen Paulos

1. Unless you are an Andrew who has not had a day off sick in three years who is being unfairly maligned here

While I would love to see someone from Horsham win again this week (although not as much as I would like to see someone from my house win it) it isn’t very likely.  The winning ticket is not more likely to be bought at Waitrose just because one of last week’s winning tickets was bought there.

On the other hand – it is no less likely either.  That is the point of random:it can be very counter-intuitive.  Everything about the draw makes the results of any week totally independent of previous weeks, in the same way that if you toss a coin 10 times the chances of getting heads on the 10th go are 50% even if the previous 9 were all tails, or if they were all tails.

You can’t just point at a statistic that says no shop has ever sold a winning ticket two weeks in a row and say that the shop selling last week’s winner is guaranteed to not do the same this week.  Whatever numbers you choose, or are chosen for you on a lucky dip, and wherever you buy a ticket, you have the same millions-to-one odds against winning.  That’s what random means.  You can’t study the form like with horse racing. In fact the only way to improve your own personal odds is to buy more tickets, but each one you buy will have an equal (and tiny) chance of winning.

But that is no reason not to have a go, as long as you really don’t expect to win.  Some recent research showed that many punters get far more than a pound’s worth of enjoyment out of their losing tickets.  Apparently the day dreaming about what one would do with the jackpot has some sort of positive effect.

There is one little superstition regarding lottery tickets that I will own up to myself though.  Somebody did the maths and worked out that if you buy a ticket earlier in the week you are statistically more likely to die in a road accident than to win, so you won’t catch me buying a ticket days in advance.

There is growing evidence that acupuncture can greatly increase a woman’s chance of becoming pregnant

I am more than a bit sceptical about claims for medical treatment based on theories like “the body’s major organs use energy pathways to communicate and that malaise occurs whenever communication breaks down” but I have a bit more tolerance for the assertion that ” the mind can have the most profound influence on the body’s health”.

In the late Stephen Jay Gould’s now-legendary essay The median is not the message,¹ he mentions the possibility of mental attitude affecting physical health – “Attitude clearly matters in fighting cancer” he says, and then goes on to say:

I asked Sir Peter Medawar, my personal scientific guru and a Nobelist in immunology, what the best prescription for success against cancer might be. “A sanguine personality,” he replied.

If mental attitude can have such an effect in one area of medicine, then why not another?  In other words, this acupuncture may well have the claimed effect but only indirectly, by bringing about the mental state which has the real effect.  Other ‘treatments’ could do the same if the subjects believed enough. It may well be a placebo effect, but if you get the result you want why quibble?

At the end of the day though, the claim that all it takes to overcome fertility problems is a little prick has got to be newsworthy on its own.

The real surprise that Kerron didn’t jump on a story which is just crying out for a Carry On-style comment – he is never normally reticent to let loose with a double entendre: he must have missed this story. 

1. no apologies for plugging this article yet again

The first statistics were from a dubious survey by an Internet job site which got picked up by the Argus and said, amongst other things, that salaries in Crawley had dropped by £6,000 a year to be about £8,000 below average earnings for the country.  The new set of statistics say, according to the Crawley News of Dec 26th, that Crawley is “the fifth-highest earning spot in the UK”.

They can’t both be right, but I suspect they are actually both wrong.  The first survey is more wrong, being based on a small sample of jobs advertised and implying that they are representative of all jobs.

The new one looks a lot more believable, based on better data, and done on computers instead of the back of a fag packet, but its still advisable to look behind the headlines before getting too excited about it.

As we saw from a brief examination of ONS data, residents of Horsham earn, on average, significantly more than residents of Crawley, but they are not in the top four above Crawley because they are not in the list at all.  The Centre for Cities study only covers 59 ‘cities’, and its not clear exactly what criteria are used to define what gets in there.

The only places in Sussex which are included are Brighton, Worthing, Crawley and Hastings.  Chichester is not there despite being officially a city.  The real story should not be what Crawley’s positions in the various league tables are but the fact that it is included at all!

The list of places which are deemed less worthy to have in the study includes Stevenage, Basildon, Guildford,  Bracknell, Basingstoke, Exeter, Chesterfield, Dover, Winchester, Ashford, Salisbury, Sevenoaks, Maidstone, Lancaster, Chelmsford, Colchester, Gateshead and Harrogate.

So when the Crawley News says that Crawley is the “fifth richest in the UK” it should really say that earnings are fifth in a list of 59 places.  The nature of averages being what they are, there will be plenty of much smaller places with much higher earnings – like every town in Surrey probably or any villages with a population of a thousand containing a few stockbrokers or hedge fund managers and 900+ people on the poverty line.

But it can’t said often enough – don’t trust statistics and don’t let averages obscure real need.   The survey says that Crawley ranks high not only in income but also in equality and employment levels.  I’m sure it does, but if you happen to be one of those on a minimum-wage income or unable to find work, being told that everyone else in your area is doing very well thank you is not a great consolation.

Lets put it this way, if I was in a room with Roman Abramovich and a local homeless person I would not expect them (the homeless person) to be overjoyed by knowing that the average net worth of our little group was well into the billions of pounds.

Without even knowing what the right figures are you can tell that the ones used in the story are wrong.   The clue is that it all comes from a self-promoting survey done by an Internet jobsearch site, and is based on a survey of jobs advertised rather than all jobs.

It also quotes the national average salary as being £31,969, which seems a little on the high side.  The latest ONS annual survey of hours and earnings (ASHE) for 2007 found a national median wage of £23,764  – 2.9% higher than 2006 and a full eight grand lower than what is quoted in the Argus.

That is a median weekly wage of £457 for full-time employees.  And of course, that is not the whole picture as there are many part-time employees now.

Looking at the tables for gross earnings by place of residence we see that the average earnings are:

• Brighton & Hove
  £21,795 (median – up 1.9%)
  £25,235 (mean – up 3.2%)
• Crawley
  £21,381 (median – down 4.8%)
  £25,511 (mean – no change)
• Horsham
  £25,431 (median – up 5.2%)
  £33,428 (mean – up 6.4%

But those figures are for people living in those places.  They may well be commuting elsewhere to earn those salaries.  The equivalent table for gross earnings by place of work show:

• Brighton & Hove
  £19,391 (median – up 4.6%)
  £22,311 (mean – up 4.4%)
• Crawley
  £22,378 (median – down 1.3%)
  £28421 (mean – up 1%)
• Horsham
  £19,734 (median – down 1.4%)
  £24,107 (mean – up 2.5%)

So what does all that mean?
For a start, whichever way you cut it the worthless survey showing Brighton’s average as £28,749 is actually way above the real average for Brighton & Hove.   All it proves is that the survey is based on a sample higher than the real world.

The reason for the survey’s average being higher than the real one could be down to the fact that lower-paid jobs are not advertised as much.  The reason for the survey’s average being lower than last year could be down to anything, but its not down to Brighton’s salaries going down.

There are something like 78,000 jobs in Brighton, trying to extrapolate from a sample of 3,000 which were advertised is pointless.  Many of the lower-paid jobs are not advertised as such.   Supermarkets and fast-food places are recruiting all the time and will take on thousands of new employees each year either without advertising or with a single blanket advert.  Often the advertising is an in-house poster.  So all those new jobs will have escaped the survey.

At the other end of the scale, many higher-paid jobs in the private sector are filled by headhunting or by having agencies looking through their  files of suitable candidates and may never get advertised normally. And, of course, in larger companies jobs are advertised internally and filled without ever reaching the outside world.

And many jobs will not have been advertised because they never fell vacant at all.

I just can’t understand why Tony Mernagh, executive director of Brighton and Hove Economic Partnership, was willing to be quoted so extensively without making any comment about the statistical flaws in the survey method.  When he says that salaries in the city have been below the national average for some time he is right, but not to the tune of £3,000.

The tables of salaries on the ONS website are fascinating though.  Just the few numbers quoted above can lead to all sorts of observations like:

• People who live in Horsham and Brighton and Hove earn more than people who work there.
  Presumably this is the effect of residents who commute to London and elsewhere for work.  The differential is a lot larger for Horsham.
• People who live in Crawley earn less than people who work there.
  An interesting conclusion.  Crawley contains a lot of commuters too, but also has a lot of inward commuting.  One conclusion could be that the higher-paid jobs in Crawley are filled by inward commuters
• Earnings for Horsham residents are high and going up while the salaries for jobs in Horsham are low and falling.
  Again, this will be related to commuting, but is an improvement in the overall affluence masking a decline in the local employment market?

Its hard to know where to stop though. The figures quoted above were from tables for all jobs.  The tables for full-time jobs shows much higher salaries and different relationships between just the three areas.  I’m sure you could dip in and select statistics which prove whatever you want to.  The question is, what were allthetopbananas.com trying to prove, or were they just after getting their name publicised a bit?

If that is all they were after it worked a treat because I had never heard of them before.