Mash-Up

Well, hello, blog - long time no see.

Just thought I'd share this this fun track - this year's United States of Pop, a mash-up of the top 25 billboard hits of the year, created annually by DJ Earworm. I don't think this year's is quite as good as years previous, but it's damn catchy, and the video is great. Enjoy.

Sporcle is a lot cooler than it sounds.

My new favorite game website: Sporcle. The site features tons of quizzes along the lines of "Name all the countries in Europe" or "Name the book based on the antagonist." Be very careful about when you start playing, though, because it quickly sucks you in for long periods of time.

(We have really fallen off the blogging. This post is just under a month after the last post. I would love it if we could all start this up again.)

Awful Tattoos.

These are two of the worst tattoos I have ever seen, and they are both on the same person: White-supremacist MMA fighter Melvin Costa. [Amazingly there exists no Wikipedia page for this guy, so I just stuck in a link to a random blog post about his tattoos.]

The First Thanksgiving.

A hilarious reenactment of the first Thanksgiving that includes references to small-pox-covered blankets, the Pequot War, and King Philip's War:

A Talented Actress

Taking advantage of coincidence, porn star Lisa Ann has played both Sarah Palin and Tina Fey in pornographic parodies of, respectively, Sarah Palin's life and 30 Rock. Check out the hilarious trailers below .

Who's Nailin' Paylin? (This trailer is completely safe for work.)


30 Rock: A XXX Parody (This trailer is less safe for work due to a few women in skimpy clothing and some swearing.)

Who knew they could get weirder?

The Decemberists are turning The Hazards of Love, their most recent album, into a super-trippy animated film. This should be interesting:

The Wire

A video of someone's choices for the 100 greatest quotes from The Wire. Oh how I miss some of these characters.

"American Soldier"

Ian Fisher, a high-school senior who decided to enter the army after graduation, allowed a reporter and a photographer from The Denver Post to follow him from the time of his enlistment through his return from deployment. The multimedia series, which includes an in-depth article, photographs, and videos, can be found here. A nice selection of the photographs can be found here.

[NSFW!] Problems with the plumbing.

Two vagina-related points today:

1. Humans have apparently long had a fear of vaginas with teeth (vagina dentata). Someone recently decided to take that fear to the next level by making a horror movie entitled Teeth about a girl who regularly uses her vagina-teeth to bite off body parts.
2. The more horrifying story: "My vagina fell out." Apparently female genital prolapse "is characterized by a portion of the vaginal canal protruding from the opening of the vagina." In other words, an innie becomes an outie, as seen below. I would not wish this on anyone.
   

more cool nature photos...

Sperm Whale Eats a Giant Squid! (click through for more photos)

Insider trading.

Carly and I are currently dog-sitting in midtown for my aunt and uncle. They live next door to Raj Rajaratnam, a hedge-fund manager (he founded Galleon Group) and number 236 on Forbes' list of the richest Americans. Raj is also notable for his fantasy football league, which has a $100,000 entry fee and awards a total of $1,000,000 to the top three teams each year.

Early this morning his apartment was raided by the FBI and Raj was hauled in on insider trading charges alleging he earned over $20,000,000 illegally. Apparently the FBI is good at quiet raids, because Carly and I slept through the 6am arrest and apartment search.

**Correction: Raj was arrested Friday morning, not this morning. Carly and I still heard nothing.

1M Frames Per Second

The video is very long, and I recommend you skip to random points throughout it, as the type of bullet and the material being impacted are changed. The end features cutouts of animals being hit with barrages of bullets.

Pretty charts. Ugly news.

A few pretty and devastating graphs.

First: Percentage job loss from peak during post WWII recessions (Calculated Risk):

Second: year-over-year delinquency rate changes, where red indicates an increased rate and green indicates a decreased rate (New York Federal Reserve):

Third: the current delinquency rate as of the second quarter of 2009, where a darker color indicates a higher rate (ibid):

Obama wins Nobel Peace Price

All I am saying is this: do we really live in a world where the Arizona State commencement speech committee has more stringent standards than then Norwegian Nobel Committee?

Google Wave

Not nearly as cool as they think it is, but still one of those "finally!" moments for the internet.

http://wave.google.com/help/wave/closed.html

Owned!

Chicago eliminated in first round of Olympic 2016 voting. Obama's reputation as being unable to get things done will be solidified by the time you go to bed tonight. Happy 2010 elections! (Oh, and good luck on Iran!)

Mapping Sin

Useless but entertaining "sin map" from Wired:

"We're gluttons for infographics, and a team at Kansas State just served up a feast: maps of sin created by plotting per-capita stats on things like theft (envy) and STDs (lust). Christian clergy, likely noting the Bible Belt's status as Wrath Central, question the "science." Valid point—or maybe it's just the pride talking."

Internet Meme Timeline

The title is self-explanatory. Be careful: this site can waste all of your time if you let it.

"How to Write Well"

[Note: everything in the post except for this note, including the title, is taken directly from Greg Mankiw's Blog. Rather than linking to it I figure it is easier for me to just copy the text and cite the source. For those of you outside of the world of economics, Mankiw (sometimes referred to as variations on N. Gregory Mankiw) is a famous economist who headed the Council of Economic Advisers under Bush 43 from 2003 to 2005 and teaches at Harvard. The original post can be found here.]

When I was CEA chair, I sent the following guidelines to my staff as they started drafting the Economic Report of the President. A friend recently emailed me a copy, and I thought I would share them with blog readers. They are good rules of thumb, especially for economists writing for a general audience.

ERP Writing Guidelines

• Stay focused. Remember the take-away points you want the reader to remember. If some material is irrelevant to these points, it should probably be cut.
• Keep sentences short. Short words are better than long words. Monosyllabic words are best.
• The passive voice is avoided by good writers.
• Positive statements are more persuasive than normative statements.
• Use adverbs sparingly.
• Avoid jargon. Any word you don’t read regularly in a newspaper is suspect.
• Never make up your own acronyms.
• Avoid unnecessary words. For instance, in most cases, change
  o “in order to” to “to”
  o “whether or not” to “whether”
  o “is equal to” to “equals”
• Avoid “of course, “clearly,” and “obviously.” Clearly, if something is obvious, that fact will, of course, be obvious to the reader.
• The word “very” is very often very unnecessary.
• Keep your writing self-contained. Frequent references to other works, or to things that have come before or will come later, can be distracting.
• Put details and digressions in footnotes. Then delete the footnotes.
• To mere mortals, a graphic metaphor, a compelling anecdote, or a striking fact is worth a thousand articles in Econometrica.
• Keep your writing personal. Remind readers how economics affects their lives.
• Remember two basic rules of economic usage:
  o “Long run” (without a hyphen) is a noun. “Long-run” (with a hyphen) is an adjective. Same with “short(-)run.”
  o “Saving” (without a terminal s) is a flow. “Savings” (with a terminal s) is a stock.
• Buy a copy of Strunk and White’s Elements of Style. Also, William Zinsser’s On Writing Well. Read them—again and again and again.
• Keep it simple. Think of your reader as being your college roommate who majored in English literature. Assume he has never taken an economics course, or if he did, he used the wrong textbook.

Speech! Speech!

Assuming you saw the President's address to Congress last night. Apparently The Daily Beast has highlights from it. I thought it was a bit professorial, and painfully fast-and-loose with the facts, but overall a pretty decent speech (with quite a finish).

Ultimately, I don't see this changing much. And I believe Joe "You Lie" Wilson, for all his lack of manners, probably did an excellent job of undermining Obama. If you think about the subset of people who came into the speech against Obama's reform efforts but were warming up to it as the speech went on, that sort of outburst is exactly the sort of thing to snap one out of the increasing level of trust building between the speaker and viewer throughout the speech, reminding viewers that there was a reason they opposed this guy before, and his "sweet-talk" shouldn't necessarily win them over now.

As a side note, it is sort of terrifying how divisive this issue has been, given that there's so much everyone agrees on (like pre-ex's). I mean, even the school speech was a bitter partisan issue. And Drudge Report is reporting higher readership than at the same time a year ago, which is astounding given that a year ago we were in the height of the election season (and about two weeks into the Sarah Palin Era).

news bloopers

I enjoy bloopers of all sort, because I like watching others embarrassed, so these news bloopers from HuffPo are enjoyable (someone needs to teach me, again, how to embed video) . A few are dumb, but the "Terrifying Criminal Mastermind" is pretty hilarious. Also, as per usual, I love Anderson Cooper.

Making the USA look great.

As you may or may not know, Iceland is one of few places in the world that has made the USA look financially responsible and risk-averse during the turmoil of the last few years. Basically, Iceland privatized and monetized its fishing industry in the 1970s, and the new-found free time allowed the country to turn into "[...] a machine for turning cod into Ph.D.’s." Unfortunately, this led many (extremely overconfident) Icelandic men to jump into finance with no training or experience; hilarity ensued, if hilarity can be equated to financial and economic ruin.

I recommend reading this (admittedly lengthy) article by Michael Lewis, written for the April 2009 issue of Vanity Fair: "Wall Street on the Tundra." Aside from describing the logic behind the rise and fall of Icelandic financiers and banks, this article supplies what I always desire in travel writing: a picture not only of the beautiful scenery and buildings of a country, but also of the personalities and idiosyncrasies of the population.

Send rescue!

Below is a video that includes the 911 call made by a police officer who confiscated some marijuana and baked brownies with his wife. After eating the brownies, the cop calls 911 because he and his wife think they have overdosed and are dead ("Time is moving really really really really slowly"). Highly entertaining, though it makes me question how well police are educated about the illegal substances from which they supposedly 'protect' the general public.

"Who Gains from President Obama's Stimulus Package...And How Much?"

I recommend everyone at least read this summary of a recent publication by two economists at The Levy Economics Institute of Bard College (summary taken from this website):

"In this Special Report, Levy scholars Ajit Zacharias, Thomas Masterson, and Kijong Kim provide a preliminary assessment of the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), a package of transfers and tax cuts that is expected to provide relief to low-income and vulnerable households especially hurt by the economic crisis, while at the same time supporting aggregate demand. By the administration’s estimate, ARRA will create or save approximately three and a half million jobs by the end of 2010; while the ameliorating impact of the stimulus plan on the employment situation is surely welcome, say the authors, the government could have achieved far more at the same cost by skewing the stimulus package toward outlays rather than tax cuts. Their analysis points toward the necessity for a comprehensive employment strategy that goes well beyond ARRA. The need for public provisioning of various sorts—ranging from early childhood education centers to public health facilities to the “greening” of public transportation—coupled with the severe underutilization of labor, naturally suggests an expanded role for public employment as a desirable ingredient in any alternative strategy."

If you are interested in reading the complete article (only four-and-a-half pages), it can be directly downloaded here.

The world is ending!

The world seems to be going completely crazy, as evidenced by the following:

Reason 1: GMail is experiencing a complete outage, including POP and IMAP servers. Fucking weak.

Reason 2: Alberto Gonzales agrees with the investigation into abuse of prisoners by US personnel.

Reason 3: I was accepted into The New School's MS in Economics program.

Water slide.

This is a video Katie emailed to some people. I just uploaded it to YouTube and am posting the link. Enjoy.

Photoshop, circa 1902

The first photo was created in 1902 out of 3 others, below.






This comes from a cool article about early photo fakery.

"The Next Breadbasket?"

... "How Africa could save the world - and itself," from The Atlantic. The article is really short and interesting, and I like this graph a lot, but I wonder about some of the things not elaborated on - why is Germany so awesome at growing wheat, for example?

The more things change...

I think all of you will be glad to know that The South is still The South. Yesterday in Marion, Alabama two families escalated their years-old feud into "'[...] a full-scale riot [...]'" involving up to 150 people (though other reports put this number closer to 300) and leading to eight arrests and two hospitalizations. The major source of the feud is unknown, but the the day of the riot two members of the involved families were arrested at the local high school for fighting. After these arrests, family members followed the police to city hall, where the riot erupted. According to a police sergeant, people were "'throwing jack irons, throwing tire irons, anything they could get their hands on.'" Maybe the funniest line of the AP blurb: " The town's police chief was hit in the head with a crowbar but was OK."

The Grangerfords and Shepherdsons would be proud, though none were killed in Marion.

Apple versus Microsoft.

I can't sleep, so naturally I am splitting time between television and videos on the Internet. I laughed out loud quite a few times watching this ad for a new smartphone that "runs Windows Vista and connects to the Internet through AOL!":


In the interest of a small amount of fairness:

Japan.

I just can't seem to wrap my head around the myriad facets of Japanese culture, from the vestiges of the Samurai Bushido to Ganguro to 2-D relationsips. Further confusing my understanding of Japan are commercials featuring celebrities from the United States. In the hopes that someone can help me understand how the many distinct subcultures of Japan create the outward appearance of a (somewhat-cohesive, although significantly caste-like) single culture, enjoy these hilarious commercials from Nic Cage and The Governator:

Improved technology.

A new method of storing bicycles (I am not sure this will ever become widespread because of: 1. Complications related to the use of underground space in large cities; and, 2. The negative environmental impact associated with the use of the motors in the parking unit, which offsets at least part of the benefits of riding a bicycle.):


Improved delivery of ketchup and mustard:

Whackjob Roundup.

Maureen Dowd wrote a hilarious article this week entitled "Sarah's Ghoulish Carousel" about Sarah Palin's recent fear-mongering and attempts to keep her face in the national spotlight. The article includes hilarious lines like: "Consistency was long ago sent to a death panel in Palin world."

Michele Bachmann has revealed that she will only run for president "If I felt that's what the Lord was calling me to do [...]." Apparently Bachmann only decided to run for Congress because god "called" her to say that she should. After she was told by god to run she prayed and fasted for three days to confirm that she had correctly heard god's will. Jesus Christ that is crazy (note the lack of direct address--I refuse to talk to Jesus, even if he did manage to get Bachmann into office).

Feel free to add other deserving whackjob news to this thread.

Let's bring the blog back, people. I miss reading the posts here.

Astronauts and Jon Stewart

...because they are the best people, two unrelated articles:

Why Neoconservative Pundits Love The Daily Show

Scientist Tackles Ethical Questions of Space Travel

More articles.

1. "In Battle, Hunches Prove to Be Valuable" - This NYT article attempts to explain why, both physiologically and psychologically, some soldiers in war zones are significantly better than most at detecting dangerous situations (e.g. soldiers who are known for their ability to identify IEDs before detonation).

2. "In Study, Texting Lifts Crash Risk by Large Margin" - This NYT article discusses a study of truck drivers (based on eighteen months of taped observation) that shows that texting while driving increases the risk of a crash by up to twenty three times. The authors claim the pattern extends to non-commercial drivers as well. The research is currently undergoing peer review.

3. "Should Thursday be the New Friday? The Environmental and Economic Pluses of the 4-Day Workweek" - Scientific American discusses the potential benefits of four-day workweeks (e.g. four days of ten hours each instead of five days of eight hours each), citing Utah as an example of the savings that can be had: "Local governments in particular have had their eyes on Utah over the last year; the state redefined the workday for more than 17,000 of its employees last August. For those workplaces, there's no longer a need to turn on the lights, elevators or computers on Fridays—nor do janitors need to clean vacant buildings. Electric bills have dropped even further during the summer, thanks to less air-conditioning: Friday's midday hours have been replaced by cooler mornings and evenings on Monday through Thursday. As of May, the state had saved $1.8 million."

On a lighter note

LOST season 6 promos!!!

Not spoilers, just little teases to keep you guessing...


Oceanic ("30 years" (since 1979, so we know it's current) "with perfect safety record"??)

Hurley ("nothing but good luck"?? and check out how the people behind him look like, but aren't, Locke, Walt, and Michael)

Kate (DIDN'T kill her stepfather??)

And biggest "holy shit" of all: the official ABC teaser


ALSO: a promo poster featuring ALL the characters, dead and alive...probably just an advertising ploy, but what if this means the bomb really did "hit the reset button?!?






Thank you, Comic-Con.

Another weird one

Free plane tickets?!

Two Very Different Articles

Two articles I thought were worth sharing:

2-D Love

Casualties of War in Iraq - it's very long but absolutely worth finishing.

I guess I'm not stupid...

...at least that's what Dr. Jon LaPook, who works for CBS and has an awesome name, tells me: "No, you're not stupid if you're confused about health care reform."

His piece in HuffPo today is about how politicians, insurers, pharmaceutical companies, etc., have intentionally made this issue impossible for most people to get a handle on. And he lays the four main goals of the legislation:

Coverage expansion and subsidies. This is where most of the estimated trillion dollar price tag over ten years would go -- to expanding Medicaid for uninsured and lower income people and to help people who can't afford it pay on a sliding scale for insurance through new health insurance exchanges.

Insurance market reforms. This is about fair play in the insurance industry. Advocates want to eliminate practices such as refusing to cover people with pre-existing conditions and jacking up premiums if they're sick. The most controversial proposal is the
establishment of a "public option" -- a government insurance plan that would compete against private ones.

Delivery and payment reforms. This is about delivering more effective care at a lower cost. About 20 percent of the 2.5 trillion dollar annual health care price tag does not contribute to better health.

Prevention. This has been long overlooked in America. Spend a few dollars on foot care for a diabetic and you may prevent a foot amputation and thousands of dollars in expenses.

I know embarassingly little about the health care system, so I'm curious as to what you guys think about this. Clearly, the reforms mentioned above are needed, but does the current legislation go about it in the right way? Is it an efficiant use of a trillion dollars? Etc. Thanks!

Governor Sanford *should* resign

Generally speaking, I wouldn't say infidelity necessitates an elected official's resignation (unless they support DOMA or something like that), but the AP reports that the governor spent nearly $40,000 on air travel for five flights to Brazil, sitting in first/business class while he aides sat in coach. And that is grounds for resignation.

"The Jews and Their Lies."

Holy shit. I had no idea Michael Steele and the RNC could be so stupid as to create The Obama Card, a game that allows players to use their Obama credit card to purchase "Anti-semitic, anti-Latino, and overtly pornographic literature - with pictures to boot" (AMERICAblog). Apparently this material helps the public understand just how Obama's spending is destroying our country.

Using a search engine modeled after Amazon's, 'players' search for keywords relating to items they wish to purchase. A search for Jews brings up a set of thumbnail images including, you guessed it, "The Jews and Their Lies." One can also, with proper searching (as done by AMERICAblog), find items like "Sex Secrets of Escorts" and "Porn: Have Anal Sex and Call Her Best Friend for a Threesome". Seriously.

Also hilarious is the fact that certain words are banned: one must use homosexual instead of gay, and the word vagina is banned.

Check out the AMERICAblog post to see screenshots of some of the searches (for some reason Blogger won't let me upload these images).

TV and space

both make me unreasonably happy.

Thus today was a good one for fucking around on the internet, because I got to dissect the brand-new Emmy nominations (BSG was once again criminally overlooked, although I'm really happy about the recognition Breaking Bad is getting) and check out lots of Apollo 11-related NYTimes content (today being the 40th anniversary of the launch): reader's photos and memories of what they were doing at the time, a cool page of NYTimes' original coverage, and, best of all, really amazing photos taken by the astronauts, many of which I'd never seen before.

Phthalates and Penile Volume

A very bizarre op-ed in the Times today.

One more MJ post.

Footage of Michael Jackson's hair catching fire during a 1984 Pepsi commercial shoot has just been discovered:


As always, I recommend everyone see the four-hour, made-for-TV mini-series The Jacksons: An American Dream, which dramatized the same accident in this way:

Public vs. Science: Evolution and Climate

So, Gmail informs me that there have been 42 posts and comments since the last time I read anything over here ... even though I'm still not caught up, I felt compelled to pass on this fascinating study which not only compares what the public thinks about evolution and global warming with what scientists think, but it also shows the difference between what the public thinks that scientists think and what they actually do think.

Only one?!

In the fall of 2006 the Secular Coalition of America announced that they would award $1,000 to the person who identified the highest-level atheist, humanist, freethinker, or other nontheist currently holding elected public office in the United States. SCA Advisory Board Chairman Woody Kaplan, a civil liberties activist and former member of the ACLU's National Board of Directors, took some of the suggested names and interviewed close to sixty members of the U.S. House and Senate. “At the time, twenty-two of them told me they didn’t believe in a god,” Kaplan recalls. “Twenty-one of them said, ‘You can’t tell anybody.’ One of them said you could: Congressman Pete Stark.”

Here is his acceptance speech. Nothing earth-shattering, but that's just it - how is it possible that his simple, logical thinking is so rare among elected officials?

This sounds too familiar

“People often don’t know what products acetaminophen is in,” said Dr. Lewis S. Nelson, a medical toxicologist from New York University who was the panel’s acting chairman. “It isn’t that hard to go above the four-gram dose. If you took a couple acetaminophen for a headache until you got to the maximum dose, and then maybe later you take Tylenol PM and some Nyquil for a cold. And your back hurts, so you take Vicodin — by now you’ve probably gotten to a seven-gram dose.”

I am glad NYT put out an article to mitigate the hype/scare of last week's panel decision, but Dr. Nelson, who I work with, has a point here.

Strange Syntax

Not stabbing in the head, but stabbing the head. Struck me as odd.

Snake eyes, everyone loses.

The above photo shows the aftermath of a fight between a 13' python and a 6' alligator in Florida's Everglades in 2005. Apparently the python swallowed the alligator whole and began to digest it, inspiring the alligator to claw at the insides of the snake. In the end both animals were dead, and as can be seen in the picture above, the hindquarters of the alligator were sticking out of the python. (In case the image is too small to be meaningful: the scaly thing sticking toward the lower-right corner of the picture is the alligator's tail, while the other two points are the ends of the torn-in-half python. This just adds another item to each of two lists: 1. Reasons no one should live in Florida until they are old enough that they can't leave the house; and, 2. Reasons I am not cut out for any kind of wilderness adventure.

Invincible.

Hilariously, Michael Jackson's final studio album was named Invincible. Also hilarious is Michael's melting, whitening, clearly-not-invincible face, shown in its different stages throughout the years in the great morphing video below.

Cats!

Two cat-related stories:

1. The owners of a Kansas zoo allowed their pet golden retriever to raise three white-striped tiger cubs [note: this is the term used in the article I read, though it doesn't really seem right; the animals have black stripes, not white ones] who were abandoned by their mother. The family, seen above, is now being split apart because the cubs have grown large enough that even just playing with the dog the cubs could severely injure her. There are some pretty cute pictures in this slideshow. This MSNBC report includes video:

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

2. Riana Van Nieuwenhuizen, an animal sanctuary worker in South Africa, lives "[...] with not one but FOUR orphaned cheetahs, five lions and two tigers. Forty-six-year-old Riana said: 'I love them all. But they're a handful.'" All of the pictures below are shot at her home, where the animals seemingly have free reign.

China Lights Up.

Two bewildering stories relating to tobacco have come out of China recently, and both make me glad to live in the USA:

1. The Gongan county government of central China has ordered civil servants in the area "[...] to puff their way through 230,000 packs of local Hubei-produced cigarettes over the year," or face a fine. Contradictory to the central government's policies intended to curb smoking, this edict is an effort to stem losses of tobacco tax revenue to non-local cigarette producers. The edict has since been put "under study" to determine if it should be in place or not.

2. Tong Liangliang, a two-year old from China, now holds the unofficial record of being the youngest chain-smoker in history. Liangliang (pictured above) was pushed to smoking by his father, who believed that the cigarettes would numb the pain of the boy's hernia until he grew old enough to have an operation for the condition. Liangliang's smoking began about six months ago, but he is already smoking a pack a day and "[...] resists all his father's attempts to take away his only pain killer."

Alice in Wonderland.

Check out these pictures of the Mad Hatter, the Red Queen, and the White Queen from Tim Burton's upcoming interpretation of Alice in Wonderland. The characters are played by Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, and Anne Hathaway, respectively. (Images taken from HuffPo.)

I am worried that this movie will be disappointing in the same way that Burton's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was, but I have to admit that these images give me some hope. Between these visuals and the fact that the film will be shown in 3-D I will likely end up going to see this in theaters despite my reservations. Does anyone know anything else about this project? Any early reviews of the script and casting?

This guy is my great-uncle

...really. This could get interesting.


Ed Meese, Far-Right Reaganite, Hired By GOP To Coordinate Sotomayor Attack

Damn Mahmoud, you don't remember Benford's Law?!

Statistics for the win.

I won't go into to much explanation since Nate does, but check this out. Benford's Law says that, with remarkably few assumptions, an extremely wide range of types of data all exhibit similar patterns when it comes to their values' first digit.

So whether you're talking about the number of people living in each of America's counties or the distance between Earth and each of the Universe's objects, if you took your entire list and only kept the first digits, the proportion of 1s would be about the same on both lists, and the same for 2s, etc. (This sort of makes sense - there are probably more counties with 10-19 people than 90-99, more with 100-199 than 900-999, more with 100,000-199,999 than 900,000-999,999, etc.)

Long story short, Nate's analysis appears to show that one of Ahmadinejad's opponent's vote totals per county(?) behaved extremely well according to Benford's Law - except there were far too many 7s ...

Fucking weak.

Students at two elementary schools in California will, because of a clerical error and strict laws regarding the length of school days, be forced to complete 34 extra days of school this summer. An associate superintendent, who has now conveniently decided to retire, mistakenly allowed the schools to have short days during the school year that were only 170 or 175 minutes, below the required 180 minute threshold that defines a school day in the state. The law is so strict that these 170 or 175 minute days, typically shortened to allow teachers more time to prepare lessons, do not count as even partial school days, meaning that if the schools hope to receive their usual amounts of state funding next fall the students must complete 34 additional at-least-180-minute days of school before starting summer vacation.

"Fourth-grader Sean Cornish says his classmates 'think it's dumb that they have to go to school for these extra days because some lady messed up.'" I agree, and also cannot believe the state laws do not allow the schools to make up only the missed time, rather than the number of days that were too short.

Let's move to rural Siberia or Malawi.

The BBC has aggregated a lot of information about swine flu into a convenient map of the spread of the disease over time. Finally, an excuse to move to Siberia.

Clouds.

A new class of cloud was discovered this week: asperatus clouds (above). In honor of this surprising find I decided to completely take a posting from New Scientist and bring it over here! Check out the nine interesting cloud formations below (original post is here and includes descriptions of how each forms).

Fallstreak hole:
Roll cloud:

Pink UFO (altocumulus lenticularis):


Cap cloud:

Wave cloud:
Virga:

Mammatus:


Kelvin-Helmholtz:

Horseshoe vortex:

Best. Excuse. Ever.

During a town-hall style meeting in Green Bay President Obama wrote a note excusing an attending fourth-grader's absence from school, then walked off the stage to deliver it to her. Kennedy, the fourth-grader, will present her teacher with a note that says, simply, "To Kennedy's teacher: Please excuse Kennedy's absence. She's with me. Barack Obama." If nothing else, Obama is a pretty fucking cool president.

Most underreported story of the week?

I'm on vacation and keeping it short.

Victory?!

Nate Silver confounds me again

A pretty fascinating fivethirtyeight post from yesterday: The Palin Paradox: Women More Likely to Elected in Male-Dominated Districts.

His findings are exactly what it sounds like they are. Even when he isolates Democratic-leaning (and thus more likely to elect a woman at all) districts, "the most male-dominated from among these strongly Democratic districts elected women in 10 out of 15 instances. The 15 most female districts elected just 3 women."

So, "all told, after controlling for the district's partisan affiliation, male-dominated districts were more than twice as likely to elect a Congresswoman as were female-dominated districts."

What he doesn't have, of course, is explanation for this seemingly - counter intuitive phenomenon. But he has some interesting thoughts:

"It's possible, and maybe even somewhat likely, that there is some sort of latent variable affecting both the sex ratios and elections to the Congress that I haven't accounted for .... Perhaps in male-dominated areas, women are more likely to violate traditional sex roles including something like running for political office, which has traditionally been a male-dominated occupation -- the Sarah Palin frontierswoman caricature works well here. It would be interesting to know whether there more women actually running for office in male-dominated areas, or rather, whether they are winning more often when they do run. Or perhaps this is a phenomenon that goes beyond politics, and career growth is retarded for the dominant gender when there is an insufficient number of the opposite one. Or perhaps there is even something more Freudian: a lack of female companionship (or vice versa) triggers a yearning for it that is manifested in the way we vote."

Strangely Badass IV: Mark Malkoff.

Here are the reasons Mark Malkoff is making this list of strangely badass people:

1. Mark is the audience coordinator for The Colbert Report.

2. Mark visited all 171 Manhattan Starbucks in one day:


2. Mark lived in Ikea for one week:


3. Mark started the first-ever Guns 'N Roses tribute band composed entirely of children. The band is known as Little GNR.

4. Lastly, Mark is living for one month (June 2009) on Air Tran jets to get over his fear of flying. On his peak days he will fly twelve flights. He will sleep overnight on the planes after the other passengers have disembarked.


Mark at one point in one of the videos I have seen also claims to have started the Naked Cowboy in Times Square. I can't verify this and it seems a dubious claim.

Reshaping Earth.

Using images from NASA's Earth Observatory, Wired has created time-lapse views of regions of the world undergoing significant changes.

The disappearance of the Amazon rainforest:


The draining of the Aral Sea:


The urbanization of Dubai:

Hitler in color

Pretty amazing color images of Hitler from LIFE magazine - the craziest thing, to me, is how unreal it seems: I've seen the "Indiana Jones" movies so many times that it's tough to really comprehend that Hitler's uniform isn't a costume, the parades aren't staged, etc.

Visualizing Obama's budget cuts.

Banned cartoon.

As is described here, in this banned episode of Tiny Toon Adventures, "[...] Buster Bunny, Plucky Duck and Hamton Pig find a bottle of beer that never goes empty, then proceed to get drunk, steal a cop car, cause general chaos and collectively die by driving said car over a cliff."

Wha?

Unless I'm being duped, Dick Cheney is pro-gay-marriage.

An exclusive club.

From The Warren Times Observer, a Pennsylvania paper:


(In case you cannot read it, the ad says, "May Obama follow in the footsteps of Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, and Kennedy!")

Shh, don't say anything - you don't want to jinx it!

Not sure how many of you have noticed, but the numbers that keep coming out on the economy are consistently pretty-bad-but-they-could be worse kind of numbers. Also not sure if you noticed, but the news has sort of just stopped talking about the economy ...

So it should come as little surprise then, even with no indication of economic improvement, that consumer confidence numbers are on the rise - and fast! It seems that without hearing bad news about the economy all the time, people are actually starting to think it's improving (even I have to actively resist this trap). But then again, people thinking the economy is better could very well be all it takes to start the recovery.

Don't screw this up for us CNN.

"Roman Catholic priestess" dragged kicking and screaming from Air Force One

pretty funny

Upgrading your outlook.

This is just one of many versions of this commercial:

Bad parenting.

"Sometimes I do better with lists," a wise man once said. To that end let's start getting some lists together and vote on who makes the best submission (à la Apples to Apples). The topic for this trial run: awful celebrity baby names. My entries (these are just the ridiculously-named children, not all the kids in each family):

• Zakk Wylde: Hendrix Halen Michael Rhoads (named after Jimi Hendrix, Eddie Van Halen, Mike Piazza, and Randy Rhoads);
• George Foreman: George VI (Joe), George V (Red), George IV (Big Wheel), Freda George George III (Monk), Georgetta, and George Jr. Foreman has said he named all his sons George because, "In this career, you have to prepare for long term brain damage.";
• Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin: Apple (Paltrow discussing the name: "It sounded so sweet and it conjured such a lovely picture for me – you know, apples are so sweet and they're wholesome and it's biblical – and I just thought it sounded so lovely and … clean! And I just thought, 'Perfect!'" Bonus points because Apple's godfather is Simon Pegg.);
• Demi Moore: Rumer Glenn Willis (as in Bruce Willis) and Tallulah Belle Willis;
• Frank Zappa: Dweezil, Ahmet Emuukha Rodan (a member of the Reggie Cleveland All-Stars), Moon Unit, and Diva Thin Muffin Pigeen.

Lost. [Spoilers contained in this post!]

With only one season remaining I think it is time to make some predictions about how Lost is going to resolve the ridiculous mountain of unanswered (unanswerable?) questions the show has allowed to pile up over the years. As a quick refresher of what last happened in the Lost universe, here is the Wikipedia summary of the season five finale:

In 1977, the survivors succeed in detonating the modified nuclear bomb at the construction site of the Swan station, the finale ending when the bomb is detonated. In 2007, Locke and the Others travel to the base of the four-toed statue, where Jacob lives. Locke is revealed to be an impostor: an old acquaintance of Jacob who tricks Ben into killing Jacob. In flashbacks, Jacob visits several of the main characters.

In Lost physics the explosion of the bomb in 1977 is supposedly going to eliminate the underground source of the magnetic field so that Oceanic flight 815 will not be brought down by in the future, thereby restoring the world as it was when the main characters boarded the plane in Sydney. I have a really major problem with this logic: changing an event in 1977 alters which
of the potential futures becomes reality from that moment onward--that is, everything from that moment forward represents a different future from the one that occurred without the explosion. Here's a rough idea of what I mean:

I guess my main point is just that detonating that bomb ensures that it is not possible for the future to turn out the way it already has--expressed another way, the future that we, the viewers, have already seen cannot possibly be repeated. We have jumped from one potential future to another in which the plane cannot crash because of the magnetic field, even if everyone is on the plane as they were in the future we already know (this all assumes that Faraday's belief that the detonation will destroy the magnetic field is correct).

All that said, I think one of the consistent themes throughout the show has been the inevitability of the role each person plays. In the end all those who are 'supposed to be on the island' will be there whether the plane crashes or not; Jack will become de facto leader; Sawyer will initially rebel but become respectable when need be; Ben will connive and backstab; et cetera. This seems to imply that we should be able to piece together the basic point of the show--if everyone will fill the same role throughout this alternate future then the moral will be the same. Before I go off on another long ramble I'll ask a few questions of the floor: Is my reasoning sound? What do you think of differently? What is the moral of the show? How is Jacob's old friend inhabiting Locke's body? (I didn't even bother to touch on this just yet.)

Oh, and here's a barely-related GraphJam post that I enjoyed:

I oppose Maria Sotomayor!

And so does Mike Huckabee ...

Bacon Explosion!

In a glorious moment that will supply me with chest hair for the rest of my life, we had a "Bacon Explosion" this weekend.

http://www.bbqaddicts.com/blog/recipes/bacon-explosion/

I don't even know what to say about this

Passer-By Pushes Potential Suicide Jumper From Bridge In China

Waterboarding is torture.

Well, Hannity is too filled with hot air to follow through with his offer to be waterboarded, but Christopher Hitchens and conservative radio host Erich 'Mancow' Muller have each undergone the treatment. Both lasted less than ten seconds and have reversed their positions, stating that waterboarding is unequivocally torture. Check out the videos (and the associated articles) below (the sound on the Mancow videos is terrible).

Hitchens: "Believe Me, It's Torture"


Mancow: "Mancow Waterboarded, Admits It's Torture"

Robobama is coming for you!

Actually, this is pretty awesome.