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: