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 ...