-
Belated happy birthday!
Happy birthday (yesterday), ams16! -
Winter tomatoes
Gourmet magazine has an article up about the slave labor conditions in winter tomato growing camps in FLorida -- which is, apparently, where the overwhelming majority (90%?) of US-grown winter tomatoes come from. It's pretty horrible. If you do want tomatoes in winter:
Whole Foods is the only grocery chain that has signed on to the Coalition of ( Read more... ) -
Placebo birth control pill study?
Today, s student in my stats class told me a story that I would love to verify. She worked for a clinical study center over the summer, and was telling me about something in their handbook on study design. Apparently, "in the 50s or 70s or something like that," there was a study of the birth control pill, in which some women were given the pill ( Read more... ) -
Winter sports weekend
I took elder child cross country skiing yesterday (first time for both of us), and ice skating today (first time for him). Both trips featured half an hour of hating it, and swearing it was no fun at all, followed by about five minutes of starting to get it. and another hour and a half moving from "I see why people like this" to "This is fun! Let ( Read more... ) -
Another kind election-results map
The problem with maps coloring the US red or blue is they don't show how many people live in the different areas. You've seen cartograms:
( Read more... ) -
Orange spice chocolate cloud cookies
I made some cookies recently which were a big hit with my co-workers. Having typed up the recipe for them, I figured I'd post it here too. The recipe makes a very soft cookie that almost melts when you eat it. The basic technique, beating sugar with whole eggs until pale and thick, isn't a very common one; I make a chocolate mousse in a similar ( Read more... ) -
Exit poll slice & dice
I'm poking around at last night's exit polls, looking for some interesting stories for my classes. This one caught my eye. The numbers are national, so the sample size is huge (17,836 people).
ObamaMcCainMarried women with kids51%47%Married women, no kids44%53%Married men with kids45%54%Married men, no kids48%51%
So married women with kids vote ( Read more... ) -
Cool data visualization website
The worldmapper site is an archive of world maps, distorted so the area of each country is proportional to interesting data such as population, or wealth, or net immegration, or a whole host of other data sets.
Here's one showing where tourists travel to:
( Read more... ) -
From the Onion, or real news?
From the Onion, or real news?
In fact, some of the most basic details, including the $700 billion figure Treasury would use to buy up bad debt, are fuzzy.
"It's not based on any particular data point," a Treasury spokeswoman told [source] Tuesday. "We just wanted to choose a really large number."
Click here for the actual source. -
Appropriate song for current events
I had this Tom Paxson song, sung by Arlo Guthrie:
on an album I listened to over and over again as a pre-teen. (I had no idea at all what it meant at the time; I remember getting my mother to explain it to me.) It's been stuck in my head again, for obvious reasons. It's worth a listen ( Read more... )
Click to view