Fosters Quantified

My wife and I were concerned that one of our foster kittens, Mustachio, wasn't gaining weight so we started weighting all three of them at regular intervals.

We have enough data points now that I figured I could get a fairly reliable slope of best fit, so I entered them into a Google spreadsheet and made a chart.



Mustachio seems to be doing just fine now, but it's interesting that his weight change is essentially the inverse of Tree Trunks (forgive me, I named them in about five seconds like an American Indian). Even though Tree Trunk isn't gaining weight as quickly as the others she's still gaining weight, so mild foster kitten worry allayed through some basic analytics.

Misleading Statistics

On my Facebook feed I found this from MoveOn.org:

This is a description of my thought process:

Wow, 1.38 million dead since 1968... but aren't there roughly 10,000 gun related homicides a year in the US? So about 450,000... where are the other 2/3's?

Wait, you're twice as likely to take your own life as to be the victim of a homicide. Are they counting suicides? I mean, I know a gun makes one more likely to succeed at suicide but surely they're not counting that.

Let's check their sources. What? I have to type that crap in... ugh.

But they're misrepresenting the numbers!

I know, I know, I'm typing.

Source 1
Source 2
Source 3
Source 4 < That's my favorite

They counted suicides. I get the logic, but this is a gray area and to be fair if you're going to count suicides in that number it needs to say so. It's misleading.

Oh, and I looked up the war deaths too. Suicide was not listed as a cause of death in any of the tables cited, but it very well may be counted. The chart does appear to take into account all deaths caused by war and not just those in battle. That's good. However, they don't count Confederate soldiers' deaths from the Civil War. Which is strange because more Americans were killed during that war than every other American war combined.

Kind of disappointed MoveOn.

Required Reading

Color-blind monkeys get gene therapy and are cured. That's insane. They did it by injecting a type of virus carrying a gene that essentially activates a protein that the monkeys are lacking in their cone cells. Wired and MIT.

Interesting video on tangible statistics. So fascinating...

More interesting food research by Brian Wansink. Short

More on high speed rail. It's so cool but just not cost effective for the most part. More on this later when I eventually talk about sunk cost fallacy.

Great article on entrepreneurs in Africa. Must read.

Cameras in London and cops driving around in cars in America are really expensive and both don't do ANYTHING to deter crime... (sarcasm) shocking (/sarcasm)!

Buzz Aldrin gives a Q&A on Freakonomics.

Well written piece about the future of cars, or rather; electric cars are taking over.

New Scientist puts out a list of 13 things in science that can't be explained. Here's round two.

Contact lenses that can monitor your bodily functions. They actually have a working model too.

Penn and Teller's show, Bullshit, covers The Bible. It's good but I wish they'd scream less and be a bit more objective. Then again, it's a show called bullshit.

Some college professors are giving money back to their students that they receive in royalties for required texts that they authored.

Some 9/11 Bush hate pieces. One by Barry Ritholtz of The Big Picture and excerpt of an article in The Atlantic (long) commented on by Chris Blattman (short), a professor of economics and political science at Yale who runs this insightful blog.

Finally, an explanation of why people who don't necessarily agree with Republican candidates vote Republican; they prefer their moral values and views on personal wealth. The strongest indicator? "Whether candidates view themselves as 'better than normal' human beings because of their wealth."

Think the Tevatron (ever notice that just about everything cool was either invented in Chicago [skyscraper] or resides near Chicago?) or Large Hadron Collider is huge? The US was planning one back in the 90's that was over twice as big as the LHC and actually started construction. Here's a photo gallery and story about what remains - yeah I'd totally live there. Here's a piece from Wired about how Fermi Lab's Tevatron is working around the clock to churn out ground breaking research before the LHC comes online.

A company has found a way to detect autism in children much earlier - 2 years old instead of the usual 5 to 6.

A university professor lands in jail for sharing research with Chinese graduate students... really? And apparently The State Department classifies satellites as munitions so that some cutting edge research done on them is considered classified. Short.

A 48 pound genetically engineered rainbow trout was caught in Canada. Just go look at the photo.

The highest resolution photo of Andromeda ever taken can be seen here. Andromeda is 2.5 million light years away and is the closest galaxy to our own Milky Way Galaxy.

Monday Reading

Beautiful compact fluorescent light fixtures that open like a flower as they become warm.

Hubble Ultra Deep Field in 3D... again.

A great Q&A with Sam Adams Brewery founder Jim Koch.

The nine nations of North America. I've been saying this for years, but apparently someone realized it far before I did.

Just days from entering grad school for a profession that clearly doesn't need more people (architecture) I find that my other calling (statistics) is actually worth while... hmmm?

I don't know why I found this short article by Paul Krugman so interesting. It's just a comparative line graph between the US and Germany showing what the current recession has done to both countries' GDP. I guess it's just shocking to see what a 4% drop in GDP can do to our whole country.

I forgot to put in my "life update" below that I visited the more respectable part of my family; a neurosurgeon, a physicians assistant, a retired three star general, and between their three kids they have like... a doctor and three more masters degrees... it's sick; in Lafayette, IN. They, being part of the medical profession, are way more attune to the problems of socialized medicine than I. I learned some really interesting things and am of course a bit more skeptical now of the whole thing, but I just can't drop it. Why can't everyone in our country get decent health care? Why not? I get to have F-18's fly over my head every year, my whole city is power washed every week, we can land men on the moon, but I can't get affordable health care? There has to be a compromise. Here's an article from GOOD Magazine that highlights one of the many key issues to health care. That is, that we're willing to pay exorbant amounts of money on unneccesary or ineffective parts of health care (yes we all know this but their spin is interesting).

Oh, and one more. I was ready to tear this article to shreds, but it turns out I agree with the author. Want an affordable well built home? Make it smaller.