South Park should do an episode on the drug war, I can only dream

Wow, I didn’t expect Mexicans to be so religious, I don’t think any of my friends go to mass more than once a month. The data came from the World Values Survey and the graphs were made with Verifiable which makes much prettier stacked bar charts than Excel ...

Karatani’s answer to Marx’s lacunae on the state in Capital is to read his methodology transcritically, as a pronounced parallax of constant transposition in which the principle of association undoes the unholy trinity of capital, nation, and state

—Peter Hitchcock, The Failed State and the State of Failure

Must be a slow news day because the New York Times has an article about the statistical software R. Israel was right to take advantage of the holiday news lull to invade Gaza.

R first appeared in 1996, when the statistics professors Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman of the University ...

Concha y Toro: Trio 2006 Cabernet Sauvignon, Shiraz, and Cabernet Franc Poor Shiraz, alone amongst the Cabernets must feel trapped like Odysseus between Scylla and Charybdis, ha ha ha. It was actually pretty good.

Yet even by WaMu’s relaxed standards, one mortgage four years ago raised eyebrows. The borrower was claiming a six-figure income and an unusual profession: mariachi singer. Mr. Parsons could not verify the singer’s income, so he had him photographed in front of his home dressed in his mariachi ...

It is well known in psychology that the way a question is asked can strongly influence the answer. For example, if you spin a random number wheel and later have people guess the proportion of United Nations countries that are African, their answers closely follow the number the wheel landed ...

Now that we now that Sarah Palin didn’t fake her pregnancy and Bristol Palin is carrying Obama’s baby let’s talk about something else,

Assume that:

A = Has Down syndrome
B = Mother is between 40-44 years old
C = Mother is between 15-19 years old
Total Births = 4,265 ...