Archive for February, 2008
Ethnic Tensions
February 29th, 2008I was trying out a new Indian restaurant the other day with my friend, and at the end of the meal we had an interesting conversation with the owner. He told us that he started the first Indian restaurant in our area in 1993. (This was after he told us about the deadbeat cook he fired after just one day, for grabbing the butt of the female dishwasher. Ironically, that guy was the one to recommend the very restaurant he was fired from.) That really got me thinking about what ethnic cuisines are popular in the …
Double Trouble
February 22nd, 2008A few months ago I wrote about being an identical twin. Back then I’d done some research on twins, but I really didn’t find out that much. That was before I read “Entwined Lives”, a fantastic book that covers just about everything twin-related under the sun. It was even written by a twin, Nancy Segal. (She’s fraternal.)
Nancy (with a Ph.D. in twin research) writes about all kinds of twins: fraternal, identical, conjoined, and even triplets and other “multiples”. Considering that she’s a fraternal twin herself, I think it’s funny that she talks about the “lesser” …
Various and Sundry
February 14th, 2008Yesterday I was prepping for a medical procedure I was having done today. Since I’m still a bit loopy from all the fasting and stuff they knocked me out with, I’m gonna postpone posting until next week. (which will be on twins yet again.) Anyway, here’s some fun links in the meantime (shamelessly taken from the Freakonomics Blog)
Top Grossing Movies of All Time, Adjusted for Inflation
Benford’s Law
How to Win at Rock, Paper, Scissors
And for Valentine’s Day, a biological look at kissing
Here’s to Life
February 8th, 2008Recently I was reading through the various prediction-related links from Ian Ayers’ site (which I originally found through the Freakonomics blog). Regular readers might remember that I blogged once previously about Ian Ayers’ book “Super Crunchers”, which discussed the power of automated decision making, data crunching, and well-run randomized trials. But this time I had an even more important topic in mind - how long we expect to live. On Ayers’ site are a couple of excellent links that try to predict your life expectancy.
The Political Calculations link simply asks for your age and tells …
Front Loaded
February 1st, 2008A few months ago I wrote about video games titles. I tried to see what words were popular in video game titles and what weren’t. Sometimes, though, I wonder about other aspects of titles. Anybody’s who’s ever lookeed in a phone book has no doubt noticed businesses that start with earlier letters of the alphabet on purpose. (Though supposedly this doesn’t help those businesses much. Sorry, AAAAAAdvantage Plumbing.)
I think this applies to names of people, too. Take a look at this graph, so that you can see what I mean. “A” is the most …