Crowd estimating

Speaking of statistics, this is a neat insight from a professional crowd estimator. He recently estimated the crowd at Glenn Beck's rally in Washington, and previously estimated Obama's inauguration crowd. It sounds like he specializes in bipartisan disappointment.

"The time-honored way to dismiss scientific estimates that don't reflect the pre-event hype is to claim political bias on the part of those doing the estimate. I am amused to see that those who embraced my Obama inauguration estimate as soberly realistic are now attacking the Beck rally estimate, produced using exactly the same methods, as deliberately biased.

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It's not easy being green

Scott Adams on building a green home:

"As a rule, the greener the home, the uglier it will be. I went into the process thinking that green homes were ugly because hippies have bad taste. That turns out to be nothing but a coincidence."

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Spurious statistics are up 17% this year

There are a lot of stats flying around these days. Frequently, they come to my attention by way of The Daily Show by the way of Fox News. I hear about the percentage of people think President Obama is not a U.S. citizen or that he's a Muslim. (I like this response to the ponderings on Obama's religion.) Or maybe there's a statistic about how many people responding to an online survey agree with something Sarah Palin said onetime. These statistics are being used to legitimize the opinions of pundits, many of which are founded in absurdity at best and hatred at worst. There is also never any mention of how the questions were phrased, how data was collected, who was asked, etc. They are presented as irrefutable fact, and I dislike it.

So I came up with my own statistic. It's the only one I've heard recently that strikes me as demonstrably true, as it takes into account every single person who calls this country home:

49% of Americans are below average.

Isn't simplicity a beautiful thing?

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Apparently, I just post YouTube videos now

But this is really good.

Via Wait in the Van

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If you liked Brontė Sisters Power Dolls...

...you'll love this.

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More on comments

Because I know all two of you are really curious about this, it turns out that there were two problems with my comments:

1. They were occasionally not added to the database. I still don't know why.
2. Some of the emails (but not all) were spam filtered. Yay.

I believe the single comment that was lost has been recovered. (That would be your comment about poppies, Howdy.)

In related news, I'm thinking of changing web hosts. I still like the idea of having this site in PHP, but the fact of the matter is that I spend most of my days programming in C#, so I'm not very quick at making changes. Does anybody know of a good .NET web host? Preferably one that has PHP and .NET avaialble? I've got one that looks OK, but they're kind of limited on storage space.

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Awesome hats

I think we can all agree that hats are awesome. I'm not talking about baseball hats, but hats one might find at a haberdashers, or crazy giant things people wear on their heads. Apparently, so does an old friend of mine, because he started up awesomehat.net. Brilliant!

P.S. Jesse and I are featured on the site wearing awesome hats of our own.

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