First 9 and a poem

Ok, I have now put in almost all of my songs into iTunes (3104 of them) and here are the first nine played:
Beware Of Darkness Concrete Blonde
You Know What You Are? Nine Inch Nails
Getting Smaller Nine Inch Nails
Triumph Of A Heart Björk
Show Me Your Soul Red Hot Chili Peppers
Peek-A-Boo! Devo
Disappointment The Cranberries
Carolina In My Mind James Taylor
Who Made Who AC/DC
 
Why 9? Because I’m superstitious? [...]

al-Marri indicted

Via Hilzoy, Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri  is going to be tried in a criminal court. This is mostly good news, it brings another person out of indefinite imprisonment without any cause shown, but:
Indicting him in a federaldistrict court in central Illinois could avert a Supreme Court ruling that would tie the Obama administration’s hands in [...]

Craziness becomes even crazier

He’s a nobody, but Colorado state Senator Dave Schultheis makes it obvious that he thinks that people should be punished for having sex:
Sexual promiscuity, we know, causes a lot of problems in our state, one of which, obviously, is the contraction of HIV. And we have other programs that deal with the negative consequences — [...]

Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer

A few weeks ago I finished reading the ‘Graveyard Book’ by Neil Gaiman (yeah, I know it’s for young adults) and last week I got ‘Who Killed Amanda Palmer’ by Amanda Palmer of the Dresden Dolls. Neither of these things is surprising as I have two Dresden Dolls CDs and have 4 or 5 books [...]

Tierney, Pielke, and Lomborg and Global Warming

John Tierney (really, why is he still with the NY Times) has another article downplaying global warming. He pretends to be in some sort of center in the global warming debate: global warming is real and caused by humans, but it’s not that big a deal and it’s better to fix things after than to [...]

Rahm Emanuel and the Stimulus package

Via Kevin Drum, here’s Rahm Emanuel talkingabout Paul Krugman’s objection to the size and proportion of tax cuts in the Stimulus package passed:
“They have never worked the legislative process,” Emanuel said of critics like the Timescolumnist Paul Krugman, who argued that Obama’s concessions to Senate Republicans—in particular, the tax cuts, which will do little to [...]

Still no music, but a poem anyhow

I’m still putting music into iTunes, so still no random 10 (I’m up to 1720 songs). I will instead direct you to Carrie Brownstein at NPR and today’s song of the day (With all my Heart by Clem Snide) which I quite liked.
Of course, the lack of music doesn’t relieve of my poetic responsibility, so here’s [...]

North Dakota is a bit crazy

Amanda has a post about North Dakota’s attempt to ban abortion by declaring fetuses people (which passed their house). When I went to look for the official language, I found that there are other bills about abortion:

they want any abortion provider to put a sign with this up (this passed their senate):

“Notice: No one can force [...]

Baye’s Rule

Since Baye’s Rule came up in the problem from xkcd that I linked to a couple posts ago, I thought I would put up a more basic problem that looks at it:
Suppose a disease is present in .1% of the population (so one in a 1000). A test for the disease is 99% accurate (so [...]

Comparative effectiveness of drugs

Hmm, a few people are writing about the push by drug and medical device companies to take money out of the stimulus package for comparative effectiveness studies for treatments. The reason there’s need for this is that the FDA approves a new drug or treatment if it’s safe and effective, they do not test to see if [...]

A math puzzle via xkcd

Not only is xkcd a great comic, but they also put up problems like this one (via here):
Sue and Bob take turns rolling a 6-sided die.  Once either person rolls a 6 the game is over.  Sue rolls first, if she doesn’t roll a 6, Bob rolls the die, if he doesn’t roll a 6, Sue [...]

Patrick regulations to put homeless on the street

The Patrick administration has been trying to change the way the state deals with the homeless. Much of what they do is good, but this isn’t:
The regulations, scheduled to take effect April 1, would deny shelter to families who in the last three years had been evicted from or had abandoned public or subsidized housing [...]

Number of Filibusters

I wrote about this awhile back and thought I would put in the final numbers for the record number of filibusters in the 110th congress (from here). Here it is in graphic form (it starts with the 66th congress, 1919-1920, since the cloture rule was added in 1917 and its first use was in 1919)

This is not [...]

Pakistan and Sharia Law

Well, it seems that the Pakistan government has agreed to allow Sharia law in their Swat region:
The Pakistani government, desperate to restore peace to a Taliban-infested valley once known as the “Switzerland of Pakistan,” agreed Monday to enforce strict Islamic law in the surrounding district near the Afghan border, conceding to a long-standing demand by [...]

Lis Hartel

I read the obituaries because you find people who have done amazing things that you’ve never heard of. A case in point is Lis Hartel who died on February 12. She won two silver medals in the equestrian sport of dressage in 1952 and 1956 (she also won the world championship in 1954). What makes this [...]

Sunstein and Cost-Benefit Analysis

This bit by Brainiac reminded me that I am deepy uneasy about Cass Sunstein directing the White House Office of Management and Budget’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA). There’s a progressive paper detailing some of the problems here, but I only needed to look at his article here to say why I have a problem with [...]

Just a poem

I had problems with my computer here at NU, so it was cleansed. This means (since I was too lazy to bring in CDs or a portable hard drive) that I lost all my songs on iTunes and have to put them all back on (this is more work than bringing in a portable hd, [...]

Cost of textbooks

Via Kevin Drum (there are some interesting comments there), I went to see Andrew Gelman’s post about $150 statistics textbooks. Since I’m teaching introductory statistics, this is a timely post (in fact I’m supposed to give the text for a summer course by the end of the day–and I’m not even going to teach it). One of [...]

Mugabe survives

I guess we’ll find out how it works, but I’m not sure I’m optimistic about a power-sharing deal that keeps most of the security forces under Mugabe:
The rivals reached a formal compact to share power last September.
Despite that agreement, Mr. Mugabe and Mr. Tsvangirai fought a bitter political duel over control of key ministries, and [...]

The end was near?

Via Pandagon , here’s a video that’s been making the rounds (although it was put up in January):

Here’s a bit of the transcript (from here):
It was about September 15th [sic]. … On Thursday at about 11 o’clock in the morning the Federal Reserve noticed a tremendous drawdown of, uh, money market accounts [...]