Steve Landsburg posted the joke, “We always knew that Penn State football was like a religion. Now we know which religion.” This has provoked a discussion on this vaguely libertarian blog about whether this joke inappropriately impugns Catholics or the Roman Catholic Church.

Some argue that the joke can’t impugn anyone it doesn’t mention; by taking offense, you must first concede that the shoe fits and therefore you undermine your grounds for taking offense. Others argue that a joke can promote stereotypes by referring to them, even in an unstated fashion.

Foster parenting teaches us how to live as so many low-income families already live—check to check, coupon to coupon, appointment to appointment. The difference is that most foster parents hold middle-class passports, and they can cut short their sojourn among WIC recipients and Medicaid administrators at any time. No one knows what exactly will happen to Sophia and the nearly half-million kids in her situation if they exercise that privilege. If Republican lawmakers have their way, we may well find out.

Bedford’s Law identifies patterns in number distributions that occur in nature.

That’s BeNford’s law, not Bedford’s, as your quote correctly spells – proof, I guess, that you read what you think is there, not what actually is there.

Interesting article. Thanks for the link.

[A]ccording to [predictions based on] Benford’s law, accounting statements are getting less and less representative of what’s really going on inside of companies. The major reform that was passed after Enron and other major accounting standards barely made a dent.

Next, I looked at Benford’s law for three industries: finance, information technology, and manufacturing.

The finance industry showed a huge surge in the deviation from Benford’s from 1981-82, coincident with two major deregulatory acts that sparked the beginnings of that other big mortgage debacle, the Savings and Loan Crisis. The deviation from Benford’s in the finance industry reached a peak in 1988[,] decreased starting in 1993 at the tail end of the S&L fraud wave, [and didn’t return to] its 1988 level until … 2008 [the start of the latest financial meltdown].

Neither manufacturing nor IT showed the huge increase and decline of the deviation from Benford’s that finance experienced in the 1980s and early 1990s, further validating the measure since neither industry experienced major fraud scandals during that period. [But the] deviation for IT streaked up between 1998-2002 exactly during the dotcom bubble….

“In a way, it’s a lot more challenging than trying to simply tell a story,” [Spiegelman] says of his chosen medium. “In a prose story, I could just write, ‘Then they dragged my father through the gate and into the camp.’ But here I have to live those words, to assimilate them, to turn them into finished business—so that I end up seeing them and am then able to convey that vision. Were there tufts of grass, ruts in the path, puddles in the ruts? How tall were the buildings, how many windows, any bars, any lights in the windows, any people? What time of day was it? What was the horizon like? Every panel requires that I interrogate my material like that over and over again.”

Intriguingly, when second section of Maus was published it immediately shot to the top of the New York Times best seller list — for fiction. The Times would eventually re-characterize this apparent story of mice and cats as a work of non-fiction/memoir.

Hard to say. But you can get a pretty good idea you compare electoral outcomes in 2004 (when Bush beat Kerry with 50.7%) to outcomes in 2008 (when Obama beat McCain with 53%).

It’s not surprising that some parts of the country did not favor a French-speaking windsurfer from Beacon Hill. But it IS surprising how many of those places found Obama even MORE objectionable — even in the face of a national trend going the other direction.

Where are these places? See http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/11/05/us/politics/20081104_ELECTION_RECAP.html?ref=politics
and click on the 2d map. It shows all the places that voted more heavily Republican in 2008 than in 2004. Draw your own conclusions.

(H/T The New Republic, http://www.tnr.com/the-stump/95709/rick-perry-and-the-map-worth-thousand-words)

http://www.npr.org/blogs/monkeysee/2011/09/29/140915714/congratulations-television-you-are-even-worse-at-masculinity-than-femininity

“[T]here is something about this narrative hectoring about men not understanding manhood that seems particularly brutal in that it specifically attacks them for emotional ineptitude while simultaneously attacking them for having emotions.”

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/09/25/us-saudi-king-women-idUSTRE78O10Y20110925?feedType=RSS&feedName=topNews