What I hate about (population) statistics

You can, too, in a few easy steps:

1. Go to Wikipedia's list of urban areas.
2. Click on the Density column in the table so that urban areas are listed in decreasing order of density.
3. Scan the table to find that Los Angeles, at 2,570 people/km^2, is the most densely populated "urban area" in the U.S.
4. Hate population statistics.

To be fair, Wikipedia warns us about the dangers of trying to rank the world's largest cities, but it's one thing to read the article and quite another to see that, by certain criteria, the U.S. model for urban sprawl and poor city planning could be considered space-efficient.  

Looking at the list of cities proper, you can see that NYC's population density was being severely dragged down by the inclusion of its suburbs, while the city of Los Angeles is barely more dense than its suburbs.

Choosing what to report

I had heard about the new leukemia treatment, but not looked any closer until this xkcd popped up in Reader. 

So I searched for recent articles on the leukemia treatment, and after looking at articles posted on ABC, IBT, MSNBC, the Myeloma Beacon, NYT, Nurse.com, WSJ, Huffington Post, CNN, CBS, and Fox, only *one* article mentioned the (very cool) fact about the repurposed HIV.

Kudos to you, Robert Bazell of MSNBC.

So, I think I'll continue to read comics as my primary news source.

Raising breast cancer awareness, PA style**

Rediscovered while going through photos from July...while getting on the PA turnpike, going east from the Irwin exit, there was a truck in front of us that supported breast cancer research.  That was sweet of them! 

But could we get a closer look at the bumper sticker?

Um, thanks for your support, I guess?


** To be honest, I'd associate this kind of sentiment with NJ more than western PA.  Maybe the truck was from Philly?  Oh, wait, Hazleton, PA is right around the crossroads of I-80 and I-81.  That's not Philly, but still definitely east of the mountains.


Oh, man.  It's an entire company that does nothing but "save the tatas" merchandise.

Fun with Picasa

Ever since I started thinking about moving to Picasa for all my online photo album needs, I've spent a little time here and there playing with it.  One of the coolest (and scariest, if you're worried about Google using your tagging of people in photos in order to be able to use their facial recognition software to track where you are) features is its ability to pick out faces from your photos and group similar photos together so that you can more easily tag your photos (and then later on be able to easily find "that picture of aunt Bea and cousin John").


Even after tagging a whole lot of people, some of its guesses are funny-cute, like guessing that the 4 year-old version of Sarahmac is the 4 year-old Finn.  

And some guesses, coupled with the faces that it managed to pick out of the picture, are just odd, like thinking the Clone Wars-era Anakin might be me or Connor, or that Luke might be Sarah.

I am Number Four (2011)

Is it an alien action-horror-thriller, a high school drama, or love song to obsolete photographic technology?  You decide, because the filmmakers couldn't.  They probably should have stuck with the high school drama with some alien thrown in, like a teen Starman.

Kevin Durand sighting!  It makes us happy to see Joshua getting work.  He's got a great voice and body language.

Red Riding Hood (2011)

We liked Amanda Seyfried in Veronica Mars, so we've since netflixed Letters to Juliet and now Red Riding Hood **.  Letters to Juliet was watchable, if uninspired, and notable mostly because it paired Vanessa Redgrave and Franco Nero, presumably in a nod to Camelot.  


Red Riding Hood has received execrable reviews, and for about 80 minutes I couldn't understand why.  It wasn't good, but it wasn't terrible.  And then we got the "reveal", which was one of those Agatha Christie-style reveals where the murderer is one of the least-developed castmembers and one of the few who hasn't yet been accused by someone else of being the murderer.  Sigh.


** yeah, we also saw Mamma Mia!, but that was for Meryl.

2011 Colchester triathlon

The race was on Sunday and the results are now out.  I've put a spreadsheet of the individual results up on Google Docs.  Compared to last year's results, my swim and bike times were actually worse.  I'm not too concerned about the swim time, because scuttlebutt after the race last year was that last year's swim leg was shy of 1k, and everyone's times were low as a result.  The increase in my time from last year to this is consistent with the overall trend (maybe even slightly less of an increase, relatively speaking compared to the leaders).  It's still slightly embarrassing as a self-identified swimmer to be in the middle of the pack, even if the pack is very fit.  I'm pretty sure I did worse on the biking because I did more running and less biking than last year, because the running training was actually less wear and tear on my body (the position of my bike's handlebars is conducive to making my hands numb after 15 minutes of cycling; I really need to fix that for next year).  So: more open water swimming, more cycling with improved handlebars on the bike, and more overall conditioning so I can go faster on the running leg (I have no excuse, other than relatively poor conditioning, to not be doing a sub-25 minute 5k).