Kieran Healy’s Weblog Sociology and other distractions

Posts from October 2006

Posted
22 October 2006 @ 5pm

Tagged
Misc

Nameless Horror

Via the common-as-dirt PZ Myers comes this site, which alleges it will tell you how many people in the U.S. share a name with you. The results are not encouraging.

HowManyOfMe.comThere are:
0

people with my name
in the U.S.A.
How many have your name?

Now, I am in Australia at the moment, so technically this result might be true and […]


Floating the Fraud Balloon

Daniel wrote a piece for the Guardian’s blog saying that critics who wanted to reject the findings of Burnham et al.’s Lancet paper and believe the Iraq Body Count estimate (or similar-sized numbers) were going to have to come out and claim that the paper was fraudulent, “and presumably to accept the legal consequences of […]


Posted
16 October 2006 @ 5pm

Tagged
Misc

More Burnham et al.

Here are some comments from Andrew Gelman on the Burnham et al. paper. People who’d like (or ought) to learn more about statistics could do worse than read Gelman and Nolan’s terrific Teaching Statistics: A Bag of Tricks. I am slightly embarrassed to admit that I am awaiting the publication of Gelman and Hill’s Data […]


Statistics and the Scale of Societies

How many people are murdered in the U.S. every day? How many people die in car accidents every day? How many people die of heart disease in the U.S. in a year? What about the number who die for any reason at all? If you don’t know the answer to these questions, do you have […]


Posted
9 October 2006 @ 5pm

Tagged
Misc

Sometimes behaves so strangely

Just listen to at least the first few minutes of this radio show , which begins with the work of Diana Deustch, a psychologist who studies the psychology of music. The opening segment demonstrates a remarkable phenomenon, whereby a looped segment of ordinary speech appears—after a few repetitions—to become musical. Moreover, once you’ve perceived it […]


Posted
5 October 2006 @ 8pm

Tagged
Misc

When boyhood’s fire was in my blood, I read of ancient freemen

I just watched the trailer for 300, a film version of a Frank Miller graphic novel (which I haven’t read) about the battle of Thermopylae. Looks like the core of it is a good old relentless battle in the spirit of Zulu. There’s also some stuff on Sparta and its amazing toughness, Persia and its […]


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