Around the blog world

Some things I saw surfing the blog world today ...

Given the post below -- the one about Children of Men -- I found this note over at Marginal Revolution interesting:

An indigenous language in southern Mexico is in danger of disappearing because its last two speakers have stopped talking to one another.

Now it's not as juicy as it sounds. It seems they're not "not talking to each other" because of a feud so much as they've just drifted apart. Still, that kind of sucks. One of the comments, though, claims there still are as many as 90,000 speakers of the language so it could be journalistic hyperbole. Who knows?

Over at Sabermetric Research there's a post about a paper claiming to show that batters with a surname beginning with the letter K (the baseball scoring symbol for strikeout) strike out more often than other batters. Though I haven't seen the paper itself, I fear this is one of those cases that gives statistics a bad name. You know, one of those "lies, damned lies, and statistics" kind of things. I have no proof, but I suspect it's a case of a very large sample size, which results in VERY small standard errors, which then makes almost every result "statistically significant". As I remind my students, there is a tremendous difference in statistical significance and practical significance. Still, I'd like to see the paper before making a final judgement.

Finally, my old pal The Vol Abroad shares 8 random facts about herself. Knowing her as I do, I was not at all surprised by how witty her facts were. My favorite:

5. I have SunDrop in my house right now. It's liquid gold. I only refrigerate one can at a time so I don't go through it too quick. My husband put an empty can in our transparent recycling bag, and I grant is a perfectly normal thing to do. But I had this paranoid fear that some SunDrop addict would walk by our house, see it and then break into our house to steal my stash. That's the grip SunDrop has on you.

Though I don't have the Drop addiction I had as a younger man, I can certainly appreciate the extremely high marginal utility a can/bottle of the "nectar of the gods" would have if I lived in a foreign (heathen?) land where it was not available.

The whole thing got me to thinking about random (perhaps surprising?) facts about me. I figured I'd share some, but with a twist. Here's a mixture of "true facts" (aka, facts) and "false facts" (aka, lies). If you know me well, you may have no trouble separating the two, but I'm still curious about how easy I am to peg.

1. If the election were held today, I'd vote for Hillary.
2. I am an occasional (secret) watcher of American Idol.
3. I speak 2 languages (including English) well enough to get by (if the natives are patient) and I know the "clueless tourist" version of 1 more.
4. My favorite current author is an obscure (at least in America) Japanese writer.
5. I own a Beastie Boys CD (you know the song).
6. I believe steroids have made most baseball records of the past 15-20 years meaningless.
7. Though incredibly vulgar, Clerks is one of my all-time favorite movies.
8. My first "favorite song" as a child was Rhinestone Cowboy.

When I did these off the top of my head, I had 5 "trues" and 3 "falses". For symmetry's sake, I changed a fact to a lie so now there's 4 of each. If there's any interest, I will reveal the true me later.