While I’m still recouping/adjusting, I thought a little humor might be in line.  This one comes courtesy of sometimes reader/my uncle in law Deac, who labeled this a golf joke…but I think it tells us something important about engineers:

This is one of the coolest uses of graphic/animated data I’ve seen….it compares past Olympians to each other to show what the events would have looked like if the gold medalists from different years had competed against each other.  Swimming seems to have gained the most over the years, while the long jump seems more impervious to time.

This infographic looks innocuous, until you look at the upper right hand corner.  Cats have 72 hour days? (h/t junkcharts)

This is a useful page if you ever wanted to know what superhero your font of choice would be.  The only downside….no comic sans (asshole).

XKCD.com added a new page where he answers hypothetical questions with physics.  This weeks is “what would a mole of moles look like?”  Haven’t we all wondered that at some point?

This is a useful flowchart/infographic from Lapham’s Quarterly for those who routinely get accused of witchcraft:

My younger brother’s in town, which means I’m going to wind up having some excellent philosophical debates over the next few weeks.

I like these sorts of debates because they are pretty easy to deconstruct, as opposed to scientific or data analysis debates.  Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal managed to condense the summary in to one panel:

I lost track of which color was which quite frequently, but if you can get over that, this is stunning:

No comic, but a mildly humorous anecdote:

My wonderful husband and I took a child birth education class today.  The teacher was excellent, and spent a lot of time emphasizing that there were lots of different opinions about lots of things, but the focus should always be having a healthy baby/healthy mom.

She repeated this several times (clearly trying to avoid having any natural childbirth vs epidural debates) and then mentioned that you could read plenty of research about all sorts of different aspects of childbirth, but that it was really important to assess sample size, who did the study, etc etc.

I started to laugh a bit, and she looked at me and said “no really, you would not believe how many bad studies there are out there!”.

Needless to say, I enjoyed this teacher immensely.

My kind of class right there.

Advice for the Red Sox this year?

Between the heat and being 8 months pregnant, running to catch the bus is pretty much more than I can handle these days.  Still, it’s nice to know my age doesn’t preclude me from competing in the Olympics.  

Apparently I’m on the wrong end of the bell shaped curve if I want to win a medal though….

If sports aren’t your thing, how about a summer romance?  What, you’re trapped in the friend zone?  Here’s the stats on whether you should try to get out or not.

No summer vacation?  Stuck at work?  Use data?  Here’s Juice Analytics new chart chooser (2.0) to help figure out how best to present your data.  Haven’t tried it yet, but it looks awesome.

I’ve written before about retractions and their impact on public trust…but this was pretty stunning.  Yoshitaka Fujii, a Japanese anesthesiologist, has been found to have faked data in 172 published studies, dating back to 1993.  That’s a record.

My bff from college is from West Virginia, and always told me that coal is a big deal there.  Turns out she wasn’t exaggerating….apparently it matters more than political party in how people vote.

James over at I don’t know but…. had a good post about the inaccuracies in the reporting about the Higgs boson.  Went more in depth than I could have, for sure.

That’s it for now, have a good weekend!

It has nothing to do with statistics, but the Higgs Boson story has been the most exciting news I’ve heard in a while.  Physics was always my favorite of the sciences, and it’s nice to see hard science reporting make major headlines.