I was flipping through the Volokh Conspiracy yesterday when I stumbled upon an article that revisited an incident involving their contributor Jim Lindgren.  

Just wanted to let you all know that I just released quite few comments from the spam folder.  Not entirely sure what happened, but I was getting notification for comments that were subsequently not appearing on the blog, including some from regular readers (karrde in particular seemed to have a few routed that way).

Anyway, I found them all in the spam folder, and made sure they got posted.

This also explains why there are a few right answers for yesterday’s brain teaser…..Eric’s answer was one of the ones that got caught up in the filter, and thus wasn’t there when Geek Vader got it right, even though it’s time stamped several hours before.

I’ll be more vigilant about this in the future.

When I was younger I used to spend a pretty strange amount of time reading through brain teaser books. As such, I occasionally hear a brain teaser and know the answer without being able to remember how in the world you get there. That’s what happened with today’s teaser…. I heard it on the Skeptics Guide to the Universe podcast this morning, answered immediately, then spent the rest of the train ride working out why I was right.  I got there somewhere near Hyde Park.

Lets see how you do:  A jeweler has 9 pearls, all identical shape and feel.  He knows one weighs slightly more than the other 8, but all he has to measure with is a balance scale (one with two arms that compares weights to each other). What is the minimum number of times he needs to use the scale in order to figure out for certain which is the heavy pearl?

Roe vs Wade turns 40 today, and whatever you think of it, I hope you can appreciate that this is an effective graphic (from the Pew Research Center, via WaPo)

As someone who spends an inordinate amount of time thinking about data and using the internet, I tend to get pretty interested in how internet companies are using data to think about me.  

From the LOTR project:

I was curious what Nate Silver was going to do until the next campaign season started….analyzing growth in government spending seems like a great project to me.

Also from the NYT, an interactive pick your own New York based basketball team game.  I’m thinking Kareem’s the first pick I’d make.

I’ve already started scouring Craigslist and yardsales for Legos, so I was interested to see this article on why they’re so popular (yeah, I’d say they’re for the little lord but I am STOKED to get to play with them again).

This blog picks a random spot every day and takes a picture of it.  Surprisingly fascinating.

And just because it’s Friday, the 40 best dog GIFs of all time.

I ran in to this post on Ann Althouse’s blog yesterday, and was intrigued by her comment that ladies looking for a man should move away from the east coast. She linked to a map from the NYT that showed where the unmarried men in the 18-34 demographic tended to live, and indeed at the top of the list were states like Wyoming, Alaska and North Dakota.

After taking a look at the map and accompanying graph though, I was a little baffled by her follow up:

But you guys, in New York and Massachusetts (and #1, my home state, Delaware), you have rich pickings in the female-heavy disproportion, where you can continue to behave in ways that women will angst over in the pages of the New York Times, which the guys in North Dakota and Alaska and Wyoming probably don’t read, but if they did, would they shed a tear for you?

Being a Massachusetts resident who hasn’t been on the dating market in a few years, I was curious how bad our “female-heavy disproportion” was…..so I scrolled down.  I was a little surprised to find out that every single state in the nation has more young unmarried men than women.  I normally like Althouse quite a bit, and I was a little surprised to see this oversight there*.  I immediately checked the comments and found that it took over 30 comments before someone even mentioned the numbers, and it was around comment 60 that someone finally spelled out that men were actually the majority everywhere (at least on the state level).  In case you’re curious, feminists were directly blamed for making women the majority in comment 6.

Since that part had already been corrected in the comments by the time I got there, I added this:

From the 2010 census, the population of Massachusetts is 8 times the population of North Dakota…and it’s 25-34 year old population is 10 times as large. If you assume half of people in that demographic are single (just to pick a random number), then Massachusetts would actually have 193,000 more single men than North Dakota even though Massachusetts has a lower percentage.  So basically, your odds might be slightly worse, but your selection is much bigger. Which you prefer probably depends on what you’re looking for.

I always find it a little fascinating when people default to presuming the “odds” model of dating works better than the “numbers” method…..because in real life most people use the numbers method.  Young people tend to move to cities, then back out once they’re married.  When you’re only looking for one, numbers matter more than odds.

Oh, and in case you’re curious about the cities she was presumably referencing, here’s the city data.  Men still outnumber women in Boston, and in most cities actually.  Even NYC is more even than many would have you believe.

*To be fair, I think she was more annoyed at the next NYT article she linked to in that post that portrayed North Dakota men as bad people.  I don’t think the state populations were her overall point.

It’s already been solved, but can you top this answer in thoroughness?