Friday Special 70

Panoramic Snake River view in Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming

Launched today: GeoEye - to map, monitor, and measure the Earth

Seven Revolutions: What will the world look like in 2025?

Google unveils anticipated Chrome web browser

The Homer Simpson Euro

The art of the hobo nickel - carving new imagery into currency.

A man in Spain recently found a Euro coin with Homer Simpson carved into what was previously the bust of Spanish King Juan Carlos. Reuters link

HT Blogadilla - (hey guys, I love your layout!). Here's more currency from the Original Hobo Nickel Society.

How reliable are GDP estimates?

Not very. The graph depicts UK data - note that the 'latest estimate' is our best estimate but, of course, by no means the true value:

Thanks to Michael Blastland for putting the graph together. Here's his fifth article on the ways in which the media abuse statistics, scroll down the page for links to the other four.

Prison and TB

Using longitudinal TB and cross-sectional multidrug-resistant TB data for 26 eastern European and central Asian countries, we examined whether and to what degree increases in incarceration account for differences in population TB and multidrug-resistant TB burdens.

We find that each percentage point increase in incarceration rates relates to an increased TB incidence of 0.34%.

Net increases in incarceration account for a 20.5% increase in TB incidence or nearly three-fifths of the average total increase in TB incidence in the countries studied from 1991 to 2002.

The paper (gated) is here.

The voice dies

Don LaFontaine passed away, at the age of 68. As a kid, I often wondered how different the world -or at least the cinema- would be without him.

He was 'the narrator guy in all the movie trailers'. Here's a great youtube clip.

Fun with statistics, "which Palin is the mother?" edition

Well, Sarah, I'm calling you a liar. And not even a good one. Trig Paxson Van Palin is not your son. He is your grandson.

The Daily Kos has an 'interesting' story claiming that Sarah Palin's youngest son, who has been diagnosed with Down's syndrome, is really her daughter's son. There is much evidence presented, mainly consisting of pictures where certain bellies appear to be too large while others too small. But statistics deliver the killer argument:

The final point of interest is that Trig Palin has been diagnosed with Down's syndrome (aka trisomy 21). This is an interesting point, as chances of having offspring with Down's Syndrome increases from under 1% to 3% after a mother reaches the age of 40. However, 80% of the cases of Down's Syndrome are in mother's (sic) under the age of 35, through sheer quantities of births in this age group.

And of course, 99% of deaths are not due to suicide, so killing yourself is safe!

Thanks to Scatterplot for the pointer.

Obama on the beach

They don't come cuter than that! For many more pictures & a family bio, check out Obama's scrapbook.