Lies, damned lies, and statistics

Here are a few random observations/numbers for your edification.



The bridge in Minneapolis was rated as deficient in 1990. That sounds terribly negligent until you read that there are 70,000+ more just like it in the US. Either the standards are too high, or the entire county's infrastructure is badly in need of repair. Regardless, Minneapolis is not an aberration (the Alaskan Way viaduct comes to mind).

Construction on the new Minnesota Twins ballpark has been halted. Two thirds of the cost was publicly funded. I guess they didn't have anything better to spend taxpayer dollars on. Can you say "damning"?

To replace/repair all of those 70,000+ bridges would cost $188 billion. At the time of this posting, the cost of the Iraq war was $450 billion, 4 and a half years in. [sigh]



The other day I watched a crow eat a plastic bag. He just... ate it. Pulled it apart piece by piece and ate every last scrap. Sure, it had some tantalizing artificial nacho cheese product on it, but still. Put that shit on a bigmac or somethin' at least. Gross.



Emigration to Canada has hit an all time high of 10,942 in 2006. Like box office records that get broken every year, a raw number isn't as meaningful as a number adjusted for percentage of population (or for inflation, in the movie analogy). The population increases every year, so naturally the raw number will increase, all other factors remaining roughly equal. How does that compare to the population overall?

With an estimated population of 301,139,947, that means 0.0036% of our population left in 2006 to Canada. In 2005 that same number is 0.0033%. I don't find an increase of 0.0003% (about 900 people) to be particularly significant, which is the central thrust of the article (that this is some huge increase).

In contrast, Canadian immigration to the US in 2006 was 23,913, down from 29,930 in 2005. That corresponds to 0.0725% of our friendly northern beer swillers moving here for 2006, and 0.0917% for 2005 (please bring a hockey team to Seattle while you're at it, ok buddies?). That's a decrease of 0.0192%. While I recognize the upswing in American emigration and downswing in Canadian immigration, a more relevant point is being ignored.

Go read the first article, this one, and tell me if "The United States is more than 20 times more popular with Canadians than Canada is with Americans" is the gist you get ([.0725/.0036], which is the more generous set of data, the number is 28 for the 2005 set). Take from that what you will.


Oh yeah, and Canada is like, lame and stuff. Just so that clever joke is out of the way.



I have a new favorite place. This store. It's full of snooty European beer. Most of it's Belgian, which averages around 7-10% alcohol. I just pick random stuff. So far I haven't been disappointed. I asked the guy working there if I could bring my sleeping bag and sleep in the back room. It's a damn good thing that place is on the way home, and next to Taco Time to boot! It's good to branch out and learn your city.



I was on the bus the other day. It was full enough that people were standing. I got the last seat next to some retarded guy in a wheel chair. He was nice, but I couldn't understand a thing he was saying. Some lady got on and stood right there in front of me. Every time the bus accelerated at all, a curve, a stop, a start, she fell over and grasped dramatically at one rail or another.

I've seen this behavior before. This is the passive aggressive "gimmie a seat, you brute" game. I thought it was funny. I wanted to see if she would do the stumble dance all the way across town or finally give up and like, ya know, hold the stupid rail that was right in front of her. But wheel chair guy told me to give up my seat loud enough for everyone to hear (oh, now he says something intelligible). [sigh]


I love it when women understand men. Warms me heart, it does. Gives me hope that I'll find a normal woman someday.