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Nobody’s talking about the anal sex portion of a recently released survey on American sexual habits. “Evidently anal sex is too icky to mention in print. But not too icky to have been tried by 35 percent of young women and 40 to 44 percent of young men — or to have killed some of them.”
Odd size comparison of Yahoo and Google indices. I think their assumption (that a “series of random searches to both search engines should return more than twice as many results from Yahoo! than Google”) is pretty flawed. The number of returned results could vary because of the sites’ different optimizations for dictionary words, for searches with small result sets, and differences in how their search algorithms include or exclude relevant results. Put it this way: if I’m looking for a frying pan in my apartment, I’m gonna refine my search to the kitchen and not worry about the rest of the house, no matter how large it is. (via /.)
I love that Davenetics still shows up in these graphs of the top blogs on Technorati. I read Davenetics daily but the only reason it is on the list is because it’s linked in a default Blogger template. If T’rati actually looked at their “statistics” instead of just using them to market to us, this sort of thing is pretty easy to spot (if the ratio of the # of links vs. the # of sites linking is close to 1.0, the site may not belong on the list). (Oh, and Binary Bonsai is suspect as well…its high rank is at least partially due to a default link on a popular Wordpress template.)
MMORPG and the Dunbar number. “Overall, these statistics still support my original hypothesis in my Dunbar Number post that mean group sizes will be smaller than 150 for non-survival oriented groups.”
Comparison of the power law in war. Statistics show that fatalities in modern warfare trend toward non-G7 terrorism patterns rather than those of conventional warfare, independent of context.
Another in Edward Jay Epstein’s series on the business of Hollywood. This one’s about the secret industry reports done by the MPAA that reveal hard-to-come-by statistics about how much Hollywood is making from which businesses.
Racial disparities in tipping taxi drivers. African-American drivers were tipped 1/3 less than white drivers and African-American passengers tipped 50% less than white passengers.
Pokernomics: Steven Levitt is researching the economics of poker. If you send him statistics from your online games, he’ll share the results with you.
Comparing newspapers’ online “circulation” (# of blog links) with their offline circulation. The Christian Science Monitor had the highest ratio by far, with the Wall Street Journal being almost invisible on the web (which will eventually affect their influence, I think).
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