A few good graphs

From the Journal of Irreproducible Results site:





The second graph, while linked on the JIR page, is actually part of an outstanding letter to the Kansas School Board regarding intelligent design. Check it out.

Sacagawea dollars: they're big in Ecuador

Half of the Sacagawea U.S. dollar coins are currently in circulation in Ecuador, according to Tom Zeller Jr. in the Ny Times' "Lede" blog.

I think the other half are in U.S. Post Office stamp-vending machines. Whenever I buy a book of stamps with a $20 bill, I get a fistful of (coin) dollars back - so I feel like I hit it big at the casino, or possibly robbed a pirate.

Anyway, dollar coins suck, but they apparently cost a lot less to make than bills. So they're introducing new dollar coins with some presidents' faces on them.

'America is not at war'

More commentary on the military/civilian divide. This is from a forwarded e-mail, so there's no telling if it's Photoshopped or what. But anyway:

Molly Ivins was 62

The NY Times obit about Molly Ivins, the journalist who had worked there and last night died of breast cancer, includes some passages worth repeating:

In 1976, her writing, which she said was often fueled by “truly impressive amounts of beer,” landed her a job at The New York Times. She cut an unusual figure in The Times newsroom, wearing blue jeans, going barefoot and bringing in her dog, whose name was an expletive.

...

“Naturally, I was miserable, at five times my previous salary,” she later wrote. “The New York Times is a great newspaper: it is also No Fun.”

...

Covering an annual chicken slaughter in New Mexico in 1980, she used a sexually suggestive phrase, which her editors deleted from the final article.

(The Washington Post obit tells the story a little differently, leaving me all the more curious: In 1982, after she used a colorful colloquialism to described a local chicken-killing festival, the Times and Ms. Ivins recognized that it was time to part ways.)

What did she say??

...

Ms. Ivins learned she had breast cancer in 1999 and was typically unvarnished in describing her treatments. “First they mutilate you; then they poison you; then they burn you,” she wrote. “I have been on blind dates better than that.”

She is missed.