onion intern

The Onion's "Weekender" magazine's headline is "I'm Kinda Getting The Hang Of Filling Tori Spelling Up With Babies: We Chat With Dean McDermott." The image mouseover text (and page title) read instead "Babys" and "Dylan McDermott." If you're the kind of person who can't copy the word "babies" correctly, shouldn't you at least be the kind of person who knows which McDermott Tori Spelling is married to? Seems unfortunate to fail on both counts.

how many Americans have seen avatar?

Let's give up on that question and focus on a simpler one -- how many tickets have been sold in the U.S. to see Avatar? If you search for this online, you'll always come down to Box Office Mojo's numbers -- everyone just cites them. They say 93 million tickets, based on revenue of 709 million and an average ticket price of $7.61. This might work for most movies, but for Avatar it's obviously crap. The average ticket price for Avatar needs to be adjusted to include IMAX and 3d showings. Box Office Mojo, while not doing this, helpfully has an article about the breakdown of Avatar's ticket sales: around 64% 3D, 16% IMAX, and 20% 2D. The average price of an IMAX ticket is $14.58, and the article guesses that there's a $10 average price for 3D tickets. 709m/(.64*10+.16*14.58+.20*7.61) is around 69.1 million tickets. This puts it somewhere around Independence Day, Spider Man, and Love Story in number of tickets sold. Note that other movies' ticket totals on Box Office Mojo's list should be correctly calculated because they don't have these large 3D and IMAX components. For future reference, the "real" average price for an Avatar ticket, given Box Office Mojo's prices and breakdowns, is $10.25. So as a rough approximation, just divide Avatar's gross ticket sales revenue by 10 to get the actual number of tickets sold.

blindingly obvious

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/03/business/global/03toyota.html says that the U.S. may require that pressing the brake pedal make your car stop (even if you're stepping on the gas). Why hasn't this been a feature since, I don't know, forever, is baffling to me. If you don't have a stick shift, when do you ever want to brake and keep gas going to the engine at the same time? Even then, once you're moving there's no reason to brake and keep gas going.

navel-gazing

Paul Krugman posted http://gawker.com/5482309/stereotyping-people-by-their-favorite-new-york-times-writer, which is good, and funnier because he posted it. With some public figures, I routinely imagine them watching/reading the things about them that I do. For instance, I imagine Obama watching the Daily Show a lot. He doesn't. The nice thing about Krugman is, I think he actually does do a lot (though more) of the stuff I do, so he actually sees this stuff.

liberal elite

The Daily Show has diversified its correspondents to the point that there is now exactly one white American male on the show -- Jon Stewart. If you throw in Christian, zero. Impressive. Of course, it also points to the smaller number of correspondents in regular rotation. John Oliver does like 60% of the reporting, with Cenac, Mandvi, and Bee doing the rest, and Jones doing voiceovers. So it's still usually two white men talking.