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.

Travesty of justice and statistics

In a development that boggles my mind, the U.S. court system is completely ignoring a basic tenet of statistics and (wrongly?) convicting people because of it. Police are running partial DNA samples through databases of millions of people, and claiming that the chances of anyone in the database matching is the same as the chance of one person matching. That's like saying that the chance that someone has hazel eyes is 1 in 20, so the chance that anyone in the world has hazel eyes is 1 in 20. A man was recently convicted of a 38-year-old rape-murder in San Francisco based on a degraded DNA sample. The jury was told only that the chance of a match was 1 in 1.1 million, and not that, given the size of the database, the chance of a random match was 1 in 3. The judge prevented the defense from challenging this number, and even from saying that the defendant was a suspect only because of this match. The Washington Monthly and LA Times have articles on it. The SF Chronicle apparently couldn't be bothered to do any research, just putting out the prosecutor's line. The Washington Monthly article even points out that someone was fingered using this technique for a crime she could not have committed, since she was in prison at the time. How the courts could so willfully misunderstand statistics, and how the FBI's scientists can have the gall to testify to false odds, really baffles and enrages me.

Lyon->Saint-Louis->BSL->SXF->TXL->CDG->ITM->KOJ

My friend suffers from being Russian. Mainly this manifests itself in soulful depression and occasional bouts of invading Georgia, but it's now causing him massive travel problems. He's currently on his way to Japan, via the above itinerary. His plan was to go to Berlin, settle some issues with his old landlord, then fly Berlin-Paris-Osaka-Kagoshima for a conference. Unfortunately, his Japanese visa only came through today, and his flight is tomorrow. From Berlin. As is bastardly policy, if you miss one leg of the trip, everything is canceled. So, while it's easy to get to Paris from Lyon, he had to get to Berlin. Moreover, while it's not clear, it seems possible that the university, which bought this ticket, might ask for its money from him if he misses the flight. There are no direct flights from Lyon to Berlin. He found a pretty cheap solution: take the train to Basel, fly Easyjet to Berlin, spend the night, and take his flight the next day. Unfortunately, the Basel airport is actually in French territory, and French air traffic controllers are on strike because there is a proposal to centralize European air traffic control. So his flight tonight was canceled. There's a flight early tomorrow morning, getting into Berlin at 8:40 am. His flight is at 9:55 from a different airport at least half an hour away. Online check-in not possible. The current plan is for his girlfriend (who lives in Berlin) to go to the other airport before him and attempt to check in at a kiosk, so that his boarding pass is ready even if the 9:25 check-in deadline has passed. He may also have to ditch his luggage, at the first airport if it's slow off the carousel, and probably at the second airport with his girlfriend in any case. Oh, and his phone is dead. And the flight to Berlin may be canceled. Stay tuned for the thrilling conclusion tomorrow!

Dreaming in French

I had a dream in French a few nights ago. This was supposed to be a big achievement. Thing is, though, there are different kinds of dreams. There are those weird dreams in which nothing makes much sense and it's clear that your brain is inventing everything. And there are stress dreams in which you dream about a situation before it happens because you're stressing about it. In this case, I hadn't yet made an appointment to see the doctor about my non-improving knee, so I dreamt that I was seeing her, and that I was reproaching her for not telling me to put my knee in a brace. Unfortunately, I didn't know the word for brace (attelle), and I wasn't thinking of the word for wrap, so my brain substituted "accrocher" (to hang) for "wrapping." Not what I think people mean when they talk about "dreaming in French." Things were slightly better a night or two later when I dreamt of saying "tu" to someone and then correcting myself and saying "vous." At least that was some weird dream. But I'm still making obvious grammatical errors, even in my own world.

Lyon taxis

Because of my knee, I've been taking a lot of taxis. I've learned recently that taxis in Lyon have a "minimum fare" of 6.10. I didn't believe it initially, but it's been confirmed by independent cabbies. However, 6.10 is not the initial fare on the meter, which makes the initial fare on the meter kind of silly. Why not just start with 6.10 and keep the meter constant for a while?

should i just had said "FIRST!!"?

One advantage of being up much earlier than everyone else is getting to comment before they get a chance. Thus, I was the first commenter for
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/19/disinflation/
I wrote a complimentary thing about how he was the most depressing voice since Cassandra, and then said "A minor typo -- *weak economy," because I'm anal like that. My comment was moderated for a while, and then when I check it now, I find that "week economy" has been corrected. Fine, I think. My comment was probably moderated out of existence, and he just changed the text. Fine. But then there are multiple comments just saying "weak not week"! All posted hours after mine! I want credit for my blog copy-editing!