Rorty Bomb

This is kind of a quirky not-really-musical follow-up to the recently posted "Africa" and "Total Eclipse of the Heart" entries. But basically, I like serious blogs with non-serious entries.//Rorty Bomb is a finance/personal blog written by Mike, "a financial engineer in the San Francisco Bay Area. Originally from Chicago, he enjoys economics, sociology, critical theory, tacos, whiskey and center-left politics on the side." 

Mike uses a sparse, words-and-white-background minimalist prefab theme for the blog, which he decorates with a smattering of silly pictures for comic effect.  The blog is named after a difficult-to-pronounce philosopher. Rorty Bomb features timely heavy-duty subjects like the financial crisis (proposing his own gloomy Do-It-Yourself stress tests!) and the impending Iranian Twitter Revolution.

But better yet,  Rorty Bomb includes this gem, which was linked to by the New York Time's Opinionator:

"Good Hangovers

There are too many negative 'I don’t remember last night' hangover stories that involve a tiger in the bathroom and people missing. I want to share a positive one. One night after finals weeks concluded in graduate school, me and my roommate were overserved by the local bar.

I woke up the next morning not sure how the night concluded. I went to check my email and saw 4 emails I didn’t expect from Ebay. Are you familiar with Ebay’s 'Buy it Now' feature? I had received two emails at 3 in the morning saying that I had won two 'Buy it Now' auctions, and two additional emails saying my payment via paypal had been received and my product would be shipping in the morning.

I was quite scared to open those emails, but it turned out I had purchased Toto’s Toto IV (featuring the hit songs 'Africa' and 'Rosanna') on vinyl, as well as a 7″ single for Bonnie Tyler’s 'Total Eclipse of the Heart.' With shipping, this was a total of about $11, perhaps the best $11 I’ve spent in my life.

We pieced together that this purchase was made to settle an argument over me playing Rosanna on the dive bar’s internet jukebox, when Africa was available. My stance, that you should switch up the Toto, was taken as me endorsing Rosanna as a better song than Africa, which is nonsense, though I may have said something akin to 'we really need to hear this on vinyl before we can make a judgement call.' "

Pretty ace.(From mjg)

Peter Donnelly: How juries are fooled by statistics

Peter Donnelly: How juries are fooled by statistics is a TED talk by by Oxford mathematician Peter Donnelly, and thought it was an interesting take on sensitivity/specificity and legal medicine. Further, I thought none of my friends would think this was interesting, but I thought TOTI readers might hear me out. It's a good example of why medical students should care about such things. (I would skip ahead to the relevant bit that starts at 11:03 minutes.)

Peter recounts the SIDS case ( = "cot death" in British), where lawyer Sally Clark was accused of murdering two of her children. In court, a pediatrician stated that the chance of both of them dying of SIDS in a family like hers was 1/73 million. The two deaths are, of course, likely not independent as they shared both environmental and genetic factors, and bad statistics were used to arrive at the figure. Sally was convicted.

Sally's sentence was eventually reversed on her second appeal, but she died in 2007. The Guardian stated "Her family said she had not recovered from the miscarriage of justice." The pediatrician, Sir Roy Meadow, faced a disrepute charge by Britain's General Medical Council, and was struck from the medical register. He was recently re-instated on appeal (stating he had not set himself up as a statistical expert). 

I think this is a nice illustration of why sensitivity and specificity matter more than just something to memorize for medical boards. 

New Math

New Math is a well-designed, simple website about concepts as math equations run by the mysterious CRAIG DAMRAUER. Craig claims to bake his ideas fresh every monday. Simple, delightful. Some of the ideas are rather half-baked, but I appreciate the fresh visual appeal.

As a tangential aside, I always have trouble spelling "equation." It makes sense that there is a T there, because the two sides equaTe but it's weird that everyone pronounces it equaSION. Like an invasion of equal signs. Sigh. I digress. Enjoy!

(From sorry, I forgot)

Zilch

Zilch is a 5-dice game of chance that imitates Yahtzee. It's awesome.

(From Buzzfeed)
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BONUS! An entry killed before it could be published due to a removed Youtube link:

Young Sarah Silverman was a Youtube video from Jimmi Kimmel's show showing a young Sarah Silverman. Sarah went on her boyfriend's show to promote her Comedy Central series. The re-united couple dance around the awkward situation of what happened in the interim of their semi-recent break-up, and use a tape from the early cenozoic era as a distractor. Youtube totally rained on my parade and took the video down. 

(From Buzzfeed)