Around here we prefer range voting to approval voting or IRV.

This is not your father’s Macbook.

This one is going into the ebiquity research archives.

John Bohannon, Robin Goldstein and Alexis Herschkowitsch, Can People Distinguish Pâté from Dog Food?, American Association of Wine Economists, AAWE Working Paper No. 36, April 2009.

“Considering the similarity of its ingredients, canned dog food could be a suitable and inexpensive substitute for pâté or processed blended meat products such as Spam or liverwurst. However, the social stigma associated with the human consumption of pet food makes an unbiased comparison challenging. To prevent bias, Newman’s Own dog food was prepared with a food processor to have the texture and appearance of a liver mousse. In a double-blind test, subjects were presented with five unlabeled blended meat products, one of which was the prepared dog food. After ranking the samples on the basis of taste, subjects were challenged to identify which of the five was dog food. Although 72% of subjects ranked the dog food as the worst of the five samples in terms of taste (Newell and MacFarlane multiple comparison, P<0.05), subjects were not better than random at correctly identifying the dog food.”

It puts a new spin on the concept of eating your own dog food.

While we can use Twitter for news or reports on unfolding events from the field, it’s a noisy channel. As usual, Randall Munroe captures it well. I especially like its highlighting how Twitter’s search page lets you know there have been dozens of new matching tweets since you searched a moment ago. It seems that the flu-related tweets are arriving faster than anyone can read them.

The common observation that correlation does not imply causation is a cold and cruel idea that knows no mercy.

I thought this cartoon from a recent issue of the New Yorker offers an accurate comment on modern life.