I'm amused at the absurd responses here... However, for me, sex is rare, and it's got nothing to do with hormones, or being attracted to my wife... It has to do with being wiped tired all the time from working 12 hour days, watching kids, yardwork, renovations, you name it... Given my wife works every bit as hard as I do... she's just as wiped.

If I took that out of the equation and just thought of 'the sex'... I'd have to say the quality of the sex when we were actually making babies, was so far and away better than any sex I've ever had anything else just sort of pales in comparison...

of the white stripes...

Crawl out from under your rock.

I find it interesting you didn't seem to be complaining that the time series adjusted numbers were likely inflated when they rose far faster than they should have over the winter... That Harper's article was a !@#$ing crock filled with nothing but innuendo and suspicion. ALL of those numbers are put forth for good reasons, in the open, and justified by academic economists. The PROBLEM is with the media overhyping 'horserace' numbers that intend wittle down something as complex as a $10T economy to three or four indicators. It can't be done, and quite frankly I was under the impression that this was entirely your mission at 'how the world works'.

I did read the article actually, and it was filled with innuendo and suspicion. When he talks about conspiracies of past administrations fiddling with the numbers produced by BLS, he doesn't use any smoking guns, he merely posits that there is motivation, and the methodolgy changes, from this he draws the conclusion that BLS is the puppet of the administration. It's a crap argument that isn't based in fact, it's based on inuendo and suspicion.

What I found most galling was the author's complete omission of a BusinessWeek article about a year ago that had actual, founded critism of the numbers produced by BLS for the IPP. It underscored the complexity in what the numbers are trying to achieve.

Having worked and lived with academic econommists my entire life, I assure not one of them has EVER felt compelled warp truth to some 'other' nefarious keeper. Being an academic statistician, I can futher assure you that while I am perfectly capable of confusing any fool walking down the street with numbers I (and 90% of the people I've studied and worked with) use the numbers to infer the true nature of a problem as described by the data at hand.

In one of my first courses on my to a PhD in statistics a professor pointed out to us: "Statistics is about data reduction... it hopes to collapse a hopelessly complex problem down to a single defining charactaristic on which sensible desisions can be made." That's it, nothing else. The mechanism on which it collapses the information can be manipulated, as can the expectations on what the summary actually means. Trying to infer definatively the state of an economy that does $10T in business every year to three or four numbers is a fool's game, and I expected better of 'how the world works'

The fairly decent critisism of statistical numbers I referenced in my last post can be found here:

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_25/b4039006.htm

just about any spreadsheet written for linux can handle an arbitrary number of rows...

I'm not sure about open office, but somehow I suspect it can as well...

It wasn't that there was no opposition, rather if there was, it was usually a shrill characture of a '60's radical. Having attended every demostration in DC since the start of the war, I was appalled at the complete lack of coverage of the crowds. In fact Salon.com was nearly as guilty as I have a clear memory of an article by some 'expert' who claimed the crowd estimates were absurd. I'm pretty sure I've got plenty of pictures taken by balancing on a utility box that disproves him if you're interested. Given how many other people I saw with pictures, video cameras, etc., I'm pretty sure it would have been a trivial endevor to have shown the cross-streets he sighted were in fact over run with people for blocks, yet the editors here couldn't be bothered any more than any other news outlet.

I lamented the 'loss' of A-B last night. My thinking wasn't that the beer symbolizes America, rather it's the symbolism that a foreign company is interested in owning something that for all practical purposes only Americans consume.

It's almost as if we're being played for suckers by having to pay profit to people who rightly look down at us for being so idiotic as to drink stuff they wouldn't serve their pigs.

'In my book, you get points for staying out of the can'

All this business about his being a war hero for being a prisoner... It's a grand thing, a remarkable sacrifice, but a prereq for the presidency?

Not so mucgh.

Yeah, it fails for me as well... that is to say the papers I've written don't come up first. What it did do, however was link me to completely new and different people with the same name, something that never comes from google.

To be frank, I've been annoyed with google lately. It seems whenever I perform a search, 'how to make dovetail by hand' for example. I either get the wikipedia entry, or a series of links that are either asking me for money to teach me said skill, or if they are 'free' they are liberally peppered with ads sponsored by google.

In cuil, however I get what the web was made for: some schmuck who knows something and just wants to share.