Tyler Cowen notes some interesting statistics on the months during which one is most likely to die of a given cause. You’re most likely to die an accidental death in August, and most likely to drown in July.

No surprise on the death by drowning statistic. Several children drown every summer in Memphis when it starts getting hot.

On the other hand, you are most likely to fall to your death during December. Tyler wonders whether that statistic is driven by holiday suicides flinging themselves off buildings and bridges, but I suspect there’s a simpler explanation. December is the month in which people climb up on the roof to hang holiday lights and other decorations.

Tyler doesn’t speculate on November, the month during which you are most likely to be shot. At first I thought maybe this has something to with family arguments over Thanksgiving dinner. But then I remembered: deer season!

I’m not a huge aviation buff, but growing up around the Air Force it’s hard not to at least have some passing interest in the topic. Apropos of that, Michael Jennings has a long, informative post about the Boeing 757, which will no longer be produced after 2004.

Also at TransportBlog, Patrick Crozier has a post that attempts to compare the safety records of various jet aircraft. As he notes, the figures are “a bit dodgy because there will be quite a few of the more modern planes that haven't crashed yet.” Or, in econometrician-speak, there’s right-censoring of the survival data. Nonetheless the figures suggest aircraft are getting safer over time, as we’d probably expect (due in part to better materials, more rigorous safety inspections, and improved automation of aircraft).

Daniel Drezner and Roger Simon have been mixing it up over their favorite films.

I’ve had a list of 10 movies sitting on my personal home page for a few years; for sake of comparison, here they are (in semi-random order); all of them made in the past 20 years:

1. Lone Star (John Sayles) – Examining the secrets of a small Texas town on the Rio Grande.
2. Secrets and Lies (Mike Leigh) – Examining the secrets of some really messed up people in London.
3. Fargo (Coen Brothers) – A kidnapping gone bad with a very pregnant cop investigating it.
4. A Fish Called Wanda (Charles Crichton and John Cleese) – British lawyer gets involved with a band of jewel thieves.
5. Blood Simple (Coen Brothers) – Woman gets caught cheating on her goofy husband with an almost-equally goofy guy by a psychotic private investigator.
6. Exotica (Atom Egoyan) – Canadian tax inspector hangs out at a strip club.
7. Four Weddings and a Funeral (Mike Newell) – English guy with eccentric friends falls in love with gorgeous American woman.
8. Jackie Brown (Quentin Tarentino) – Airline stewardess gets busted for running drug money for Samuel L. Jackson with a goofy beard.
9. The Sweet Hereafter (Atom Egoyan) – Canadian lawyer investigates the aftermath of a horrific bus accident, while he deals with demons of his own.
10. Zero Effect (Jake Kasdan) – World’s weirdest detective (with sidekick who does most of the real work) investigates what happened to a CEO’s keys.

Not a lot of overlap (just one movie) with Dan’s list. If I made a “top 20,” though, I’d probably have Say Anything, Courage Under Fire (which Denzel Washington deserved an Oscar for), Groundhog Day, Schindler’s List, and Saving Private Ryan on my list too. Rounding out the 20, I’d have to add Pulp Fiction, Hoop Dreams, Insomina (the original version with Stellan Skaarsgard), The Spanish Prisoner, Out of Sight, and Gattaca. And probably 50 other movies too that should have made the cut. And if I took off the 20-year restriction…

Venomous Kate: smarter, classier, and better-looking than Ann Coulter.

I kid you not (OK, maybe I kid you a little)… Gary Farber has the scoop.

Steven Taylor has a copy of a column he wrote on seeing Mikhail Gorbachev speak recently at Auburn University. In my youth I found Gorbachev a very interesting figure and read a couple of his books—for some odd reason, they had copies of them at the dinky base library at RAF Fairford. Of course, it probably didn’t hurt that the leggy brunette I had a thing for was a fan of Gorby as well. (Ah, my misspent youth…) Anyway, back from the digression… like Steven, I’m stunned by how much things have changed since then. And I think Steven has it more-or-less on the mark when he says:

The ironic thing about this new era, which in many ways is less threatening in absolute terms than the Cold War Era (terrorist are rather unlikely to destroy large parts of the world), it is more threatening to us in specific, personal terms (the odds of being on a plane, or being in a building that might be bombed has increased). And, aside from a perception of enhanced personal risk, the world itself is more unstable.

One thing I would note, however, is that global terrorism was alive and well during the Cold War too; ask the Israelis in Munich, American servicemen in Berlin and Beirut, West German politicians, the people who died on Pan Am 103 (and on the ground at Lockerbie), the people of Latin America, the Quebecois, or the British (both in Ulster and in Britain proper). I think the main difference from then and now is that the global projection capabilities of terror groups have improved, although I don’t think anything has really changed that makes terrorism more feasible—9/11, or its equivalent, could have happened in 1980. The important difference is that now there’s a group that simultaneously has the audacity,* motive, capability, and opportunity to carry out large-scale attacks on U.S. soil.

James Joyner is compiling links to photos of bloggers of the fairer sex. One glaring oversight: the omission of the ladies of madpony.com.

Jeff Taylor at Hit and Run finds it odd that the Chinese astronaut didn’t see the Great Wall of China from space.

I have become convinced that for blogging to go mainstream, first it must overtake that other pretender to the journalistic throne, the alternative newsweekly (or alt-weekly for short). To do that, we must determine what makes the alt-weekly successful.

Rather than the obvious possibilities—lengthy, one-sided articles on progressive causes, an editorial slant that considers Tom Tomorrow the necessary counterbalance to the opposing ideology espoused by Ted Rall, the gratuitous use of four-letter words, a level of commitment to journalistic ethics that would make Jayson Blair blush, or the savvy copyediting skill that somehow makes every serious news story jump to the page with the ads for the titty bars on it*—I believe alt-weeklies succeed primarily because of the innovation of the “I Saw You” (ISY) personals ad.

So, in order to compete, I present Signifying Nothing’s first ISY ad.

You: cute girl waiting behind me at Papa John’s on Jackson Avenue around 9:50 p.m. while I futzed with the debit card receipt.
Me: well, you got here, so you’ve probably figured it out by now.

Now to get the bugs worked out…

Apologies for the light posting; I’ve been busy working on integrating some changes into the department web site. More posting soon (I think)...

I’ve been spending most of my morning trying to free up enough space to install the SimCity 4 Rush Hour Expansion Pack on my Windows 98 partition ($19.66 at Walmart, before the $10 mail-in rebate offer). So far I’ve:

• Accidentally blown away 50GB of Debian packages when I tried to use parted to resize a partition to free enough space to move my root partition.
• Faced mysterious crashes when using reiserfs for my new root partition that went away when I reformatted to use xfs instead. (Advantage: SGI.)
• Sat for two hours while reiserfs tried to reconstruct the tree of my old Debian package mirror disk (which currently won’t mount).
• Accidentally set the frontside bus speed of my motherboard to 133Mhz (because I forgot what processor I have in the machine… I’ve now concluded it’s a 1.15 GHz Athlon XP, and no I don’t know what PSR it has). That’s because I flashed my BIOS thinking that would fix the mysterious system crashes.
• Tried to pay my DirecTV bill online (I got a lovely “our systems are down” message).

Needless to say, I’m nowhere close to being able to play the game yet. Grr. And it remains to be seen whether I can actually resize the FAT32 partition my Win98 install lives on without accidentally blowing it away too. Which probably means I’m going to have to either find my original Win98 CD, or break down and install the copy of WinXP Pro I paid $50 for sometime last year I have lying around (which I was really hoping to save for… well, I don’t know what really).

My copy of Virginia Postrel’s new book, The Substance of Style: How the Rise of Aesthetic Value is Remaking Commerce, Culture, and Consciousness, had shown up in a box on my chair by the time I got to work this morning. I’ve only gotten through the Preface, but it’s been a good read so far. (I would have sat down at one of those nice new tables they have on the rear porch of Weir Hall and read some more, but a half-dozen other people had the same idea I had. They weren’t reading Virginia’s book, though.)

I also watched a bit of the CBC news on Newsworld International this morning—a rerun of last night’s National, with Peter Mansbridge looking appropriately dour, as always. Apparently the Alliance and Progressive Conservatives, Canada’s two main parties of the right, are making another run at a merged organization, tentatively to be named the Conservative Party. I’m not sure that it will fly. The PCs seem to me like warmed over British “one nation” Tories, while the Alliance seem more like the Texas GOP minus the libertarian instincts. More importantly, the Liberals are positioned to capture the median voter in Ontario and Quebec, which is where the votes are anyway under Canada’s system of not-quite-proportional allocation of seats in Parliament. So even if they pull off the grand alliance, I’m not sure it solves much in the long run. (Then again, I’ve been half-expecting Canada to collapse due to its own internal contradictions for the past decade. Of course, states with even less reason to exist, like Belgium, have persisted as well. Blame the Treaty of Westphalia.)

I also learned that a tenth dwarf was added to the presidential race on the Democratic side down here, some guy from Arkansas who apparently is a lot like Howard Dean but spends more time hanging out with war criminals (the latter part I learned from Matthew; Peter didn’t mention that part).

But that story got less play than news that (a) everyone in the media and Parliament is now treating Paul Martin like he’s the prime minister, instead of Jean Chrétien, and (b) Canada’s opening seven more consulates in the United States next year. Amazingly they’ve just gotten around to adding Houston, the fourth-largest city in the United States. Apparently they’re also opening up in a place called “Raleigh-Durham,” which I was under the impression were actually two distinct cities. Then again, so once were Buda and Pest. Or, for that matter, Toronto and Etobicoke.

Dan Drezner’s blog is a year old today. Congratulations and many, many happy returns!

Christopher Genovese writes about his tour of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center today; it’s definitely worth a read—and not just because the people who pay my salary have experiments running out there.

Ok, this is something that’s been bugging me the past week: someone I ran into at APSA (I forget who) said that Evanescence is a Christian band. I don’t see it. I suppose you could read the lyrics of some of the songs on Fallen that way, but then again you could read “Big Yellow Taxi” as a pro-environmental song too—even though the feeling it engenders in me is to go to the radio station and set fire to all of their copies of the song, which would probably release all sorts of industrial chemicals into the atmosphere. And it hasn’t given me the irresistable urge to go to church or anything. So I’m just very confused.

Anyway, here’s a Rolling Stone article that didn’t clarify the situation for me in the slightest.

Yes, this is me singing “The Boys of Summer” (the Don Henley song, now famous once again in the form of the cover version by the Ataris) at the Blind Pig in Ann Arbor earlier this month. See you on the flip side!

Acidman thinks the design of Signifying Nothing is too busy. But at least I don’t have any photos of me—or Brock—shirtless on the front page…

James at OTB lets it rip, with some extra-special goodness for fans of America’s Team.

Glenn Reynolds reports on his test drive of the Mazda RX-8 sports car. When we were in England, Dad bought an RX-7 (1981 model, I think), which would have been shipped back to the U.S. to be my first car if the entire undercarriage hadn’t rusted out. That was a fun car to ride around in.

I pride myself on trying to learn something new every day. This weekend was a particular bonanza of new factual information—some significant, some not. I present it all and let you decide what’s important and what isn’t.

• Ypsilanti was originally called “Watertown,” but was renamed in honor of a hero of the Greek revolt against the Turks.
• Talent at volleyball is apparently not genetically-determined.
• Ypsilanti’s student ghetto is less impressive than Ann Arbor’s—but somewhat more like a real ghetto.
• Eastern Michigan University’s PhD program in psychology is only three years old.
• It’s hard to identify words that rhyme with statistical terms.
• Some peoples’ buttocks are apparently located half-way up their backs.

And, a few unanswered questions:

• If you redact 28 straight pages from a report, and everyone with half a brain already knows what those 28 pages say, what exactly was the point of the exercise?
• If Miller High Life is the “Champagne of Beers,” what is the Cold Duck of beers?
• Why do women travel in pairs?
• Is Bob Graham really running for president, or is this just an elaborate joke that nobody has let me in on?

I don’t know what’s worse: the fact I can’t sleep, or the fact that the meteorologist currently on The Weather Channel, a reasonably attractive woman named Jen Carfagno, has a fan site. Actually, multiple fan sites. And a Yahoo! discussion group, with no fewer than 319 members, that describes her as “terminally cute.”

Then again, maybe I shouldn’t poke fun, considering I have a website full of photos of pavement. Glass houses and all…

Those of a more serious bent may want to know about the progress MLG&W is making restoring power in Memphis. In addition to Brock, my mom and grandparents are still without power as well; their neighborhood has started a betting pool on when their power will be restored.

Here’s the photos I took at my 10th high school reunion. I’ll see if I can collect some others from Wayne and maybe some other people too.

Erica, one of those who have RSVP’d for Dean’s blog party on Saturday (hence explaining how I discovered her blog), has apparently produced a reasonable facsimile of the sangria produced at Casa Dominick’s in Ann Arbor. Not only is the sangria there good, they also give change with $2 bills.

The short version: We came, we ate, we drank, we danced, we left.

The long version: A journalistic account of our tenth high school reunion would probably focus on its unrepresentativeness. Even accounting for the otherwise-disposed (due to imprisonment, disability, or death), the attendance was quite skewed. Most attendees appeared to still reside in Ocala or its environs. African-Americans and Latinos made up a goodly portion of our graduating class, but few of either were to be seen. Some cliques were far better represented than others; among the nerds, attendance was sparse, while the former “in-crowd” was abundant. But that account would be incomplete.

Of all the people I knew well and particularly wanted to catch up with, I only saw two. I wish more of those people had come. But I also got to see other people—the vaguely-remembered, the long-since-forgotten, and the wouldn’t-have-known-them-from-Adam—some of whom I got to know better. And I got to demonstrate the all-purpose white guy dance, always a plus for any social occasion.

Now, maybe some of the other attendees were stuck in the past, trying to recapture the glory days when they were the unchallenged Titans of the social pecking order. But for the rest of us, it was an opportunity to restore old connections and make new ones—and who could miss out on a chance like that? So, here’s to hoping I’ll see a few more of us in 2008.

Thanks to Alex Knapp at Heretical Ideas for selecting my sidebar quote as his Quote of the Day.