In the 3rd and final article in this series we’ll examine the national unemployment rate by various demographic factors. Earlier we had seen how widely the unemployment rate varied by state and yet while all states have had increases in unemployment rates since this recession started, many states are showing signs of a leveling... »
In 1960 a young scientist named Frank Drake formulated an equation that attempted to quantify the number of extraterrestrial civilizations in our galaxy. His equation and what the terms mean are shown below. N is the number of civilizations in the Milkyway Galaxy that we may be able to communicate with R* is the average rate... »
Recently blogger Julian Sanchez coined the phrase “one-way hash argument” to describe how easy it is to throw up FUD in what passes for public debates these days and how much more difficult it is to combat that FUD with actual facts. Good points to be sure, but I think there’s a solution to... »
Today, June 22 2009 on Good Morning America Dianne Sawyer interviewed 3 people on President Obama’s health team (one of them Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius). When they got to the issue of cost Dianne pointed to a recent study that revealed the original projected cost of medicare over 25 years... »
The national unemployment rate is about as useful a number in a nation as large as the United States as a national traffic report would be. In this series of articles we’re going to peel back the layers on THE unemployment rate in an attempt to get a number that’s a little more useful.... »
On June 10, 2009 Senator Voinovich (R-Ohio) gave a presentation to the Senate about our fiscal budget problem. To underscore just how much money the government is spending he used pacman as a visual metaphor. Below is a snippet pulled from Politico.com (at the end of this article is the full speech pulled from... »
The United States is the 3rd largest country in the world by population. With a population of about 300 million people it is only slightly smaller than the populations of Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Italy and Spain combined, which according to the Wikipedia article above, is about 314 million. Because of this, whenever... »
In December 2004 the Seattle Post Intelligencer ran an article titled “State slips behind in school spending” subtitled “Administrators release study, call for Legislature to act.” In previous articles we examined two of the statistics quoted in that article, specifically, class size and per-student spending. The big problem of the originally quoted statistics was... »
Thanks in large part to Al Gore’s book we’ve all seen the graphs showing temperature and CO2 levels for the last 600,000+ years (reproduced below). For many people today the image below serves as the iconic image of global warming. Al Gore even climbed onto a scissor lift to help make it so. Climatologists... »
