Category: Crazy

Like all group projects… (courtesy SMBC)

More Wisconsin centric visualizations (though I can’t embed this one). Apparently Wisconsin leads the country in heavy drinking (heavy is defined as more than one drink a day for women and two a day for men).

North Central Wisconsin has the heaviest concentration. I’ve spent time there. There’s not much else to do. Though northern Minnesota isn’t as bad, and that seems basically analogous.

Minnesota didn’t need as many sweaters either…

Via fixr.com, the top import for every state. Apparently in Wisconsin, the most important thing (from outside the state – beer, cheese and bratwurst don’t need to be imported) is a good sweater…

I knew dietary supplements were completely unregulated, but when a study finds that 4 out of 5 don’t even contain the ingredient on the label, it’s worse than I thought.

Hilarious, from SMBC…

These stories simply drive me crazy. A completely innocent man spends 30 years on death row. For almost half that time, it was clear he was innocent but state officials would not reopen the case.

Anthony Hinton, 29 years old with no history of violent crime, steadfastly maintained his innocence. A polygraph test given by police exonerated him, but the judge (now-retired Circuit Judge James Garrett) refused to admit it at trial. Mr. Hinton was appointed a lawyer who mistakenly thought he could not get enough money to hire a qualified firearms examiner. Instead, he retained a visually-impaired civil engineer with no expertise in firearms identification who admitted he could not operate the machinery necessary to examine the evidence. With no credible expert to challenge the State’s assertion of a match, Mr. Hinton was convicted and sentenced to death.

The State’s evidence of a match was wholly discredited by three highly qualified firearms examiners, including the former chief of the FBI’s firearm and toolmarks unit, who testified in 2002 that the bullets from all three crimes could not be matched to a single gun at all, much less to Mrs. Hinton’s gun, and found that her gun could not have fired the bullets from the third uncharged robbery. For more than fifteen years, attorneys with the Equal Justice Initiative repeatedly have asked state officials to re-examine the evidence in this case, but former Jefferson County District Attorney David Barber, and Attorneys General from Troy King to Luther Strange, all failed to do so.

A productive life pretty much thrown away.

I think the whole tech company April Fools thing has become pretty old. Google Maps Pac Man is a nice thing (not a prank, just something fun).

This Citi Bike tweet amused me:

The @CitibikeNYC unicycles are an exciting addition to the fleet! http://t.co/08kOXxjWYq—
Peter Burka (@pburka) April 01, 2015

And Seth Godin’s post today was amusing…