Crazy – Page 29 – Steve Fischer's Random Blog

Misleading Stat o’ the Day

The Atlantic’s “The Misguided Freakout About Basement-Dwelling Millennials” points out a critical issue with the “young people are living with their parents” statistics:

From the Census reports:

It is important to note that the Current Population Survey counts students living in dormitories as living in their parents’ home.

Well that changes things rather a lot, doesn’t it. College enrollment is at an all time high. Hmm, perhaps you should break out in college, vs. not in college.

Hard to see a frightening trend in that chart.

July 5, 2014

Vanishing Water

One of the more amusing What If posts in a while.

What would happen if all the bodies of water on Earth magically disappeared?

The quick answer:

As is often the case with these questions, everyone would die.

Now I read stuff like this via RSS. He must have edited the post after the feed went out. Here’s the Titanic paragraph in the post:

The Titanic sank in about two miles of water. After it disappeared beneath the surface, the two halves of the ship took between 5 and 15 minutes to reach the bottom.[2] Without the ocean there, it would have reached the bottom in about 30 seconds, striking it at airliner cruising speed.[3]

The RSS feed adds this to that paragraph:

Although no one has ever dropped a cruise ship from a high altitude,^{[citation needed]} their terminal velocity at the surface is probably a little below the speed of sound.

Citation needed! That’s the funniest part of the whole thing.

July 2, 2014