Hal O'Brien

From the ever-amazing TED site: "Hans Rosling: Debunking third-world myths with the best stats you've ever seen."

Rosling is able to illustrate brilliantly the amazing progress that Asia in particular has made since, say, 1960. He has a cute Swedish accent, to boot.

Stats wonks take note: www.gapminder.org provides just about all the tools he uses. I'm going to be chewing on this off and on for a while, I think.

Back from our road trip around the state of Washington.

Reading a good issue of The New Yorker, I came across the claim from John Colapinto that US retail business lost about $40 billion in 2006 from theft. Which sounds impressive, until one learns from the US Census Bureau that retail sales, total (excl. motor vehicle and parts dealers) for 2006 (NB: Adobe .PDF file) was very close to $3 trillion. So theft accounts for an amount only 1.34% of US retail sales, which is probably within the margin of error of their accounting practices.

Bottom line: They have no idea how much theft is actually taking place. It's not enough to measure accurately.