Monday, June 22, 2009

Hello, loyal readers. My apologies for not blogging in over three months.

My excuse is that I got a new job, and this new job eats up my time in several ways. The commute is very long and the work itself gives me little opportunity to surf the Internet. So I have less time for actual blogging, and less time to find interesting things to actually blog about.

But hopefully as I settle in I can find a way to work this blog back into my routine.

To that end, check out this statistical analysis of the election results in Iran. Just by looking at the various vote tallies, it can be shown that there is a 99.5% chance that these tallies were made up by a human rather than generated randomly, as would be the case in a clean election. Fascinating.

2 comments:

Cheryl said...

I tried reading it. Emphasize that "tried".

Clark said...

Very interesting. Of course, some election somewhere MUST be the outlier. If the odds of something happening naturally is 4 in 1000 and it happens, it doesn't mean it was faked. It also doesn't mean you can be 99.6% sure it was faked.

From Feynman: "You know, the most amazing thing happened to me tonight. I was coming here, on the way to the lecture, and I came in through the parking lot. And you won't believe what happened. I saw a car with the license plate ARW 357. Can you imagine? Of all the millions of license plates in the state, what was the chance that I would see that particular one tonight? Amazing!"

(Not that I would be surprised to find that the Iran election was rigged.)

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