Paul Murray's weblog, with news you may have missed and my $0.02 worth on a number of topics.

"You can't make up anything anymore. The world itself is a satire. All you're doing is recording it."
- Art Buchwald

I bet you don't have a friend who's an acupuncturist

E-mail me: pmurray [at] despammed.com

Random facts. This is a collection of unrelated facts that I've stumbled across in my recent reading:

• "The average American household with a DVD player now has a library of 70 DVDs, according to Adams Media Research." (NY Times)
• "[Sen. Edward] Kennedy was the first member of Congress to connect to the Internet and pioneered online discussions in usenet forums." (Sunlight Foundation via rc3.org)
• "Since 1975, [California] has led the nation in adopting tough energy standards for household appliances, homes and buildings. As a result, California's per-capita electricity consumption has remained flat for nearly three decades, while the rest of the country's power demand has grown 50%." (LA Times)
• "In 1990, refrigerator efficiency standards went into effect in the United States. Today, new refrigerators are fancier than ever, but their power consumption has been slashed by about 45 percent since the standards took effect. Likewise, thanks in part to standards, the average power consumption of a new washer is nearly 70 percent lower than a new unit in 1990. ... [On the other hand, newer, larger] TVs ... can draw more power in a year than some refrigerators now on the market." (NY Times)
• "Conceived just before the beginning of the design-by-committee era, Elwood Engel's magnum opus [the 1961 Lincoln Continental Sedan] was the last mass-produced automobile to be designed by a single man." (Hagerty Insurance PR)

(Photo credit: Morven)

Labels: random facts

posted by Paul Murray at 2:17 PM | permanent link |

Random facts. This is a collection of unrelated facts that I've stumbled across in my recent reading:

"More than 90% of federal defendants plead guilty; the vast majority who go to trial are convicted; four of five convicted defendants serve jail time." (LA Times)

"The F-15, the backbone of America’s air power for more than a quarter century, may just be the most successful weapon in history. It is certainly the most successful fighter jet. In combat, its kill ratio over more than 30 years is 107 to zero. Zero. In three decades of flying, no F-15 has ever been shot down by an enemy plane—and that includes F-15s flown by air forces other than America’s." (The Atlantic)

"The general expectation in sports is that performance improves over time. Future athletes will surely be faster, throw farther, jump higher. But free-throw shooting represents a stubbornly peculiar athletic endeavor. As a group, players have not gotten better. Nor have they become worse.

'It’s unbelievable,' Larry Wright, an adjunct professor of statistics at Columbia, said as he studied the year-by-year averages. 'There’s almost no difference. Fifty years. This is mind-boggling.'

There are measures in other sports that have shown similar consistency, like golf scores or batting averages, but none of them are as straightforward as lobbing a ball toward a basket." (New York Times)

Labels: random facts

posted by Paul Murray at 12:24 PM | permanent link |