So a few months ago in Amsterdam, a couple British tourists died from a drug overdose. The Brits are kind of like the canaries in a coal mine of tourists. Brits are usually the first to somehow kill themselves, if given the opportunity. (It has to do with alcohol.) Anyway, they did die. It turned out that some guy on…
I’m in Amsterdam. It’s been three years since I’ve been here, which is the longest I’ve ever been away since 1991, when I first visited (and then lived in) this fine city. Like New York or Chicago, Amsterdam has gentrified. A lot. The city is also less interesting. It’s called vertrutting: dulling. There’s a movement to “stop the verturtting of…
NYC style. Greenpoint, Brooklyn.
So there’s something very odd about this: According to the [New York City] Department of Health, New York University students were dispatched to gather shisha from of 13 hookah bars; after samples were analyzed, it was found that all 13 samples contained tobacco. Well I should hope so! You might find the same if you analyzed a pack of Marlboro…
It does seem pretty stupid to rob a gun store. But it also calls into question the deterrent effect of guns. A good man with a gun was not enough to stop four bad people with guns. There was a gunfight. The store owner was killed. His wife believes her life was saved because of his gun. I wonder.
When 311 is introduced for non-emergency calls, there’s always talk about how the new 311 system will ease pressure on the 911 system. That never happens (but “hope springs eternal…”). I can’t actually find the 911 numbers, but I know there are more 911 calls now than in 2003, when 311 was introduced here in NYC. (I know because 911…
I’ve written before about their foolish and inaccurate claim that the black-to-white racial disparity among those shot by police is 21 to 1. I said, given the group they look at, the number is 9 to 1. But without any slight-of-hand or misleading highlighting of statistical outliers, the actually black-to-white racial disparity, the take-home stat, is 4 to 1. More…
* This is a footnote to the above post. (and the third in a series on basic math concepts) The ProPublica people don’t explain confidence intervals at all in this piece, but in their original they say, “a 95 percent confidence interval indicates that black teenagers are at between 10 and 40 times greater risk of being killed by a…
Let’s not forget the French police officers who were killed. Particularly Ahmed Merabet, who died protecting other people’s right to make fun of his religion. David Brooks has an interesting take on the matter. While deliberate provocation is best left at the kids’ table, let’s not get too on our high-horse about our own dedication to free speech: Let’s face…