Month: October 2007

CNN beefs up its evening coverage.

But check out the MSNBC headline.

An automated non-reader writes:

Thank you for taking our spending habits survey.

Your survey responses place you on the TIGHTWAD portion of the Tightwad-Spendthrift dimension.

Scale scores range from 4 to 26. Your score (8) was shared by 2.7% of our original sample of over 13,000 people. Again, thanks very much for participating!

My fiscal conservative credentials go up a notch.

A reader writes:

Like you, for me she goes clockwise but you can reverse her:

Stare at her left heel, the one that "hits" the "floor". Now look at the reflection of the foot as it hits the floor. "Make" it change direction. Imagine it goes counter clockwise. Soon it will. There is some kind of "jerk" in the image…when the loop starts again or maybe it is on purpose. That’s where I can reverse it.

Now, while still concentrating on the "reflection" of her left heel, bring your focus out a bit until you see her leg swinging counter clockwise. If it is still going clockwise, look at only the reflection of her foot again. Keeping trying that until you get the leg swinging counter clockwise.

Ahhh. From right-brain to left brain. Like looking very closely for four years at Iraq. But it keeps switching back!

"Not gay," apparently. Just pretending.

A helpful round-up of where he is and is not. More like not.

I was interested, but more than a little confused, by the recent bloggy discussion of sitemeter stats and the burning question of whether Daily Kos’s traffic is over-estimated, or not. My take over the years has been to see the data as somewhat dicey – rough at best. But I didn’t realize quite how rough. I recently re-upped my subscription to Sitemeter and paid more money for more stats. Immediately, the balance between "visits" and "pageviews" shifted, with a pretty similar pageview count but a marked drop in visits as a proportion. More interestingly, the visit length increased dramatically as well – and now it tells me that the average visit length to the Dish is almost four minutes – far more than it once was and far more than most other blogs in its category. (To give a comparison, my average visit length is given as 3:58; Glenn’s is 0.05; Powerline is 0.03; Kos is 0.22.) I can see why my average visit length would be higher than a quick-link site like Glenn’s, but not that much longer. And I don’t think a big shift with my new subscription was coincidental. The data from the Atlantic’s measurements show no such change at all. So what gives?

My assumption has always been that these figures are pretty shaky. At best, I thought I could rely on them for some internally consistent numbers over time – a very rough gauge of progress. Now I’m not even sure about that. Any thoughts?

I found this test from Megan. I’m a righty, it would appear. I tied hard to see the dancer going counter-clockwise but couldn’t for the life of me. You?

Yglesias examines the criteria that Mickey Kaus deploys for writing about other people’s private lives.

Scientists are finally honing their searches:

Writing in the US journal Science, astronomers from six major centres, including Nasa, Harvard and the University of Colorado, outline how advances in technology suggest scientists are on the verge of being able to detect the presence of small, rocky planets, much like our own, around distant stars for the first time. The planets are considered the most likely havens for extraterrestrial life.

One technique relies on observing the shift in light coming from a star as a planet swings around it. Until recently, this "radial velocity" method has only been sensitive enough to pick up planets far more massive than Earth, but improvements now make the discovery of a second Earth highly likely, said Dave Latham, a co-author on the paper at the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics.

"It could happen almost any time now. We have the technological capability to identify Earth-like planets around the smallest stars even now," he said.

(Hat tip: 3QD.)