I’ve often mocked The Media for saying “former Italian prime minister” (what kind of prime minister is he now?) and so it is mildly disappointing that I won’t get to apply the phrase to Mrs Gandhi. The Agonist (cited by Brad DeLong) says:
News reports said she [Mrs Gandhi] would support Dr. Manmohan Singh, a former finance minister, as prime minister. A Sikh, he would be India’s first minority prime minister.
Nu? India has a majority?
When I disagree with Vin Suprynowicz it’s usually over the appropriate treatment of foreigners, but Vin’s Iraq policy is not without appeal.
He didn’t need to put it so spitefully, though. Secession is not a punishment.
On yet another hand, maybe the natural division of Iraq is not the obvious one. I’d split Iraq into the 18 provinces, if not finer, and hold plebiscites: “For each of the 17 other provinces, yes or no: shall your province federate with ________?” Merge the provinces into federations where 3/5 of the voters in each province consent to joining with each other province. Then hold another round of plebiscites allowing border districts to switch by simple majority.
Ellipsoids can be packed denser than spheres can. (Cited by Oliver Xymoron.) One of these days I must make a doodle of this result.
Dave Muse thinks the Michigan state lottery has a mechanical bias favoring smaller intervals. (Cited by Jon Handler.) So I wrote a short program that generates all C(50,6) = 1589 0700 possible lottery draws and counts the resulting intervals. The distribution that Muse found surprising is, ta-da, very close to what my program predicts. The bias, if any, is small.
Watching Hitchcock’s Secret Agent (1936, starring John Gielgud so young that I couldn’t place him), I think I’ve spotted Hitchcock – but my first thought was “there’s Rumpole!”.
Bill Poser at Language Log agrees with me: Greek, not Latin, ought to have been spoken in The Passion. (Cited by Prentiss Riddle in a comment at languagehat.)
Heather Mac Donald: The Diversity Taboo (cited indirectly by Eric Rasmusen)