Emptying my Pockets

Ran into this article a while ago while doing my normal blog readings. The gist here is that civilians tend to be significantly better on a statistical level at hitting their intended targets, capturing bad guys after shootouts, get wounded less often, and mistake innocent bystanders for the criminals less often. Good reading.

Foot note to TTAG, your math is bad, and you should feel bad.

(4702 bullets fired - 323 ND's) * .78 Miss Rate = ~3415 bullets fired at suspects and missed.

3415 + 323 ND's = 3738 Total Number of Missed Rounds

3738 Total Missed Rounds/4702 Total Rounds Fired = 79.5% Total Miss Rate

100% - 79.5% = 20.5% Total Hit Rate for NY Police

*This is under the assumption that the study removed the ND's from the total number of bullets fired to boost the NYPD's accuracy rating.

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Here's a well written article on the logical fallacy of orienting maps Northwards, what we can do about it, and what the likely outcomes of making any changes would be. I can't help but think that this is an extremely cool but really impractical idea, just from the standpoint of trying to change a globally standardized and accepted method of displaying maps. 

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Never be surprised when bureaucracy is idiotic. That's it's natural state. 

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Pretty dang cool article on why the commonly held theory of the passive continental margin is probably wrong. The way the earth moves is just more complicated than we had originally thought, and I'm glad to see modeling that takes that into account.

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The perils of letting computers do too much of our thinking. A good read, but since higher efficiency is always the ultimate goal, quite a few more things will become the domain of algorithms in the future. Should break points for life and death decisions be put in so that the outcome is determined by a human operator? Absolutely.