The [URL="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-22430145"]story[/URL] of three women, missing for years since they were teenagers, now found alive and well in Cleveland, is breaking news all over the world.

The name of one of them, Amanda Berry, caught my eye at once. Her case is one of those featured in Robert Lancaster's site, no longer updated since he had a stroke some years ago, which aims to expose a well known "psychic" as the callous, harmful fraud that she is. This account, written six years ago, describes a reading on a popular TV show between this psychic and Amanda Berry's mother, who has since sadly died in the belief that her daughter was dead as told to her by the psychic on the show.

The whole of Robert Lancaster's site is highly recommended if anyone wants an illustration of the terrible harm fraudulent psychics can cause.
[URL]http://www.stopsylvia.com/articles/montel_amandaberry.shtml[/URL]

[url]http://news.yahoo.com/your-own-black-box-162809896.html[/url]

why don't they make the [URL="http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/909/if-aircraft-black-boxes-are-indestructible-why-cant-the-whole-plane-be-made-from-the-same-material"]whole plane[/URL] out of that stuff?

Also thanks to Brian-E for posting the links above. Browne famously, in my area, told a family that their son was dead in a similar kidnapping. The kid turned out to be alive and living not very far away, attending school and completely integrated into the abductors home. Google (or Bing) Shawn Hornbeck for all the details.

On the subject.....
[QUOTE] [B]"Pasties And A G-String (At The Two O'Clock Club)"[/B]
-Tom Waits, Small Change

[SPOILER]Smelling like a brewery, looking like a tramp,
I ain't got a quarter, got a postage stamp
Been five o'clock shadow boxing all around the town,
Talking with the old man, sleeping on the ground
Bazanti bootin al zootin al hoot and Al Cohn
Sharing this apartment with a telephone pole
And a fish-net stocking, spike-heel shoes,
Strip tease, prick tease, car keys blues
And the porno floor show, live nude girls,
Dreamy and creamy and brunette curls
Chesty Morgan and Watermelon Rose
Raise my rent and take off all your clothes
With trench coats, magazines, a bottle full of rum,
She's so good, make a dead man come
Pasties and a G-string, beer and a shot
Portland through a shot glass and a Buffalo squeeze
Wrinkles and Cherry and Twinkie and Pinkie and Fifi live from Gay Paree
Fanfares, rim shots, back stage, who cares, all this hot burlesque for me
[I][scat][/I]

Cleavage, cleavage, thighs and hips
From the nape of her neck to the lipstick lips
Chopped and channeled and lowered and lewd
And the cheater slicks and baby moons
She's a-hot and ready, creamy and sugared
And the band is awful and so are the tunes
[I][scat][/I]

Crawling on her belly, and shaking like jelly,
And I'm getting harder than Chinese algebrassieres
And cheers from the (hmm) compendium here
"Hey sweetheart" they're yelling for more
You're squashing out your cigarette butts on the floor
And I like Shelly, and you like Jane
And what was the girl with the snakeskin's name?
And it's an early-bird matinee, come back any day,
Get you a little something that you can't get at home
Get you a little something that you can't get at home
It's pasties and a G-string, beer and a shot
Portland through a shot glass and a Buffalo squeeze
Popcorn, front row, higher than a kite, and I'll be back tomorrow night,
And I'll be back tomorrow night[/SPOILER]
[I][scat][/I]
[/QUOTE]

[QUOTE=ewmayer;339594]Thanks for keeping us abreast of all those titillating legal issues, firejugger. :)

However, I'm still trying to figure out why the club thinks "nipple-covering pastries" are preferable to bikini tops. Sure, the "edible uppergarment" aspect of it would indeed be novel, but since these clubs are generally of the "lookie, no touchie" variety except for lap dances, I'm dubious as to the business proposition represented by pairs of jiggling Danishes - and most pastry doughs wouldn't last more than a few seconds ... oh wait, *now* I think see things more clearly, as it were.[/QUOTE]Shouldn't cheesecake be covered with cheesecake?

[I]It is only logical[/I]™

[url=http://press.web.cern.ch/press-releases/2013/05/first-observations-short-lived-pear-shaped-atomic-nuclei]Things have gone pear-shaped at CERN.[/url]

If God exists, she has a warped sense of humour...

[URL="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22223190"]Reinhart, Rogoff... and Herndon: The student who caught out the profs[/URL]....

This reminds me of a fairly funny paper (I'd never guess that such a trivial result would be published, even though most users knew about these pitfalls; most biologists wouldn't know how to deal with a tab-separated text file or even a small database that a bioinformaticist would use, so many gene lists were converted into Excel before handing over to the end users).
[url]http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2105/5/80[/url]

Of course, the whole idea of doing bioinformatics in Excel would make almost anyone chuckle. The lesson is simple - don't use Excel (there's not even a decent ANOVA implementation in it for using it on a row by row set)! And no one whom I know does. But apparently in economic this is par for the course. Have R&R even thought about doing the simplest of all numerical stability tests, resampling, or at the very least it's simplest "leave-one-out" bootstrap? Have they calculated everything just once? Incredible! Apparently the inadvertent "leave-[I]five[/I]-out" readily demonstrated that the dataset was not particularly robust.

[QUOTE=Batalov;339762]The lesson is simple - don't use Excel.[/QUOTE]

I once employed an Office Manager who was responsible for producing the monthly reports for the GM.

One month the numbers didn't add up. So I asked her for the spreadsheet to check her equations.

There were no equations.

When I called her on this, she admitted that she was using Excel as a desktop publishing program -- she was using a hand calculator to do the math, and entering the values into the spreadsheet cell by cell...

Edit: Sigh. It's really my fault for not questioning her work earlier....

Well, not for bioinformatics, is what I meant.

But for personnel management or (I dunno) purchases, sales, invoices... maybe!
For toy stuff. There's t-test, there are scatterplots and barcharts. One can download a plugin for ANOVA on the whole sheet of data. This could be plenty for some particular use cases. There's "=VLOOKUP(38, data!A1:B9, 1, FALSE)" :max: :rolleyes:

[url]http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/05/russian-spacecraft-returns-to-earth-with-most-of-its-furry-crew-dead/[/url]

:sad:

[I]"...the flying pet store of death..."[/I]

We need more writers like this!