Math is hard, let's go shopping

The above is a quote from a voice-chipped Barbie that came out on the market years and years ago, prompting a group calling itself the Barbie Liberation Organization to switch those voice chips into GI Joes. This is also a favorite joke with my best friend, who made the switch from studying fluffy pretty words, like me, to becoming a statistician.

The US Census Bureau put out its 2007 Statistical Abstract of the United States today. The abstract says, among thousands of other things, that adults and teens will spend nearly five months (3,518 hours) next year watching television, surfing the Internet, reading daily newspapers and listening to personal music devices. If you'd like to take all five of those months off, you might be able to get through the report in its entirety. Of course, that's not the intention but there's something perversely enticing about the idea.

For someone like me for whom the above title bears a grain of truth, you might do better checking out the press release. There's a surprisingly nice sense of humor as a gift to those of us who begin blacking out at the sight of so many numbers in so little context, such as "Pet owners walked an average of 1.6 dogs in 36 percent of U.S. households in 2001, while people were tolerated by an average of 2.1 cats in 32 percent of homes. (Table 1227) ". Also, apparently the US endangers more crustaceans than anyone else in the world.

I'm hoping to slowly wend my way through this thing and will post on it as is possible and relevant. If my statistician is out there, I'd love your two cents in the comments.

And from the world of statistical improbability, Tony Snow apologized to an NBC news reporter for calling his question about the Iraq Study Group "partisan". I'm impressed and just ever so slightly turned on.