Mid-October Already...

OK, only five blogposts in the last month and a half. I know, pathetic. Meh. Things are still mega-busy, so I'll be back among the bloggeratti one of these weeks, just not right now.

Items:

• Japanese legislator busted for too much Wikipedia editing: A Japanese bureaucrat has been reprimanded for shirking his duties to make hundreds of Wikipedia contributions about toy robots, officials said Friday. The agriculture ministry said the bureaucrat, whose name was not released, contributed 260 times to the Japanese-language Wikipedia entry on Gundam, a popular, long-running animated series about giant robots that has spun off intricate toys popular among children and adults who belong to the so-called "otaku culture" of fascination with comic books, animation and robots. "The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam," ministry official Tsutomu Shimomura said.
• Via 43 Folders, 41 Reasons Why Your Blog Probably Sucks. Number 13 (I know, I know): Not posting regularly. There are two primary reasons that not posting regularly is "bad". One is that readers lose patience when they don't your schedule. (Not everyone uses an RSS reader.) The other reason is that search engine spiders often index your pages on a frequency proportional to your posting. The more you post, the more frequently you might get indexed, thus increasing the chances of search engine traffic. (Note that in some niches such as politics, you need to post 10-20 times per day to get noticed.) At the least, if you can't post regularly, have a consistent schedule that's obvious to your most loyal readers.
• I've watched several films over the past few weeks. Two great thrillers from the 1970s: The Day of the Jackal and The Taking of Pelham One Two Three; A couple of Robert Altman's lesser known films, O.C. & Stiggs and Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or, Sitting Bull's History Lesson; and two very "different" films (I like 'em when they're different) -- Shortbus and Cube. More on these later
• I also read a book by a guy named Ian Ayres that I have to recommend for all you numbery people -- Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-by-Numbers Is the New Way to Be Smart. Lots of good stuff in here on statistics, data gathering, and practical applications of the analyses presented so as to be understood by the interested amateur.