And so are his minions: Ryan Bird is a middle-aged guy from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He’s a frequent flyer, racking-up over 125,000 miles a year traveling on behalf of his company. On the 26th of September, when the TSA lifted their utterly moronic total ban on liquids in favor of a mind-numbingly...

While we’re playing with statistics here at ITA, here are some more numbers to crunch. The web’s archive of professional football data, pro-football-reference.com, recently ranked the best and worst QBs of the modern era (since the 1970 AFL-NFL merger) and posted the results on their blog. PFR’s...

One of the challenges with addressing the question of income inequality is that you can get very different impressions depending on how you look at the data. “The L-Curve” plots the data as income amount by percentile. The singular noticeable feature on this plot is the huge spike at the...

The list of successful 2006 Indiana bar exam applicants has been released. Yours truly was on that list. Following a ceremony on October 20th, I’ll be a bona fide attorney. Update: I like how one person described it: Isn’t that a weird feeling? I wasn’t even happy; I was just relieved....

For when reality is just too convenient.

In a post below, Zach links to a web site that attempts to illustrate the distribution of income in the United States. However, one of the figures cited on the site doesn’t pass the sniff test. After representing the annual household income of $40,000 as a stack of $100 bills 4 cm high and the...

Anthony Stockelman, an inmate in Indiana’s Wabash Valley Correctional Facility for molesting and killing a young girl, has received an involuntary tatoo of the girl’s name on his forehead, pictured below. While I certainly value the rule of law, it’s hard to muster much sympathy in...

In a previous post, I noted an analysis by Kim, Solomon, and Kessler on how the Democratic Party can reconnect with the middle class. They pose an interesting critique: “conservatives believe the wealthy are the engine of the economy; we believe the middle class is the engine of the economy.”...

The headline “14-year-old student flees to Cuba” really threw me for a loop. What kind of a person flees from Miami to Cuba? Are 14-year-olds really that stupid? Then I read the article and it all made sense: “And in school, he was accused of cheating to try to win the class presidency.”...

(Thanks to Off Colfax in the comments of Zach’s post below for this one) I’m sure many of our highly-intelligent and good-looking readers are familiar with the old internet science experiment where one drops a pack of Mentos into a 2-liter bottle of Coke and produces a soft drink fountain....