Nate Silver points his big stats brain at gay marriage and ranks states by what year they would likely vote against a gay marriage ban (bit of a double-negative there). He’s got a full half of the US theoretically ready to jump on board by 2012.

Crowdsourcing an Ethical Dilemma describes the results of using Amazon Mechanical Turk to pose variations of the Trolley Problem to a bunch of strangers. For example:

…a trolley is hurtling down a track towards five people. You are on a bridge under which it will pass, and you can stop it by dropping a heavy weight in front of it. As it happens, there is a very fat man next to you – your only way to stop the trolley is to push him over the bridge and onto the track, killing him to save five. Should you proceed?

They varied the scenario and the number of people one would save, and charted the results. (via waxy)

Another great TED Talk from the archives: Peter Donnelly on statistics. Don't be scared, it's totally accessible and engaging. Trust me, I was an English geek, math ain't my strong suit. Coincidentally, this also crossed my path today, from Nature, The Science Of Doping.

Good article on Nassim Nicholas Taleb. I really need to bump The Black Swan up my to-read list.

The latest issue of Outside has an article on Rod Liberal's brush with death via lightning:

Watching an electrical storm from afar is a natural spectacle, but there's good reason to feel fear when it comes closer. If you could stop any one of the 25 million flashes that touch down in the U.S. each year—gargantuan electrical discharges created by the buildup of excess negative charges in clouds—you'd feel heat of up to 50,000 degrees Fahrenheit, five times hotter than the surface of the sun. A single flash can carry more than 100 million volts, the equivalent of 833,000 people sticking paper clips into electrical outlets. And lightning has been known to roam as far as 15 miles from the storm that bred it before striking from a clear blue sky. One minute you're the master of a fourteener; the next you're on a gurney with a tube down your throat and a lifetime of recovery ahead of you—if you even survive the current ripping through your nervous system, which can instantly shut down your heart.

Even though I'm pretty good at getting off the field when death from above threatens, I'm probably not good enough. This got me to thinking about the stats, because inevitably somebody wants to keep playing, citing various quoted miniscule odds of being killed in a given year. Conveniently enough, the National Safety Council has an Odds of Dying page (1 in 1, given enough time :-). For lightning, 66 people were killed in 2002, so the NSC rates that as you having a 1 in 4,362,746 chance of dying from lightning in a given year. However, these odds are calculated based on the total US population, which includes the vast majority of people smart enough to stay inside when the thunder booms. What you really need to know, and which is probably unknowable, is how many people in a given year spend time outside during a lightning storm. Divide that number by 66 and then talk to me about odds...