As I sat on the cliffs by Astwood Cove on Saturday I saw a large blue car ship five miles offshore, leaving the island and very very slowly heading South West, away to the Caribbean, or maybe to Panama and then across to the Pacific... And I thought just how strange it might be to be at sea at Christmas, with a family (of sorts) but not your own...

[Via Arthur's Seat]

Amidst all the celebrations after Wednesday, we shouldn't forget.

Unfortunately, it seems almost everyone has.

I don’t know what the figures look like here, or where to look for them, but I think it’s probably true that everyone multitasks more than they used to, and some of us multitask virtually all our waking hours.

In short, we are all teenagers now.

There's a good chunk of the middle class that, although certainly nice people, hard working, reliable and whatnot, are not particularly bright, creative, or too fond of original thought, nor taking risks.

This class I see being bled white over the next few decades, as their niches dry up like summer puddles.

I did vote. Well, I did spoil my ballot.

In retrospect, this magazine's coverage of so-called evolution has been hideously one-sided. For decades, we published articles in every issue that endorsed the ideas of Charles Darwin and his cronies. True, the theory of common descent through natural selection has been called the unifying concept for all of biology and one of the greatest scientific ideas of all time, but that was no excuse to be fanatics about it... As editors, we had no business being persuaded by mountains of evidence.

Good journalism values balance above all else. We owe it to our readers to present everybody's ideas equally and not to ignore or discredit theories simply because they lack scientifically credible arguments or facts. Nor should we succumb to the easy mistake of thinking that scientists understand their fields better than, say, U.S. senators or best-selling novelists do. Indeed, if politicians or special-interest groups say things that seem untrue or misleading, our duty as journalists is to quote them without comment or contradiction. To do otherwise would be elitist and therefore wrong. In that spirit, we will end the practice of expressing our own views in this space: an editorial page is no place for opinions.

For those who don't know, Bill James is the father of scientific analysis in baseball - he was the first to argue that you could use statistics [well, numbers really, not a lot of baseball analysis is really statistical...] to better understand the game and what was actually going on. This approach of course was made famous to many via Michael Lewis' Moneyball. But the point James is making is that our attempts at understanding this are always, no matter how sophisticated they are, somewhat simplistic, by definition simplified, invariably abstracted. This is the point Virginia Postrel is working around in her latest NYT column that I mentioned yesterday.

A good analysis of how many of the basic statistics we take for granted are built on a series of compromises and value judgements which disappear from view by the time we get "results".