Daniel Moore

I thought this analysis of the numbers in the Iranian "election" was interesting so I wanted to do it on my own, except that I used the data from the county level instead of the province level (mainly because that was the first set of data I could find). With this set of data, you do not get the same oddities in the ones and tens digits that they got in the province level data. Plus, there are a lot more data points, so any systemic tampering should stand out even more. My graphs are below. You'll notice that each digit gets about 10% of the vote or what you would expect.

Update: Ah... they mention the difference between province and county analysis here.

Posted by Daniel at 11:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Over at Bacon Bits, they're kept up not having a native function that turns a calendar date into which quarter of the year it falls into. I don't do a lot of fiscal Excel work, so it doesn't bug me so much, but the solution shows some of the power of the CHOOSE function. Too many users would default to a really ugly nested IF statement. Ugh. I shudder just thinking about it.

What keeps me up night about non-native functions in Excel is why there isn't a RANGE function. Whenever I want the RANGE (that is, MAX - MIN) I have to write out the full (=MAX() - MIN()). I've put the function in my personal macros workbook for quick usage, but I share a lot of my Excel worksheets so that isn't a perfect solution... Anyway, frustrating...

Posted by Daniel at 9:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I just finished listening to the Wait, Wait… Don’t Tell Me from this past weekend (with David Axelrod as the guest) and it included this little obnoxious exchange:

PETER SAGAL, HOST: So, let's take the President's dog. Obviously, that was focus-grouped, you really wanted to appeal to the Portuguese-American community with the choice. Seriously, do you, is it part of your job to worry about that, how things will play politically. How they'll look, how they should be framed?

DAVID AXELROD, WHITE HOUSE SENIOR ADVISOR: I only, I only got called in for the final three on the dog.

…

UNIDENTIFIED VOICE: But who were the other two? Were there really two others?

AXELROD: One was Miss California.

So obnoxious. I don’t care what your politics are or who you support, but it is never okay to call a woman a dog. Period. Especially if you are a government figure serving the people of the United States. Even if you are a Democrat. He should be ashamed of himself.

Posted by Daniel at 10:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)