A simple DLD this evening before July comes to a close. No crazy epic iglevian thematic arc this time. Just a few links that might please you. And lots of big words. And YouTubes!

Ironic Pop Culture Humor

My girlfriend has taste like yours. She loves web comics like the Oatmeal; TV shows like Top Chef, Arrested Development, and Mad Men; and all that vapid unfunny "edgy" pop culture stuff that I see discussed here on AN but which bores me completely. (Equally unfathomably, she likes me....)

She thinks this is the funniest thing in the world:

Cool Guys Don't Look at Explosions (warning: YouTubes!)

She played it for me about ten times and laughed hysterically through each one. I thought it was a little bit funny, but only once. But her taste is more like yours than mine, so maybe you'll like it. Assuming you haven't already watched it a million times yourself, that is.

DIИGERZ!!!

Oh, and speaking of things to watch a million times. The new guy we got in the Brad Ziegler trade is Brandon Allen. (For me, he falls near the Corey side on the Corey Wimberly to Reggie Willits spectrum.) It's possible that he will suck like the rest of our prospects, but at least he is large and hits gigantic dingers.

In case you missed it, here is one from a few days ago:

Brandon Allen's epic dinger (Warning: quasi-YouTube on the MLB site!)

A sampling of reactions from AN: "Holy shit" "WANT" "WOW!" "Holy Crap" "Damn!" "BOOM" "OMG".

Hot Underwear Models!

In case you missed the news, our very own thewhizkid has a new girlfriend. And WhizDad approves. (Warning: AN mega-thread with 1,000+ comments!)

In matters of starlet idolatry I tend to be contrarian, but in this case I have to concur with the rest of the universe: Kate Upton is quite lovely. Elcroata objected to the plasticky photoshoppery of the billions of Kate pictures that flood Google image search, and he's absolutely right. They are terrible. To truly appreciate the pulchritude of the future WhizDaughterInLaw, you need to find her doing something other than modeling underwear and trying to look sultry. (And by the way, no one can truly be sultry at 18. You have to be at least 25. Or 23 in Latin America.)

Here is my favorite: Miss Kate is chair-dancing while attending a basketball game. Contrary to her usual habit, she is fully clothed here, but if your workplace is strict it might still be NSFW due to extreme jiggling.

Kate Upton Dougie (Warning: YouTube!)

Apparently she is demonstrating a popular dance called the "dougie". I have no idea what that is, but I'm pretty sure it has nothing to do with elcroata's Adriatic island paradise Dugi Otok.

Stats for Science

Did you know that baseball stats are actually useful in real life? I mean, not just for picking your team in the roto league, but as real data for real statisticians who don't even care about baseball. It's because it's one of the few resources we have where there is basic life information on people going back several decades. It's especially true for research in left-handedness and right-handedness. A lot of that stuff where you read about how people who are left-handed are more likely to do such-and-such rely in part on statistics about baseball players.

Here is a silly study where someone uses baseball data to help prove that you are more likely to live longer if you have cool initials like "G.O.D." or "A.C.E." and die sooner if you have bad initials like "S.O.B." or "A.S.S." Apparently the study actually got published, though the link there only gives you the abstract.

If you think that sounds ridiculous, you're not alone. Here's another study, with the complete PDF this time, where some other guy questions the methodology of the first. Among other things he complains about small sample size. Seriously, how many guys actually have the initials "F.U.K."? I mean, besides Frankie Ubaldo Katzenbaum.

Assuming we omit people who don't have exactly one middle name -- as well we should, you freaky four-name and two-name mutants! -- there are 26 x 26 x 26 = 17,576 possible combinations of initials. I think there are more than 18,000 famous people you've heard of. So if the initials are evenly distributed, you ought to be able to come up with a person for any combination of letters.

But of course they aren't evenly distributed, and there must be a million times more MJB's than XNQ's. But if the letter combination is above average frequency, you should be able to come up with one. "DLD" seemed like it would be relatively common, but I had a bitch of a time finding any. I finally came up with two. Some obscure baseball player named Daniel Lynn Dumoulin, whom I had never heard of, and a composer named David Leo Diamond, whom I actually had heard of most of y'all surely haven't. The former was a reliever who appeared in all of eight games. The latter has a reputation for being one of America's better composers of the 20th century, but he wrote in that hideous modernist style that dominated "classical" music from the mid 1960s through mid 1990s. I think I once sang in a piece by him during my chorus days.

Can you think of anyone whose initials are "DLD"?

Stats for Real Life

OK, enough trivia. Here's an example of how statistical analysis can help you with real world problems. This is an ancient link -- by which I mean it's almost two years old, OMG! -- but it contains valuable information for you. OKTrends, the statistical arm of the dating service OKCupid, did a thorough study of what sort of picture will get you what sort of responses on a dating site.

The Four Big Myths of Profile Pictures

Some of the results are surprising. Like that angle where the girl holds the camera above her head actually works. Here we all thought those girls were stupid, but in fact they are smart. And it's still true even after you control the sample for cleavage. The camera angle is more predictive of success than the boobies. Who would have thought?

See, now that's important information. You should read the whole thing. It has lots of pretty pictures and pretty graphs. This one is my favorite.

It shows that if you are a woman, the benefit you get from showing cleavage in your picture is negatively [positively] correlated with your age. So if you're a young maiden fresh out of high school, keep the goods covered, but if you're approaching MILF range, bring out the boobies!

The story presents this as counterintuitive, but it makes perfect sense to me. (Also, I may be slightly misrepresenting that graph....)