I've tried to recently start throwing out "Causation doesn't always mean correlation" whenever I can find situations that it makes sense.

E.g. a recent Wired article talked about statistical analysis "proving" that the idea of a football team gaining "momentum" after an interception is a myth.

I think it's a fair assumption that sometimes a team gets momentum from an interception... but other times the team who lost the ball gets fired up in response. And lots of other times there is no clear advantage one way or the other. But the overall statistics being a wash doesn't mean there aren't specific affects going on at a finer scale that have been missed by big picture statistics.

Pascals, not Newtons, of course.

The "slug" is a unit of mass, but I don't know of anywhere that it's used.

I each of the examples ("tons of displacement, "tons of explosive energy"), the unit of force (pounds or tons) is being used as a stand in for mass with the implicit assumption that we're talking about the mass that relates to a given force in earth gravity.

A ton is 2000 pounds.

Pound is a unit of force. Weight is a force. It translates exactly to a unit of mass as long as gravity stays the same (i.e. we're on Earth).

The metric system uses grams as a unit of mass, and pascals as a unit of force. If I go from Earth to Mars, my weight changes, but my mass stays the same.

When talking about tons of displacement for ships, that's saying that the ship displaces X tons of water (muddling weight vs. mass in there too).

When talking about explosives, tons is referring to the amount of energy equivalent to an explosion of X tons of TNT (again muddling weight vs. mass).

or is that a mis-spelling of Chat Roulette?

Maybe my perception is wrong, but aren't the majority of U.S. cell phone users on a plan that they're paying for in terms of 100s of minutes at least? 15 seconds is annoying, and I agree with his preference for these things going away, but who doesn't just have a monthly plan that dwarfs their actual usage to start with? Pogue's back-of-the-envelope calculations seems to completely ignore this.

Absolutely right! *Not* just bit-depth, not just low light performance, but actual dynamic range. Video, photography, microscopy... all these recording media have dynamic range that is *tiny* compared to what humans perceive naturally. In part because electronic display media have dynamic range that's equally limited. The same is true in audio recording. In all these cases, human ears and eyes are cheating- my eyes mostly adjust fast enough when I move them that I don't realize that I can't see dim things inside and the bright things outside my window at the same time. It only becomes noticeable when I turn on a light in the night or step outdoors away from a building at night that it takes time for my eyes to adjust, but they're doing the same thing constantly. But this is no excuse- technology should be working to match what we actually perceive, and this doesn't seem to even be on the radar. Perhaps this is a case where there's no obvious easy avenue for improvement, so researchers and manufacturers just ignore it.

But 4 megapixels to 8 megapixels isn't doubling the image size, it's doubling the number of pixels. So it is reasonable to expect the file size to double, not quadruple.

Fair point, especially considering TFA's topic. All my observations come with the "in the US" caveat.

Are iPods common but not iPhones? Or are iPods a rarity also?

Never. I'm just saying that iPods are *everywhere*, whether they're perfect or not.

Standardization on mini-B? Or micro-B? Or the thing that's on most LG's right now? Or the thing that's on most Motorola's right now? I'm just saying that, if I wanted to bet on availability of a given cable in any random place, I'd bet on being able to find the thing that plugs into the ubiquitous iPod.

But you don't jam your phone directly into the PC, laptop, TV, or DVD player, do you? You use a cable to connect the two, and both ends matter- saying there are more full size USB A things to plug into doesn't say anything about what's on the other end of that cable, and the debate is about whether that other end is a USB mini-B, a micro-B, a dock connector, or anything else.

I think a survey of backpacks, shoulder bags, etc., in just about any demographic in the United States is likely to turn up more dock connectors than mini-B. Doesn't mean that's the best choice, just that saying the iPhone uses a non-standard connector is misleading.

The USB mini-B cable may be "standard", but the iPod dock connector is plentiful. Check households, office desks, backpacks, and I bet you'll find it much easier to locate a dock connector than a USB mini-B to anything.

I don't think your (1) and (2) are necessarily true. If we assume there's some truth in the re-usable cliche that "____ is 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration". This contest gives a chance for someone who's got that 1% to get the 99% taken care of by others. I could just post in my blog, or on /., my great idea to help people, but if it wins the contest it's more likely to actually happen.