The Latest from Boing Boing

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• Night Launch
• On the likelihood of having all three of your kids share a birthday
• Flashlight transforms into submachine gun
• Chris Reccardi's psi-fi prints
• Awkward Olympics music: Tatar cover of Queen's "We Are The Champions"
• 6 month jail sentence for hentai collector
• Microsoft's profits, by division

Night Launch Posted: 13 Feb 2010 10:49 PM PST

On the likelihood of having all three of your kids share a birthday Posted: 13 Feb 2010 10:15 PM PST In his Guardian column yesterday, Dr Ben "Bad Science" Goldacre schooled us (and the Daily Express) on some basic statistical numeracy: Often one data point isn't enough to spot a pattern, or even to say that an event is interesting and exceptional, because numbers are all about context and constraints. At one end there are the simple examples. "Mum beats odds of 50 million-to-one to have 3 babies on same date" is the headline for the Daily Express on Thursday. If that phenomenon was really so unlikely, then since there are less than a million births a year in the UK, this would genuinely be a very rare event. Their number is calculated as 365 x 365 x 365 = 48,627,125. But in reality, of course, it's out by an order of magnitude: one in 50 million are the odds of someone having 3 siblings sharing one particular prespecified birth date that the editors of the Daily Express sealed in an envelope and gave to a lawyer 50 years ago. In reality there is no constraint on which day the first baby gets born on, so after that, the odds of two more babies sharing that birthday are 365×365=133,225. And they might even be a bit lower, if you two feel friskier in winter and have more babies in the autumn, for example. Then there is the context. Living on your street, hanging out with the people from work, it's easy to miss the sheer scale of humanity on the planet. In England and Wales there were 725,440 births last year. From the ONS Statistical Bulletin "Who is having babies" 14% were third births, and another 9% were fourth or subsequent births. So there are 102,000 third children born a year, 167,000 third or more-th children, and if we include the rest of the Kingdom there are even more, so on average, three shared birthdays will happen once or twice a year in the UK (although to be written about in the Express it would need to be a birth within a marriage, making 55,000 chances a year, or once every two years) Guns don't kill people, puppies do Previously: Japan 2008 Smoking Statistics - Boing Boing Boing Boing: How statistics caught Indonesia's war-criminals Security and the statistics of rare events - Boing Boing Fun world statistics comparison site - Boing Boing Boing Boing: Collection of publishing industry statistics Fox News lies with statistics - Boing Boing

Flashlight transforms into submachine gun Posted: 13 Feb 2010 10:33 PM PST Firearm designer Magpul Industries prototyped this flashlight that transforms into a submachine gun. They demonstrated the weapon, called the FMG-9, in 2008 but apparently haven't yet put it into full production. "Fits right in (your back pocket) when you got for a walk. If it gets nasty, you get down to business." (Thanks, Jody Radzik!)

Chris Reccardi's psi-fi prints Posted: 13 Feb 2010 09:10 PM PST Chris Reccardi, co-creator of the fantastic mod spy cartoon "The Modifyers" that I blogged yesterday, set up a little gallery of his psi-fi paintings in our new Boing Boing Bazaar/Makers Market! He's selling large prints of the hyperdelic illustrations, reproduced on stretched canvas in signed/numbered editions of 100. Chris Reccardi at the Makers Market/Boing Boing Bazaar Previously: New psi-fi paintings by Chris Reccardi Chris Reccardi and Lynne Naylor art show Interview with artist Chris Reccardi

Awkward Olympics music: Tatar cover of Queen's "We Are The Champions" Posted: 13 Feb 2010 03:14 PM PST A Tatar performance group covers the Queen anthem "We Are The Champions." Apparently this has something to do with the 2010 Winter Olympics, which opened last night. Hey, beats Celine Dion. Video Link. (Thanks, Anatoliy Ulyanov)

6 month jail sentence for hentai collector Posted: 13 Feb 2010 01:59 PM PST Wondering whether that collection of 'the character bio says she's 18' hentai is legal or not? Your quandary is at an end. It's illegal enough to get a custodial sentence. On one hand, jail time for owning cartoon smut is a creepy example of victimless thoughtcrime. Then again, very little is as creepy as this guy's comic collection. [Wired]

Microsoft's profits, by division Posted: 13 Feb 2010 11:50 AM PST Practically all of Microsoft's profits come from selling Windows and Office. Everything else, including Zune, Xbox and all that it does online, either loses money or barely breaks even.

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