Freakonomics blog discusses this piece from the LA Times:

State crime lab analyst Kathryn Troyer was running tests on Arizona’s DNA database when she stumbled across two felons with remarkably similar genetic profiles. The men matched at 9 of the 13 locations on chromosomes, or loci, commonly used to distinguish people.

The [Federal Bureau of Investigation] estimated the odds of unrelated people sharing those genetic markers to be as remote as 1 in 13 billion. But the mug shots of the two felons suggested that they were not related: One was black, the other white.

In the years after her 2001 discovery, Troyer found dozens of similar matches — each seeming to defy impossible odds.

If Troyer had an understanding of statistics, she might have realized that a 1 in 13 billion unlikely event actually has a very high probability of coming up, if you compare everyone in the database to everyone else, in about 1.4 trillion comparisons.

This is an example of the famous birthday problem. If you take a typical elementary school class (of, say, 23 people or so) and ask each child for his or her birthday, despite being 366 possible birthdays, there's actually a more than 50% chance that two children will share a birthday. (Assume there are no twins in the class.)

When people don't understand mathematic concepts like this, they can reach faulty conclusions, like believing that this finding makes the whole DNA system useless (it's not) or believing that a match is absolute proof of guilt (also not).

Airlines charge a lot of fees—for phone reservations, changing a non-refundable reservation, checking bags, snacks. At this rate, our future airline tickets will look something like this.

When we buy a ticket, most people just look at the bottom-line price. But the fees can completely change the equation, especially if you end up having to change your plans now that some airlines are charging $150 per ticket.

Rick Seaney of FareCompare has a handy chart of fees. Keep it in mind next time you book. Now, why don't some of those travel sites start including this information with their price comparisons?

When I joined Drinking Liberally at the start of 2004, it consisted of a handful of (great) people meeting in a bar in New York. Now, on its five-year anniversary, the organization has grown to over 250 chapters including all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and even four foreign countries, and expanded to include Eating, Laughing, Screening, and Reading Liberally. Happy birthday Living Liberally!

Marc Fisher of the Washington Post just named Greater Greater Washington his Blog of the Month. It begins: "When a D.C. cabbie refused to take David Alpert from downtown Washington to a scruffy neighborhood clear across the city, the poor hack had no idea with whom he was dealing." Thanks Marc!

Since I started Greater Greater Washington, I've been getting behind on photos. Here is my 30th birthday celebration in January.

"Some fifty years ago a great German jurist had a curious dream. He dreamed that he died and was taken to a special heaven reserved for the theoreticians of the law. In this heaven one met, face to face, the many concepts of jurisprudence in their absolute purity, freed from all entangling alliances with human life. Here were the disembodied spirits of good faith and bad faith, property, possession, laches, and rights in rem. Here were all the logical instruments needed to manipulate and transform these legal concepts and thus to create and to solve the most beautiful of legal problems. Here one found a dialectic-hydraulic-interpretation press, which could press an indefinite number of meanings out of any text or statute, an apparatus for constructing fictions, and a hair-splitting machine that could divide a single hair into 999,999 equal parts and, when operated by the most expert jurists, could split each of these parts again into 999,999 equal parts. The boundless opportunities of this heaven of legal concepts were open to all properly qualified jurists, provided only they drank the Lethean draught which induced forgetfulness of terrestrial human affairs. But for the most accomplished jurists the Lethean draught was entirely superfluous. They had nothing to forget."

-Felix Cohen, 1935

Via Tim Wu.

This secret email was recently leaked from John McCain and Hillary Clinton's draft email folder:

CONFIDENTIAL/URGENT POLITICAL PROPOSAL

Dear Sir

First we must solicit your confidence in this issue. This is by virtue as being utterly confidential and "top secret".

We are SENATOR HILLARY CLINTON, the wife of the former United States head of state, PRESIDENT BILL CLINTON, and also SENATOR JOHN MCCAIN, friend and associate of current head of state PRESIDENT GEORGE W BUSH. We got your contact through business inquiries as we were searching for contacts of a citizen who can help save our and our family's political careers since our country has been frustrating us.

We are top officials of the United States Senate Government who are interested in importation of oil into our country with funds that are presently trapped in the FEDERAL TRANSPORTATION TRUST FUND dedicated to improving transportation. We wish to send this money to overseas accounts in the MIDDLE EAST but cannot due to restrictions in Congress Transportation Equity Act requiring that this money must be spent to build roads, bridges and high speed trains.

If you accept we will deliver to your a sum of 30 DOLLARS in the summer 2008 in form of a "GAS TAX HOLIDAY". You will then deliver this money to accounts of our friends in Middle East by taking it to your nearby gasoline station where they have information to forward the money. Please supply your bank account, social security number, address and your vote in DEMOCRATIC PRIMARIES AND NOVEMBER GENERAL ELECTION.

But bear in mind that this transaction requires absolute confidentiality. Do not visit WWW.GASTAXSCAM.COM where there is information about dangers of our proposal and a petition to stop us from this diversion of funds.

PLEASE NOTIFY US URGENTLY OF YOUR ACCEPTANCE OF THIS PROPOSAL

Awaiting your rapid response

Yours truly

SENATORS HILLARY CLINTON AND JOHN MCCAIN

Read more and sign the petition at www.GasTaxScam.com.

OpenLeft analyzes the politics involved in Hillary Clinton's recent proposal to eliminate the gas tax for the summer, a stupid gimmick that would make things worse and not help consumers. Her own advisors admit that this is a cheap trick to win votes, done purely for the political value. She is only proposing this because it is such a bad idea that it has no actual chance of passing.

Now, not content with scoring her own cheap political points, Clinton is calling out each Member of Congress to stand with her on the gas tax. She is even using right-wing language like "with us or against us," declaring that Members who don't support this policy are standing with the oil companies, even though this proposal doesn't "take on the oil companies" at all.

Colorado Democratic Senate candidadate Mark Udall blasted Clinton's behavior:

Senator Clinton claimed yesterday that I either stand with her on this proposal or stand with the oil companies. To that I say: I stand with the families of Colorado, who aren't looking for bumper sticker fixes that don't fix anything, but for meaningful change that brings real relief and a new direction for our energy policy. We can't afford more Washington-style pandering while families keep getting squeezed. It is exactly the kind of short-sighted Washington game that keeps us from getting real results to our energy problem.

Chris Bowers asks, if we're seeing this now from Hillary Clinton, we can expect more of the same in a Clinton presidency—not so unlike the worst of the other Clinton presidency, actually.

Are we to suffer through another Democratic President who will make impromptu, right-ward shifts toward bad policy, justified in nonsensical, Orwellian language, all the while claiming such a move must be done because it will score huge political points even though it is ultimately a bad political calculation, and then threaten the entire Democratic Party to fall in line behind such a move or else? This is basically all of my worst fears about Hillary Clinton becoming President rolled up into one giant ball of tin-foil and dropped on my front porch.

President Bill Clinton steered our national dialogue around conservative frames and left the Democratic party disorganized and hapless while chalking up only a few progressive accomplishments. We know know that President Hillary Clinton would do the same. President Obama has certainly had his moments of buying into right-wing frames, too, but Clinton's willingness to adopt craven political gimmicks that would actually hurt our country is in a whole other league of awful.