Or maybe not...

Did you catch the story last weekend about the first woman ever to swim across the Atlantic -- at age 56? It took her 25 days; she rested on a boat each evening and swam during the day. Or at least during most days; she swam on "19 out of 25 days"; "her longest stint in the water was about eight hours, and her shortest was 21 minutes."

Sounds pretty impressive, no? Well, at least it does until you start reality-checking the claim. Swimming 2,500 miles, from the Cape Verde Islands to Trinidad, in 25 days?


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Not possible. A woman swimming 100 meters in one minute -- that's slower than the world record pace for the 100 meter freestyle, but faster than the record for the 800 meter -- would take almost 28 days to swim that distance, swimming around the clock. (And it's entirely impractical for a boat to remain in a fixed position overnight in mid-ocean, when you can't just drop anchor. But that's a minor complication.)

It turns out that she swam only a small fraction of the journey, resting on the group's catamarin for the rest of the trip. The best estimate is that she swam about 250 miles in total -- one tenth of the distance involved in "crossing the Atlantic."

To be fair, apparently Benoit Lecomte, the man who, in 1998, was the first person to "swim across the Atlantic," did much the same thing:

Reached Thursday at his home near Dallas, Lecomte said he did it the same way Figge did — taking frequent breaks on board a boat that moved toward his destination.

He said he doesn't know how many miles he actually swam — "It's a very good question" — and added he, too, took frequent breaks and swam no more than eight hours a day.

Missing the point

CNN's got an interactive map up showing the projected job gain, by state, from Obama's economic stimulus plan. Here's a screen grab; you can roll over the actual map to see exact numbers in each state:
Which states look like they'll be helped the most? California, Texas, Florida, Illinois, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, New Jersey -- all big states (in terms of population). Why is the plan biased towards big states? It's not. The map is colored based on the number of jobs created in state, but that's not very meaningful. Of course more jobs will be created in states with more people; coloring the states based on the new jobs per capita would be far more interesting.

Or maybe boring. Based on the data from the report, it looks like the states will see very similar job creation rates per capita. This graphs shows the number of jobs forecast to be created per thousand people, ranging from Mississippi, which will get about 11 jobs for every thousand people, to Wyoming, which is forecast to see about 15 new jobs for every 1,000 people. That's not a very large range at all.

Super Bowl Ad Prices

Super Bowl ad prices provide a lot of opportunities for interesting comparisons and conversations. The original price for a 30 second ad in Sunday's game $3 million, but according to Bloomberg news, only 12 of the 67 spots actually sold for that much, with two of the last ads to sell going for the "bargain" price of $2.4 million (20% off!). NBC had a record $206 million in ad revenue, which would actually work out to an average of over $3 million if there were, indeed, 67 spots. I'm not sure how those numbers relate to one another; the ad revenue total does not include pre- or post-game ads, but maybe it includes non-national spots or "revenue" for those spots promoting other NBC shows?

AdvertisingAge provides a table with a lot of historical context for Super Bowl ad prices from 1967 to 2007, giving the actual price, the inflation adjusted price, the average rating, and the average numbers of homes and viewers watching the Super Bowl. (There's clearly a problem with the listed actual, non-inflation-adjusted, price listed for 1983; it should almost certainly be $400,000, and not $1,400,000. The error doesn't propigate to the inflation-adjusted prices, fortunately.)


MSNBC has a graphic showing the cost and number of viewers over time:

Here's a graph that I created, based on the AdAge data, which shows the CPM, or cost per 1,000 views, in 2007 dollars:
I'd really like to compare the Super Bowl ad prices with the cost of other ads. I'd need to do some hunting to find relevant data.

Finally, and not directly about ad prices at all, the New York Times has a really cool interactive map of popular Twitter words around the country during the Super Bowl (found through Flowing Data.)

Robert Reich mixing percentages and raw quantities

In an op-ed in Sunday's Washington Post, Robert Reich wrote:

Meanwhile, our broken health-care system drains more of our dollars yet delivers less care. When President Clinton tried to tackle health care in 1994, it represented 14 percent of our GDP, and 38 million Americans were uninsured. Now, the nation spends 16 percent of its GDP on health, and about 44 million of us are uninsured.

So what's the catch? He's sweeping the population change under the rug. In 1994, the US population was about 260 million; it is now (2008) around 304 million. So the percentage of the population who are uninsured has stayed pretty constant: it's gone from 14.6% in 1994 to 14.5% now. Yes, we are spending more to insure that same percentage, but the numbers he uses in this op-ed exaggerate the magnitude of the increase. I'd call this example intentionally misleading, and not merely confused.