Okay, I read this story, and thought it was from The Onion News Service: "Farnworth says police permission should be a requirement for those buying Kevlar vests."
It's bad enough that Mike Farnworth, member of Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition (to reason? To logic?) is favoring this pea-brained idea with a private member's bill. Apparently this is such a great idea, the Solicitor-General wants in on it too!
Now, gangs are bad. The Bacon brothers in this story sure have all the hallmarks of bad people living bad lives (allegedly). But what's the plan? Increase the lethality of gang warfare, so the gangsters start thinking "hey, somebody could get hurt!"
It's a weird, twisted logic that suggests that defensive armor is the problem. The quotes from the promoters of this idea, as far as I can tell, don't even make sense:
This isn't really original, or even half-clever. It's a cruder, stupider variant of a clever idea called shot quality.
But here goes.
While I was trying to avoid watching the OT tonight, I did this:
If you don't need many shots to score a goal, we'll call that "shot efficiency." Other analysts refer to it (or related measures) as "shot quality."
How many shots does a team have to take to score a goal? Here's the
First number is team rank (by point percentage, so it accounts for games in hand, OTL, etc.; when all teams have played all their games, point percentage ranking is the same as their final standings ranking).
I was reading the amusingly data-manic (and graphically sound) Feltron 2008 Annual Report, when I came across this tidbit on page 3: "Photographs taken: 1,468"
The source of all this data (Nick Felton, graphic designer), used four cameras to do his work (EOS 20D, SD870 IS, Leica M6, and "Blackbird Fly"), with most of the photos captured by the first two.
This is from a graphic designer who owns multiple extremely serious photographic instruments, and all I could think was "that doesn't seem like a lot, does it?"
Ahem. I opened my seriously non-serious iPhoto, and looked at the "Last 12 Months" folder.
