Curry Free Throws vs Suspected Terrorist Gun Buys

A comparison by Zachary Crockett from Vox: a suspected terrorist can buy a gun more easily than Steph Curry can make a free throw. Via Visual News.

Remembering Orlando

Orlando is reeling. Here it is in more tranquil times: Lake Eola Park downtown, the site of many vigils this past week.

Brian Resnick and Javier Zarracina from Vox have a cartoon explaining mathematically that predicting a mass shooting, like Pulse, is beyond our abilities. They consider a prediction that is 99% accurate in detecting a lone mass shooter. That shooter, hiding within a group of 1000 people, could be labeled by such a prediction, but that same prediction could label another 9 law abiding folks as potential threats.

If such a prediction scheme was used for the the 323 million people of the US, we could have a false positive group of over 3.2 million!

Timely Stats

From an analysis by RAINN the Rape, Abuse, & Incest National Network.

On The Road ... Map

On a trip to visit family, we stopped at a gas station in Hammondville, Alabama. On the wall was a map of the US with this wear pattern of customers touching where they were on the map. The many touchers have worn though the paper map down to the underlying supporting board. It seems that many have traced their path of travel extending southwest to Birmingham, AL and northwest to Chattanooga, TN likely along the connecting route US 11, passing through Hammondville, or along the parallel interstate 59 a bit further west. What remains is a roughly ellipsoidal bivariate frequency distribution of wear with a greater frequency of wear centered on Hammondville and lesser frequencies of wear in ellipsoidal contours around it.