This blog post has a succinct writeup of important things you should know about the Middle East. Even if you’re reasonably well-informed, odds are there’s something new there. A couple of things that I had forgotten:

• Arabs are Semites, as they speak a Semitic language
• Iranians are Shia Muslims, but they are not Arabs. They are Persians.

Also, an important thing to remember if you find yourself starting a war in the Middle East:

[Iraq is] mostly Shia (roughly 60%), but under Saddam the Shia were oppressed and the Sunni were in power despite being only 20% of the population.

As GWB said when he was told in 2003 that an invasion could cause a civil war between Sunni and Shia: “I thought they were all Muslims!”

The NHTSA has a table with an overview of stats on vehicle crashes in the last dozen years. The trend seems to be that driving is becoming safer (if you look at the last several rows). Note that it’s in reverse-chronological order.

Interestingly, motorcycle fatalities more than doubled in a decade. Maybe there are more motorcycles on the road now, but I doubt it’s increased that much. It could have to do with the aging demographics of motorcyclists.

There’s also a whole query interface if you want to take some time to extract more interesting data.
(via BoingBoing)

From a while ago… The True Cost of SMS (Text) Messages. Based upon the analysis, it’s about 61 million times more expensive than a typical cable modem connection. They then compared it to “writing bits out on paper and mailing them” and found that “…getting a SMS delivered is bit for bit 200x more expensive than getting a message hand delivered to your doorstep anywhere in the United States.”

Apparently there’s a movement in SF to name a sewage treatment plant after our illustrious President.