I like DC characters; I just hate DC
Please also tag for Fabian Nicieza and Grant Morrison, as well as the issue numbers of the arcs in which they both butchered Jason's characterization, as well as for typical trigger warnings. I am very serious about this- I unfollow people who don't fucking tag.
I am likewise willing to tag for anything. I do my best to tag for anything that might generally be a problem for someone, but if I'm posting something you need to Savior, just drop me an ask and I'll do my best.
This is an anti-Babsgirl blog.
dont be mean
be median or mode
damn math fandom bloggers
shut up we have a good range of jokes
this is our domain
guys we’re forgetting the point of this post and going off on a tangent
how did a three-word post cos this many puns
(via official-which)
… huh?
This is backwards; probability of homosexuality increases with each son, meaning that the 5th son is more likely to be gay than the 4th son than the 3rd son than the 2nd son than the 1st son.
Simple mathematics also demonstrates that this is wrong. If there was somehow a 0% chance that a 5th son was gay, then there’d be a 33% chance that the 4th son was gay, a 66% chance that the 3rd son was, a 99% chance that the 2nd son was, and a whopping 132% chance that the 1st son was gay.
Suffice to say, I think that the tweeter mixed some things up.
To be honest I actually had no idea math has any play in someone’s sexual orientation.
Oh, yeah, they’ve done birth order studies and found that male children born after male children become more and more likely to be gay. IDK what the exact numbers are, but I know it’s not a flat 33% increase - since you can’t have more than a 100% chance of homosexuality, there must at least be some type of cutoff point or asymptote effect or something. But birth order does play a role in homosexuality amongst male children, which is believed to result from the way the pregnant person’s body adapts to more male children. Some type of prenatal hormone thing.
The female relatives of gay men are also more fertile on average than those of straight men, indicating that there’s probably a genetic component, too.
There are a lot fewer studies of female homosexuality, sadly, and even fewer deal with bi/pansexuality and asexuality in their data. Basically none of them deal with intersex and trans* facts, too, so there’s definitely a lot more research to be done, but these studies still do present some interesting results.
(via annicaspoon)
- (We’re taking a calculus final. The TA is a well-known Lord of the Rings fan, and we’ve had running LotR jokes all semester.)
- TA: “Okay, guys, everyone look at me. We’ve been over the rules, but just in case: no notes, pencil your answers in on the scantron sheet, and graphing calculators only – no more ‘can I just used my cell phone’ nonsense.”
- Student: “[TA's name], my calculator batteries just died! What should I do?”
- TA: “Here, I’ve got a big box of spares.”
- Student: *struggling* “I can’t get this packaging open…”
- Student 2: “Here, I’ve got a pocket knife.”
- TA: “And I’ve got a pair of scissors if you need them.”
- Student 3: *from the back of the room* “OR MY AXE!”
- (Everyone starts laughing.)
- TA: “The only axes allowed on the exam are in the graph section.”
- (Everyone groans.)
- TA: “Oh, come on, you’re in a math class. Deal with the math jokes.”
- (The professor enters with a stack of exams. With him are two exam proctors.)
- Professor: “Tolkien jokes already, [TA's name]?”
- TA: “Hey, I didn’t start it.”
- (The professor starts handing stacks of exams to the TA and proctors.)
- Professor: “But I’m about to finish it. [TA], take these exams down the left flank. [Proctor 1], follow the desks down the center. [Proctor 2], take your exams right, along the wall.”
- (At this point, many of the students have realized where this is going: Theoden’s lines from ‘Return of the King.’)
- Professor: “Forth, and fear no problems! Solve! Solve, students of calculus! Points shall be taken, scores shall be splintered! A pencil day! A red-ink day! Until three thirty!”
- (The professor pulls out a pencil, holding it out like a sword, and runs down the first row holding it out. Students hold up their pencils, hitting his as he passes.)
- Professor: “Solve now! Solve now! Solve to good grades and the class ending! MAAATH!”
- Entire Class: “MAAATH!”
- Professor: “MAAAAATH!”
- Entire Class: “MAAAAAATH!”
- Professor: “Forth, exam-takers!”
- (The entire class rises to their feet and gives him a standing ovation. A week later, we get an email from the professor.)
- Professor: *at the end of the email* “PS: I appreciate all of you who wrote in their evaluations that I was the one professor to rule them all, but the best one yet was the student who called me ‘Mathrandir.’”
While it’s no surprise that nearly 50 million Americans live below the poverty line, new statistics from the US Census show that almost 100 million others are counted as low-income citizens, making half of the population of America officially poor.
The latest figures out of the US Census Bureau show that in addition to the 49.1 million Americans who fall below the official poverty line, those that rake in enough to be between that level and the income equitable to double it fall into a new “low-income” category, which counts an additional 97.3 million people. Altogether, that clump of nearly 150 million Americans living in dire economic standing accounts for around 48 percent of the US population.
American officials have deemed the current poverty line to be at around $22,000 for a family of four, but the new category just about doubles that figure to $45,000 and places those that fall between the numbers as low-income. The Associated Press reports that for families that fit in that range, often half of the household income is spent on child-care costs and housing bills.
Taking into account medical, commuting and other living costs, the number of people living below 200 percent of the poverty level has been drastically changed and not for the better. Before those factors were taken into consideration, the US Census reported in September that only one-in-three Americans qualified as poor or low-income.
As RT reported earlier this year, the number of Americans living below half, or 50 percent of the poverty level, is equally as alarming. Around 20.5 million Americans — or 6.7 percent — have personal incomes that place them in that bracket, which equates to annual incomes of less than $5,570 for an individual or $11,157 for a family of four. In Washington DC, which is part of the wealthiest metropolitan region per-capital in the country, one-in-ten residents are grouped into that category.
Don’t fret though. It isn’t all doom and gloom! Some Americans are in fact seeing a turn for the better. While half of the country might be considered poor now, some citizens recently saw pay raises in the last year that were to the tune of 40 percent. Unfortunately, they probably didn’t necessarily need that bump. According to the Guardian, the top CEOs in America saw pay hikes between 27 and 40 percent last year. The paper adds that the highest paid exec in the US racked up more than $145.2 million last year, and the median value of their profits on stock options jumped 70 percent.
(via alexandraerin)
So I was curious how much of the various Bats’ patrol time should be broken up into actual “patrol-and-respond” stuff vs. specific investigations (hitting up a corner where a dealer has been known to go, hitting up a specific meeting, trailing a target, etc.). I had a hunch that it would be a vastly more effective use of their time to work on specific investigations than to just patrol aimlessly, so I started crunching some numbers.
TL;DR: It is in no way, shape or form a better use of the Bats’ time to wander the streets aimlessly than to conduct specific investigations. This is because, if they patrolled a random area, they would encounter an average of at most .10 crimes per night.
The details:
Since Gotham City is often compared to NYC, I decided to start with the NYC crime rate, using 2010 numbers, as they’re pretty recent. I am not factoring in any type of supervillain activity in this, since those tend to be special occurrences vs. a usual night’s patrol. I first divided these yearly statistics by 365 to get a general estimation of how many crimes of these categories occur (and are recorded) in NYC per day.
But that’s not quite right, is it? Gotham City is Crime Central in the DCU, so it should rightfully be significantly higher than NYC. I figured that something like 1.5 times the crime rate should work pretty well, so I went ahead and worked with that.
Things after that got a bit more complicated. How to factor in the fact that the Bats patrol only at night? I finally decided that, between the lot of them, the Bats are probably active for a total of 8 hours a night, that being 1/3 of the day, so I divided the new numbers by 3. That’s a bit more than even Batman himself probably does, but we’re going to go with it, for reasons you’re about to see.
Now here’s where it gets interesting. See, the Bats together can’t patrol the whole city, let alone any single vigilante. So I estimated Gotham to be the same square mileage as NYC and figured out the crimes per night per square mile. This isn’t quite accurate, since some areas would have *much* higher crime rates than others, but it’ll do for a baseline number.
I then had to figure out the active patrolling area of any given Bat. I figure that, with their various forms of Batransportation and their ridiculous access to technical stuff, they probably want to have about a maximum ten minute response time to a crime they hear about that occurs on the very opposite end of their active territory for the night. Now, the Bats generally laugh at the speed limit, so we’ll say that they can, if they gun it, go a full 100mph as the crow flies to get to where they need to be. This gives them an active diameter of a whole 1.67 miles, which translates to a circular area of 2.19 square miles for a 6720 square mile city.
So, using the averages, how much crime will they encounter in this entire area at maximum, not accounting for the fact that they would have to hear about the crime and get there in time to respond properly?
0.10 crimes per night.
But this number isn’t quite fair. Of course the Bats are going to spend more time patrolling the higher-crime areas. So what happens if they patrol a really, really nasty area, with a crime rate that’s fully 100 times the average?
Well, there’ll be about 10 crimes in their area during the night. 6 of them, incidentally, will be property crimes. Only 2 will be violent.
So basically, if the Bats stop to respond to your general random crimes, it’s going to be while they’re going back and forth between actual productive investigations.
A squared plus B squared equal C squared!
i what
PYTHAGOREAN THEOREM BITCHES
(via glompcat)
Compiled by: http://saphire-dance.tumblr.com/
Special thanks to:
AvatarMaxine for pointing us to the sales data over at http://www.comichron.com/monthlycomicssales.html
Gorblax for his ludicrous amounts of data entry
and
DaggerPen for her editing and help compiling Cass’s Batman indices.
Our full data analysis can be seen here:https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AnV-sN5RRp21dEVibVFFQS0tWEgzcDBRY2d4RHNOUlE#gid=9
When defending the return of Barbara Gordon to the Batgirl title and the benching of her successors Cassandra Cain and Stephanie Brown, Babs’s “iconic” nature is usually cited. And admittedly, when it comes to other media adaptations, Barbara seems to have a clear advantage, something seemingly reflected in the sales of her run compared to that of Cass and Steph:
But with the boost in sales the New 52 brought, comparing their runs is difficult. Babs obviously sells more copies, certainly, but only in an era marked by dramatically increased sales for DC in general. Indeed, comparing the stable and related Batman title shows the problem of a raw numbers comparison rather readily:
But then we stumbled upon a solution, the same one Diamond uses to compare comics: Batman.The Sales Index of selected monthly Best Seller Charts is presented as a comparative tool for retailers and publishers. It presents Diamond’s monthly sales for individual titles in relation to Diamond’s total sales for the issue of DC Comics’ monthly Batman comic book. (Batman is used as the control title – with a value of 100 – because sales of Batman usually remain relatively stable.) This allows for easy comparison to other titles and helps retailers gauge their orders for all other titles. This formula is only a guide, other factors may impact a titles’ ability to sell in certain locations and clientele.
The index number, a percentage of how the comic sells in relation to Batman, makes it easy to compare titles sold in different timeframes and economic situations. It’s not perfect; while Batman is chosen for its relative stability, major events in the title can cause dramatic changes in the index of other titles during the month. Hush alone virtually halved the Batman index of most other titles during its run. However, despite these fluctuations, comparisons to Batman are extremely useful in determining the success of a book.
So, how do the Batgirls stack up when you look at Batman indices alone?
But don’t start crowing with victory just yet, Cass and Steph fans. Babs’s Batgirl run is occurring during a period of vastly increased sales for Batman, something which did not occur during the entirety of the other Batgirls’ runs.
So what does this mean, then? It means that there is no one true Batgirl.
Really. There is absolutely no hard and fast indication that Babs, Steph or Cass would have triumphed in terms of sales if given the same circumstances in the New 52. We cannot say with absolute certainty that Cass or Steph would have beaten Babs. But we certainly can’t say that Babs would automatically sell over Cass or Steph, either.
But what about the other debate that’s been going on, that of Barbara as Batgirl vs. as Oracle? Well, that’s not quite so cut and dried, either. In terms of Batman index, Oracle takes the lead by a healthy margin, with the Oracle mini heartily outdoing the Batgirl: Year One mini, and all Birds of Prey books outdoing Barbara as Batgirl.
In terms of raw numbers, though, the trends are slightly less clear. Barbara as Batgirl in the New 52 once again dominates, yet Oracle’s mini outsells Batgirl: Year One, and both miniseries outdo the original Birds of Prey, yet not the Gail-written Birds of Prey Volume Two.
So while Oracle seems perhaps to have a slight edge, it still can’t be pinpointed for certain.
One thing that is clear, however, is that the changes to Birds of Prey in the New 52 were not for the best. Consider the Batman Sales Indices of the three Birds of Prey series so far:
But what about in terms of raw sales? Well…
Certainly, the New 52’s BOP series outsold the original BOP run in terms of average issues, but only barely, and BOP V2 actually outsold it, making it the only pre-Flashpoint title in this analysis to outsell its New 52 counterpart. Suffice to say, things aren’t looking too good for the Birds of Prey.
Why could this be? Well, there are a variety of possibilities, potentially but not necessarily including subpar writing (this is not necessarily a condemnation of the writer’s abilities; we haven’t read this book. It’s just a possibility), the differing cast, and, especially, the loss of its three original and core members: Helena Bertinelli, Dinah Lance, and Barbara Gordon as Oracle. The lack of Gail Simone is another definite possibility: Gail tends to sell very, very well, something seen across these titles:
All this, of course, begs the question: with no clear evidence that Barbara as Batgirl would have outsold either her successors Cass or Steph or her other well-known identity of Oracle, but with clear evidence that Birds of Prey has suffered from the changes made to it, was it truly the right decision to return Barbara to Batgirl? And was it truly the right decision to eject Gail Simone from the DCnU?
We’ll leave you all to ponder that one.
Oh, and if any of you wanted to see more charts:This is absolutely fascinating.
I am interested to see how Gail Simone’s leave impacts the title as it seems many readers were reading exclusively because she was on it.
Yeah, we’re definitely going to be keeping a close eye on those sales. I have a feeling that Babs’s book is about to take a nosedive…
- Teacher: 1 + 1 = 2
- Classwork: 2 + 2 = 4
- Homework: If you're flying in a jet plane across the Atlantic Ocean from your beginning point in Hawaii, how many frogs in the Amazon Rain Forest die due to the winds you create via startling a butterfly into flight due to the noise of your engine and causing it to flap its wings in just the right way to create a vortex in the air? How does the answer change if your favorite color is blue?
- Quiz: Just kidding 3 + 3 = 6
- Test: I give you a hamburger.
(via kenjideath)
This is the person your algebra problems warned you about.
ugly laughter
Pffft.
(via fyeahlilbit2point0)
