Yesterday’s Times Freakonomics column was a great one. A Missouri engineer and his daughter did a seven-month study collecting the weather forecasts of their local television stations (and NOAA) and compared them to the actual weather — and as experience might have helped you guess, found that you can pretty much only rely on the next-day forecast, with everything else more or less being a random guess. (Of note, this is something I’ve wanted to do for a long, long time; I’m glad that someone finally did it!) The column is a long-ish read, but well worth it if you’ve ever even given a moment’s thought to looking at the weekend forecast mid-week…

Anytime an article contains the phrase “These are sweeping generalizations that are intended to provoke a heated debate, so try not to get too offended”, you can be sure that it’s a total piece of crap penned by an intellectually-dishonest author who’s too lazy to put a sufficient amount of coherent thought or reason into his article. Given that truism, Aaron Rowe’s “Top 5 Reasons to Dislike Pre-Med Students” doesn’t disappoint, and in fact, might delight those who discover that it’s an even more steaming pile of crap than you’d have guessed from its title!

This might be my favorite news article correction ever, from my old school paper, the Columbia Spectator:

CORRECTION: This submission misstates that one Dalai Lama admitted to having sex with hundreds of men and women while knowing that he had AIDS. Additionally, the submission misstates that many monks participated in the dismemberment of female bodies. In fact, there is no factual evidence to substantiate either of these claims. Spectator regrets the error.

I mean, that’s just awesome. Nice work there, editors…

I am incredibly excited about the launch of Flickr’s new video uploading abilities — what a welcome addition to an already-awesome online service! (I also love Heather Champ’s silly little intro video to the service… nice work, that.) With the new kiddo at home, we find that we’re taking a slew of both pictures and videos; we’ve shared all the photos with our people via Flickr, but have had to do a bit of custom work to get the videos online in a way that let us exercise a bit of control over who could see and reuse them. No longer!