"Uganda’s president, Yoweri Museveni, recently tweeted that he and Queen Elizabeth II were 'friends with mutual benefits.'"

"I sympathize: English expressions are confusing, some of them feel almost deliberately obscure – designed to exclude non-native speakers from the joke," writes Mona Chalabi, who was inspired to interview her mother — whose first language is Arabic — about what various English expressions might mean.

It's a good idea, but the mother is too self-protective to serve up the kind of comic fun that, say, Ricky Gervais extracted from Karl Pilkington over the meaning of "People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones":

Whatever happened to Vox and FiveThirtyEight?

So Ezra Klein and Nate Silver took flight from The Washington Post and The New York Times, respectively, and announced that they were putting together these journalism-transforming websites that were unveiled soon enough to massive attention. But the success of a website has to do with the continual drawing of eyeballs, and there ought to be a constant flow of linkable material that is, in fact, getting linked. I'm not seeing it. Maybe I'm not looking in the right places, but are people reading and talking about articles at Vox and FiveThirtyEight?

At FiveThirtyEight right now, the front page is full of things I'm not going to click through to: "Only 11 States Have Ever Elected Both a Female Governor And Senator," "How Americans Like Their Steak," "This Man Has Worked For the NBA For the League’s Entire History," "Same-Sex Couples Settle Down More Often in States That Welcome Them," "Eat More Nuts," etc. Okay, I clicked on something, "The Power Bob," which I knew would be about hairstyles, coming from Mona Chalabi, and I got to: "Are Businesswomen With Short Hair a Cut Above the Rest?" Chalabi got out the old 70s style manual "Dress for Success," which showed 5 patterns of women's hairstyles and deemed 2 of them bad for success — "too long" and "too curly." She then classified the hairstyles of the 50 most-powerful women in business today, and found that 8 had "too long" and 1 had "too curly." Chalabi declared herself depressed about her own career prospects, since her hair is long and curly. FiveThirtyEight is oriented to analyzing statistics, and Chalabi generated a statistical study, but it's completely silly, based on a 36-year-old book telling younger people how to become successful and a lot of pictures of older women who already are successful, and ending up with bloggish emphasis on the writer's own emotional state.

At Vox, I'm so put off by the central design concept — yellow highlighter — and all the articles that begin with "Everything You Need to Know About" that I can hardly force myself to look for something to read, but I'll go with "Jill Abramson's ouster from the New York Times," because that's a story I've been following and because it's written by Matthew Yglesias and oh, yeah, they got Matt Yglesias slightly lit up my interest. The format surprises me. It's like I've hit the "Abramson" tag on a blog, and I'm looking at a vertical timeline of posts on the subject. I click on the second one down, titled "The NYT's great explanation of disruption," and I get to "Read the New York Times' insanely clear explanation of disruption," which is written not by Yglesias but by Ezra Klein. Insanely clear. Is that sarcasm or has "insanely" become a normal intensifier like "very"? Serendipitously, the topic of disruption relates to FiveThirtyEight and Vox. The Times text says: "Today a pack of news startups are hoping to 'disrupt' our industry by attacking the strongest incumbent — The New York Times." Ezra, restating the NYT text, reveals that "insanely" really did just mean "very." I am now as immunized to the word "insanely" as I am to the phrase "Everything You Need to Know About."

And that's everything I need to know for now about the insanely disruptive websites Vox and FiveThirtyEight.

ADDED: Proofreading, I got the bloggish, statistics-minded idea of seeing if this was the first time in 10 years of blogging that I had used the word "serendipitously." It turns out I'd used it once before, in this sentence: "Car sticker encountered in Madison, that I serendipitously only had to wait 3 days to find a use for. " The sticker in my then 3-day-old photograph said: "Get your ass to Mars."

The news about toilets — reported by a woman at the statistically oriented website FiveThirtyEight.

Yesterday, I noted the "awful gender optics" at the website FiveThirtyEight.

They've got one female and 6 males... [and] the one woman they've got, Mona Chalabi, has as her first topic on her list of 3 topics, toilets. They have the woman doing the toilets!

But let's look at that article about toilets, "Toilet Seat Covers: To Use or Not to Use." As the headline indicates, Ms. Chalabi focuses on those paper shields that one sometimes encounters on toilets. The first few words suggest that the reader is presumed to be female: "When your date casually mentions his flossing routine...." Chalabi signals her cleanliness which extends even to the males she dates. They are the type whose small talk assures the female that they attend to the finer aspects of hygiene.

Anyway, as noted, the topic is toilet seat covers, and Chalabi — following the FiveThirtyEight approach to journalism — mines a paper published in Pediatrics for statistics that relate to why one might not want to sit directly on a toilet seat. There are 8 paragraphs of that, and then one last paragraph:

You can decide for yourself whether the covers are a low-cost way to minimize risk or an expensive waste of paper. But there is one other piece of research that might be relevant, especially if you’re a man. Between 2002 and 2010, doctors documented 8,959 incidents of “penile crush injury related to a toilet seat” in U.S. emergency rooms. We’re not sure how those happened — for example, whether most occurred sitting or standing — but we thought you should factor it into your decision about the seat covers.

Ha ha. That sounds like it's meant to be funny. It's only a penis, and what are these men, so inept that they can't deal with the up-and-down of a toilet seat? We’re not sure how those happened... 

If you go to the summary of the study, at Chalabi's link, you'll easily picture how it happened, and it's not cute or funny at all. There were 13,175 genitourinary injuries related to toilet seats in the U.S. in the years 2002–2010.

The most common mechanism involved crush from accidental fall of toilet seat, described in 9011 (68.4%, 95% CI 6907–11 115) cases.

Most crush injuries were isolated to the penis (98.1%). Of crush injuries, 81.7% occurred in children aged 2–3 years and 99.3% occurred in the home. Crush injuries increased over the period 2002–2010 (P = 0.017) by ≈100 per year, ending with an estimated 1707 (95% CI 1011–2402) by 2010.

The journal, remember, is Pediatrics. These are very little boys just learning to pee at the toilet, with their penis in a vulnerable spot, after they've swung the seat into an incompletely upright position. Once you visualize the problem, the design defect of the toilet seat is actually quite shocking. And yet here is Chalabi — supposedly into statistical revelations — transforming this information into something like a joking parting shot for the article. The reader is prompted to laugh at a grown man — perhaps a bad "date" — who can't even protect his own penis when he opts to pee standing up.

Thanks to Meade for reading the toilet article (which I had referred to in yesterday's post without reading). His comment on yesterday's post was:

[W]ho knew so many American males (1000+ per year) suffer the injury of penile crush caused, apparently, by plumbing design catering to womens' gender specific demands to have the toilet seat DOWN?

The awful gender optics at FiveThirtyEight.

Yesterday, we were talking about Nate Silver's big new project, an ambitious news website founded on his highly successful approach — originally done solo — of processing statistical information. Silver made his reputation crunching election polls and predicting outcomes. That is, he had lots of raw information, and there were specific events in the future that would occur on a particular, known date and which many people care about intensely. How does that scale up into a whole news website? I'm going to be watching, and I've read a few articles and will keep reading and reporting my observations.

But I've just got to show you this, the entire array of "contributors" displayed in the sidebar on the main page at FiveThirtyEight:



They've got one female and 6 males. I guess it says something about their orientation toward numbers that they put 3 males then the female, then the other 3 males. That's sorta like gender-balancing. I'm not going to say they need to equalize the numbers for the sake of appearance, because I wouldn't want them to further degrade the significance of women by padding the operation with females who are not respected. My criticism is that the one woman they've got, Mona Chalabi, has as her first topic on her list of 3 topics, toilets. They have the woman doing the toilets! Her second topic is: teeth. Teeth!

I know these guys are statistics-focused, but somebody has got to have some sturdy intuitions about how things look and feel.