Elections in South Africa, kind of more competitive

BBC

According to the BBC, the upcoming election is the most competitive since 1994, assuming you use a loose definition of "competitive". The ANC got nearly 70% of the vote last election, but there's been a lot of controversy so in the polls they're down to a dismal 60%. So really, it's MORE competitive than the 1994 election, when they got 62%.

Friends on Bizarre Foods

In case anyone cares, my friends Robert (Egbert not Cole) and Julli will be on the South Korea episode of Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern on April 21st at 10 and 11pm. They are food guides for the part on Korean BBQ or galbi.

First Cousins Bad, Third Cousins Good

Science Blogs

I'll start you out with this lovely article about King Charles II of Spain and how he was insanely inbred. Some of you may remember a post I did almost exactly three years ago about the lineage of the King of Sweden and I was able to connect him to King George I six times. I think I might try a similar thing with King Charles II and see what I get.

Not Exactly Rocket Science

The earlier article let me to this second article which I found fascinating. The gist of the article is that a couple who are third cousins tend to have more children and more grandchildren than other more or less related couples. The mentioning of grandchildren is important as it means that their own children were healthy enough to have their own children, which is not always the case with more closely related couples. However, why more distantly related couples have fewer children and grandchildren is a bit of a mystery.

Rare Movies

I was playing around with Criticker and an interesting idea came to me. When Criticker makes a guess of how much someone would like a movie, it takes the scores of the 1000 people that agree that person the most, finds the ones that have seen some movie, and then takes the top 10 of those to create a prediction.

When looking at a movie, it lists all other people using Criticker that have seen it, but only shows the TCI scores (the measure of how much someone agrees with someone else) for those in that persons top 1000. Therefore, if TCI scores are only shown for say 2 people, then that means out of 1000 people, only 2 have seen it.

So I got to thinking, 1000 people is, statistically, a pretty good sized group. Therefore having just two out of 1000 see a movie means that 0.2% of the population have seen the movie, with a margin of error of 3%. This lead me to wondering, which movies have I seen, that the fewest number of people have seen. There are of course of number of problems in terms of selection bias using this method, but I can deal with it.

The 30 movies I have seen that the fewest number of Criticker users in my top 1000 have thought of ranking (bolded, movies I recommend seeing):
The Baker - 0.1%
Benji the Hunted - 0.1%
How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying - 0.2%
Reckless Kelly - 0.2%
The King and the Clown - 0.3%
Animals are Beautiful People - 0.4%
The Cocoanuts - 0.4%
Felix the Cat: the Movie - 0.4%
The Princess Blade - 0.5%
The Wraith - 0.5%
The Court Jester - 0.7%
Norma Rae - 0.7%
Hellbound - 0.8%
Larger than Life - 1.1%
So Close - 1.1%
Monkey Business - 1.3%
Welcome to Dongmakgol - 1.3%
Guys and Dolls - 1.4%
Boxing Helena - 1.5%
I Love You to Death - 1.6%
Ned Kelly - 1.6%
The Black Hole - 1.8%
Fantastic Planet - 1.8%
For Richer or Poorer - 1.8%
Animal Crackers - 2.0%
The Legend of 1900 - 2.2%
Strictly Ballroom - 2.3%
Vanity Fair - 2.4%
Young Einstein - 2.4%
Six-String Samurai - 2.5%