This Made Me Laugh

From Andrew Gelman's blog.

Writing about four-leaf clovers, Steven Levitt says, "I’ve been looking my whole life and never found one." This reminds me that when I was a kid, my sister Susie and I used to find them in the backyard all the time. We'd also occasionally find siamese dandelions (one stalk, two heads) that we'd put on our older sister's bed to freak her out. Much later, Susie told me that our land was on some sort of former waste dump and so we (along with the clovers and dandelions) were probably being poisoned.

The New York version of this story: several years ago I was standing on the subway platform, and I offhandedly said to my companion, Hey, let's look for rats. We looked, and, indeed, there was a rat. I mean, I knew that there were rats in the subway--I've occasionally even seen them on the platform--but I didn't know they could be summoned at will in this way.

Gelman has to be one of the most down to earth statistician types I've ever read. Actually, James Hamilton is another. When you read Hamilton's Time Series Econometrics book, it's unbelievably dense and painful. Then when you read his blog, you're like "Goodness, is this the same person?" Gelman, though, is more like Ken Binmore, a game theorist. Binmore's book is actually approachable, because he writes so well, and brings it down to the mere mortals. Gelman's book and blog do the same thing. We clumsy social scientists who are intellectually challenged appreciate it much.