It's Not That The Mohammedans Don't TRY To Patent Anything

clipped from www.qando.net Barack Obama recounted the contributions of Islam yesterday during his speech in Cairo. This may not have been what he was talking about: German media outlets reported last week that a Saudi inventor’s application to patent a “killer chip,” as the Swiss tabloids put it, had been denied. The basic model would consist of a tiny GPS transceiver placed in a capsule and inserted under a person’s skin, so that authorities could track him easily. Model B would have an extra function — a dose of cyanide to remotely kill the wearer without muss or fuss if authorities deemed he’d become a public threat.

For some extra calibration, Jews have won 184 Nobel prizes from a population hovering around only 12 million worldwide. Muslims have won only 9 Nobels from a population now hovering around 1.4 Billion -- and one of them [Arafat] was a blood drenched ruthless killer. The shock never ends.

This means that on a per capita basis, the average Jew is approximately 2,400 times -- for the numerate, that's over 3 orders of magnitude! -- more likely to win a Nobel prize than the average Muslim. Put another way, there would be over 24,000 Muslim Nobel prize winners if the average Muslim was as likely to win one as the average Jew.

Perhaps O Duce isn't quite up to the latest facts on Muslim enlightenment? Ya think?

Innumeracy Update: Recalculating Behind The "Boo Frickin' Hoo"

Glenn and Charles link to this sob story about how burials are down at the (huge) Najaf cemetery so now we're supposed to feel sorry for the soon to be unemployed staff there! One the surface, Glenn's certainly right about what outrageous MSM spin-reverse-meistering this is.

But it's even worse than he suggests when you get out your spreadsheet and chart wizard.

Whenever I read an article where numbers are thrown around ranging from "soared" to 150 per day to 6500 per month -- hmm, it's kind of hard to quickly compare furlongs per fortnight to miles per hour, no? -- as casual evidence for the storyline, I get suspicious. Of a cover up, innumeracy or -- all too often lately -- both.

So let's take the key numeric assertions listed in article in varying units and out of order sequence and normalize and sequence them (see chart -- numbers from article highlighted in table above, my conversions in white cells).

Isn't THAT interesting!

No wonder they quoted the numbers in varying units -- when normalized they show a downtrend culminating in a most recent month's daily burial rate lower than that quoted for the (non war) 1990s under Saddam! Best to leave that storyline left untold by the MSM, no?

Obfuscating the unfavorable-to-MSM storyline? Innumeracy? Both?

Yes.