"The mathematically proven winning strategy for 14 of the most popular games."

A not-quite-accurate headline for an interesting article with plenty of math.

"Drunken falls cause more deaths than drunken driving in Wisconsin."

"The most recent figures available show 349 deaths in Wisconsin from alcohol-related falls in 2012. That compares to 223 alcohol-related traffic deaths that year."

The article (in the Capital Times) does not mention the (comforting?) thought that, unlike drunken driving, drunken falling is only killing the drunk. Or so I presume. Another annoying thing in this article is that it takes a gratuitous swipe at old people:

Julia Sherman, coordinator of the Wisconsin Alcohol Policy Project... said older people are already at risk from falls and adding alcohol or alcohol in combination with drugs or medications only adds to the problems. �When I hear about happy hours in retirement communities I get worried,� said Sherman. �With the population aging, it�s an area we haven�t looked closely enough at.�

But we're given no statistics about the ages of the the falling-down-dead drunks and the only anecdotal evidence is of a 32-year-old woman who fell off a fire escape.

Another thing about falling is that it's a standard type of accident, drunk or sober. Some of the people who fall are going to have had something to drink. It doesn't mean the person was falling-down drunk. For all I know, there are falls that are avoided because those who have had something to drink are walking more slowly and paying more attention to where they are stepping or they are just not walking that much. Whatever, people need to walk from one place to another, and drinking and walking isn't morally wrong, like drinking and driving.

Back in 2011, there was a lot of talk about drinking and walking. The Freakonomics guys popularized the topic:

Steven Levitt: For every mile walked drunk, turns out to be eight times more dangerous than the mile driven drunk. So just to put it simply, if you need to walk a mile from a party to your home, you�re eight times more likely to die doing that than if you jump behind the wheel and drive your car that same mile...  For 20 years, we�ve been told you should never, ever drive drunk. We should have been told you should never, ever walk drunk and you should never, ever drive drunk. And because nobody thought about it when we were coming up with what was moral and immoral, somehow now, drunk walking just can�t find its way into the immoral box.

Oh, I'm sure some folks are working on that.

ALSO: The use of the word "drunken" is unsupported by the text of the article, which only speaks of "alcohol-related" accidents. 

"David Simon, the creator of the iconic Baltimore-based HBO series The Wire, lashed out in a lengthy interview against Martin O�Malley..."

"... saying in the wake of this week�s riots and curfew that the former Baltimore Mayor and Maryland Governor was the 'stake through the heart of police procedure' in the city."

Speaking with The Marshall Project, Simon traces his wariness back to O�Malley�s time as Mayor between 1999 and 2007, when Simon says he made �mass arrests� of citizens for minor offenses to pad crime statistics. �[W]hat happened under his watch as Baltimore�s mayor was that he wanted to be governor. And at a certain point, with the crime rate high� he put no faith in real policing.�

Simon, a crime reporter at the Baltimore Sun for more than 10 years before he moved to television writing, has been an outspoken critic of O�Malley for years. He has even said that the Wire character Tommy Carcetti, an ambitious politician who manipulates crime reduction statistics, is partly based on O�Malley, a presumed Democratic presidential candidate.

Here's the whole interview. Excerpt:
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