Friday Four

1. Should the government pay women to go on dates with socially-awkward men? Until some time in the past year, there was a blog that seriously advocated such a position. (HT: Word Spy)

2. Have you a favorite program that its vendor discontinued, or which otherwise disappeared from the market ages ago? VetusWare.com, which bills itself as "the biggest free abandonware downloads collection in the universe", might be able to help.

3. There's a web site, Spurious Correlations, that can help make the point, humorously, that correlation does not imply causation. Today's "spurious correlation" shows that, for example, US spending on science, space, and technology very strongly correlates with suicides by hanging, strangulation and suffocation, with a correation coefficient of 0.992.

4. After having my sleep interefered with almost nightly for well over a year by my daughter, who fought sleep tooth and nail as an infant, my son's love of sleep is a huge (and much-appreciated) relief. His first attempt to communicate with me (excluding crying, and at least that I successfully decoded) was to tug my pants leg to request bedtime.

A couple of nights ago, he nearly made me laugh after a night feeding with how strongly he wants to sleep when he's tired. As I held him bedside to put the bottle away, he lunged for the center of the bed. He's done this for Mrs. Van Horn a few times, too. Bless you, Little Man!

-- CAV