Two posters at FiveThirtyEight.com throw cold water on the theory that Benford's Law proves the Iranian elections were rigged.

NBA games appear to be dramatically biased towards ties, with a tie twice as likely as either team winning by one point. Details and speculation at the link. Via Kottke, who notes a similar phenomenon in golf.

Following up on Vu's link in the comments to a pre-election poll showing a sizable Ahmadinejad lead, here's Nate Silver arguing that the much-trumpeted linear graph doesn't by itself prove election fraud. But as Nate's commenters point out, alphabetizing final state-by-state results flattens out exactly the sorts of discontinuities (regional and otherwise) we would expect to see in partial, real-time election results—rendering Nate's demonstration somewhat unpersuasive. There's also this news, via Andrew Sullivan: the president of Iran's electoral monitoring commission has declared the results invalid, and Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani has resigned his position on the Expediency Council.

Friday morning links.

* Is Dollhouse already canceled? Fox is advertising that Prison Break returns to Fridays on 4/17.

* Mike Krzyzewski gets a tough evaluation on ratemyprofessor.com.



* Alternate-universe Watchmens. Only the Woody Allen hypothesis really sings.



* And this xkcd is quieter than the ones that usually get ricocheted across the Internet, but damn if it didn't make me laugh.



* And is time really the fire in which we burn? Consider the thermal time hypothesis. More at MetaFilter.

According to Connes and Rovelli, the same applies to the universe at large. There are many more constituents to keep track of: not only do we have particles of matter to deal with, we also have space itself and therefore gravity. When we average over this vast microscopic arrangement, the macroscopic feature that emerges is not temperature, but time. "It is not reality that has a time flow, it is our very approximate knowledge of reality that has a time flow," says Rovelli. "Time is the effect of our ignorance."

I think Rovelli just wrote Alan Moore's next three graphic novels. Grant Morrison's, too.

7%: my odds of divorcing in the next five years. Via Freakonomics.

How you will die, via MetaFilter. The 'Filter link has some good secondary information, including this map of catatrophe-by-region. Enjoy your weekend.

Crazy demographic of the day: In today’s America, there are more World of Warcraft players than farmers. Via Paul Krugman by way of an email from Steve.

There are four times as many Americans living in urban than rural areas. There are four times as many people sucking back coffee in New York city alone than make a living farming. According to the Burea of Labor, there are just as many people employed in Architecture and Engineering as farming, hell, 3 million people working in Computer and Mathematical jobs. But when one of these "What does America think about culture" pieces comes on, do I ever see a mid-30's software engineer onscreen bitching about having to download BitTorrents of "The IT Crowd"? Fuck and no.

Four million people in the US play World of Warcraft. And yet, do I ever hear:

ANDERSON: We stopped by the gates of Ogrimmar in Durotar, on the east coast of Kalimdor, where one local told us Hollywood just can't relate to the level-grinding life.

UNIDENTIFIED ORC: They've never been back here, questing Razormane or Drygulch Ravine, y'know ... or farming for Peacebloom and Silverleaf. They're out of touch.

No. No I do not.