Blasts From The Past, Part 2

I don't know if this is going to become a regular feature or not (cf.), since every time I try to start a Regular Feature, I seem to lose interest in maintaining it, but I have long had the idea kicking around in my mind that in today's bloggy-style Web, too much good writing gets forgotten too quickly. Thinking out loud aside …

Following a link from Thers, I came to a fine post by Daniel Davies: The D-Squared Digest One Minute MBA - Avoiding Projects Pursued By Morons 101. It is dated 27 May 2005, and opens thus:

Literally people have been asking me: "How is it that you were so amazingly prescient about Iraq? Why is it that you were right about everything at precisely the same moment when we were wrong?" No honestly, they have. I'd love to show you the emails I've received, there were dozens of them, honest. Honest. Anyway, I note that "errors of prewar planning" is now pretty much a mainstream stylised fact, so I suspect that it might make some small contribution to the commonweal if I were to explain how it was that I was able to spot so early that this dog wasn't going to hunt. I will struggle manfully with the savage burden of boasting, self-aggrandisement and ego-stroking that this will necessarily involve. It's been done before, although admittedly by a madman in the process of dying of syphilis of the brain. Sorry, where was I?

The rest.

For the numerically-non-phobic, be sure to follow D²'s link to the description of Benford's Law. (Or click it here, since I swiped it.) Fascinating. I'd never heard of this before. And, it's a stellar example of how to write for the lay audience.

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Notes:

1. I replaced the last link in the blockquote with one pointing to the corresponding entry in the Internet Archive. The original link, today, points to a junk site; evidently, the domain name was allowed to lapse. Says something in favor of this Blasts From The Past idea, doesn't it? Okay, maybe it'll become an Irregular Feature.
   
   
2. The phrase "bloggy-style" is not mine, sadly. I stole it from Heather Havrilesky.