Statistics of the Daleks

Greetings.

Jewish date:  5 ’Iyyar 5770 (Parashath ’Aḥare Moth-Qedhoshim).

Today’s quasi-holidays:  National Hanging Out Day, Patriots’ Day (Massachusetts and Maine).

Worthy cause of the day:  “Continue Progress on the Human Rights Council - The Petition Site”.  (And I am fully aware that expecting most parts of the United Nations bureaucracy to do the right thing is like expecting to win the lottery.  But we still have to prod them anyway.)

Today’s news and commentary:

• “Mat of microbes the size of Greece discovered on seafloor”
  
• “JP Morgan Chase Lectures America on the Sanctity of Contracts”

Today’s weird thing is “Ages of Doctor Who actors on their debuts”, which goes to the trouble of using regression to document a trend of decreasing ages of the actors portraying the Doctor in Doctor Who.  While the trend is evident, I am puzzled why the R² of the regression line and confidence intervals for the regression parameters are not reported.  Is the author trying to hide statistical insignificance?  Is there some statistical error being hidden?  And is this all just a plot of the Daleks?  Enjoy, share the weirdness, or go talk to your local statistics teacher.

Aaron