vickyj asked: What kind of information do you wish there had been accurate, reliable statistics on? There are no historical limitations here. What would you do with the data?

Oh man.  So, so many things.  Here are 3.

1. Dollar menus at fast food restaurants, which appear to have little regard for inflation, but that just can’t be right.  Are the burger patties getting lighter?  The mustard of lower quality?  Are there still pickles on the Junior Cheeseburger Deluxe at Wendy’s?  And on the demand side, how does a price increase from $0.99 to $1.09 affect sales?
2. Social network aspects of Tumblr.  I don’t actually know much about how to do proper social network analysis, but I want really badly to have easy access to whether the people who like my posts are just promiscuous with their likes and whose reblogs are the most valuable.  But even with anonymized data I think there’s a lot of fun to be had.  Tracking attribution and misattribution.  The relationship between word counts and follower counts.  And just how close and insular the networks are.  Is everyone I follow following everyone else I follow?  If I meet a person in real life who is on tumblr, will our dashboards look at all similar?
3. All my statistics from all the organized sports I’ve ever competed in.  I’d also need numbers for the other participants.  Did I ever actually get a hit in Little League?  How’d my 5k times shorten over high school?  Was I really the worst player at basketball camp, or did it just feel that way?

velocipedeandcontreras asked: Who will win the FIDE candidates matches to challenge Vishy Anand for the title of World Chess Champion? (Veselin Topalov is out now and so is Shakhriyar Mamedyarov). Who would you prefer if you could pick any active chess player?

I was going to say that my favorite active chess player is The RZA, but now that I see that WuChess.com is defunct and just directs to RZA’s twitter, I must say that my favorite active chess player is The GZA.

Now that Mamedyarov is out, FIDA is really up in the air.

bthny asked: If you could only eat one type of cheese for the rest of your life, what kind of cheese would it be?

- OR -

You decide to open a museum. What is it dedicated to?

It would be a museum of natural history, but for mythological creatures.  While there would be displays and placards on stuff like how mer-people communication (sign language, how else could they talk effectively underwater?) and the eating habits of centaurs and minotaurs (hay and humans, respectively), the main attraction would be the ‘excavated’ skeletons of the various creatures.  Cyclops skulls and hydra bones and all that fun stuff.  How cool would that be?  And since most of the mythological beasts are just amalgams of existing animals, we could use real bones and just mix and match.

What are the two best ideas you’ve had since yesterday?

[After asking you yesterday to ask me questions, only one person did, and I’ll need to think on that one a little longer.  So I’m stuck asking myself more questions.]

1. Filling out a change of address form for “Current Resident”.
2. Romeo and Juliet but with rival urban dance crews.  The sequel will be Hamlet with urban dance crews.

What it has come to

The most observant among you will have noticed that I haven’t posted much lately.  Rather than make excuses, I’m making solutions.

Tumblr has this fancy ask feature, that you might not know about.  Back last year, when everyone was asking and answering for the first time, I wasn’t ready.  I wanted my first ask response to be special.  I didn’t want to be one of those people who goes around answering just any question asked of them. But I’m getting old, and it seems like it could be fun, and it’s time to get this show on the road.  To get you started, here are a few questions I can answer:

1. How much The-Dream have you been listening to lately?  I’ve been listening to so much The-Dream lately.  Love Vs. Money over and over and over.  I almost scraped by last.fm profile so that I could create a line graph of how my The-Dream listening has changed over the last few months, but I was too lazy and I also worry about overquantifying my life.
2. What was the score of the last game of Scrabble you played?  363-168.  Although I was keeping score and my arithmetic isn’t the sharpest.  People think that because I’m sort of a math person that I should be particularly good at basic computations, but the truth is that I wasn’t quizzed on long division or my times tables once during college, and even my addition is unreliable.  I had 363.
3. Have you watched every episode of Make It or Break It recently?  Indeed I have.  And while it won’t go into my list of tv shows I tell everyone all the time that they need to watch, when they get around to actually competing, the show is ridiculously fun.  Also, a few times a season, there will be just amazingly blatant product placement, which I enjoy a great deal.  Yesterday’s episode was kinda horrible though.
4. What do you order every time you get breakfast from McDonald’s? Sausage Biscuit and two Hash Browns for $3.  I try not to do it more than every two weeks or so.  On rare occasions, I only do one Hash Brown instead of two.  Once, I did two Sausage Biscuits and one Hash Brown.
5. Does the use of “must” in a sentence necessarily indicate a lack of certainty compared with the same sentence without “must”? No it doesn’t.  There are some things at play that could convince someone that it did.  But, it doesn’t.

So, ask away.  Hopefully I’ll be back to coming up with my own ideas shortly, but it’s hard to say when.