via http://www.thevalve.org/go/valve/article/graphs_trees_materialism_fishing/ "someone with good taste in books (i.e., it often agrees with mine) and generally sensible ideas" "It also shows up in his penchant for quantifying, one of the more piquant instances of which is a footnote in The Modern Epic which shows that the distance of countries from Ireland is positively correlated with the frequency with which references to them in Ulysses are cliches. (I can't remember whether Moretti thinks this is a reflection on Bloom or on Joyce.) ""Moretti wants to find the frequencies with which different kinds of book occur in large libraries, by means of small samples. This is a perfectly legitimate procedure, but it is of course very unlikely that the frequencies found in a sample of, say, 100 books are exactly the same as the frequencies in the entire population of, say, 1,000 books. To make comparisons between different populations, we need to know how precise the estimates are: the difference between 60% and 50% doesn't signify if the uncertainty in each case is plus or minus 10%. What Moretti did was "sampling without replacement," and calculating the confidence intervals for this procedure is an old chestnut of statistical inference. (For fixed sample size, unsurprisingly, the confidence intervals are tighter for small populations than for large ones. Conversely, and again unsurprisingly, for fixed populations, smaller samples have larger confidence intervals.) It'd be unreasonable to expect Moretti, a middle-aged full professor, to learn statistical inference, no matter how much he writes in praise of "serial history." Whether it is equally unreasonable to expect him to send a graduate student down to the college bookstore with a twenty for Schaum's Outline of Statistics and a roborative latte, look up "Proportions, confidence intervals for" in the index, turn to p. 196, and start plugging and chugging, is another matter."

"for Juno, the clinic embodies what she is afraid people will see when they look at her--the set of implications and connotations evoked by the catchphrase "sexually active." Which, based on the way she reacts to the term, seems to her to indicate both sexual promiscuity and the kind of blase attitude about sex and its potential consequences that she chides her best friend for expressing when she first tells her the news. Although Juno often performs that kind of flippancy about her own pregnancy, just as she spends a lot of time denying that sex with Bleeker meant anything to her emotionally, it's fairly clear early on that this doesn't actually reflect her emotions. In other words, what the clinic represents to Juno is lack of commitment--a refusal to take her, her sexuality, and her pregnancy seriously. And for someone with Juno's adolescent intensity--for a kid with her personality at her age, everything that happens to her matters greatly, and every major decision has to be consi