I finally decided to get a Wii Dance Dance Revolution. This required getting a Wii, and gamesinwelt.com had the lowest prices. Curiously they shipped from China, where Wii’s are not for sale. I searched for “gamesinwelt.com complaints” and “gamesinwelt.com sucks” and found nothing. Okay, I thought. As it turned out my credit-card payment did not go through so I haven’t lost any money but here is what should have made me suspicious:

1. The site didn’t work very well. One of the error messages I kept getting made no sense.

2. It didn’t take direct credit card payments. The credit-card payments were made through Paypal.

3. Delivery was not only free, it was really fast — 2-5 days.

4. The site listed FedEx as a delivery choice in one place but not on the home page.

5. Although there were about 9,000 Google hits for gamesinwelt.com, when I went to the pages the ads weren’t there. They were brief ads. And only ads.

When I searched “gamesinwelt.com scam” — after the purchase — I did find useful information that confirmed my fears. One persuasive point was that the site was registered only a week ago. This is why there was so little negative information available. Foolish me.

More “My credit-card payment did not go through” — that’s what I was told when I called Paypay. But then I got an email saying it had gone through. Ugh! So I called Paypal again and complained. And was told I needed to call back in a week when I hadn’t gotten the stuff. Then I waited a week and called Paypal for the third time. And then I was told a dispute had already been filed and — when it was resolved in my favor — I would get an email saying the money had been refunded. So I had to call Paypal three times (so far) to deal with this and one of those times was given wrong information.

The story continues.

Andrew gives excellent advice about how to write a scientific paper. This is his best point:

Consider Table 2. Do you want the reader to know that in line 3, Min Obs is 894? I doubt it. If so, you should make a case for this. If not, don’t put it down. When an article is filled with numbers and words that you neither expect or want people to read, this distracts them from the content.

In other words, most tables should be figures or omitted. I would add a broader point: Don’t try to impress anyone. It gets in the way of helping them — helping them understand what you’re saying. (The classic example is B. F. Skinner, apparently insecure Harvard professor, calling one of his books The Behavior of Organisms instead of The Behavior of Animals. The book said nothing about plants.) Many tables seem more meant to impress than communicate but it isn’t just tables. That section at the end where epidemiologists talk about the “limitations” of their study: The content is so predictable, so fact-free and unhelpful that I think they are just trying to impress readers with how careful they are. So I would add to Andrew’s advice: Don’t tell people what they already know.

I also like his list of content-less words, such as very and nice. Allen Neuringer told me you should never use very and I was impressed.

Alex Tabarrok’s comments.

A friend of mine named Margaret Meklin recently won the Russian Prize — awarded for the best work in Russian by a writer living abroad — in the short-story category. From her amusing essay about going to the prize ceremony in Moscow:

I chose to participate in this contest out of desperation: Working at a U.S. company in the customer service department, I was somewhat tired of clients who didn’t hide their annoyance at my Slavic accent.. . . I was hoping that upon winning this prize, I would acquire an inner strength protecting me from [their] impatience.

. . .

After the ceremony, I stumbled upon the main juror, the one who had ironically called me a “genius,” and the phrase he greeted me with was, “Are you surprised that you got it? You haven’t read the other nominees . . . they were even worse than you!”

John Lennon once said, referring to the Beatles, “ We’re more popular than Jesus.” At dinner last night someone said that Michael Jackson was more popular than the Beatles. That surprised me. Was Michael Jackson more popular than Jesus? Google hits, as of this morning:

• Beatles: 54,400,000
• Jesus Christ: 47,600,000
• Michael Jackson: 41,600,000

For comparison:

• Barack Obama: 95,800,000
• Harry Potter: 93,200,000
• Brad Pitt: 28,200,000

Does that make J. K. Rowling (6,600,000 Google hits) the most powerful person in the world? Unlike President Obama, she can say whatever she wants. And she speaks to the most impressionable people in the world.

I’m flying to Los Angeles today. Three new things — all of them new to me this flight — are making this trip distinctly more pleasant than earlier trips:

1. Southwest has special check-in if you’ve checked in online but have a bag to check. The line went very fast.

2. Crocs shoes. So easy to slip off and on at security.

3. Free Wi-Fi while waiting for flight.

I suppose after a while I’ll get used to this but right now it reminds me of how I felt the first few times I read the NY Times online.

Now that everyone knows what a Ponzi scheme is, isn’t gmail quite close to one? More and more users, more and more storage needed to store their email. The price of storage is unlikely to fall forever. Eventually cost per user will overtake profit per user — and then the whole thing begins to collapse. Not in my lifetime, please.

Or, at least, how safe do the people who prescribe and give them think they are? Jock Doubleday has an interesting way of finding out: Offer money to drink the ingredients, adjusted for body weight. The offer, which began in 2001, is currently $200,000 to “an M.D. or pharmaceutical company CEO, or any of the relevant members of the ACIP [the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices] now including liaison representatives, ex officio members, chairman, and executive secretary” who will do this.

More The person who accepts this offer needs to fulfill a contract posted here. However, it isn’t clear what the “Agreement-in-Full” mentioned in the contract consists of. So it isn’t clear if the person can know what he or she is getting into before putting $5,000 at risk. If the Agreement-in-Full cannot be examined now, this is a meaningless — too vague to be understood — offer. I have written to Jock Doubleday to find the Agreement-in-Full.

And more Mr. Doubleday says he has the Agreement-in-Full but he would not show it to me nor apparently to anyone else not on the list of those eligible for the offer. So the whole thing is a tribute to the magic of web pages.