e pur si muove

Twilight Yacht on Sturgeon Bay, originally uploaded by Elia Diodati.

This picture taken at twilight in scenic Door County, Wisconsin has inspired the latest header picture.

According to Readers’ Digest, if you have to lose your cell phone¹, lose it in the Slovenian capital Ljubljana. Out of 30 cell phones deliberately “lost” in Ljubljana, all but one were successfully returned, for a whopping 97% recovery rate. Hong Kong and Kuala Lumpur tie for bottom spot with merely 13 of 30 phones (43%) returned. But before we Singaporeans get smug about beating KL this time round, I have to remind you that 16 out of 30 (53%) isn’t that much better, really.

Surprisingly (to me), 80% of cell phones were returned in New York City. It seems, then, that the probability of getting your cell phone back doesn’t correlate with size. (Toronto did better with 93% recovery, but one could always attribute that to the esprit de corps du Canadien.)

Nor does it quite correlate with geography, as you can see for yourself. I’ve replotted the Reader’s Digest data on Google Maps and you can see that there isn’t a very clear pattern. (In descending order, the color code² is blue, red, yellow, green, cyan, purple, violet. Dot beats undotted, and pin beats circle.)

I’m tempted to generalize this to say that in general, the Far East fares the worst in returning lost cell phones, but this doesn’t explain South Korea’s excellent performance. Or is that merely because Seoul is flush with ultra-futuristic cell phones that the ones used in the research were simply not interesting to would-be finders keepers?

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1. Mobile phone, for you non-American readers.↩
2. Yes, the color code is crappy, but I’m too lazy to redo it.↩

A WoW character is too sexy for his shirt…