miss manners, longitudinal studies, damn lies and statistics

Dear Miss Manners:

How do I reply to people who ask me to guess how old they are?

"Four."

young student's documentary leaving audiences stunned from bibliotech. a bunch of young black children overwhelmingly prefer white dolls, and choose black dolls as 'bad'. i was astonished.

a mini-headline in the paper that pissed me off recently was something like "name on arrival: finland has gotten 600-and-something new 'mohamed's in the last couple of years". finland has a vanishingly small number of immigrants and asylum-seekers - it's not the most popular destination, what with finnish being hard to learn and the climate, and there was a headline in the same week, i think, about how they're going to fall short of the EU quota of refugees this year (foreigners comprise ≈2% of the population). wax explained that the interest is because 'mohamed' is now a more popular name in finland than some extremely common and popular finnish male name. ...so, yes, it is possible to get a headache from rolling your eyes.

eta: wax_jism is extremely anxious to add to the above that the reason finland has few foreigners is not that they don't want asylum here but that the requirements are extremely strict and it's almost impossible for them to get in.