PaulSpoerry.com

On last night’s Colbert Report, Stephen cut through all of the doom and gloom of the Democratic Convention by profiling someone who’s flourishing in the current economy: A repo man.

Others who are probably doing well these days include unemployment-office workers, squatters, pan-handle makers, trashcan-fire emporiums, tumble-weed manufacturers and super-villains.

Stephen Colbert gave Firefox 3 his “Colbert Bump” on the day of Firefox 3’s launch.  You can watch the video here.

Download Day was a wild success, and the Firefox guys were happy to share some thanks and credit with Stephen.  However, a few questions naturally arose, e.g., what was the direct impact of the Colbert Bump? and could the effect be precisely measured?

Here’s what they did:  they looked at downloads of Firefox 3 by users within the U.S. – and then drilled down to a minute-by-minute view to see what, if anything, could be detected.  At minute 23 of the broadcast, Colbert said, “Firefox 3 just got the Colbert Bump.”  What happened next?

A big spike in downloads exactly one and two minutes later:

There is other scientific evidence proving the Bump’s effect.  If you’re interested in that previous study by James Fowler of the University of California at San Diego, you can read the complete version here.

Lewis Black (proving again that he is one of the best comics alive) goes to town on the “liberal media” paranoia that pervades the right-wing and leads them to do things like counter the “biased” Wikipedia with Conservapedia — which has a quite unique definition of homosexuality. Remember, Wikipedia is written by US, so apparently the right wing things that we’re liberally biased. LOL!

Like the great philosopher Stephen Colbert once said: “Reality has a well-known liberal bias.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4UyPGPwIzQ