We are going Google here in Michigan-land and my university email switched over this weekend.I will reserve judgement for now, but in the meantime I have a question:Does anyone know how to delete an attachment from an email without deleting the email itself?Addendum:I am informed that Google's view is "don't delete, buy more space". Consistent with this, there is no way to do it in Google. I have been pointed to two external programs that can do it; you can read about them here and here.I am also told that there is some way to continue using...
Monday, July 30, 2012
I picked up Crimea, The Last Crusade at a used bookstore on Tottenham Court Road in London. The Crimean War was a bit of history that I knew next to nothing about, an omission well remedied by this book.The book is written as serious popular history. The author has read widely in both the primary and secondary literature, and there are many pages of notes at the end. Still, the style was a bit less academic than I care for, both in the sense of detailed documentation and in the sense of explicit discussion of the literature in the text. I suspect...
I found that the NYT review got me more stirred up than the movie. The review has too much about current politics and, I think, a complete misreading of the politics of the movie itself, which is right-populist in much the same way as Law and Order. The line police are always good and noble, while politicians, police upper management (commissioner Gordon excepted and even he is a bit ambiguous here), rich people and lefty populists are all (Batman excepted), bad, or at least ineffectually wimpy. Not a vision that has much empirical plausibility...
Sunday, July 29, 2012
1. The Atlantic on archery in Bhutan. Charlie will like this one.2. TSA grope and pillage.3. Tyler Cowen remembers my colleague Miles Kimball in his graduate school days.4. WSJ on changes in the first class cabin.5. The American Men's Studies Association comes to Ann Arbor in April, in case you are looking for an excuse to visit.Hat tip on #2 to a Facebook frie...
Saturday, July 28, 2012
The Leaning Tower of PisaDecomposing achievement test scores into cognitive and noncognitive componentsLex Borghans, Maastricht UniversityTrudie Schils, Maastricht UniversityDraft version July 11, 2012AbstractTest scores on achievement tests depend on both cognitive and noncognitive skills. The predictive power of achievement tests is therefore potentially due to all components. The question of this paper is whether it is possible to disentangle cognitive and noncognitive factors from the performance on the test. Using data from the international...
I thought this was one of the most interesting things I read in reason in recent months. I reminded me of a debate I heard about in graduate school about segregation. The question in that debate was whether getting rid of legal segregation and discrimination would have sufficed to improve the position of African-Americans in the US or whether it would require social change in addition to legal change. I thought the right answer in the debate was that you had to have both, that a strict libertarian ending of only the legal restrictions would have...
The Atlantic on cult pop historians of the left and right.Rand and Chomsky play the same game to some extent.I have always found, at least since I clued in to why reading history is interesting (hint: it is not about being able to recite lots of facts) that one of the most useful bits of it is how reluctant historical figures are to fit into the political categories of the moment. They had different ideas, and different concerns. And from that one can learn, or be reminded, how transitory and arbitrary are many current political configuratio...
Friday, July 27, 2012
On Fox News just now "Alba's company makes chemical-free products".Good trick, that, making products without chemicals.Oh, and she was on the show (giggle) promoting a law that would harm her company's competitors (giggle), a fact that went unmentioned. I have no idea about the law, but shouldn't the conflict of interest at least have come ...
Thursday, July 26, 2012
The story of David Osler, the fellow who designed our home in Ann Arbor, which we really, really like.Note that Osler's father-in-law, Emil Lorch, is the same Lorch that Lorch Hall, home of the Michigan economics department, is named after. Our building was originally home to the architecture faculty, now located on north camp...
One of my pet peeves at seminars and conferences is speakers who zoom back and forth among their slides as they try to figure out what they want to say next. To combat this minor evil, I propose a clicker that delivers a mild electric shock (or emits some obnoxious noise) whenever the speaker moves both forward and backward through his or her slides with a given small time interval.I offer this idea free of charge to product developers everywhe...
Monday, July 23, 2012
Wow ... I am a bit envious of the students who got to participate in Michigan's game design bootcamp featuring Sid Meier (of Civilization), Brian Reynolds (Alpha Centauri) and others.Game design (though I was thinking more of board games back then) was one of the handful of careers I thought about, along with architecture and marketing, on the way to becoming an academic economist.Turns out too that Sid and his three kids are all UM alums. Go Bl...
1. The unused, but quite pretty, City Hall subway station in NYC.2. Improvements at Frita Batidos in Ann Arbor.3. The Taj Mahal from many angles.4. The Daily Mail on the dangers of potty prodigies.5. Some wistful thoughts from the University of Chicago magazine on the occasion of the move of the Seminary Co-op Bookstore out of the seminary basement. The Co-op is one of the best things - maybe the best thing - about Hyde Park.Hat tip on #3 to Jackie Smith and on #4 to Charlie Bro...
The Seattle Times has a fine obituary. I like this bit:Former Sonics guard Slick Watts once said, "In most big cities, the famous people are the sports stars, but in Seattle, J.P. was the man."And some memorabilia:Addendum: there is some social history in the check list. Can you imagine a similar television personality in the present day advocating either praying or milk drinking (what about the lactose intolerant!) or eating all your food...
We saw Safety Not Guaranteed last week at the State Theater in Ann Arbor along with a surprisingly full house.This is a sweet little indie with a fun story, some pretty good acting, and lots of beautiful Pacific Northwest scenery (though my sense from the credits is that much of it was filmed in the Seattle suburbs, rather than near the ocean as is suggested in the movie).The NYT liked it too.Recommend...
Saturday, July 21, 2012
Americans honor those who die in mass shootings via the strange ritual of repeating their (usually not very well thought out) opinions about gun control. In that spirit, I thought I would share mine.First, I do not think that individuals, in general, have a right to bear arms. I think the fundamental right is to self-defense. This is a right that those on the left really ought to like, as it is all about allowing the vulnerable to protect themselves from thugs of various sorts.I know that, at this point, I have already lost some Europeans. The...
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