You'll be as excited to learn as I was that the UN has declared 2013 to be the International Year of the Quinoa.Sigh.Via: the Econom...
Thursday, December 27, 2012
Wednesday, December 26, 2012
Monday, December 24, 2012
2012 is the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Thomas Kuhn's book "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions".Longtime readers may recall that Kuhn's book made it onto my list of books that had the largest intellectual influence on me. For me, recasting the history of science in terms of paradigm shifts mattered less than recasting science itself as a social enterpirse. Some related thoughts from the Guardian and from David Warsh at Economic Principals.If you have not read the book, it remains well worth readi...
This article on vote fraud from the New Yorker got passed around a lot before the election but, having read it, I think oddly so. The main point seems not to be about whether or not there is vote fraud, but that some red team activists use vote fraud as a wedge issue and sometimes don't get the facts right. Is it really news that activists of any flavor make stuff up in pursuit of thier political objectives?More broadly, this, like voting rights for felons, seems like an amazingly bad issue for the blue team to push on. First, it is transparently...
1. Sometimes Social Security stinks for reasons other than its weak design.2. Cool old computers that people still use. I have a working Kaypro II that runs CP/M but it does not get used much.3. Some rare good news from the war on (some) drugs, courtesy of Colorado and Washington.4. Famous writer Cosmo tips from McSweeny's.5. A day in the life of an awfully serious University of Washington undergraduate. Where were the food carts when when I was student?Hat tip on #5 to Charlie Bro...
Sunday, December 23, 2012
Shields, Carol. 2001. Jane Austen. New York: Penguin.This is one of the Penguin Lives series of short biographies. Though a hardcover, it is trade paperback size and just 185 pages. The books are a bit pricey, but I have mangaged to find several of them at used book stores or sales - this particular one at a sale at the University of Toronto.As it turns out, not all that much is known about Jane Austen's life, particularly the early bits. She grew up in modest, but not impoverished, circumstances, and it was not clear that she...
According to the Daily Mail, Delta Airlines has received 22,000 applications for 300 flight attendant jobs.Missing from the Daily Mail piece is the obvious conclusion, which is that Delta either pays its flight attendants too much or makes its application process too easy or, more likely, both.Hat tip: Charlie Br...
Washington played pretty well, including coming back from an 18-3 deficit in the first half, but not well enough in the end. Thus ends the Huskies' third 7-6 season in a row. Thus starts a bit of grumbling too, I suspect, in Huskyland. Everyone much prefers Sarkisian and 7-6 to 0-8 under Willingham to be sure, but it is time, one hears, to take the next step, and get up into the region of 8-10 wins a year. The Huskies get to start next season, and to start life in the remodeled version of Husky Stadium, and to start taking the next step,...
Saturday, December 22, 2012
I had been wondering why my old friend Laura Hartman - I was the external reviewer on her dissertation long ago and her post-dissertation party at the Hotel Linne set a standard that has not yet been exceeded - suddenly left the Swedish think-tank SNS in 2011 to return to Uppsala University. Now I know. Good for Laura.The blogger reporting on the affair goes off the rails a bit at the end of the post but the basic point that SNS blew it, and not in a small way, is surely correct. Perhaps the comparisons to Stalin can wait, though, until...
I had not heard about this before reading this article but it sounds pretty bad.I am not sure why it is comforting that it was about the department budget (which presumably depended on undergraduate bums in classroom chairs, as they often do either directly or indirectly) rather than about athletic succe...
The New York Times magazine does a piece on Jerry Seinfeld.I particularly liked this bit:Almost from the beginning, Seinfeld has forsworn graphic language in his bits, dismissing it as a crutch.I don't mind cursing and smut, but it is not elegant and, as usually applied in stand-up comedy, not very clever....
Mueenuddin, Daniyal. 2009. In Other Rooms, Other Wonders. New York: W.W. Norton.Mueenuddin grew up in both Pakistan and the US, including along the way an undergraduate degree in English at Dartmouth, and so is rather uniquely positioned to write a book of short stories about Pakistan, with a special emphasis on life among the relatively well-off. The stories provide a window into worlds most Americans will never see, and so function as sociology or travelogue as well as fiction. Mueenuddin does not shy from the blunt or unpleasant in pursuit of...
Steve Kelly of the Seattle Times interviews ABC/ESPN announcer Brent Musberger, who is doing the play-by-play for today's bowl game featuring Washington against Boise State. With Keith Jackon and John Madden retired, I think Brent is probably my favorite college football announcer, at least on television. The bowl game is at 3:30 Eastern today on ESPN. Boise State is, suprisingly to my mind, favored by five....
Friday, December 21, 2012
Megan has a really thoughtful take on many dimensions of last week's school shooting.I particularly like the focus on thinking cooly, calmly and realistically about what policy can accomplish and what it cannot as well as her suggestion of a cooling off period before period before policy gets done in the wake of the media frenzy following a dramatic event.Hat tip: Dan Bl...
Thursday, December 20, 2012
Bob is the former editor and publisher of reason magazine - that's what he was doing back in the day when I was the reason summer intern - and, later, the former president of the reason foundation. Now he does transportation policy full time.I found his Congressional testimony on airport security screening useful; there was more that I did not already know than I expect...
Another of my blue team economist facebook friends (let's call him/her G, and G is only the latest of many in recent days) just posted a small-n univariate regression (in the form of a two-dimensional scatterplot with a line) on facebook that is intended to imply policy conclusions about gun control. Rather than scream, or write a snarky comment on facebook, I will simply note that this economist, and all the others before him/her, would mercilessly mock anyone who offered a similar type of evidence in a policy domain related to their...
Annarbor.com on the university's purchase of the building that houses iconic Ann Arbor burger joint Blimpys. I think pushing Blimpy's out is a mistake on the university's part. The "cool college town" aspect of Ann Arbor attracts both students and faculty. Blimpy's is part of that vibe. There are also plenty of other places the university could expand that would be less disruptive to the cultural fabric.Read about the Facebook petition he...
Hell hath no fury like an Atlantic assistant editor scorned.Molly is correct that the Black and Nagin piece (helpfully provided on Lott's website) is the best critique of the Lott and Mustard work but, at least relative to the last time I looked, gives a somewhat misleading take on the literature as a whole, which is decidedly mix...
Wednesday, December 19, 2012
Some thoughts on the school shootings:1. My heart goes out to the familes of the children. I have been surprised, as a relatively new parent, just how strong the bond of affection is between parent and child.2. I liked this piece from the Telegraph. Indeed, it is almost the only thing I have read or seen that I thought was very serious.3. How sad that we honor the fallen children by having a festival of confirmation bias (and I have in mind both the red and blue teams in this regard).4. Why don't Americans engage in loud, public displays of...
Tuesday, December 18, 2012
Monday, December 17, 2012
1. Danny Bonaduce, who played Danny Partridge in the Partridge Family TV show, is now a disc jockey on KZOK-FM in Seattle, which is the radio station I listened to in high school and which, in an amazing display of consistency, still plays exactly the same music it did then, though now it calls it "classic rock" instead of "album-oriented rock".2. Ann B. Davis, who played Alice the maid in the Brady Bunch TV show (which was on just before the Partridge Family each Friday night) graduated from the University of Michigan (Go Blue!) in 1948 with a...
Sunday, December 16, 2012
Good stuff, and entertaining on multiple levels.I especially like his gruff dismissal of the interviewer's sillier questions and his claim that critics are too scared to say anything negative about Jane Austen.I read A House for Mr. Biswas in my student days and was quite impressed with it.Among the Believers, which I read more recently, is the most effective critique of the sad current state of political Islam that you will ever read, in large part because it is indire...
Friday, December 14, 2012
Wednesday, December 12, 2012
1. Very cool 3-D sidewalk art.2. Health care waiting lists around the world. Rationing by waiting is really inefficient.3. The Atlantic on my graduate school colleague Matt Khan on moral hazard, government and natural disasters.4. Say it ain't so Joe. What world does this guy live in?5. Chicago's fattest (as one of my grad school buddies used to call them) at work. And then it gets even better.#2 via John Cochrane's blog, and #4 via the Agita...
The Flat is a documentary about what an Israeli filmmaker learns about his family from the things he finds in his grandmother's flat in Tel Aviv after her passing. Those things are awkward, but interesting, as are the reactions they provoke. The end result provokes thinking on many levels, about family, about how we present ourselves to others and about the relationship between the personal and the historical.This is the best movie I have seen in a while. NYT likes it t...
Tuesday, December 11, 2012
Monday, December 10, 2012
Sunday, December 9, 2012
Okay, this is slightly old news, but I remain surprised the Cal dumped head football coach Jeff Tedford. There have been a lot of injuries the past couple of years, as well as some turnover (partly due to Washington) at the lower levels of the coaching hierarchy. More broadly, what makes them think they will find another coach this good? Cal is not a great football place. I would have given him another year. It wasn't that long ago that Washington was trying to lure him away to replace Tyrone Willingham.In possibly unrelated news, Cal has an ugly...
Tuesday, December 4, 2012
Kentucky bans atheism, dares sinners to mock it. Just kidding about the daring part. This is a pretty sad business. Seems to me that if you can only get people to adopt your religion (whether it be some flavor of Christianity, or of Islam, or of communism or whatever) by threatening them with violence, then your religion deserves nothing but disda...
From the New York Review of Books, some very good bits from P.J. O'Rourke. My favorite bit:What are your reading habits? Paper or electronic? Do you take notes? Do you snack while you read?Behold the book with its brilliant, nonlinear search engine called flipping-through-the-pages. A Kindle returns us to the inconvenience of the scroll except with batteries and electronic glitches. It’s as handy as bringing Homer along to recite the “Iliad” while playing a lyre. I dog-ear all my books, underline passages and scribble “Huh?” and “How true!”...
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