1. Scott Sumner, standing on one (?) foot. And here is a Sumner podcast with Russ Roberts.
2. The physics of free throw shooting.
3. A mathematician discusses string theory and many other matters.
4. Is older music crowding out newer music?
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I’ve always thought older music (and artistic endeavors in general) should crowd out newer music. The flow of music contains high quality and low quality music yet to be sorted. The stock of older music contains only the high quality stuff because we discard and forget the low quality stuff.
Given the choice of what to listen to, I can be pretty well assured if I listen to the Oldies station, they’ll have weeded out the crappy music of the period and play the good music. If I listen to the new rock station, the weeded out is at best, just begun.
I absolutely love having instant download access to excellent, lovingly compiled anthologies of proto-jazz, delta blues, and afro-beat music that a generation ago would have been much harder to get my hands on.
Having access to old music increases the average quality of music listening (by greatly increasing the number and diversity of possible listening experiences). Also, it increases the average quality of newly produced music by giving musicians access to a broader range of styles.
To say old music crowds out new is sort of like saying that understanding history undermines your appreciation for current events. It’s just false, and backwards. A taste for history enriches and enlivens the present.
Sort of a more expansive version of the old/new music question was posed by director Mike Figgis in this talk broadcast on the BBC in 2007: “Is There Too Much Culture?”
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/freethinking2007/pip/crxww/
A nice summation of it here:
http://www.truetalkblog.com/truetalk/2007/12/overly-cultured.html
Why did they study free throws in three dimensions? Aren’t two enough?
Maybe because the ball is released slightly off-center, so the angle matters, especially if you hit the rim? Just a guess.
Anyone who has ever played basketball on a middle school team could have told you everything those researchers assert. How can this kind of “research” seriously be justified on any level?
in order for there to be popular, innovative musicians there need to be innovative listeners.
the absence of such killed most new classical music in the 20c.
He thinks Cole Porter and swing are stunting his son’s musical growth? Seriously?
Also, to his anecdote there’s plenty of anecdotes that people’s tastes are becoming more varied. I can now access new French blues online, African choral music, hymns from a congregation in Palestine, the Butterfly Lovers Concerto, the Beatles, Seth Walker, Pink Martini, etc etc etc. And odds are his son is listening to all sorts of music he couldn’t imagine either.
Exactly. String theory, a/k/a mental masturbation, like its physical counterpart leaves the devotee with nothing to show for his efforts but a sticky mess and a lot of frustration.
“Also, to his anecdote there’s plenty of anecdotes that people’s tastes are becoming more varied. I can now access new French blues online,”
Way off topic, but not really, and I don’t care anyway, but the reduction in costs for things like music that increase our musical taste by lowering the transaction costs of finding variety don’t actually mean we are a richer society as many people assume and some write books about. It emphasizes how poor we actually are, but how we can make do with less.
@Andrew: Poorer for having wider and deeper access to culture? That’s damn near my definition of increased wealth. How could wealth be defined such that we are poorer for having the opportunity to sample music from many times, places, and styles?
3.: if only economics could be as scientific as this stuff…
a goddamn communist:
Foregive me if I came off harsh, but I certainly never stated that “any middle-schooler knows how to perform rigorous sensitivity analysis on their freethrow shot. Or perform high-fidelity 3D simulations for that matter.”
I believe that scientific inquiry should be performed if it would be of value to someone other than the researchers themselves. This may include other researchers, so if this study in some way helps answer other questions that require things like “rigorous sensitivity analysis” or “high-fidelity 3D simulations” than I will accept that this paper was worth the time, money, and energy expended. However, the idea (as expressed in this article) was to provide difinite knowledge of the optimum way to shoot a free throw.
Ideally, this paper should be most appealing to basketball players. However, as I said earlier, the conclusions of this paper state nothing about the correct technique for shooting free throws that wasn’t already widely known. I really did learn every technique this article mentions while I was in middle school. The information unique to the paper, such as the ideal shot having three backward rotations before hitting the rim, are not helpful to players. We don’t determine the exact amount of rotations, we get a “feel” for the right amount of spin.
What this paper has done is confirm, through rigorous scientific analysis, that the current methods for shooting free throws are the correct ones. That must have some value, but when considering the other problems these researchers could be addressing, my opinion is that the paper has little value.
That the internet stiffles innovation by drowning future musicians in too much inspiration must be the crappiest argument ever.
Well, anon, you may not see this, but for posterity it is related to my pet peeve when people call technological innovation deflation because it improves the capabilities of our gadgets. Usually it’s some economist saying “inflation isn’t so bad because we can buy all this stuff from China and our computers are faster for the same amount of money.” They are missing the point. Maybe we buy stuff from China BECAUSE inflation is unacceptable.
Here I’m not concerned as much with the monetary issue but with the technology issue itself. As a first pass, I’ll define wealth as something you can sell. That’s not a great definition, but it conveys the idea. These technologies that allow us to entertain ourselves for free increase welfare, but because they are so anchored in personal lifestyle and current systems they are not enduring wealth. My song list is of no value to anyone else. Google can go bankrupt. If we believe these things are wealth then we will have an overly optimistic view of our situation.
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