Category: Web/Tech

1. The Airline Screening Playset.

2. How to eat sushi.

3. Robert Fogel is a China optimist.

1. Helpful inequality.

2. The Chinese war against drugs.

3. More on the economics of virtual worlds.

4. Breaking up big banks doesn't, on its own, work.

5. Somali pirates solve the overfishing problem.

6. We're discussing this paper over lunch today.

7. Clay Shirky on the internet, always worth reading.  It has many excellent one-liners.

1. Are good-looking staff bad for business?

2. Manhattan vs. Alaska.

3. Here is an old post, advice for budding economists, a reader asked me to rerun it.

4. Myths of the American Revolution (of general interest, don't hold me to endorsing these).

5. Was this movie subsidized?: "Sandrine Bonnaire is Hélène, a middle-aged housekeeper in a luxurious Corsican hotel, who one day sees a couple on a balcony exchanging erotic glances and seductive gestures over a chessboard. She is sexually aroused and tries to lure her husband into a similar situation by giving him a chess computer – but the attempt fails when he does not understand the connection between chess and erotic intimacy (really)."  Kevin Kline plays in his first French-speaking role.

6. How to warn people.

1. Neanderthal jewelry.

2. Via Kottke, 100 things we didn't know last year.

3. "Cognitive fluency" and the prejudice against migrants (and others).

4. Hamburg wars over "the creative class."

5. Google applies to become power marketer.

1. The honey bomb.

2. Should you go to law school?

3. How to be happier.

4. Rortybomb on credit cards and here also.

5. Will eBooks wall off social knowledge?

6. The commercial real estate bubble, a good post for the skeptics.

1. Read a book you'll hate.

2. New story on high-frequency trading.

3. 2010 book preview; oddly not one of them excites me except maybe the Per Petterson.

4. The music industry of the future?

5. "Superstar teachers had four other tendencies in common: they avidly recruited students and their families into the process; they maintained focus, ensuring that everything they did contributed to student learning; they planned exhaustively and purposefully–for the next day or the year ahead–by working backward from the desired outcome; and they worked relentlessly, refusing to surrender to the combined menaces of poverty, bureaucracy, and budgetary shortfalls." More here.

6. Why the Eurozone has a tough decade to come.

7. Ezra Klein is on Colbert tonight, early part of the show.  Today his WP blog is broken so he can't announce it.

8. What not to say when buying a car.

1. One way of slowing the surge in health care costs.

2. Blacks lose their majority in Harlem.

3. Is food the new rock and roll?

4. Will Tyler tell?

5. Reviving the films of Elvis Presley.

6. Are newspaper stories too long?

1. Ask Felix Salmon anything, via Chris F. Masse.

2. Brad DeLong on studying heterogeneous capital.

3. Where does Chinese inflation go?

4. Via Felix Salmon, very good Sana'a image.

5. How Bill Gates works.

1. Is Somali pirate cash causing a Kenyan property boom?

2. What is the hardest language?

3. Markets in everything: how hackers check their work on viruses.

4. Has the anti-foreclosure program done more harm than good?

5. National and cultural differences in cell phone usage.

6. How economists manage their money (and lives).

7. Twitter as eternal plumbing.

From Joanne McNeil, this is one of my favorite blog posts in some time.  Excerpt:

I hadn’t realized my number of subscriptions (now 752) was at all unusual until the Bygone Bureau’s Best New Blogs post went up. And Nav at Scrawled in Wax responded with a post, How Many Feeds is Not Enough?

…Folders are key to keep from feeling overwhelmed. I have four must read folders “friends,” “daily,” “boston new&events,” and “ballardian” (pretty much every blog on Ballardian‘s list of links.) I have about a dozen other folders marked by subject, but everything else is subject to “Mark All Read” depending on the time I have to scan through it.

…The funny thing about this, is just a few weeks ago I dumped a couple hundred RSS feeds and stopped following a number of Twitter accounts to clean house. I feel like I could comfortably follow twice as many blogs without feeling fatigue as the number I follow has more to do with what I enjoy reading rather than a limit to what I can control.

It's best to read the whole thing and then save it to one of your folders.

By the way, Michael Nielsen has asked me how I assemble information.  I read about 10-15 blogs a day and two or three major news sources and three or four link-intensive sites, such as The Browser.  I receive a lot of emails from readers, which almost always I pursue.  I've optimized my Twitter feed to find interesting links, which includes following Michael.  Twitter has decreased the amount of time I spend browsing on the web.  Most of all, I read lots and lots of books and plenty of magazines, in numerous areas, plus journal articles in fields I work in.

1. Man divorces eleven times.

2. Village Voice best of 2009 jazz list and here is another good jazz list.

3. www.oliversacks.com is now up.

4. Peter Berkowitz reviews the new George Nash book on the conservative movement.

5. England's greatest composer?

6. Thomas Boswell: "Long ago, I asked Gene Mauch what was his worst day was as a manager. Random question. But Mauch actually thought about it, then said, "The day you realize you care more than the players do."

1. Ross Douthat defends the filibuster; here is Will Wilkinson on the same.

2. Most Kindle best-sellers are free.

3. The year's best and worst: a Ukrainian perspective.

4. People are reading more not less.

5. Revisionist history of the Ivy League?

6. Map scaled by how many languages an area has produced.

7. Top ten pro-liberty books of the decade?

1. Chinese railway photos.

2. Three lessons for surviving the holidays.

3. Do cell phones deter kidnappings?

4. The loss rate of sprinters.

5. David Brooks's "Sidney Awards," part II.

6. The historical origins of fish and chips.

7. Should scientists be more psychotic?