Category: Web/Tech

We now know a little more:

After a closer examination of the Antikythera Mechanism, a surviving marvel of ancient Greek technology, scientists have found that the device not only predicted solar eclipses but also organized the calendar in the four-year cycles of the Olympiad, forerunner of the modern Olympic Games.

The device also had a likely connection with Archimedes.  Here is the full story.

Think of a blog as competing with both Google and Wikipedia, among other aggregators.  If you knew you wanted to read about "the minimum wage," you could bypass Tyler and Alex and Google to the best entries (some of which might include us, of course).  But with Google and Wikipedia you must choose the topic.  A good blog writer can randomize the topic for you, much like a good DJ controls the sequence of the music.  Sometimes you might trust us more than you trust other aggregators, but we can’t count on that and arguably the other aggregators improve at a rate faster than we do.

Flying puffin!

1. Leopard vs. crocodile

2. How easy is it to disappear?

3. "Lifestreaming"

4. The real Panopticon?: "Subjects tested in a room with a mirror have been found to work harder,
to be more helpful and to be less inclined to cheat, compared with
control groups performing the same exercises in nonmirrored settings.
Reporting in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, C. Neil
Macrae, Galen V. Bodenhausen and Alan B. Milne found that people in a
room with a mirror were comparatively less likely to judge others based
on social stereotypes about, for example, sex, race or religion."

You’ll find it here; she is my BlogLand friend and her writings are always interesting.

1. America’s hot new restaurant

2. Incentives work, n = 1 (and now n=2)

3. The Milky Way; it loads a little slowly but it’s worth it

4. Markets in everything: death tourism

1. Fifty outstanding translations, via Bookslut.

2. The cost of being Batman, via www.geekpress.com

3. More on the file-sharing controversy

4. The new "Big Mac" index, so to speak

5. An economic theory of excess defensiveness

1. Megan Non-McArdle is blogging again, at rhubarbpie.  Here is her post on which are the lovable women.

2. Markets in everything: a restaurant with a menu for dogs (but how can they afford it?)

3. Star Wars according to a three year old, a short YouTube video via Yana

4. The water shortage myth

The tyler-city blog is a computer generated blog of gibberish meant solely to generate links (can readers explain the economics?).  It is drawn from all over, including quite a bit from Marginal Revolution.  It’s gibberish but as Tyler might say even a million monkeys occasionally generate some very good sentences.  Here are a few, I’ve provide links but please don’t encourage them too much.

I thought both were tyler cogent, for quite complex topics.

The Ton Ball That Keeps The Taipei tyler Tolerant Is Pretty

and it is good to know that "besides his many talents, Tyler was also a really nice kid."  But my favorite posting is this one:

Small steps toward a much better tyler.

1. Via Bookslut, check out the Walter Benjamin book cover (scroll down a tiny bit).

2. Are CD boxed sets disappearing?

3. Price discrimination

4. New libertarian and right-wing blog on culture, YeahRight.

5. The carbon tax in our future, details revealed.

Yet another [new iPhone program], Urbanspoon, is “a cross between a magic eight ball and a slot machine:" you shake the phone, and it randomly displays the name of a good restaurant nearby, using the iPhone’s G.P.S. and motion sensor.

Here is a longer review of the new iPhone.

1. Be skeptical of medians.

2. The pattern recognition theory of humor, via GeekPress.com.

3. AmateurEconomist, a new on-line magazine.

4. Victor Niederhoffer on worry; see the comments for a partial summary of my talk.

5. A superb post on charity, from Freakonomics blog.

Prof. [Anita] Elberse looked at data for online video rentals and song
purchases, and discovered that the patterns by which people shop online
are essentially the same as the ones from offline. Not only do hits and
blockbusters remain every bit as important online, but the evidence
suggests that the Web is actually causing their role to grow, not
shrink.

Here is the summary article.  Here is the Elberse paper.  Here is Chris Anderson’s response.  Overall I cannot call this one for Elberse.  If you take a genre as given, the web looks less revolutionary but part of the long tail is the creation of new genres.  We have blogs now, for instance, and we didn’t fifteen years ago, even though blog readership is quite concentrated among the top sites.  Or maybe the "Quickflix rental distribution" isn’t so skewed to the left (the least-rented titles aren’t so popular) but where were Quickflix, Netflix, and other such services fifteen years ago? 

Static estimation by deciles and related measures is often misleading since in part the "long tail" effect is to make the top deciles thicker than before, not necessarily to raise the status of the bottom decile relative to the top.  In his response, Chris Anderson nails this point:

The best example of this is in what she describes as a growing
"concentration" of sales around a relatively small number of
blockbuster titles. In the Rhapsody data, she finds, the top 10% of
titles (out of more than a million in that data sample) accounted for
78% of all plays, and the top 1% account for 32% of all plays. That
sounds pretty concentrated around the head, until you reflect, as she
notes, that "one percent of a million is still 10,000–[…]equal to
the entire music inventory of a typical Wal-Mart store."

Nor does showing that most of the sales are in the top of the distribution refute the claim.  Arguably it is the middle tail which is suffering and the long tail, and the best sellers, are growing in import.  That seems compatible with Anderson’s core thesis.  The long tail hypothesis may be oversold but the data in the Elberse piece don’t really dent it.

Elberse wants to define the Long Tail hypothesis as claiming there is
more money to be made in the niches than in the blockbusters; while I believe you might find a quotation to that effect from Chris Anderson the more
general idea is simply how important the niches are
becoming.  Elberse concedes a lot at one point:

It is undeniable that online commerce has significantly broadened
customers’ access to products of all varieties, including the most
obscure. However, my findings suggest that it would be imprudent for
companies to upend traditional practice and focus on the demand for
obscure products.

You could have rewritten that as "The Long Tail hypothesis is basically true, just don’t sell to the Long Tail alone."  On that we should all be able to agree.

A Chinese man who set up an online business selling dead mosquitoes says he’s received 10,000 orders in just two days.

Nin Nan, of Shanghai, came up with the idea of selling mosquitoes he killed to attract visitors to his online jewellery shop.

"I locked myself in the room, thinking hard of a promotion plan. With a ‘pa’ sound and a dead mosquito, I came up with this weird idea," he told Qianlong News.

Nin sells his mosquito corpses for six yuan – about 45p – each. His ad reads: "Truly killed by human hands. Can be used for science studies, decoration, and collection."

Here is the story, and thanks to Allison for the pointer.

1. How bad will things get?  A symposium.

2. How smart is the octopus?

3. Single-factor Gaussian copula.

4. Avner Greif responds to critics.

5. "Stairway to Heaven" revenues: one guesstimate is $562 million.  And they don’t even put it on iTunes.

1. The world’s top twenty public intellectuals?  Lots of Muslims make this list.

2. Let readers rank the bias of news stories, using a digg.com approach.

3. Alan Wolfe on Bruno Frey, Dan Ariely, and behavioral economics; a thoughtful essay.

4. Megan McArdle on Roissy.

5. Ten more stunning bridges.