Category: Web/Tech

1. Ben Casnocha reviews Kling and Schulz.

2. Are better-looking athletes more likely to win?

3. "Mozart was a Red" — Murray Rothbard's satire of Rand, here is the full text.  It doesn't seem that funny to me.

4. Portrait of Durrr: an on-line poker player.

5. Seth Roberts interviews me.

1. Air Genius Gary Leff is hailed by CNN.

2. Good post on interest rates (though I am not sure I agree with it).  Brad DeLong comments.  Critically important stuff and two of the best recent economics blog posts, in some time.

3. The world's first native Klingon speaker?

4. Spider silk tapestry.

5. Via Yana, France's hamster hotel, and here.

1. How much will U.S. taxes ever go up?

2. Useful lateral thinking and how it is described by the lateral thinker.

3. The biological bases of business and entrepreneurship.

4. One hour show with me in Second Life; they even did up a Tyler Cowen avatar.  Other shows are here, including economist Robert Frank and libertarian Adam Thierer.

5. Matt Kahn on "cash for caulkers".

6. The new AEA calendar of economists.  To whet your appetite, here is a photo of Francis Ysidro Edgeworth.

1. Scott Sumner's most absurd belief: India as #1 in gdp by 2109.

2. Click "play" and watch unemployment grow.

3. Who is Hollywood's most overpaid star, relative to box office returns?  Will Farrell is #1 it seems.

4. Markets in everything: NYC McDonald's with sleek Danish furniture.

5. Saddam's strategic thinking.

6. Via Caroline Flyn, China ethnicity of the week, good for a whole year (photos, recommended).

7. The Political Economy of Trust, by Henry Farrell.

1. Strange China video of the day.

2. Do men live longer if they marry smarter women? (No, I haven't checked if the original paper deals with the identification problem in a reasonable way.)

3. Another review of *The Big Questions*.

4. Daron Acemoglu in Esquire on economic growth.

5. How to get wealthy from your own life insurance (hint: Hansonian).

1. Profile of Doug Elmendorf.

2. Ross Douthat's new blog.

3. Gladwell responds to Pinker.

4. Via Felix Salmon, Clay Shirky on ontological classification.

5. The economics of pinball.

6. Why does the universe look the way it does?

7. Inventing a better patent system.

8. Interview with a Michelin inspector.

1. Reverse remittances: Mexico to the U.S.

2. Will intelligent aliens look like us?  (By the way, I say no.)

3. The most important law passed this year?

4. Pictures of libraries.

5. This is very dangerous information.

6. Provocative feminist (?) blog.

7. Tips for getting better advice: "Listen to people who hate you."

1. Only 35,000 viewers for Fox Business Network at a typical moment in time; MR content gets a bigger audience than that.

2. The economics of Second Life and Worlds of Warcraft: a discussion and comparison.

3. Atlantic books of the year.

4. Tips for all-you-can-eat buffets.

5. What economists don't understand about cell phone pricing.

6. Angus responds to Scott Sumner.

1. One defense of "too big to fail" banks.

2. Krugman responding to Scott Sumner?

3. Behavioral economists study sex toys.

4. Pinker reviews Gladwell.

5. Do caring doctors help you recover?

1. Via Jura Stanaityte, Ten simple rules for choosing industry vs. academia.  More simple rules here.

2. Is Bayh-Dole a "drug tax"?

3. "Tell-all" book about IKEA.

4. Countercyclical asset: haunted house novels?

5. China's empty city (of the day).  YouTube.  At about 1:20 you will see that a city built for one million residents remains empty, a' la Austro-Chinese business cycle theory.  "Ordos was a government idea, an infrastructure project taken to its limits, the motivation was likely gdp…"  — can you get better than that?  After the first minute or so the video is stunning.

1. Undercover economist eats with Naked Chef.

2. Genetics and success, from Atlantic Monthly.

3. List of hot people in Tokyo.

4. Terse answers from Uwe Tellkamp.  I guess he is tired from having written an almost 1000-page book.  I really liked this one.

5. Summary of recent inequality trends.

6. When do Power Laws hold?

The idea is that publishers could use their robots.txt as a ransom note, selling it to the highest bidder — Bing or Google.

Here is the link.  Still, it is a cute idea.

Someone once told me that there is nowhere we are more honest than the search box.

That's from still-a-Wunder-but-no-longer-a-Kind Ben Casnocha.  Read the whole post (drawing upon Michael Agger), it's one of the best I've seen in some time.  For instance:

There are some remarkable contrasts between "dumb" searches and "smart" ones. People who start their search "how 2" are more likely to search "how 2 get pregnant" or "how 2 grow weed." People who start their search "how one might" are more likely to search "how one might discover a new piece of music" or "how one might for the rise of andrew jackson in 1828."

Another contrast is between people who type in "is it wrong to" vs. people who type in "is it unethical to."  If you type in "is it wrong to" the first suggestion is "is it wrong to sleep with your cousin."  Number two is (yes, I tested it in Google): "Is it wrong to sleep with your step dad after your mom dies."  If you type in "is it unethical to," the first suggestion is "is it ethical to sell customer information."  Next comes a question about animal experimentation.  You'll see the lists of comparisons behind the first two links offered above.

1. Felix Salmon also recommends the new Bob Pozen book.

2. Are dreams just exercise for the brain?  I enjoyed this line: “I argue that dreaming is not a parallel state but that it is consciousness itself, in the absence of input from the senses…"

3. Rene Girard on war and apocalypse.

4. How much do (non-related) animals cooperate?

5. Via Kat, why we fall for "fast news."

6. How to improve the health care bill, by David Leonhardt.