It’s been a while now since studies have started suggesting that Project Self-Esteem was doing more harm than good by appraising kids on who they are instead of what they’ve done. It looks like people are finally starting to take note. I remember when my grades started to skyrocket in middle school. How did I feel? Terrified. I felt it was some sort of fluke that would be exposed to my own humiliation. Read the article to see how that relates.

Energy costs to suppliers declines 50% as shale assists energy growth. My energy costs have not decreased by 50%.

Note to Microsoft: OSes should get better and not worse over time. I have a dedicated NAS, so I don’t use Windows Server, but I have been annoyed at how anemic Vista/7’s photo slideshow screen saver is compared to XP. No, it’s not a big deal (there are freeware alternatives), but features should get better and not worse. On the other hand, every version of Windows Search was worse than the previous until Vista came along. Good show!

Does Facebook demonstrate that the Web is not as polarized as we think? No, but it does suggest that we are not as segregated as we think. I know this because of all of the arguments I see about how Obama and/or the Republicans are destroying our country (Note: this is not an invitation to talk about how Obama and/or the Republicans are destroying our country.)

My wife and I were married for three years before I gave her my password. Kids today are dumb.

I am naturally attracted to the idea of employee-ownership. But it might be a bad idea.

Buffalo is paying its teachers to have plastic surgery. This is such an embarrassment that the teachers union itself is willing to drop it at the next round of negotiations. But they don’t want a new round of negotiations. In the current environment, that’s understandable.

Men want sons and women want daughters. I will have to read the whole report at some point, but society’s girl-preference would mean that either (a) women want daughters in larger numbers or (b) women are more insistent on their desire for daughters.

Cue the ominous music. Mitt Romney has sent millions to an organization believed by many to be anti-gay and with a spotty racial history. Namely, his church. It’s actually an interesting article (without the ominous music, for the most part). I wonder if this is how the Obama campaign might run against Romney’s Mormonism without being accused of religious bigotry. Assuming Romney wins the nomination, of course.

I’ve said it before and I will say it again: If you think that smoking should not inconvenience you, you are a prohibitionist. You logistically can’t allow smoking to be a legal and not allow people a place to actually smoke. Smokers will simply ignore the rules. Just as they do now, but in larger numbers. If they’re breaking the rules by smoking at home, they might as well break them by smoking in a place you are more likely to have to breathe it.

The record labels have been forced to pay $45M for claiming music that isn’t theirs.

Can we use data to improve education? Most assuredly, and this is one of the things that makes the Khan Academy give me so much hope. However, it only works if we accept the validity of metrics. A lot 0f people are bothered by the concept.

Nine famous movie villains who were right all along. Some of these I had actually already come to the defense of (Senator Bill Kelly). Others had never occurred to me (The Wicked Witch).

As most of you know, I have long been bearish on China. I don’t believe that they are going to maintain the edges that they have as they continue to industrialize and I am skeptical that they have been doing enough right to create a new edge. So you knew I would have to flag this article.

From NPR, a modern look at manners.

Shortly after we first met, my wife told me that my drinking habits made me a borderline alcoholic (it was an observation, not a condemnation). That, to me, suggests that the definition for alcoholic is absurdly broad. I thought of that when I read Confessions of a Binge Drinker.

A really odd look at Sweden’s confederate subculture. As in… Confederate Flag and KKK shirts. It would be insanely weird to be in Sweden and run across that.

The communion wafer industry. My church back home switched to actual bread for a while. I thought it was kind of cool. Anyway, the quote of the piece: “Advertising our altar bread is a positive thing for Cavanagh Company. We take a lot of pride in putting our family name on a product that will eventually become the body and blood of Jesus.”

A story of a disgraced weatherman, a con job, and the Russian mafia.

100 Incredible Views Out Of Airplane Windows. My favorites are London, Rio, Qatar, and the one from Hong Kong that looks like a screaming face (#75), though really almost all pictures of Hong Kong are cool.

Why do we have so many firemen?

A long while back, Abel wrote about and linked to a piece on stray dogs in Eastern Europe.

The SOPA protests represented a rivalry between northern and southern California, movies and technology. Good for them, because heaven help us if they start really working together. There was a movie some time back called Anti-Trust, with Tim Robbins as a Bill Gates figure. The moral of the story was that software-for-profit was wrong and that “information wants to be free.” Well… what about movies? Do they want to be free? If not, why not? It was best, in the context of this movie, not to ask that question.

Also, a look at modern media piracy and its actual effects. I have always found the claim that piracy enables crime syndicates to be odd. If anything, the opposite is true, because, as this points out, they can’t compete with free any more than the studios can. Less so, since a lot of people will feel better buying legit copies. If you’re going to go illegit, why pay for it?

Kodak has filed for bankrupcy. Its future is in doubt, but it does have some patent revenue streams. They also are looking at doubling down on printing. Which is a brilliant place to go as we move to a paperless society. Should we ever meet, valued commenters, buy me a drink and I will tell you about my professional dealings with Kodak. In addition to the whole film thing, they are one of the most toxic corporations I have ever seen (and I have seen some doozies).

Apple is looking at getting into the textbook business. But who is going to pay for it? This is beyond the scope of what we usually ask teachers to supply. Personally, I think this is something that Amazon should be doing. They’d be more price-conscious. Either way, though, I do wonder how they’re going to get around the Americans with Disabilities Act, which has fought Kindle readers for being insufficiently friendly to the blind. Tablets are only going to be moreso.

Speaking of Apple and iBooks, their EULA is really quite disturbing. I mean, more than most EULA’s.

Again… the problem with news organizations “fact-checking.” Facts, in order to become (useful) information, require context. Context is open to interpretation. Therefore, “ObamaCare is Socialism” and “Republicans voted to end Medicare” ended up as Lies of the Year. Neither were lies. Both were subjective subjective judgments that we either agree with or disagree with.

Norway authorities took away an Indian couple’s kids for “feeding them wrong.” What happens when the Nanny State meets Multiculturalism.

The St. Louis Rams are going to be playing some games in London. Costa Tsiokas thinks that this may be a prelude to relocating the team back to Los Angeles (hurting their ticket sales). I don’t know about that, but the article goes on to mention that there is a fan club for the New England Patriots out there (the Patriots have also played in the UK). Does anyone else get a kick out of the irony of Brits rooting for a team called the New England Patriots with a colonial captain on their helmet?

A French diet guru wants to grade people on their weight. Using BMI. Sigh.

A look at the 1% and what they majored in. I actually do find it quite surprising that nearly 1 in 20 history majors become 1%ers. Almost 1 in 10 economics majors is less surprising. One imagines that it’s still not a good idea to go to North By Northeast State U and major in history, though. One imagines that a history major that becomes a 1% was bound for there regardless of what they majored in. Still: surprising.

A look at the DEA and the Adderall Shortage.

South America deserves an aware for finding a use for mimes.

A little while ago I wrote about how, if you have cell phone conversations in public, you have a very diminished expectation of privacy:

I was at a tire place this morning. In the waiting room was a woman talking on the phone. She talked about all of the gossip going on around her (maybe the local) LDS church. She was actually quite witty and I cracked a smile at some of the things she said. This got a Look Of Death from her for listening in to her conversation.

Turns out that this made the news:

While on a train Thursday, Bob Salladay, a senior editor at California Watch and the Center for Investigative Reporting, realized he was sitting near Santa Ana City Council member Michele Martinez. He listened to her talk on the phone and then started tweeting what she said about her campaign. He also tweeted that he was “99 percent sure it was Michele Martinez.”

It turns out, it was. In an email statement, Martinez responded: “I don’t know what’s worse; someone secretly listening to a private conversation without consent or misrepresenting that conversation publicly. It’s disrespectful, dishonest and downright creepy.” Salladay tweeted in response: “There is nothing secret about an elected official talking loudly on a public train.”

Quite so. There are some questions about whether Salladay should have taken some extra steps to verify who was talking. But other than that, I think he’s in the clear. Doug Mataconis comments:

Of course, all of this raises the question of why Martinez (who has not denied that it was her on the train or that Salladay reported what she said accurately) would have a conversation like this is in public to begin with. We’ve all been in some public area where people talk on their cell phone far louder than they need to, forcing at least one side of their conversation upon us whether we want to hear it or not, and I’ve personally been surprised at the number of times you can hear people talking about things out loud that one would think they wouldn’t want anyone else to know about. Martinez’s outrage here would sound a little more sincere if it weren’t for the fact that she was dumb enough to talk about this on a train where anyone around her could here what she’s saying. The fact that one of those people happened to be a reporter is really just her bad luck.

Quite so. As I said in my post, there is no expectation of privacy if you are talking in a public area to where other people can hear you. It was Salladay’s good luck that it was a conversation that he wanted to hear, but more often than not it’s more along the lines of LDS gossip that I listened to.

Doug goes on:

What if the conversation that Salladay had overheard hadn’t had anything to do with the campaign, though? What if it was some kind of personal conversation that revealed, or appeared to reveal, something embarrassing of a personal nature? Would it have been appropriate, from a journalistic standpoint, for him to “live tweet” the conversation in that case? Admittedly, it becomes a more difficult question at that point, and it’s hard to make the case that the private life of a state representative is really all that newsworthy unless it involves something illegal. The fact that Martinez might have been having a fight with her husband, for example, doesn’t strike me as something the public needs to know. At the same time, thought, it’s a tough line to draw and it’s hardly an invasion of privacy if someone is speaking so loudly in public that everyone around them can hear clearly.

This, to me, is a broader question of journalistic ethics that is unrelated to how the information was obtained. If it’s not right to report it because a staffer says so, it’s not right to report it because you overheard it on a train. The same standard applies in both cases. I have no idea why overhearing something would be less valid than talking to a staffer who overheard something.

How elite Asian students are cheating on US college applications. There is, apparently, a booming industry around this.

Ever since a childhood fixation with Atlantis, I’ve been fascinated with the concept of lost cities.

Would Americans be healthier if they spent more on food? I think Doug makes a really good point here that in some ways it’s the availability of food rather than cost. Even if natural food is better, and even if it weren’t more expensive, it would still be less convenient. In my more severe moments, I consider the war on salt to primarily be a war on convenient foods. Not as a byproduct, but as the point of the proposed ban. Meanwhile, the problem with blaming food deserts.

The court case that almost made it illegal to tape TV shows.

Bill Gates has saved six million lives since 2007. He’s spent $28 billion from his fortune. That makes a lot of money per life saved if all of it were going to live-saving. But I don’t think that’s the case. I would be interested in a breakdown of how much his life-saving efforts have cost per life saved.

Los Angeles is apparently the favorite destination for Europeans looking to move to the US.

The top 1% of mobile users account for 50% of the world’s wireless bandwidth. Meanwhile, 5% of Americans make up 50% of health care spending.

This puts a cramp on my designs of putting an NFL team in Riverside.

The inbreeding coefficient of superheroes. Meanwhile, superheroes in Salt Lake City! And lastly, the favorite superheroes of Republican politicians. Any of them who names Ted Kord has my vote. Okay, not really.

Another month, another article on the imminent demise of the laptop. Look, the desktop isn’t even dead yet. Beyond that, the notion that because laptop design has been perfected means it’s dead is a pretty dumb argument.

The case for saving ugly buildings. Go brutalism! More seriously, I ultimately take an “out with the old…” perspective, provided that it makes economic sense to replace a particular building. I just don’t trust what the tastemakers call cool or ugly.

When you define half of Americans as poor or low-income, it says more about the metrics used than the state of our nation.

Should Hollywood go back to using miniatures? I’m for anything that would hold costs down.

One of the interesting things that jumped out at me when I originally moved north was the number of people who left their cars running while they went inside. I even did it myself sometimes. In Milwaukee, it’s causing the predictable problems. Not of theft, but “unlawful usage.” Kids stealing a ride to school. Apparently it’s illegal to leave your car running. It reminds me of the town I was raised in where it was illegal to leave your bikes out because you were in effect giving escapees from the local juvenile hall a free ride.

In Illinois, you now need ID to buy drain cleaner.

Atlantic Cities makes the case for strong urban cores. I actually agree! The problem is when people think that the way to do this is to kneecap suburbs. Atlanta has apparently accomplished a downtown renewal despite its outward expansion. The fact that the urban cores were lost in the rust belt, and that the rust belt is struggling, and that the former is the cause of the latter, has a causation-correlation problem.

From the files of near self-parody, Conservapedia wants a bible without all that liberal stuff. I’ve heard some conservatives say that Conservapedia is parody, but I’ve seen little reason to believe that’s actually the case.

This is the stuff of jetpacks and flying cars, but more fun to think about.

Here are ten reasons that Windows Phone 7 is better than Android. Of course, the real question is whether or not it matters. WinPhone is trying to occupy that sweet spot between an extremely inflexible iPhone and the WinMo-like chaos of Android. When I have to make the move away from WinMo, I still don’t know if it will be to WinPhone or Android. Probably the latter, but if Microsoft can provide what I want, I will (somewhat begrudgingly) accept the closed environment.

Farhad Manjoo says that this year may be The Year of Microsoft. I’m skeptical of Windows Phone 7, but wish them all the best. I don’t have a strong opinion on Windows 8. It’s hard to see how it will be revolutionary, though. Maybe I’m just sour because they killed the idea of a real computer-tablet.

One thing that Microsoft never got right with Windows Mobile was getting users off the stylus. Oddly, Samsung wants to bring the stylus back. It feels a little like full circle. It actually makes sense, though. There are times to use your fingers and times a stylus is better. It just strikes me as “odd” from a marketing perspective. Styluses are just considered old hat, no matter how practical.

James Joyner provides a level-headed perspective to the urinating soldiers.

Vladimir Putin is a very bad egg, but he’s got “cool” down pat. Whale hunting with crossbows? It’s almost enough to make up for the plastic surgery.

Is Japan’s failure, the “lost decade” a myth? Matthew Yglesias says it is not. If Nanani is still reading, I’d love to hear her perspective.

Hasbro is suing Asus for the latter naming their tablet the Transformer. This article says that they probably don’t have a case because nobody is going to confuse a toy with a tablet. But with Verizon paying George Lucas for the Droid name, it strikes me that there is precedent. The Transformer is actually supposed to be one of the best tablets on the market.

I could have sworn that I wrote on this before - and my apologies if I have - but I can’t find it.

Is lego evil or just highly problematic? I can’t speak to the sexism, but I find the product tie-in model to be agitating. This is kind of cool, though.

People remain in prison for a crime we are still trying to figure out if it’s possible.

Nine stubborn truths about the brain that just won’t die.

One gallon of gasoline can power an iPhone for 20 years.

A critical look at anti-Jitney laws.

Is dynamic parking pricing not working?

Are biased refs good business? It’s common in wrestling entertainment for some local hero to win the title belt for the hometown crowd only to lose it again in short order.

I think this MIT program is awesome. Not only online courses, but certificates!

Is the Toyota Camry getting knocked off its perch?

A case against the case against payday loans. More.

A self-publishing success story, marked for future inspiration.

What our taste in music says about us. Or “why I tended not to mention my appreciation of country music in my old online matchsite profiles.”

I was torn between whether I should buy this immediately or wait until I needed a nite-lite. But it sold out. They Might Be Giants needs to get on top of this and offer a genuine TMBG one.

Why conservatives and libertarians hate urbanists. Here is a potential area of common ground.

As far as the “distracted driver” phenomenon is a problem, portable electronics are only a small part of the problem. Also, the NTSB may be misleading the public.

How the characters from Lost make a peanut butter sandwich.

A look at dishonesty and intellectual dishonesty.

The shocking truth about office Christmas parties and infidelity.

So the iPod is apparently destroying ears. Ha! I don’t have an iPod! Wait… “and other audio devices”? Crap. Well, I only listen to the audio in my right ear. So I guess my left is good!

I mentioned in an old Linkluster post regarding an old court ruling that allowed a police department to discriminate against people that scored really well on their variant of an IQ test. This spawned a conversation between Kirk, Brandon, Phi, and myself.

“It’s not okay to discriminate against dumb people, so why is it okay to do it to those who are smart?” -Kirk

“We see here that they used it to discriminate against people who did very well, but they almost certainly use it against people who did poorly. So somehow or another, they have already justified the disparate impact of the test.” -Trumwill

Reading over another account of the case, I am relatively sure that we all actually missed what’s really going on here. I touched on it in my comment, but half-accidentally. I initially actually believed the departments claims of concerns over turnover due to boredom or that it was a sort of personality profiling. But the more I think about it, this is less likely something despite disparate impact, but rather it was done precisely because of disparate impact.

We all know the legal problems with IQ tests: they have a disparate impact on minorities. This can be overcome, but only with a justification process that can be expensive and arbitrary. So organizations don’t like to do it. However, if you can devise an IQ test that doesn’t discriminate against minorities, then you don’t really have a problem. Therefore, instead of accepting scores above a certain threshold, you accept scores within a particular target zone. That means excluding low IQs (more likely to be Hispanic or black) and high IQs (more likely to be white or Asian). That, to me, makes a lot more sense than the personality profiling (with is self-deprecating in the extreme) or a disdain for high IQs (police departments are more frequently asking for more education rather than less). From a police departments perspective, eliminating a few high-IQ people from consideration is worth the cost of being able to eliminate those at the low end of the spectrum. From a utilitarian standpoint, that actually makes sense to me.

What would make things really interesting is if a bunch of Asian-Americans sued.

—-

This post is going to be treading on dangerous terrain. It’s unavoidable. All I ask is that we avoid derogatory remarks and derogatory references to stereotypes. Let’s assume the following for the sake of this post:

(1) An IQ test, or a test that can be directly tagged to IQ, will have a disparate impact on Non-Asian Minorities.

(2) The reason for #1, be it genetics, education disparities, cultural disparities, or what-have-you, are not particularly relevant to the discussion.

(3) Because of (1), cities are loathe to employ such tests because of the hurdles required to justify the disparate impact. But sometimes they do it anyway because regardless of #2, they see a benefit in excluding people below a certain threshold on such tests.

A heartwarming story of a dog rescuing some kittens left for dead.

Could shale gas support 870,000 jobs by 2015? Will we let it if it can? Also, the drinking water impact may not be as bad.

White is the most popular car color, which doesn’t surprise me as much as the fact that 75% of them are white/silver/gray/black. I was suspicious, but I did a car count and it came out to about 67%. I guess by virtue of how unnoticeable these cars are compared to colored ones, I would have guessed it would have been maybe half at most.

The stereotype is that women are more cooperative in nature than men. This is true, but only in mixed-sex settings.

It’s hard to compare city crime rankings.

Are baby boys born from stress?

Yet another article on the Khan Academy. I don’t know about the future of online K-12, but the quality control feedback concept here could revolutionize schooling.

Infants prefer a nasty moose if it punishes an unhelpful elephant. A look at infant moral judgments.

Charter schools help disadvantaged kids but disadvantage advantaged ones.

How fourteen movies went from NC17 to R.

Is India’s economic decline one of the most under-reported stories of the year? When people talk about India taking all of our jobs, I get the sense they don’t understand how far behind India really is. And they’re apparently not making progress. There are alarm bells in China, too.

Unix turns 40.

Who could fail to appreciate a boneless robot that walks on soft legs?

The health risks of being left handed.

A symbiotic relationship between crocodiles and a nuclear power plant.

Some college students are saying that they will accept lower pay for higher social media freedom. Some college students apparently labor under the impression that they will get to be choosy. If they do, though, I actually understand where they are coming from on this.

This article borders are parody. When the male economy is decimated, we’re supposed to be upset that their jobs come back first? That’s exactly what we need to happen. Here is more level commentary on the same thing.

A libertarian case for government-owned networks. Given that our choices seem to be government-sponsored monopoly and government-run systems, there really is no market solution here.

There are 1.25 billion Windows PCs worldwide. Five-hundred million Windows 7 licenses last year. Can we stop talking about the “death of the PC” now?

A good rundown on electromagnetic interference and aircraft systems.

Regardless of the merits, going after single-family homes is a tough sell. As skeptical as I am of new urbanism, getting rid of urban interstates can often be a good idea. The triumphalism (”let’s get rid of more than just urban freeways!”) may cause more problems than it solves, though.

According to BBC, Brazil’s economy has overtaken that of the UK:

CEBR chief executive Douglas McWilliams told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that Brazil overtaking the UK was part of a growing trend.

“I think it’s part of the big economic change, where not only are we seeing a shift from the west to the east, but we’re also seeing that countries that produce vital commodities - food and energy and things like that - are doing very well and they’re gradually climbing up the economic league table,” he said.
Continue reading the main story
Brazilian economy

A report based on International Monetary Fund data published earlier this year also said the Brazilian economy would overtake the UK in 2011.

Brazil has a population of about 200 million, more than three times the population of the UK.

The first job I had in Estacado was helping the state CPS move its computer systems. I was one of only two white boys on the crew of a dozen or so. Most were Hispanic. One of them was a Mexican-American who was trying to learn Portugese. I asked him why, when he was already bilingual in such a useful language. He said that Brazil was where it was at in South America and that there was a real need.

When I thought about it, it made sense. Brazil’s sheer size is important, of course. But I had another datapoint of interest. Back when I was in Colosse looking for work, I kept seeing what could only be described as the perfect job. Except, after having read and salivated over the job description and requirements, they would include a sentence at the end “Must be fluent in Portugese.” Aside from the frustration to putting at the end what should have been at the beginning, I found it odd that Portugese of all languages was the one barring me for a job. Spanish, I could understand. But Portugese?

This is an old article, but I ran across it because I googled the subject, seeing yet another picture of Vlad Putin and thinking that he must have had plastic surgery.

How a professional screw-up gave an engineer a criminal record.

There is no disputing this statistic.

Apparently, Europe is not in a mess because the Greeks and Spanish are lazy. They work harder than the Germans.

A sperm donor is told to… errr… abstain, or face $100k fine.

How Ethiopian adoption industry is duping families and bullying activists.

I don’t want to hear any more about how carriers are complacent in thwarting mobile phone thieves. Let them be complacent! The alternative may be to refuse to activate any phone that they don’t personally sell you. It’d solve the problem and cost customers more money than stolen phones ever will.

From Bakadesuyo, the always popular question: Do young women prefer jerks or nice guys?

Deconstructing the temper tantrum.

We’re exporting Japanese cars to South Korea.

I believe Apple when they say that the abortion clinic thing was unintentional. The real question to me is… would they approve of an app that lets parents know that their kids are looking for an abortion clinic?

I’ve pondered switching to e-cigarettes. I fear this bodes ill for that ever happening. I’d never smoke it in the workplace, but I fear before all is said and done, e-cigarettes will be made just as inconvenient as the regular kind. Not because they’re remotely as bothersome, but because the war on tobacco has become so punitive in nature.

Rural America is fighting back against a proposed Department of Labor regulation that would hinder the ability of young people to work on farms.

A look at who is dropping out of the labor force. Also, is it a good sign that people are quitting their jobs?

St. Louis disbanded the occupiers in the right way. There are some things the police across the country have taken grief for, but far too many were excessively confrontation. The only counterpoint is whether the missteps of others made the St. Louis occupiers know what the alternative to evacuation was.

The occupiers, meanwhile, are looking at occupying homes with faulty foreclosures (or allegedly faulty foreclosures). If they target the right houses, I think this could be a worthwhile project. But they’d better be sure, otherwise they are disrupting the proper eviction of deadbeats.

Step 1: Bring back the wooly mammoth. Step 2: Find out how they taste.

If the government was putting guns in the hands of bad guys in order to track them and learn about the flow of illegal guns, that’s one thing. If they did it to make a political argument, that’s inexcusable.

An interesting view of the Occupy Movement, from China.

Is Verizon throwing in the towel on FiOS?

While anything that talks about “superiority” and “German” is inherently unnerving, I thought this insight on German reunification was fascinating.

An unbelievably cool tool that lets you see the impact of a meteor hitting the earth. And you get to choose the size, density, distance, and trajectory of the meteor!

Rod Dreher writes of hate as an element of style. Dreher brings up several good points about the obnoxiousness of it all.. and yet how we are better off for their existence.

Joel Kotkin continues to fight the good fight against the meme that people are fed up with suburbia.

A curious pair of statistics: smokers outearn non-smokers in their first job, but nonsmokers’ wages grow much fast.

An interesting look at who’s dropping out of the labor force.

How doctors approach death.

Reporters are credulous, studies show.

How to make your Windows PC boot faster.

The most expensive street drunk in Tacoma. Total tab: Approximatly $2,407,100.

When talking about outsourcing our brains to google, it’s worth noting that knowledge makes you a better googler.

The return of the laugh-track. There’s actually a lot of interesting info in the article about the process. Not just the… editing… but also how they choose their studio audience. On Married With Children, for example, they’d pack the audience with Marines and other service members. For Dear John, they got divorcees.

The earliest ads for Amazon.com were based on the premise that Amazon had an insane number of books and so where did they put them? Well, here is the answer.

It’s commonly discussed around here that women are more likely to initiate divorce than men. Why? Well, one reason could be that divorce is most likely to be instigated by the parent that will get custody of the children. The data is a bit dated. That being said, it’s noteworthy that in the couple of cases I am familiar with where the man left the woman (and there were children involved), the father got primary custody. I wonder what the numbers look like for childless couples? Also, some data suggesting that more lax divorce laws led to a decline in females murdered by their partners.

It’s commonly argued that teacher quality has declined over time, but it’s not necessarily true.

Ways to inflate your IQ.

Seriously, why did anyone ever think this would not only be a good idea, but would sell for $100? I would say something about how they must not have seen ebooks coming, but it looks like ebooks predate these things. Sometimes I think companies come up with something to confuse the technologically illiterate holiday buyers trying to figure out something to get for their wiz-kid grandson.

The glory of the original Atari logo.

Parks & Recreation: The sitcom that actually loves Middle America.

Why the intro to Batman: The Animated Series, is the best opening sequence ever. A scene-by-scene analysis.

If you want someone to be your friend, get them to do you a favor.

How does it not occur to somebody that using medical records for scrap paper is a bad idea?

Alex Knapp schools us on the seduction, and limits, of the exponential curve.

When Southern Tech (a large public university) and Piermont (a well-to-do private one) played their rivalry game this year, there was some cross-forum smack-talking between the fans of each. Not just about our teams, but our universities. I’m not going to get into what they call us (it involves our school’s racial demographics), but my knock on them is that “Well, some school has to educate those who won’t have a job at Daddy’s firm when they graduate.” It’s a cheap shot, but maybe not that far off-base.

This look at American-European values and how they conflict should surprise no one.

A magic trick that reveals unconscious knowledge.

My only exposure to the BitCoin is when one of my computers got absolutely hammered by some malware that apparently had the objective of stealing bitcoins from my computer, should I get any. Or something like that. Why anyone thought this would work, I do not know. I’m not sure I would bet on this, either.

This is a video on a $25 computer that plays high-definition video. Naturally, it doesn’t come with much attached.

It seems to me that the press does not know what to do when a prevailing narrative no longer fits. So when suddenly the pastoral, declining landscape of the Great Plains is booming, they don’t know how exactly to cover it. So they find a way to turn it into a negative. I am not slow to call bias on coverage of everything between the coasts (outside of Chicago), but I think this is more of a narrative issue than a coastal bias (or liberal bias) one.

Perhaps the most irritating thing about the deification of Steve Jobs is that he will give bosses an excuse to be a jerk for the forseeable future. They’re not being an arse. They’re being like Steve Jobs. It’s not unlike the managers at the places I have worked that read these business books and then only remember the most self-serving stuff. I remember one boss (boss’s boss, actually) who was a die-hard fan of 7 Habits of Highly Successful People. Then I actually read the book and discovered that his evangelism was… selective… in nature.

A story from a couple years ago about NBA players going back to college. Oklahoma State’s quarterback is actually a former professional baseball player. Interesting factoids: The average annual salary in the N.B.A. is $5.85 million, and players are generally secure in the near term. Their retirement years can be completely different. An estimated 60 percent of N.B.A. players are broke within five years of retiring, and 78 percent of N.F.L. players are bankrupt or under financial stress because of joblessness or divorce within two years. If the players unions really wanted my support, they would be coming up with a lifetime payment plan so that the money they make from their careers is more modest, but lasts a lot longer.

The New York Times has a good piece on the rise in audiobooks. Now that I have them set up on my smartphone, they’re hard to go without.

An obvious link that hadn’t occurred to me: our levels of incarceration hurt our mobility. People in jail can’t leave, of course, but there are other reasons as well. Richard Florida also writes about the make-up of “Stuck America.”

A look at Stanford’s free online education experiment.

ED Kain argues that America needs 1Gbps Internet in every home. I honestly don’t think that top speeds are the issue. The primary issue is reliability. Both in terms of having it available everywhere and in reliability of speed. The maximum speed is just a number. The average speed is more helpful. The minimum speed during periods of high usage is the most important thing.

The story of a woman who jokingly tried to sell her husband on eBay.

I love this! We should use landfill junk to expand Manhattan.

An interesting story on the link between video game playing and creativity. Kudos to the article for not conflating correlation with causation (it wouldn’t be surprising if more creative people were attracted to video games in the first place). The fact that computers and the Internet were “unrelated to creativity” is itself interesting, as these things are supposed to be the death knell to creativity compared to reading Dickens, locked in chains, in a basement.

What law schools can learn from Zappos!

Half Sigma likes to talk about how unhealthy marathoning is. Could cardio exercise itself be a problem?

I agree with the “weirdly sinister” description of this 1967 IBM ad that Jim Henson put together.

Should antivirus companies be allowed to overlook spyware put on your computer by the police? I find this question refreshing, as I fear the question may ultimately become: Should they be allowed not to overlook it?

Also, to what degree should police be allowed to use license plate readers? I’m having trouble coming up with a good libertarian argument against this, other than just a vague sense that the government should not be able to track us so easily. But the expectation of privacy on where you drive your publicly-registered vehicle has to be pretty minimal.

So in 1999, a federal judge ruled that police can bar people with high IQs from becoming police officers. From a constitutional standpoint, this makes sense. And in a way, I guess it’s personality profiling. But once this makes its way to the courts, what police force wants to defend the policy that cops shouldn’t be too smart? It’s a series of jokes that write themselves.

Another nail in the coffin of the “The Internet is destroying our sociability” meme.

How cheaper cocaine meant less crime. Speaking of drugs, it’s harvest time in Marijuana Country!

So our stereotypes about fast food may be mistaken. As incomes rise, so does fast food consumption.

Something to keep in mind when we tell Chris Christie to just put down the fork. What I don’t understand, though, is why we can’t just inject people with leptin? Also, more on the genetic basis for obesity. Just because you’re thin doesn’t mean that you had to work harder at it and sacrifice more than the person who is not thin. I think about food and diet and nutrition a lot less now than I did 75 pounds ago.

City people extol the virtues of the city, unsurprisingly, but it appears that city-dwellers rely on the narcotic effect of carbon monoxide to get through the hassles of the area.

The NHS declares that C-Sections should be available to all women. I have mixed feelings about it, to be honest, but a general animosity towards the expectations that doctors (all of whom work for the NHS) should have to do this.

Cricket is being destroyed by an “indecent obsession with money.” Well, why should cricket be any different? I sometimes dream of picking a sport that’s not “all about the money,” but of course as soon as it becomes popular, it becomes all about the money. And if it’s not popular, it’s not a social activity, and therefore I lose interest in it. I mean, I think Arena football (which is not all about the money) is cool, but since nobody knows anything about it, there’s no point in paying attention to it. I’ve always wanted to learn more about cricket. And I think that colleges that don’t play football should play scholarship-free rugby, just to have a new playing field without all the big boys. Until, of course, USC notices and starts its own rugby team If it gains in popularity that is. So the same basic problem.

Another cool gadget: A marriage calculator. Calculating, that is, the likelihood of divorce. My likelihood of having already been divorced is 5% and another 6% chance that we will divorce in the next several years. My wife has a 14% and 12%. I have no idea why she would be more likely to divorce than me. I would guess it is related to fact that it asked the kids question for her and not for me.

I really, really wish I’d known about this elections gadget in 2008. I hope they do one for 2012. You can see who would win what state by swings in demographics in voting and in turnout.

Should we chalk this up to the War on Drugs or the regulatory state? This, the closing of a soup kitchen because they want to regulate it like a restaurant, definitely falls into the latter category.