Misleading Factoid
The Economist magazine, who really ought to know better, wrote that
A study by the Centre for Science in the Public Interest showed that soft drinks were the single biggest contributor to calories in the American diet…
This sentence conveys no information whatsoever. An example will serve to illustrate the problem. Suppose that every day I drink [...]
Random Three
Rathergood wishes you a merry Communist Christmas!
Virginia Postrel writes about the psychology of bubbles.
And lastly, researchers read images off your visual cortex using MRI.
Swoopo
You absolutely must read Jeff Atwood’s article describing Swoopo.com. What is Swoopo? Commenter Septomin provides an eloquent summary: “someone read about the dollar auction and decided to turn it into a business plan.”. It’s a business model that will make every casino owner envious.
Lastly, I’d like to highlight a comment by Jacob (not me), [...]
Who Needs A Veterinarian…
…when you’ve got a financial engineer?
Hat tip to Greg Mankiw.
School Choice, Religion
In the comments to a previous post, George W. raises a common concern regarding school choice schemes:
School-choice sounds great on paper, and I’d go along with it if there were strictly enforced standards for education content. Too often in this country it just boils down to keeping kids from learning about evolution and sex.
George is [...]
Epistemic Crash
Mark Thoma argues that a major problem impeding the resolution of the financial crisis is
the complete breakdown of traditional information flows, and a loss of confidence in the models used to evaluate that information. Markets need information to work properly, and the information financial markets need is not available.
For example, investors can no longer [...]
