Winter’s Haven

Anyone who has not already found it should immediately go look at There, I Fixed It. It is a hilarious photo blog documenting the world’s most jury-rigged fixes, most epic kludges, and finest disasters in the making.

Or something like that.
Insect eats time:

[Video: 36 Pop songs, but only 4 chords..]

…and time eats insects.

The amount of money which American public schools waste is a major problem. In fact, it’s an utter catastrophe, albeit one that most people are completely unaware of. Andrew Coulson lays out the magnitude of this disaster:

In 1974-75, California spent $1,373 per pupil on k-12 public schooling. By 2006-07, it was spending $10,937. Adjusting the earlier [...]

The Economist magazine presents some useful data on military spending by the world’s biggest powers. Per person, Israel spends the most on its military, followed by the United States. Most developed states spend less than half of what the US does per person.
However, if one asks how much a state ought to spend on defense, [...]

I don’t usually blog on finance or economics, but this tale is too good to pass up. James Hamilton on some recent CDS shenanigans:

A credit default swap is sometimes described as an insurance contract written against the possibility of default of a particular underlying asset. If I buy a CDS and the specified asset defaults, [...]

In the wake of the news that NICE approved acupuncture and chiropractic treatments for lower back pain, Daniel Davies has written a fantastic article at Crooked Timber on how politics makes it much more difficult to rationally evaluate the effectiveness of treatments on the evidence.
Doing science is hard to begin with. When large amounts of [...]

I’ve been playing around with Wolfram Alpha, which is fun and potentially useful. I was a bit disappointed, however, that my first attempt to trip it up succeeded. Asking it “What is the length of the coast of Iceland?” produces an answer, 4970 km, which is precise, definite, and largely meaningless.
The problem is that the [...]

That is the title of a Wired article about peaceniks and the remotely controlled attack aircraft used by the US Air Force. For a moment I thought that a bunch of hard-core pacifists had gone out and bought Stinger missiles. Just because it’s ethically consistent for pacifists to blow up unmanned drones doesn’t make the [...]

Some insightful observations from my favorite Marxist:

2. The Left is not proposing any viable alternative to capitalism. Whereas vulgar libertarians have their Econ 101, the [G20] protestors have nothing, bar a few money cranks and moralistic bleating about greed.What’s unforgivable here is that there are alternatives. But no-one’s interested. Why don’t we hear about market [...]

In a post at Meteuphoric, Katja Grace explains why the notion of (non-deterministic) free will is just incoherent nonsense. I wholly concur.
I’d like to further point out that her argument does not depend on a materialist theory of mind. Buying into dualism doesn’t help make free will the least bit more tenable. The question of [...]