Bellesiles's self-defense of this latest book is, indeed, embarrassing, given the context. May God have mercy on his career.

To read.

Chapter 8. Described by a coworker as "a total mindf*ck". To read.

This is extraordinarily helpful -- particularly the parts that give examples of how to set cell formats.

I like this argument: Google can't simultaneously base all its revenue on intelligently examining all its content (emails, YouTube videos) AND claim ignorance of what they're trafficking in, common-carrier-style.

Just saw Avatar last night. Amazing. Had I read this article before the movie, I think I would have severely underestimated the likelihood that the movie would be jaw-dropping. But it really, really is.

"Say you want something. Anything. Maybe you want a public option in the health care bill, or campaign finance reform, or America to go to war against Antarctica. Or maybe you want bipartisanship in the Senate. What you do is, you focus on the culprits -- the influential opponents of the public option who could choose otherwise, or the special interests who are blocking campaign finance reform, or the dirty penguin-lovers in the Senate. Or the people who were politically positioned to cross party lines, but chose not to of their own volition. And you call them out. Or you can find your heroes -- people who do what you wanted, and extol their awesomeness.

What you don't do is just declare a pox on everyone's houses and go home."

To read. "This note tries to attempt a sketch of the history of spectral ranking, a general umbrella name for techniques that apply the theory of linear maps (in particular, eigenvalues and eigenvectors) to matrices that do not represent geometric transformations, but rather some kind of relationship between entities. Albeit recently made famous by the ample press coverage of Google's PageRank algorithm, spectral ranking was devised more than fifty years ago, almost exactly in the same terms, and has been studied in psychology and social sciences. I will try to describe it in precise and modern mathematical terms, highlighting along the way the contributions given by previous scholars."

To read.

NEA report on reading in America. Most useful to me as a source of statistics on who reads and how much.

The basics of object/relational mapping in Hibernate

Not a "scorched earth" review, inasmuch as the earth, by the time Bissell is done with it, has been consigned to some other, darker , colder dimension.

To make.

Dag! Scott McLemee takes Cornel West to the woodshed, so to speak.

In which Fallows demonstrates that David Brooks had his mind made up about Chinese collectivism before he even started writing his story -- easy enough to do, when you expect your audience to view China in the same way. Though Fallows does, of course, realize that there certain cultural baselines -- that there *is* something different between the U.S. and China, and that of course there is great variability in both countries superimposed on that. Can anyone recommend good, empirically sound results on what sort of cultural generalizations we *are* justified in making?

In which Mark Liberman does yeoman labor with the fictional character known as "David Brooks." (When the "Brooks" character "retires," the New York Times and "Brooks"'s old publishers will yell Surprise! and declare that it's all been a big joke.)

Tallying up all the financial support given to the banks. I need a drink.

Drool.

To make.

Extremely thought-provoking. Some ideas for making universities modern.

Hilarious.

Hilarious.

I just love this sentence: "Belgium is politically weak because of the linguistic divide; Italy is politically weak because it’s Italy." Really I just love the bit after the semicolon.

A clever JavaScript hack to produce a digital clock whose digits' segments are composed of horizontal and vertical scroll bars.

"I propose that we officially declare that anyone who [uses a list of three Godwin-like comparisons] be summarily consigned to the outer darkness.

Make it so."

"Summarily consigned to the outer darkness" has a nice ring to it.

"Everybody else has to stay in Special Torture Jail forever on accounta they have all come down with Schrodinger's Guilt. If they stay in the box they *might* be guilty, but if we *open* the box they might *not* be."

This is really exciting.

A really intriguing set of numbers. They may be subject to some statistical tomfoolery, though, so I'd want to check the cites before quoting this.

Milton Friedman talking a lot of sense about the failure of government regulation in the insurance market -- specifically, the failure of the employer insurance deduction.

Kimchi recipe! WIN!

Next up on the list of things Google intends to invent, just to complete its control of the stack: its own physics and its own God.

The most exquisite book-porn video ever: the remaking, from original dies, of the 19th-century Pictorial Websters. Watch a beautiful book being made, from dies to Linotype all the way through binding. Drool. However, I looked for how much the book costs; the answer is "More than I can afford."

What used to happen when someone proposed to delay a vote: "Cato and Bibulus threw themselves into a desperate rearguard action to halt the passage of the land bill. On the day of the public vote Bibulus appeared in the Forum to announce that he had observed unfavorable omens in the sky, and that the vote would therefore have to be suspended. The response of the pontifex maximus was to have a bucket of dung emptied over Bibulus’s head."

Google offering WiFi? Whuh?

Well damn. It looks like I will have to add Lévi-Strauss to my to-read list (http://stevereads.com/toread).

This is a benefit I've wanted startups to offer for a long, long time: provide healthy food, particularly fruit, and drop the junk food. Why do all software companies think it's a good idea for their developers to get fat off junk food? Harmonix behaves differently, and god bless them for it.

Great list.

On the success of Harmonix, makers of Rock Band and Beatles: Rock Band and based in Central Square. Let their success be a lesson to all startups, and let that lesson be REMAIN STARTUPS AS LONG AS POSSIBLE.

"I know Windows is awful. Everyone knows Windows is awful. Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it. It's grim, it's slow, everything's badly designed and nothing works properly: using Windows is like living in a communist bloc nation circa 1981. And I wouldn't change it for the world, because I'm an abject bloody idiot and I hate myself, and this is what I deserve: to be sentenced to Windows for life."

A slideshow.

Seems interesting.

How *not* to handle user-interface design.

Soup! With blue cheese and Sriracha!

Excellent presentation. Explains just what the title says.

"The Evolution of Cooperation, by Axelrod (1984), is a highly influential study that identifies the benefits of cooperative strategies in the iterated prisoner's dilemma. We argue that the most extensive historical analysis in the book, a study of cooperative behavior in First World War trenches, is in error. Contrary to Axelrod's claims, there soldiers in the Western Front were not generally in a prisoner's dilemma (iterated or otherwise), and their cooperative behavior can be explained much more parsimoniously as immediately reducing their risks. We discuss the political implications of this misapplication of game theory."

An excellent takedown of everything that's wrong with airport security. Though I think I'd expand on one point at the very end: if another 9/11 happens, *maybe* the Dept. of Homeland Security itself will be blamed. More than likely what will happen instead is that a few particular employees will be fired very publicly, and the whole taped-together edifice will remain standing more or less as before. They'll still spend millions on ineffective equipment, because they can. If anything, the airport-security process will just grow more Draconian, again *because they can*, and because the appearance of sternness conveys the impression of security.

On the use and -- particularly -- abuse of the Coase Theorem. Excellent. Like all economic ideas, it seems to me that the Coase Theorem ought to be viewed as a constraint -- loose or tight, it's hard to say -- on the set of permissible assertions, but itself shouldn't be used to derive truthful assertions ... if that makes sense. I haven't said that clearly. I need coffee.

Excellent piece on how to teach real software development to the youngsters. Pretty darned critical of academic computer science; I don't know (having not been a CS major) whether his criticisms are just. Though I think he needs to follow through on the logic here: if undergrad CS programs are completely impractical, yet places like MIT still manage to pump out talented engineers, then what does this say about the need for "practicality"?

Terrific. Against the "dummies" mode of learning.

More music porn.

This is going to bankrupt me today, with Amazon MP3s being the instrument of my undoing.

"I've only been following the Superfreakonomics thing with a corner of my brain; since I'm not at all interested in reading Freakonomics, I'm SUPERuninterested in reading its sequel.

But here's my question: it's *economists* who are recommending massively untested solutions to climate problems? This, from the discipline that reacts to any social-engineering effort with desperate cries of "unintended consequences"? Really? Same discipline?"

Preach it, brother Chait: 'People have made this point before, but the conservative attacks on health care reform's fiscal responsibility are beyond hypocritical. George W. Bush and the Republicans created a new health care entitlement in 2003 that was completely unfinanced. Not a dime was paid for. The Democrats have decided to completely finance every cent of health care reform, and they're taking a hundred times more flack for fiscal irresponsibility than the Republicans ever did. There's a lesson here, and "fiscal responsibility pays" isn't it.'

Congress is willing to give a quarter-trillion dollars to doctors, but do nothing for patients. Got it.

To read. Notes on making one's website mobile-friendly

To read.

To read.

On Dick Gephardt's rapid shift from populist to lobbyist. Ugh.

To read.

To read.

To view later (when the child isn't studiously working at the computer in the next room, just waiting to be distracted).

To read.

To read.

Starting point for my iPhone-development career.

To read. Some sort of API that competes with Google Maps.

On Betsy McCaughey. To read.

This dude has been writing about the failures of the Finder for so long, and I've just not understood what the big fuss is. It's a folder browser, no? So maybe this big essay, which looks to be the locus classicus of the whole thread. Hence I mark this "to read".

Recommended by Cosma Shalizi. Nice. To read.

Ha!

To view. A video about some kind of font-smoothing hoo-ha for the Mac.

Came highly recommended by a very smart coworker of mine. He says it doesn't fit within the "90% of computer books are completely worthless" category. In fact he says that for $45, it has saved him "a couple grand."

To watch. Google has some new (to the outside world, anyway) platform called Guice, involving programming concepts that I don't entirely grok yet. Hopefully this video will clear them up.

Amazing time-lapse photographs of the decay of glaciers subject to global warming.

Taibbi seems to admire the Congressman here, and calls the Fed general counsel a "nebbishy little creep". I would like to ask my readers to view the video and tell me if you agree. To me it actually seems like that counsel is doing all he can to answer questions from a hostile interlocutor as honestly, concisely, and fully as he can. I think he does that. I think the general counsel comes out looking MUCH better than his questioner. Taibbi's perception of the encounter makes me think that he, Taibbi, is a bully. His perception of the encounter makes me reinterpret Taibbi's own inflammatory writing as needless bullying just for the fun of it.

Ho.Lee.Shit. This right here is evisceration in the grand style. Here it's directed at the absurdity of letting Roman Polanski off his child-rape charge just because he happens to be a Tortured Artist or whatnot.

In general: is there any reason *not* to share the burden for medical expenses that aren't subject to substantial moral hazard? As Cohn puts out, there's *some* moral hazard here: people *may* get pregnant more if their maternity care is paid for, but this seems extremely unlikely. If we can show that an insurance policy causes very limited moral hazard, is there any argument against coverage?

I confess to only having skimmed this, but: why couldn't all of this have been said about the educational value of free public libraries?

This appears to study something I've been interested in for a while, namely: how many more Americans would start small businesses if health insurance weren't issued by employers? This is a special case of the famed "job lock."

Now is when I start subscribing to Coates. He says here so much of what I've thought, in less-coherent form and with fewer examples: that the Greatest Generation horseshit is, indeed, horseshit. Not to mention the "coarsening of the culture" nonsense, which somehow doesn't count it as a coarsened culture when the U.S. bombs one poor country after another.

Economic historian. Interviewed recently on Planet Money. Said really fascinating world-historical stuff about what had to change in the world economy before institutions like saving and credit were even possible. So I'm linking to this page with a general "to read" stamp on everything he's written.