Legal Commentary

Forget about Memorization

Posted on May 07, 2008
A recent article in Wired, Want to Remember Everything You'll Ever Learn? Surrender to This Algorithm, offers both a fascinating sketch of Piotr Wozniak's single-minded pursuit of memorization and all that you need to know if you want to match his incredible achievements...

Communist Paternalism

Posted on April 22, 2008
It's scary how many people could draw exactly the wrong conclusion from this:When the Soviet empire began to unravel in 1989, Cuba was hit with serious food and fuel shortages. From 1991 to 1995, people were getting only about 1800 calories a day and had to walk or cycle wherever they needed to go...

Amsterdam on the Reservation

Posted on April 19, 2008
I'm currently attending a Liberty Fund conference on, "Liberty, Property, and Native America." The assigned readings, drawn largely from Self-Determination: The Other Path for Native Americans (2008), have exposed me to a wonderful range of new ideas...

Unintentional Humor

Posted on April 04, 2008
Or is it? Here's an advertisement for the Audi A5:Okay, I actually chuckled at the whole "you will [verb] one of these three [nouns]..." sequence. But when it got to the three cars, I thought that Audi would be one of them! Seriously, if you were going to add one more car to the sequence, "Mercedes, BMW, Lexus," wouldn't it be Audi? That's hardly breaking the cycle.

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Obama: An Oppressed Minority Who Might End the War

Posted on April 04, 2008
As an oppressed minority, Barak Obama has seen life from a perspective all too rare among politicians. He has suffered being cast out of restaurants and other public accomodations. He has strived to pass himself off as a member of the ruling majority, only to have his efforts cast into doubt and his minority status thrown back into his face...

Musing about Correlations

Posted on March 27, 2008
In the course I'm currently teaching, the exams usually consist of two sections: multiple choice and short answer. I just finished recording the midterm grades, and for curiosity's sake I calculated the correlation between the two sections. For one class, the correlation between multiple choice and short answer was 0...

Death of the Diet: Doubting the Data

Posted on March 23, 2008
I wish I had known last Tuesday was ?Death of the Diet Day.? I probably would have celebrated it. It sounds like a really fun day.But why March 18th? That?s supposedly ?the day when more commitments will fall by the wayside than on any other day in the calendar? (in the U...

Listen to Me

Posted on March 19, 2008
I'm scheduled to be interviewed on Mike McConnell's radio show this morning (Wednesday) at 10:00 a.m. Eastern time. I'll be talking about the World Health Organization's ranking of national healthcare systems. The show is on Cincinnati's WLW (AM 700); you can listen to it live here; and it's also on XM satellite radio...

Transtemporal Economics

Posted on March 13, 2008
Tyler Cowen considers the economics of time travel. Actually, he starts with the economics of interstellar travel, but if you take relativity seriously, it?s the same thing. Tyler is most interested in how time travel in the presence of time dilation would affect interest rates (e...

Rum Thoughts

Posted on March 12, 2008
I recently finished reading -- and enjoying -- And a Bottle of Rum: A History of the New World in Ten Cocktails. It's just what it sounds like. Each chapter is named after a rum drink, from kill-devil through the mojito, each drink representing an era of our history...

More Self-Promotion on Healthcare

Posted on March 12, 2008
At the American Spectator online, I have an op-ed based on my Cato Policy Briefing on the WHO healthcare rankings.The title ("WHOm Are They Kidding") was not my creation. While whom is grammatically correct in that sentence, in general I think it's okay to use who in idiomatic sayings like "who are you kidding," "who's fooling who," and "who do you think you're fooling" -- traditional grammar rules notwithstanding.

Technology as Modularity

Posted on March 10, 2008
Via Arnold Kling, I found this interview with Drew Endy, a professor of biological engineering at MIT. It?s long, meandering, and sometimes repetitive, but still fascinating reading. The main lesson I extracted from it (and it would be hard to explain how, much less find specific quotations for support) is that technology is useful to the extent that it promotes modularity...

As You Sow, So Shall You Reap

Posted on March 10, 2008
The only people I think should be prosecuted for victimless crimes are people who have prosecuted others for those crimes. Eliot Spitzer qualifies.(Via Radley.)

A Puzzle

Posted on March 07, 2008
What do handguns and soda containers have in common?Leave answers in the comments section. (Yes, yes... I realize there's an infinite possible number of correct answers -- they're both tangible, they're both products, etc. -- but in keeping with the convention of puzzles like this, you have to find the relatively narrow and interesting category into which both fall...

Against the Drug War

Posted on March 06, 2008
Via Radley, here is an outstanding editorial by the creators of The Wire advocating an end to the drug war. At the end, they call for outright jury nullification:If asked to serve on a jury deliberating a violation of state or federal drug laws, we will vote to acquit, regardless of the evidence presented...

State vs. Community

Posted on March 05, 2008
I really liked this post by Jonah Goldberg (linked by Arnold Kling):... I don't know that you should be against building community and helping the community. I'm not against either of those things. What I generally (though not absolutely) oppose are efforts to build the state while invoking the language of community as if the two are the same thing...

Mixed Feelings

Posted on March 05, 2008
I mildly prefer Obama to Hillary, for pretty much the reasons given by Radley Balko and David Boaz. Nevertheless, I wasn't terribly disappointed by last night's big win for Hillary. Why not? Because politics is most easy to stomach when taken as a form of entertainment...

Good for Her

Posted on February 29, 2008
Excellent. Maybe this will finally put an end to the stupid (and I think recent) trend of highly public marriage proposals. I feel slightly bad for the guy, but only slightly. Against his pain, you should weigh the distress of all the women ever pressured into a "yes" by one of these stunts...

Getting from Collective Intelligence to Collective Action

Posted on February 28, 2008
I really enjoyed attending the Collective Intelligence FOO Camp, sponsored by Google and O'Reilly Media, last weekend. I'd been expecting a sort of geek slumber party, and had looked forward to rolling out my awesome Darth Vader impersonation. I was all set to cut loose with a growling, "I'm your father, Luke...

High Tech, 2008 vs. 1988

Posted on February 28, 2008
Here is a fantastic article comparing both prices (nominal and inflation-adjusted) and features of technology products now versus twenty years ago. I especially appreciate the features comparison, because even inflation-adjustment can't account for quality improvements...

Do Teens Commit Suicide More Often?

Posted on February 27, 2008
According to stereotype, yes. But not according to the data.I?ve finally returned to my old suicide project, which had been moldering in a (virtual) drawer for quite a long time. With the help of a new co-author, I?ve been analyzing the results of a bunch of regressions...

Self-Promotion on Healthcare

Posted on February 27, 2008
The Cato Institute has just released my Briefing Paper, "WHO's Fooling Who? The World Health Organization's Problematic Ranking of Health Care Systems." The arguments will be familiar to readers of this blog, since most of them were aired here first, but there's also some new material in there...

The Specter of Copyism v. Blockheaded Authors

Posted on February 26, 2008
Just posted on SSRN: The Specter of Copyism v. Blockheaded Authors: How User-Generated Content Affects Copyright Policy. Here's the abstract:Technological advances, because they have radically lowered the costs of creating and distributing expressive works, have shaken the foundations of copyright policy...

Gaming the Electoral College

Posted on February 25, 2008
Somehow I didn?t realize until this election year that the Republicans and Democratics don?t have exactly as many delegates for their nominating convention as there are electors in the electoral college. There are 538 electors (found by adding the number of reps and senators from each state, plus three for D...

In the News: Guy Likes to Surf

Posted on February 21, 2008
To my amazement, the O.C. Register ran a twee report about how I used surfing to motivate my sabbatical book project. The reporter, Marla Jo Fisher, evidently read my blog post on the topic, and thought that it would make a cute "slice of life" sort of story...

Quake Markets

Posted on February 21, 2008
Markets offer us a potentially useful tool for predicting earthquakes. Imagine the San Andreas fault divided into segments, each of which carries a price based on the present discounted disvalue of a future quake. That price would reflect both a quake's place in time and its place on the Richter scale...

Sexual Signaling

Posted on February 14, 2008
This doesn't surprise me at all:Bennett Galef's team at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, placed two male rats behind mesh screens at either end of a tank, one of which had recently copulated with a female. A number of different female rats were then placed, separately, in the middle of the tank...

Folding Heart Card, Uncopyrighted

Posted on February 14, 2008
[NB: Updated; please see concluding paragraphs.]As a matter of policy, we should favor love. It generates many private and public benefits. Individuals or communities short of love suffer terribly. Those rich in it thrive.Please allow me to offer one small step towards encouraging love: An uncopyrighted (and thus public domain) card...

How to Settle

Posted on February 13, 2008
Lori Gottlieb?s spirited defense of ?settling? in the mating market makes a number of good points, but it suffers, in my opinion, from a lack of marginal thinking. The question is not to settle or not to settle, but how much to settle. There is no such thing as the absolutely perfect, 100% match ? and even if there were, it would be foolish to wait too long for it...

Correlation versus Causation

Posted on February 13, 2008
I have a friend-of-a-friend who refuses to drink diet soda, on grounds that it makes you fat. The evidence? The fact that so many diet-soda drinkers are fat. Our friend-in-common refers to this guy as "the Caveman." I think the Caveman would appreciate this article, which notes a statistical correlation between drinking diet soda and having metabolic syndrome (a combination of cardiovascular risk factors including abdominal obesity and high blood pressure):The scientists gathered dietary information on more than 9,500 men and women ages 45 to 64 and tracked their health for nine years...

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