Ducks and Economics

Get the vaccine. From Movin’ Meat:

Seriously.  And get the damn shot.

In our community, there was a six-year old with H1N1 who developed pneumonia and staph sepsis (MRSA, of course).  Resulted in septic emboli and necrotizing fasciitis. Very grim prognosis.

Get the shot.

I think that the first lesson that people should take from President Obama’s surprise Nobel Peace Prize is that the Nobel committee is highly idiosyncratic. Betting markets yesterday were giving great odds to an Afghani activist and a Colombian politician, among others, and as far as I know no one was talking about President Obama as even a nominee. Keep in mind that unlike most of the other prizes the Peace Prize is the most overtly political (with the Literature Prize probably next in line) and it is the overt intention of the Nobel committee to provide a powerful symbolic statement in affirmation of the winner’s agenda insofar as it relates to peace. Unlike the other Prizes, peace is a broad and vague enough notion that the selection committee probably uses more idiosyncratic parameters to evaluate and nominate people. Peace is not an academic discipline with a core group of intellectuals; it is a real-world outcome contingent on many things.

Unlike the other Prizes, the pool of potential Peace laureates is pretty damn large. Prizes in Medicine or Economics are functionally selecting from a much smaller group meaning idiosyncratic picks are a lot more predictable.

There is the question of how much the selection of a somewhat controversial peace prize winner will undermine the legitimacy of the Nobel. I suspect not very much; the Nobel awards hold something of a monopoly position in the global public’s eyes and the Nobel Peace Prize gets to free-ride on the legitimacy that the other Nobel Prizes garner.

Update: FiveThirtyEight’s Renard Sexton discusses.

1. Extreme Sheep Herding with LED Art.

2. Australian Anti-Smoking Commercial. I am thinking about justifications for the libertarian paternalist argument for government regulations of tobacco, maybe write a post about that later.

3. Basejumping from Norwegian cliffs.

4. Grassboarding.

1. The mathematics of cake-cutting.

2. Bill Maher on how stupid the average American is. Lots of good lines here.

3. Christoph Waltz on making ‘Inglorious Basterds‘.

4. The economics of superhero franchising.

And: I’ll be blogging more often and on more subjects very soon, as I delve deeper into the literature on several subjects. Stay tuned.

From Tyler Cowen:

Plan supporters are quite willing to admit “it’s not nearly as good as what we wanted,” but they’re in denial about how truly bad the proposed reforms are in absolute terms or as a matter of economic logic and by that term I mean the economic logic of good Democratic economics, not extreme libertarianism.

In the meantime, repeat this sentence after me: if we don’t solve the costs problem, in egalitarian terms things will only get worse, no matter how many people we cover.

The Republicans on this issue are (mostly) very bad and hypocritical but that doesn’t give the Democrats license to proceed without a solution.

I have recently acquired a large-format Sony televison. Despite the low cost of cable television, I’ve decided firmly against getting cable; my time is valuable and cable is notoriously distracting, and I have lower-cost substitutes readily available through my laptop, which is easily connected to the 42 inch television screen in high definition, giving me oh so much more desktop space and access to much louder and better speakers. My first move was to utilize this increased capacity by playing Explosions in the Sky; the music is intense and the full emotive impact is easier accessed when the volume is very loud, which is something that my laptop can’t do very well.

I don’t think I’ll get cable. I don’t watch many shows on a regular basis and it is easy to find a friend with HBO for the weekly episode of Entourage. Besides, I can port a dvd or YouTube or Hulu to the big screen with ease. And I am excited that I can use the big screen to display interesting images of interesting things; right now my desktop background is a scan of Kafka’s first page of the Metamorphosis with Nabokov’s scribbles all over it, which is a fun conversation piece.

1. Funkbrother Rick Puig got the Truman Scholarship and is running for the vice-presidency of the Young Democrats of America. Previously Rick interned for Missouri Attorney General Chris Koster and current Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill.

2. I should move to Manhattan to be around people who are just as good-looking as I am.

3. The Farnsworth-Munsell Hue Test is devilishly hard. Details here. Here is an abstract for a paper that uses fMRI to image brain function during the test to determine where our brain processes color.

4. The Economics of the World Cup.

5. Is there a connection between Riemann-Zeta, prime numbers, and quantum physics?

1. An old teacher, Michael Dulick, retired several years ago and went to Honduras to live amongst the poor and teach. It is rare to meet a man of such great compassion and intelligence. Thanks to the wonders of modern communications technology you can read his blog here.

2. If you need to escape from a cougar UC Davis scientists recommend running away. Other apparently valid responses include staring it down, buying another shot.

3. The ever popular Nicholas Kristof discusses behavioral differences amongst liberal and conservatively minded people. Liberals are far less likely to respect authority and conservatives are more likely to evince disgust.

4. George Bush defends his record, reveals topics covered in his upcoming book. Money quote:

Bush also revealed the topic of the first chapter in his forthcoming book, which he said will be about “the stories of my administration as I saw them.” That first chapter, he said, will be answer the question: “Why did I run for president?”

5. Nate Silver at FiveThirthyEight debunks the idea that political affliation was used to choose which Chrysler dealerships to close.  Jonathan Adler at the Volokh Conspiracy does a similar, less technical analysis and comes to the same conclusion. It turns out that people who own car dealerships are far more likely to vote/donate to Republicans as a whole so the observation that dealerships that are scheduled to close tended to donate disporportionately to Republicans means nothing of substance.

6. The illusion of sex (from RealityCarnival). Also, sex in the Middle Ages and you don’t even have to read any Foucault.