Assorted links

1. Nietzsche Family Circus

2. Musings of a burned-out matchmaker.

3. xkcd exposes cloud computing.

4. New words in the 1927 Webster's dictionary.

5. Helpful hints for everyday living.

Assorted links

1. The Winklevoses really need to get lives.

2. The frustrating but remunerative lives of Natalie Portman's body doubles (not safe for extremely prudish workplaces). Really, of course, the article is just an excuse for the Daily Mail to print the pictures.

3. In Ann Arbor, teachers walking around naked would be a bold educational innovation designed to teach children about appearances and perceptions. Not so, apparently, in Georgia.

4. Zingerman's chef wins James Beard Award. James Beard's books, by the way, are great fun.

5. Drug war follies in Buncombe [sic] County.

6. Gradual student crime-fighters at U of Michigan.

Assorted links

1. Economists in love: Al Roth

2. The coolest urinal ever.

3. Are swallowed coins cyclical?

4. Comedians shouldn't steal jokes.

Assorted links

1. Descriptive differences between Mac and PC users. I don't fit well in either camp.

2. Political scientists everywhere mourn as Brits reject alternative voting.

3. A remarkably lazy, and remarkably honest, elected official in Tennessee.

4. Do you really need a SWAT team to search the home of someone who is suspected of being a driver for escorts? Even better is sending the SWAT team to the correct house.

5. Tyler praised this French existentialist version of Star Wars. It didn't work for me as well. Indeed, I thought about giving it its own post, with the title "Why the French did so poorly in the war" but then decided that would be too snarky.

6. Why I am not a Republican, Michigan legislature edition. The state budget is collapsing and they are worried about what people are doing in their bedrooms? Get serious.

7. How mistaken quotations get circulated.

Assorted links

1. Brian Dougherty on the non-interventionist right.

2. Cool, but sadly inactive, blog about old malls.

3. Top Five's version of Obama's long form birth certificate.

4. Sure, disco sucks, but shooting the stereo still seems a bit much.

5. Etiquette for women dating multiple men.

6. The last typewriter factory shuts down.

Assorted links

1. A guide to the real world for Harvard graduates.

2. Semengate. Sigh.

3. When brand names don't transfer well across boundaries.

4. Innovations in brewing from the UK.

5. On extreme ironing.

Assorted links

1. Their taste in pets really stinks.

2. Good fences make good neighbors: on the niceness of supporters of redistribution. Of course, this could just be a coastal / flyover omitted variable problem.

3. I have no objection to not working as long as people do it on their own dime.

4. Lemon James - we saw here at a concert a couple of weeks ago.

5. Sex experts in love from Spousonomics.

6. Cool map of Ann Arbor from a long time ago.

7. A sad meditation on the decline of desire.

Assorted links

1. David Warsh of Economic Principals figures out Facebook.

2. On backward baseball caps.

3. Hash Bash history.

4. Tax Movie Night! Sounds like a party. We should have one here at UM.

5. Government shutdown pick-up lines - just save them for the next one.

6. Vacant homes in well-off Detroit suburbs.

7. Some interesting thoughts on the Cola Wars in the Atlantic.

Assorted links

1. Miley Cyrus doesn't like competition.

2. More on the John Taylor graph.

3. Humorous sociology t-shirts from orgtheory.net. I like the one about formalization.

4. On empirical evidence of the failure of capitalism. My example is White Castle.

5. The Honest Courtesan on unchanging human nature and the "other". I'm more optimistic than she is on this one, in large part because of the amazing change in the cultural treatment of homosexuality in the US during my lifetime.

Assorted links

1. It is good to be Brady Hoke.

2. Get Your Game On replaces boring generic chain "wraps" restaurant on State Street.

3. Deconstructing the John Taylor graph. Ooops. I was not quite clear on what I was supposed to learn from even the truncated time series.

4. Hell hath no fury like a 92-year-old woman scorned.

5. A mighty apology at Britain's Sun tabloid.

Assorted links

1. Some thoughts on what gadgets to keep and what gadgets to let go.

2. Ernest Hemingway, yelper.

3. Gandhi gone wild. I don't think it diminishes his achievements to know that he was not perfect. No one is, after all.

4. The Honest Courtesan on the absence of male sex workers catering to female clients.

5. Funny academic paper titles ... kwacha ganyu do?

Assorted links

1. Update on former UW quarterback Cody Pickett.

2. More on the Michigan professor whose child was seized by Michigan's child protective services when he mistakenly ordered his son a Mike's Hard Lemonade.

3. Hedonic regression with two data points at the Smoking Gun.

4. Sometimes technology is not a panacea but instead just a way to waste the taxpayers' money.

5. Thoughts on how to make money. There is some reasonable stuff here, though it is much more applicable to some industries than others. Someone needs to run the firm that makes ball bearings, even though the set of people for which this constitutes doing what you love may be small. Oh, and it is hard to bootstrap your way into a large factory.

Hat tip on #4 to Lars Skipper.

Assorted links

1. Ken Troske and friends on TARP.

2. Cool photos of lonely Chicago buildings.

3. The rise of on-line romance. The length-biased sampling mentioned in the post is not the only issue; there also seems to be some confusion about what it means for a search method to be "effective". Also missing is any mention of the fact that some people may not be looking for a long-term partner, or may be choosing their search methods with both long- and short-term partners in mind. But the descriptives are interesting.

4. David Brooks parodies from U of Chicago magazine. These are funny even if you are not a regular David Brooks reader, as I am not, as they parody a general style of punditry.

5. Dierdre McCloskey on economic development (oh, and her new book too).

6. The incredible shrinking Detroit.

Assorted links

1. Revenge of the nerds: a fine piece on sports analytics from the Boston Globe.

2. Mankiw cuts Tiger Woods from his textbook. Thought question: would sales of his textbook go up or down, on net, if Greg made it marginally more salacious? Separate question: would the average number of pages read by student purchasers increase or decrease?

3. A very nice piece from the Economist's DIA blog on the Founding Fathers (of the US) and religion. They were not all deists and they were not all evangelicals, despite what the left and right, respectively, like to claim. And whatever happened to deism, anyway?

4.The Honest Courtesan on deflowering customers. The first comment is pretty moving and again illustrates the social worker role that sex workers sometimes play.

5. On the failures of economic journalists. The last one is truly quixotic.

Assorted links

1. The Atlantic on (successful) interrogation without torture.

2. An edgy (offensive?) public health message from Britain's National Health Service.

3. Reasons not to live in NYC, #937493.

4. Robert Barro on trade unions. Unions are many things, some good and some bad; it is useful to remember that one of those things is cartels.

5. The Honest Courtesan on breast enlargement. This sort of surgery is not generally something I am a fan of, but this piece makes the strongest positive case I have seen. The story in the last three paragraphs is the best bit. Mildly NSFW due to one picture of actual human breasts. It is not my fault if you view them and turn into a wicked hedonist.

6. The secret behind the 2008 election.

7. March Madness using economics doctoral program rankings.

8. Robots invade online poker games. Why not let them play as long as they are clearly labelled?

Assorted links

1. My candidate for potential causes of the Great Stagnation.

2. Amazing pictures of Detroit ruins, with an Economist interview of the photographer.

3. Kiss Kondoms.

4. Some folks in Madison did not get the memo about the new civility.

5. A P.J. O'Rourke piece from last year on the plague of "A" students.

Hat tip on #3 to Charlie Brown.

Assorted links

1. Ed Glaeser on Seattle.

2. Unions and inequality in Canada fail to fit the narrative. But then, maybe it is just accounting changes in response to tax changes that underlie the narrative in the first place.

3. How old is the oldest profession?

4. Fake callers on talk radio. The puzzle here is the upset in the article. These shows are entertainment, not debating societies.

5. Police: "oops, we did it again".

6. On kids and happiness.

Assorted links

1. Making the case for public subsidies to doctoral students.

2. Busted by your teacher on Facebook. Too bad the (math) teacher does not know about "you're" and "your" being different.

3. A negative review of the amateur restaurant reviewers on Yelp!

4. Newt gets all tangled up and ends up claiming he had his affair because of his love of America.

5. A very funny, and very pointed, Economist piece on buying respectability.

6. Happy belated 80th birthday to Gary Becker.

7. Some insight into the business side of major college athletic recruiting.

8. A ranking of the nerdiest cities in America from match.com. Ann Arbor does "well". Who knew?

Hat tip on #4 to Charlie Brown.

Assorted links

1. Maybe they will change the name to the Sleazy Exchange Commission. Happily, the report focuses on misbehavior by lawyers rather than economists.

2. Humorous quotations assembled by Lones Smith.

3. Sweden does away with postage stamps ... but what about all that lost revenue from selling mint stamps to collectors that no one will ever use?

4. Follow-up on Super Bowl prostitution hysteria.

5. Andrew Gelman on partisan politics and plain old politics in research. Many of the main divisions in economics such as Keynesian versus real biz cycles and experiments versus structural models do not correspond in any clean way to partisan political divisions, which I think is good.

6. A very short Newsweek interview with Larry Summers featuring some excellent one-liners.

7. National Review interview with Tyler Cowen.

Assorted links

1. What sociology needs more of. I like the unapologetic stance of the orgtheory folks.

2. A not-bad David Leonhardt post on higher education.

3. MR points to a cool study of the overall effects of school report cards by Simon Burgess and colleagues.

4. A Facebook application that encourages "trading up"

5. Another seminal contribution.