The birthers make their (legislative) move

I have to say that this whole birther thing reminds me of the legalism of 12-year old boys playing Risk. Does no one among the birthers realize that the signal their machinations sends is "we don't think we can beat Obama in the marketplace of ideas, so we are doing this instead"?

I do like the bit about Hawaii proposing to charge $100 for copies of Obama's birth certificate. Why not balance the budget on the backs of the silly?

Addendum: I was stunned at the number of pop-ups at Mother Jones. I would have expected them to avoid such crass capitalist tools.

Hat tip: Charlie Brown

Assorted links

1. Interview with Eve Aronoff from Crain's Detroit Business.

2. New pants for the Mounties.

3. Linguistics at the Drug Enforcement Agency.

4. Woman attacked by toilet paper dispenser sues restaurant. Somewhat less biased version here.

5. The internet and the sex trade. The main surprise to me was how much of the business has moved to Facebook.

Some of these are older; I'm doing some inbox catch-up.

Hat tip on #2 to Christine Gribowski, on #3 to Daniel Marcin and on #4 to Charlie Brown.

Movie: True Grit

Great fun ... as one expects from the Coen Brothers. This one is not as grisly as I was expecting from all of the disclaimers. I particularly enjoyed the dialogue, though it is sometimes sophisticated enough that it approaches, and perhaps crosses, the boundary of realism. The NYT review does a nice job of fitting the movie into its social and film-historical contexts.

Recommended.

Lavatorial economics

Important (though not so recent) advances in the economics of toilet seats.

Here is the abstract:

This paper develops an economic analysis of the toilet seat etiquette, that is, whether the toilet seat should be left up or down. I investigate whether there is any efficiency justification for the presumption that men should leave the toilet seat down after use. I find that the “down rule” is inefficient unless there is a large degree of asymmetry in the inconvenience costs of shifting the position of the toilet seat across genders. I show that the selfish” or the “status quo” rule that leaves the toilet seat in the position used dominates the down rule in a wide range of parameter spaces including the case where the inconvenience costs are the same. The analysis can be applied to other shared facilities that can be customized to each user’s preference.

For those with access to such things, the paper was published in Economic Inquiry in 2010.

More TSA themed toys

From Europe comes the Playmobil Security Check Point.

The first customer comment is excellent:

I was a little disappointed when I first bought this item, because the functionality is limited. My 5 year old son pointed out that the passenger's shoes cannot be removed. Then, we placed a deadly fingernail file underneath the passenger's scarf, and neither the detector doorway nor the security wand picked it up. My son said "that's the worst security ever!". But it turned out to be okay, because when the passenger got on the Playmobil B757 and tried to hijack it, she was mobbed by a couple of other heroic passengers, who only sustained minor injuries in the scuffle, which were treated at the Playmobil Hospital.

The best thing about this product is that it teaches kids about the realities of living in a high-surveillence society. My son said he wants the Playmobil Neighborhood Surveillence System set for Christmas. I've heard that the CC TV cameras on that thing are pretty worthless in terms of quality and motion detection, so I think I'll get him the Playmobil Abu-Gharib Interogation Set instead (it comes with a cute little memo from George Bush).

Hat tip: Lars Skipper

Assorted links

1. The Economist on the evolution of Europe's budget airlines and on travel website consolidation.

2. Ann Arbor (or, more precisely, a little town not far from Ann Arbor) gone wild!

3. The strange parallels between drinking and yoga - I laughed a lot.

4. Strategic scoring on the NY Regents exams, as uncovered by three of my friends.

5. Math without a license in North Carolina.


#3 via Eric Kiersky on FB, #5 via the Agitator.

History of kitchens

Megan McArdle takes advantage of a rare opportunity to issue stern rebuttals to both Tyler Cowen and Paul Krugman in a single post.

Megan titles her post"The Economics of Kitchens" but the value-added is not the economics, it is the history. Using an old cookbook and memories of her mother and grandmother, she puts the reader in a 1950s kitchen in a way that neither Tyler nor Paul manage to do.

History is really powerful and that includes the social history that conservatives often mock and of which Megan's post is a small example.