Movie: Gangster Squad

So it was Gangster Squad or a romantic comedy. Probably we should have gone with the romantic comedy but Gangster Squad is visually beautiful in both the sets and the costumes.

A dyspeptic but quite entertaining A.O. Scott calls it a "costume party run amok." It is not quite as bad as he makes out, but the cast never quite gels as an ensemble and the writing is ... well ... not as pretty as the sets.

Not really recommended.

Assorted links

1. UM papyrii on your iphone.

2. Markets in everything: pet euthanasia with house calls. Dr. Tomlinson was a co-worker of mine at Farrell's Ice Cream Parlour restaurant in Southcenter mall back in the day.

3. Megan McArdle on libertarian men.

4. The secrets of flight attendants.

5. Glenn Beck's utopian community.

6. Detroit News takes the high road with a piece on "sugar babbies" at universities in Michigan that reads more or less like an advertisement.

Hat tip on #1 to Charlie Brown. #3 and #5 via instapundit.

A Chip off the old block

Imagine my sadness that Oregon football head coach Chip Kelly has departed for the NFL. Boo hoo.

Erica Groshen

Some conservatives took offense at labor economist Erica Groshen's choice of summer camp (!!!) for her kids.

The general rule applies here, as they should know: economists of any team > pretty much anyone else who might get appointed to a government position.

Really, the folks at Americans for Limited Government should have something more serious to do with their time and their donors' money. There are plenty of genuinely wretched appointments, and plenty of bits of government that could use limiting, in every administration. This isn't one of them.

And congrats to Erica on the BLS gig.

Hat tip: Charlie Brown

We ignore causality when it suits us ...

From today's University of Michigan Record Update:

The Sweetland Center for Writing's Dissertation Writing Institute, now in its 10th year, is helping to boost doctoral program completion rates of graduate students. Compared with national rates of 50-60 percent, institute students complete at a rate of 88 percent.

To interpret this causally requires that students who select into the program are a random sample of all doctoral students, as is required for the causal interpretation the university gives to this difference in completion rates. That seems pretty darn unlikely, and the university makes no case for it in the RU write-up.

Sigh.

NB: This is not a diss on the Sweetland program. One of my students went through it and I think gained a lot from it in terms of the quality of his writing (though it had no effect on his probability of degree completion). My complaint is with the university pushing casual causal claims as part of its marketing efforts that faculty members would mercilessly mock in a seminar or refereeing context.

NYT on UW computer science

The NYT has a nice puff piece on the computer science department at the University of Washington, from which I received one of my two undergraduate degrees.

Some things have changed a lot since then, like the building, the department ranking, and being in the engineering school rather than arts and sciences, but some things remain, like there being "too few" slots.

Hank Levy and Ed Lazowska, mentioned in the article, were both around in my undergraduate days, and I took a very enjoyable class from Ed on operating systems. It was probably the most challenging course I took at Washington other than the first quarter of the graduate micro sequence from Gene Silverberg. At the end of it, Ed gave all the students buttons that said "I Survived Computer Science 451".

George Carlin at the Actors Studio

This interview was more thoughtful and interesting than I expected. I particularly liked the remarks about drugs and about his work process.