Causal follies: sex when you're old edition

So let's see, does having lots of sex make you look younger or does looking younger than your age help you have lots of sex?

One is tempted to say that they need to find an instrument, but someone might interpret that as a bad pun, so I won't.

Hat tip: Charlie Brown

Assorted links

1. The third amendment (!) in Henderson Nevada.

2. Automated essay grading demystified and (sort of) defended.

3. Graduation advice from a small, non-random, but still interesting sample of economists

4. NRO on Hoxby and Turner. The interpretation of the Hoekstra paper could be a bit more subtle, but otherwise not too bad.

5. The FT on the changing industrial organization of English cricket.

Book: Digging Up the Dead by Michael Kammen

Kammen, Michael. 2010. Digging Up the Dead: A History of Notable American Reburials. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

This bit of academic fluff is great fun indeed. I picked it up at Shakespeare and Company in Paris and got through it pretty quickly. While the author goes to some effort to find commonalities and themes, and indeed there are some to be found, most of the pleasure here is just looking at the past through the unusual lens of exhumations and reburials. People in the distant past (and even some people in the not so distant past) have worried a great deal (and for a variety of reasons) about the locations of particular bones, and reading about their obsessions makes for entertaining and enlightening reading. Oh, and in spite of the title, some notable international reburials are covered as well.

Recommended.

CBT and crime

CBT = cognitive behavioral therapy. The paper discussed in this NPR story was one of the highlights of this year's Institute for Research on Poverty Summer Research Workshop. Plus you get to hear Jens Ludwig coin the word "Seinfeldian".

Logic humor

Think about it ... original link here.

Hat tip: ASAK

Assorted links

1. Dilbert does Krugman. Ouch!

2. How can police in a college town not be able to distinguish sparkling water from beer?

3. No heroes please. One could frame this as a Canada / US thing but I think it is really of a piece with the general zero tolerance / lawsuit avoidance bureaucratic paranoia and butt-covering that is common to schools in both countries.

4. Rest area photography from Atlantic Cities.

5. The Economist on the prostitution market in the UK (where it is mostly legal): demand is down (due to the recession) and supply is up (due to the recession). What happens to prices is left as an exercise for the reader.

Hat tip on #2 to Charlie Brown and on #3 to Scott Wood.

Movie: Star Trek Into Darkness

There is substance to the criticisms that A.O. Scott up offers in the NYT. It would indeed be enjoyable to see a movie Star Trek that was like the more thoughtful episodes of the original or second television series. Still, this movie, which no one would call particularly thoughtful, is a lot of fun, and surely ranks above the median among Star Trek movies.

More prosaically, my dad the engineer would be pleased that the Enterprise actually has seat belts in this particular universe. He used to complain every time the Enterprise would get hit by something and all the characters would fly around the bridge on the original series, all because they had no technology for strapping themselves in. And I really liked the line "We're vulcan, we embrace technicality." I have some friends like that.

Elizabeth's review: "That was intense".

Recommended