Newmark's Door

"Radio Time Machine"

Potential time waster. But interesting.

Hello, I'm a musical time machine. Go back in time to hear how popular music has changed from 1940 to today, as told by the Billboard Top 100.

"Whistling His Own Tune Joey Crawford Sounds Off on 35 Years as an N.B.A. Referee"

He's had a good time. 

"A Man’s Guide to Pregnancy: How to Deliver a Baby in a Pinch"

You hope you never, ever need this information. But if you do . . . 

"Eight Places Where Americans Can Still Bank Offshore"

You know, for just in case. 

Dishtip

"What to eat and where." It should have more cities, but for the ones it has it could be useful.

"MLA Rankings of American Writers"

Hemingway is too low but given the frequent dopiness of the English professoriate, I guess it's amazing he's ranked as high as he is. 

"9 Magical bike rides to take before you die"

Most of 'em look pretty, but I'll pass.

Three on energy

Tim Worstall, excellent: "Can we please just declare the end of 'peak oil' and start worrying about something important?"

So, peak oil wouldn't be a problem if it did happen and it's not going to happen anyway. So can we please just declare the end of peak oil and get on with worrying about something important instead? Like, say, what is the solution to Simon Cowell?

(Blog author's note: I don't think economics offers a solution for Simon Cowell.)

Steven Hayward: "Unconventional Energy Meets Conventional Politics: Which Will Win?" I think it will be a very close call.

Robert Johnson on Business Insider: "The Canadian Oil Sand Mines Refused Us Access, So We Rented This Plane To See What They Were Up To". Interesting and with pictures.

"The Mathematics of Lego"

Who knew? Lego sets follow a power law.

"Time to Cut Government Funding For PoliSci Research?"

Yes. And the same holds true for virtually all research in the humanities and other social sciences. (Economics included.)

"This Paper Airplane Is A World Record Holder"

226 feet, 10 inches. With video.

Good advice--albeit a little late--for J. P. Morgan

"Don't become the market".

Republicans drop another ball

The Senate reauthorized the special-interest boondoggle known as the Export-Import Bank. Americans for Limited Government is, quite properly, unhappy.

"How to Repair a Faulty Windows Installation Without Reformatting"

Hope you don't need this, but if you do . . . 

Some favorite quotes of Terence Tao

Terence Tao is a renowned mathematician, currently at UCLA. Among the quotes I hadn't seen before is Henry the K.'s clever--and scary?--takeoff of the famous military motto:

The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.

(By the way: Professor Tao scored 760 on the Math SAT at a little less than 9 years old. His IQ is estimated at between 220 and 230. He received a Ph.D. from Princeton at age 20 and became the youngest ever full professor at UCLA at age 24. An interesting article on how his parents handled his early schooling is here.)

If you're in a free-falling elevator what should you do?

Other than pray. Answer.

"Not the end of the world"

Not to jinx anything--my people would say "kinna hurra"--but the first half of this post by Steven Den Beste from November 4, 2008 is looking like one of the best political forecasts I've ever read. 

I think this election is going to be a "coming of age" moment for a lot of people. They say, "Be careful what you wish for" and a lot of people got their wish yesterday.

And now they're bound to be disappointed. Not even Jesus could satisfy all the expectations of Obama's most vocal supporters, or fulfill all the promises Obama has made.

I think Obama is going to turn out to be the worst president since Carter, and for the same reason: good intentions do not guarantee good results. Idealists often stub their toes on the wayward rocks of reality, and fall on their faces. And the world doesn't respond to benign behavior benignly.

But there's another reason why: Obama has been hiding his light under a basket. A lot of people bought a pig in a poke today, and now they're going to find out what they bought. Obama isn't what most of them think he is. The intoxication of the cult will wear off, leaving a monumental hangover.

For an excellent case on point, read Liberal Yves Smith: "Barack Obama, The Great Deceiver".

Those times of heady promise are now a cruel memory. Again and again, Obama has shown his true colors. It isn’t simply that Obama lied. Politicians lie. But there are norms for political lying. The depth and dependability of Obama’s misrepresentations constitute a difference in kind.

Bonus: Victor Davis Hanson, who among many other things has been chronicling the sad decline of California's Central Valley, is seeing a proverbial silver lining:

Rather than Obama destroying the economy, there is a sense emerging that he is merely restraining it. Should Obama lose in November, there will be the greatest collective sigh of relief since 1980 and a yell that all hell will break lose, in the good sense of business activity, commerce, investment, hiring, and resource utilization being unleashed.

Look at it this way: for four years Obama has poked and jabbed at the corralled stallion, and when the gate goes up he will roar out as never before. Or if you are a Greek, try this: for 30 years we have been lectured to death about global warming, the brilliant Ivy League technocrats, the genius of Keynesian borrowing, the need for multiculturalism in the White House, if only we had open borders, why lawyers and academics need to be in charge—all on the “what if” presumption that no one in his right mind would let any of the above become gospel. And so we had the constant liberal whine, “if only . . . .” Now we have it in the flesh, and in cathartic fashion Obama is going to purge us of that unhinged temptation for another generation.

"The Yamal deception"

Very detailed discussion of a key piece of the hideously distorted evidence advanced for the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis. 

"An Economist's Guide to Teaching Styles"

Funny. But warning: is mostly economics in-jokes.

"The 13 Most Useless Majors, From Philosophy to Journalism"

Three guesses what kinds of majors dominate this list. (Actually, you should only get one.)

"10 Startup Ideas That Never Work"

Until, that is, someone makes one of them work. Never say never.

Other people doing my work for me, part 1

I wanted to rant about this dopiness, "Bill ending [North Carolina] new-car inspections dies," but Duke's Mike Munger does a beautiful, thorough job.

The answer is that the charade is the point.  It's important.  If we admit that most government "services" are actually just the new mercantilism of protecting zero-productivity jobs, then we would have to think about getting rid of the jobs.   And then where would legislators get their campaign money?  They'd have to talk to actual voters, instead of lobbyists.  Ick.

Other people doing my work for me, part 2

A few physicists, apparently lacking better things to do--why don't you figure out dark matter, guys?--have recently been writing about how wrong it is to expect continual economic growth on a finite planet. Here are two excellent replies to that nonsense:

"Doing The Math for "Physicist versus Economist", for Earth Day"

"Infinite growth on a finite planet? Easy-peasy!"

Other people doing my work for me, part 3

Brad DeLong recently wrote the Friedmans' case for limited government advanced in Freedom to Choose had "largely crumbled".

. . . my overwhelming thought is that the Friedmans would find their task of justifying and advocating small-government libertarianism much harder today than they did in 1979.

Back then, the Friedmans made three powerful factual claims about how the world works – claims that seemed true or maybe true or at least arguably true at the time, but that now seem to be pretty clearly false. Their case for small-government libertarianism rested largely on those claims, and has now largely crumbled, because the world, it turned out, disagreed with them about how it works.

Chidem Kurdas at ThinkMarkets replies.

Bonus: John Cochrane takes apart another DeLong post on Freedom to Choose. 

"Recommended New Books with Hayekian Themes"

Greg Ransom at Taking Hayek Seriously compiles a list of 16.

Ah, if I had but world enough and time. 

Some people take their rock criticism *very* seriously

From "Pushing Ahead of the Dame: David Bowie, song by song" comes a brutal attack on the Jagger-Bowie cover of Martha and the Vandellas. I watched that video a number of times; I never realized it was so awful.

Here's a high point for Ms. Reeves and the ladies, "Nowhere to Run".

"Celebrity Net Worth"

They don't seem to say how they know. 

But who cares? It's still fun.