Newmark's Door

"Get Smarter"

An article in The Atlantic argues that to deal with looming problems--"Pandemics. Global warming. Food shortages. No more fossil fuels"--we should get smarter.

While I'm not sure the problems listed will be our biggest problems or that they'll even be problems at all--food "shortages"?--I agree with "get smarter". I noted almost six years ago Aaron Wildavsky's fine answer to how we should cope with all the potential risks we face. He argued we should 1) get educated, and 2) get rich, and then take our chances. (Chicago Boyz referenced Wildavsky's argument, too.)

Reliance on markets, not governments, are our best ways to get smarter and richer, but that's an argument for another day.

Two bittersweet stories

Gene Weingarten, "A Parting Thought".

No one accepted physical deterioration with greater grace and humor than my father. Over the last two decades of his life, his eyesight clouded into a soup -- at first, a nice consomme, but eventually minestrone, and a hearty one.

He was effectively blind, but remarkably cheerful about it. He read The Washington Post front to back every day, all day, on a device that magnified each letter to the size of a fist; polysyllabic words required three screens' worth of letters and a nimble short-term memory. My father understood the absurdity of it. He said that using this machine was like putting on mittens to tie your shoes.

Bill Simmons, "When great ones go, it might hurt us more than it does them."

In the academy award-winning classic Cocktail, Coughlin tells young Flanagan, "Everything ends badly, otherwise it wouldn't end." It's the single greatest yearbook quote ever. Hell, it may be the greatest movie quote ever. Either Coughlin was the Thoreau of bartending, or Thoreau the Coughlin of writing. One or the other. . . .

It's been a sports experience unlike anything I can remember. Red Sox fans refuse to turn against Ortiz. They just can't. They owe him too much for 2004 and 2007. It's like turning on Santa Claus or happy hour. Every Ortiz appearance is greeted with supportive cheers, every Ortiz failure is greeted with awkward silence. The fans are suffering just like he is. Only when he left 12 men on base against Anaheim on May 14 did I receive a slew of angry e-mails from back home, but even those tirades centered more around Terry Francona's steadfast refusal to drop Ortiz in the order. I cannot remember another Boston athlete stinking this long, and this fragrantly, without getting dumped on.

"Five Money Lessons for New College Grads"

Some good advice for the youngsters (Wall Street Journal, 5/3). (Well, Lesson 3 is flawed because it fails to apply present value analysis, but hey, four out of five ain't bad.)

Along the same lines: "The $1500 Frisbee".

The right way to say things

A decent part of human relations is finding the right way to say something. Slightly different words often matter. Here's a small but fine example involving tech support.

Creativity and mental illness

Exceptionally creative people might be disproportionately mentally ill.

Creative minds in all kinds of areas, from science to poetry, and mathematics to humour, may have traits associated with psychosis. Such traits may allow the unusual and sometimes bizarre thought processes associated with mental illness to fuel creativity. The theory is based on the idea that there is no clear dividing line between the healthy and the mentally ill. Rather, there is a continuum, with some people having psychotic traits without having the debilitating symptoms. 

"Homes of the Rich and Famous"

One of life's little mysteries: among the large--and seemingly growing--number of people who are furious at "the rich", there seems, to me, to be little resentment of leading entertainers.

I could conjecture about the reasons why, but instead I'm going to link to some purported pictures of entertainers' homes.

(If you're in the market for a big house, now might well be a good time to buy. A new, 27,000 square-foot home on two acres in Beverly Hills, originally listed for $45 million, just sold for a mere $31.5.)

Two on dogs

Gene Weingarten:

I recently spent two weeks in a hospital. As far as my dog understood, I had died. After a few days of checking around to make sure I was not, for example, hiding in the laundry hamper, Murphy accepted the tragedy of my passing and was stoically preparing to go on without me. By that I mean that through some timeless, mystical entwinement of grief, survival, social cognition and the sense of commonality of purpose that have united man and dog since the first Pleistocene hominid befriended and domesticated the first gray wolf -- after just four days, Murphy moved up and stole my spot in the bed. Head right on the pillow.

"Puppy eats whole alphabet of fridge magnets". And he survived.

"Laughing Baby vLog"

A fine idea.

A smart kid. And seemingly well-adjusted.

All of 12 years old, Sky Choi is double majoring in physics and math at FIU.

Before Sky took an introductory physics seminar this semester, he e-mailed this to the professors: ``It seems like I've been waiting a long time to finally get to study physics in depth. As you can imagine, it's not easy to get the necessary math courses and high school science courses when your age is in the single digits.''

''That's the one that stopped me,'' said Caroline Simpson, associate professor in the department of physics.

Once again the Washington Post wastes a lot of its space . . .

. . . 2790 words, not including headline and byline, to be exact, on "Poor? Pay Up. Having Little Money Often Means No Car, No Washing Machine, No Checking Account And No Break From Fees and High Prices".

They could have just written "Newmark's First Law."

(It S**ks To Be Poor.)