Newmark's Door

"8 years old girl has a crazy voice"

"Crazy" as in excellent.

"What's the Longest Distance to Swim without Touching Land?"

Answer.

"Ranking babies swearing"

Message: be careful what you say around toddlers.

"Here's Why You Won't Find a Green Pepper in a Bell Pepper Multi-Pack"

The Door continues its tradition of providing you with answers to Life's Most Important Questions.

"Space Captain"

The Joe Cocker version.

"Alice Cooper on the Best Guitarist Ever"

And Mr. Cooper exclaimed "That's impossible".

"The Bongo Song"

Quite a beat from The Maestro & The European Pop Orchestra.

"The Loneliness Myth: Social Media Isn't the Culprit"

I believe it: "Long-term studies show stable loneliness levels over decades, not an 'epidemic'."

"Why we still don’t know how many stars are in the Milky Way"

Likely between 200 and 400 billion. That's precise enough for me.

"A curious tendency among Western philosophers?"

A bit of information about prominent philosophers I bet you didn't know.

"TV.Garden"

". . . your gateway to free live TV streaming from anywhere."

"Why Some Schools Are Rethinking ‘College for All’"

This is a most welcome development, one I've supported for a long time. College isn't right for everyone. Never was, never will be.

"Why Everything in the Universe Turns More Complex"

Interesting theory:

A new suggestion that complexity increases over time, not just in living organisms but in the nonliving world, promises to rewrite notions of time and evolution.

Academic paper--free--with some more detail.

"Why Do We Have to Learn Math? The answers I’ve debunked and the one I found"

Argument from a math teacher that math instruction should deemphasize doing, "complex calculations most of them are never going to perform". 

"The stagnation of physics"

Argument that physicists should stop pursuing an ever-more expensive "theory of everything".

RELATED: a piece that illustrates what he's talking about.

"The Illiquidity Discount?"

Cliff Asness tries to wrap his mind around why some people, instead of demanding a premium for illiquid assets,  seem to be willing to pay for them.

"Useless Government Program to Be Eliminated, Just As It Was to Be in 2017"

They don't call it the "deep state" for nothing.

A brief account of an interesting social experiment

How an individual's later perception of discriminatory treatment is affected by their initial perception of themselves as victims.

"The 3 Laws of Social Programs"

Charles Murray, in a 2012 post, identifies three important ways government action can "backfire".

"Why MBAs are just a waste of time, money"

"Companies are no longer interested in whether you have an MBA; they want to know what you can do": of course that should have always been true, but, hey, better late than never.

(But it brings to mind something I heard the distinguished economist Armen Alchian say in 1978. When asked how elite colleges could get away with charging so much for their product, Prof. Alchian said most of the value they were providing was the chance to meet potential mates. "If you can find someone who you'll spend the rest of your life with in college, the tuition is cheap," he said. I suspect a lot of the value of an MBA is similarly related to the friends the student makes.)

"Policies, not price gouging, to blame for California’s soaring gas prices, study finds"

How many times does the oil industry need to be studied to determine high oil prices and/or high gasoline prices are not the result of "price gouging"??

"The true cost of the Inflation Reduction Act"

"Reduction"? Hey, would you like to buy a bridge in Brooklyn?

"Our Shape-Shifting Bureaucracies and Tullock's Razor"

Steven Hayward coins the phrase "Tullock's Razor" to describe a pervasive tendency in government. (Another fine example, besides USAID, is the TVA.)

"Sell Floyd Bennett Field!"

Alex Tabarrok argues persuasively that Floyd Bennett Field, an "old military airport in Brooklyn that hasn’t been used much since the 1970s" should be sold. Over 1000 acres in Brooklyn should be worth something, right?

"America Is a World Leader in Medicine Development"

And we should really, really keep it that way.

"Tax Burden by State"

North Carolina is ranked 35th and could well drop further if the Republicans maintain their majorities in the legislature.