Thursday, July 22, 2004
The Wakefield effect
Well, this is my first post in a week. I've got lots of excuses (slow news week, sick over the weekend, the frustrating saga of my still-unrepaired laptop), but part of it is surely that once you stop doing something for a while, it gets harder to start up again. Weird that blogging feels like something you should be doing regularly. I guess once people starting checking your site to see what's new, you don't want to let them down!
So, to prove I'm still alive, here are some interesting things I've seen this week:
"Rational" tulipmania? This article in Slate reviews a contrarian interpretation of the famed Dutch tulip bubble, claiming it wasn't an example of irrationality after all. Because this is a treasured example of idiocy run amok, I'm reluctant to let it go. I don't see from the Daniel Gross summary how this all works (who exactly was willing to pay the inflated prices for tulips? Because if no one was, how can these options be worth what they were selling for?) But worth a read; I'm sure I'm missing something.
Big defeat for graduate student unionization. Read the story
here. A sad day.
Ever wonder what a hemi is?
The cognitive dissonance president opens his big fat mouth again.
One of the weirdest things in the universe may be less weird than imagined: a less romantic view of black holes from Stephen Hawking. Not gateways to other universes, but "lockboxes" that eventually spit out what you put in. A shame, really.
Would someone please do a study of suicide and anti-depressants that at least tries to tackle the sample selection problem?
You know what would help support the troops? Try paying them on time, and in full.
Well, that's enough for now. No mention of Iraq, because there's nothing good to say, and what's bad sounds like a broken record (our new cronies may be criminals, our soldiers are dying, our allies are being taken hostage, ordinary Iraqis are living in conditions no better than under Saddam, and maybe worse, and Iraq still isn't sovereign, since Negroponte seems to have a veto on just about everything). Whoops. I guess that's a few words after all.
So, to prove I'm still alive, here are some interesting things I've seen this week:
"Rational" tulipmania? This article in Slate reviews a contrarian interpretation of the famed Dutch tulip bubble, claiming it wasn't an example of irrationality after all. Because this is a treasured example of idiocy run amok, I'm reluctant to let it go. I don't see from the Daniel Gross summary how this all works (who exactly was willing to pay the inflated prices for tulips? Because if no one was, how can these options be worth what they were selling for?) But worth a read; I'm sure I'm missing something.
Big defeat for graduate student unionization. Read the story
here. A sad day.
Ever wonder what a hemi is?
The cognitive dissonance president opens his big fat mouth again.
One of the weirdest things in the universe may be less weird than imagined: a less romantic view of black holes from Stephen Hawking. Not gateways to other universes, but "lockboxes" that eventually spit out what you put in. A shame, really.
Would someone please do a study of suicide and anti-depressants that at least tries to tackle the sample selection problem?
You know what would help support the troops? Try paying them on time, and in full.
Well, that's enough for now. No mention of Iraq, because there's nothing good to say, and what's bad sounds like a broken record (our new cronies may be criminals, our soldiers are dying, our allies are being taken hostage, ordinary Iraqis are living in conditions no better than under Saddam, and maybe worse, and Iraq still isn't sovereign, since Negroponte seems to have a veto on just about everything). Whoops. I guess that's a few words after all.
