September 2009
2 posts
August 2008
4 posts
'Major discovery' from MIT primed to unleash solar... →
tiny gigantic » Smart-people traps →
July 2008
2 posts
“Already, most conversations in English are between nonnative speakers who use it...”
– How English Is Evolving Into a Language We May Not Even Understand
June 2008
4 posts
Financial Analysis of Peacekeeping
dihard:
“Every time a conflict in some poor and chaotic place simmers down to the point where peace has a chance, rich countries with an interest in reconstructing that country face a choice: do they merely provide economic aid, or should they also dispatch troops - their own or other countreis’ - to nail down and enforce the peace?”
A cost-benefit financial analysis of the situation in a...
Don't Talk to Him Before He's Had His Coffee
gknauss:
One of my favorite scenes in Star Wars is in the conference room on the Death Star, where Grand Moff Tarkin is getting a status update from his lieutenants on the fate of the stolen battlestation plans. When I was nine, it was cool because Darth Vader used the Force to strangle an uppity bureaucrat. Now that I’m 40, it’s cool now because it almost exactly resembles every corporate...
May 2008
15 posts
Watchgina: The Day There Was No News
The Dilbert Blog: The Economics Party →
“We’re pro flip-flop when it makes sense.”
Chris Blattman's Blog: The wages of terror (versus... →
The U.S. Army is trying to outbid the Taliban and al-Qaeda for wage labor
“If people abuse our socialnorms we’ll execute them in public.”
– Twitter / Robert Scoble: “If people abuse our social…
First Look: OLPC XO Generation 2.0 →
Check out the video on the link. Cute! Would love to read more about the technical details and such. Any plans for a better rollout process etc? Are these going to primarily be running Windows? The press release says that “Younger children will be able to use simple keyboards to get going, and older children will be able to switch between keyboards customized for applications as well as for...
BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Great tits cope well... →
Gotta love the BBC
Hacking in Nigeria
Alhamdu, one of my good friends from Nigeria, was taking a Cisco networking course in Kafanchan when I was there. It was through a small local NGO, and taught in a remote, poor part of a poor country. (Map. This is where there was an outbreak of bird flu when I was in Nigeria, a few days after I’d visited the place. The big problem was that instead of incinerating poultry stocks after the...
Canada | Not on our roads | Economist.com
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Go Canada! Though I must say I find this talk of oil conspiracy quite absurd - surely these vehicles are no threat to oil interests.
校内网 - 因为真实 所以精彩 (Xiaonei - Facebook clone!) →
Beautifully shameless. This site is apparently better financed than Facebook (has taken more cash) (via Techcrunch)
“I’m not sure if that’s a good investment. It took 140 million years...”
– CrossingWallStreet.com: Markets In Everything (Writing about dino dung being auctioned off.)
April 2008
30 posts
Overheard At McGill →
Mostly just racy/crude, but some good ones.
Study Suggests Math Teachers Scrap Balls and... →
Teaching math using concrete examples (at least for kids 11 and older) is probably worse than using abstract symbols. I’m slightly surprised, but happy to see researchers exploring education using randomized experiments.
Humans nearly wiped out 70,000 years ago, study... →
“The report notes that a separate study by researchers at Stanford University estimated that the number of early humans may have shrunk as low as 2,000 before numbers began to expand again in the early Stone Age.”
Croque-Saisons - Paniers →
Too bad I live alone - fresh veggies I didn’t choose would be lovely. I like cooking around ingredients.
Gin, Television, and Social Surplus - Here Comes... →
A brilliant re-casting of the free time afforded by modern society as a cognitive surplus we’ve been wasting away. Definitely worth a read. “And it’s only now, as we’re waking up from that collective bender, that we’re starting to see the cognitive surplus as an asset rather than as a crisis. We’re seeing things being designed to take advantage of that surplus,...
Color Wars 2008 » Youngme / Nowme →
Pictures of people then and now. So many of these are wonderful.
“the founder of Lenovo started out as a night-soil collector, worked his way up...”
– China Shakes the World — book captures the grand sweep of changes in the most populous nation on Earth - Boing Boing
There are many villains to blame for Zimbabwe's... →
Remarkably good article on Zimbabwe. The best I’ve read in a long time - and I started reading it with some skepticism: the byline, almost infuriatingly, says the writer “blames British ministers, white farmers and the country’s opposition for misunderstanding the Mugabe regime”.
“Dockers in Durban were refusing last night to unload the ship. The South Africa...”
– Chinese ship carries arms cargo to Mugabe regime | The Guardian
International Philosophy - Germany vs Greece →
Mindball? Best quote (you have to watch it): “… and Marx is claiming it was offside.”
WatchStronger on Vimeo (via Vimeo) I am amazed by the Berkeley Econ department.
WatchNo Dissertation on Vimeo (via Vimeo)
“Equality is a slippery slope, people, and if you give it to the gays you have to...”
– Fafblog! back to save the universe. I can think of worse tortures.
