Scrivener.net

[] Crocodile 1, Shark 0


[] How's Obama doing, relatively speaking? The Gallup Historical Presidential Approval Center tells all.


[] Omabacare political quotes of the moment...

"We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it." - Pelosi

"A bill can be bipartisan without bipartisan votes." - Pelosi

"To maintain a strong presidency we need to pass the bill." - Obama

[] Keith Hennessey explains what the Democrats really have to do to get the health care bill through reconciliation: both the legislative mechanics and the political challenges.


[] Laptop smashing fun: Highly entertaining economics class laptop smashing, from France!

Also, laptop computer meets liquid nitrogen (although the presumably shattering payoff is out of camera view -- really, some Professors should better prepare their demonstrations).

Today's spoiled generation can afford to smash laptops like this. Back in my time I paid $2,000 (1980 dollars, $5,260 today!) for a top line TRS 80 Model III with dual 32k disk drives, 48k memory, and 2 mhz processor. Plus another $2,000 for a top-quality daisy wheel printer. No liquid nitrogen or practical jokes for them.


[] What drives media bias? The bias of the media's audience. Surprise.


[] How politics works: There's what you think of the candidate ... and then there's what you think of the alternatives...

A new Elon University Poll in North Carolina finds that only 24% of North Carolinians think that Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC) deserves reelection...

However, a new Rasmussen poll finds Burr still leading Elaine Marshall (D), 50% to 34%, and beating Cal Cunningham (D), 52% to 29%.

And so it goes...

[] Awful predictions of the past year get their annual recap from Gregg Easterbrook.

After the first weekend of the 2009 NCAA men's basketball tournament, all 5 million ESPN bracket entries were wrong.

If you must make predictions, keep 'em simple...

My off-price, ultra-generic prediction -- Home Team Wins -- went 156-111 this season ... On ESPN's "Sunday NFL Countdown" Mike Ditka finished with 157 correct, and likely wasted some time by thinking.

Also: awful predictions about the stock market, economy, how the universe will end (not disproven yet), a million dead by global warming, global cooling, hurricanes, nuclear power, glaciers, sunspots ... and more sports...

Pro Football Weekly publishes two or three "best bets," to entice readers to sign up for a Handicapping Inner Circle product that costs $109.95 annually. In 2006, the PFW Best Bets went 31-34-2; in 2007, 32-36; in 2008, 35-32-1. For this season, Best Bets went 31-37. That's a four-year total of 129-139-1, meaning when Pro Football Weekly pundits are certain they are right, they are usually wrong.

PFW promotes its Handicapping Inner Circle by claiming 67 percent accuracy -- yet over a four-year period, its actual published picks were 48 percent accurate.
....

Peter King makes so many predictions, it's hard to know what to take seriously...

In late September, King said, "Minutes ago I spoke to people in Washington who told me there is absolutely no chance Jim Zorn is in trouble with the Redskins." ... Two weeks later, King said Zorn would be fired no later than the following week, to be replaced by Jerry Gray. Zorn wasn't fired until the season ended, and Gray was shown the door too. King said there was "no possibility" Jay Cutler would be traded by Denver. For the season, King forecast a Super Bowl of New England over Chicago -- the Bears did not make the playoffs -- and predicted the Saints would finish 7-9...

Remember folks, the news pages of the newspapers operate just like the sports pages, and the news channels on TV operate just like ESPN.


[] Dave Berri discusses books about sports, thinking, and thinking about sports.


[] As baseball moves from steroids scandals to to human growth hormone scandals, J.C. Bradbury observes: Banning HGH only signals to players that it works. To keep players from using it, make it legal and let them see it doesn't work.


[] The expiration of the salary cap in the NFL during the just-started free agent signing season gets a look from Brad Humphries at The Sports Economist.


[] Steady return generally has more value than inconsistent return at the same average rate. Phil Birnbaum discusses this regarding predicting game outcomes from team average for-against scores.

As a simple example of why this is so, say a baseball player hits six home runs. If he hits them all in one game he may feel great about setting a record -- but most of the home runs probably will be wasted running up the score, and none of them would help his team win any other game. In contrast, if he hits one home run each in six games he could help his team win two, three, or four games.

As it happens, this week I got in a discussion on this topic in the comments to a post at Pro Football Reference.com that presented a counter-intuitive finding that higher pass completion percentage for NFL quarterbacks is associated with scoring fewer points scored and fewer games won -- while higher numbers in other metrics, such as average yards per pass attempt (AYA) are associated with more scoring and winning.

Now, I much prefer AYA as a measure of QB performance over pass completion percentage, since the objective of passing is to advance the ball downfield, not to successfully complete a very high percentage of passes that don't advance the ball.

(And for the record, the NFL's official passer rating is probably the worst metric of all. It is so biased towards completion percentage that a QB can increase his rating by completing passes that lose yards: hit 10 of 10 for minus 10 yards each and he'll get a rating of 79 for losing 100 yards.)

But even with AYA being my preferred measure, logic says completion percentage should have some additional positive value. Analogous to the home run example, while the goal is to advance the ball, advancing it any given total amount at a steady rate (with a high completion percentage) should be preferable to doing so hit-or-miss (with a low completion percentage).

So I got out my spreadsheet software, plugged in the NFL 2009 season passing numbers, and sure enough multiple regression produced a formula that predicts points scored from passer data weighting both AYA and completion percentage positively, while giving the former twice the weight of the latter.

And from that I can produce my very own passer rating formula! Looking at the numbers, they actually correlate with scoring better than do AYA, the NFL's official rating, or any other rating method I've found in a couple days. In principle, from that I can rate passing defenses (offense in reverse) then rate whole teams ... then pick winners, and best bets against the spread...

Come the start of the 2010 NFL season I may have my own sport web site, be rating teams and predicting game outcomes ... and for $150, be selling my Premium Best Bets.

A year from now, you may be reading about me in Easterbrook's column!

When was the mermaid on the Barracuda?
Don't believe the New York Times!
~~~

Paul Krugman notes that he and his friend Brad DeLong really don't like the Wall Street Journal. But the "bad news" that the WSJ is so bad also "is good news", he says, because...

There’s a pretty good chance that we will end up with only one great national newspaper. And I know which paper that should be …

Hmmm ... I can't tell! Let's look at the Times' own reporting...

The two-decade erosion in newspaper circulation is looking more like an avalanche, with figures released Monday showing weekday sales down more than 10 percent since last year...

USA Today ... [lost] the top spot in weekday circulation for the first time since the 1990s, to The Wall Street Journal.

The Journal’s circulation, just over two million, rose 0.6 percent. It is one of a very few papers to sell online subscriptions, which are counted in the circulation total, helping The Journal, which does not publish on Sundays, defy the industry-wide decline. It has more than 400,000 digital-only subscribers, up by more than 100,000 from five years ago.

At The New York Times, which has repeatedly raised its prices in recent years, weekday circulation fell 7.3 percent, to about 928,000, the first time since the 1980s that it has been under one million...

And as we mentioned here earlier -- speculating that Krugman's resume is likely to end up on Murdoch's desk in the end -- Paul's good friends at Rasmussen report that only 24% of voters have a favorable impression of the NY Times ... something PK might take personally, being that...

Most voters (55%) don’t know enough about Paul Krugman to venture even a soft opinion about him. Those with an opinion are fairly evenly divided —- 22% favorable and 22% unfavorable ... with four percent (4%) voicing a Very Favorable opinion and six percent (6%) a Very Unfavorable view.

But if people are asked about "New York Times columnist Paul Krugman", the numbers shift significantly.

Once he is identified with that publication, his unfavorable ratings jump 15 points to 37%. The number with a Very Unfavorable view more than triples to 20%. However, Krugman’s favorable ratings show little improvement, inching up only three points to 25%...

John Fund was viewed favorably by 12% of voters and unfavorably by 22%. Just one percent (1%) had a Very Favorable opinion of him, and six percent (6%) offered a Very Unfavorable view.

However, when Fund was identified with The Wall Street Journal, his numbers jumped to 34% favorable and 20% unfavorable...

Well, if Krugman really believes the Times is going to come from behind to bury the Journal, he can buy some of its stock. It's cheap.

All of which gives me a convenient excuse to segue into this semi-annual NY Times Corrections Collection, courtesy of the Super Bowl wrap-up edition of the world's most eclectic football column [the following is edited for brevity] ...

In the past six months, the Times has, according to its own corrections page, said Arizona borders Wisconsin ... confused 12.7-millimeter rifle ammunition with 12.7 caliber (the latter would be a sizeable naval cannon) ... said a pot of ratatouille should contain 25 cloves of garlic (two tablespoons will do nicely) ... on at least five occasions, confused a million with a billion ... understated the national debt by $4.2 trillion ... used "idiomatic deficiency" as an engineering term (correct was "adiabatic efficiency")... said Paul Revere's Midnight Ride occurred in 1776 (it was in 1775 -- by 1776, everybody knew the British were coming) ... "misstated the status of the United States in 1783 -- it was a country, not a collection of colonies" ...

The Times also "misidentified the song Pink was singing while suspended on a sling-like trapeze" ... confused the past 130 years with the entire 4.5 billion-year history of Earth ... misused statistics in the course of an article complaining that public school standards aren't high enough ... said Citigroup handed its executives $11 million in taxpayer-funded bonuses, when the actual amount was $1.1 billion ... said a column lauding actress Terri White "overstated her professional achievements, based on information provided by Ms. White"... reported men landed on Mars in the 1970s ("there was in fact no Mars mission," the Times primly corrected).

The Times also gave compass coordinates that placed Manhattan in the South Pacific Ocean near the coastline of Chile ... said you need eight ladies dancing to enact the famous Christmas song when nine are needed ... said Iraq is majority Sunni, though the majority there is Shiite (hey, we invaded Iraq without the CIA knowing this kind of thing) ... got the wrong name for a dog that lives near President Obama's house ("An article about the sale of a house next door to President Obama's home in Chicago misstated the name of a dog that lives there. She is Rosie, not Roxy" -- did Rosie's agent complain?) ... elaborately apologized in an "editor's note," a higher-level confession than a standard correction, for printing "outdated" information about the health of a wealthy woman's Lhasa apso .... incorrectly described an intelligence report about whether the North Korean military is using Twitter ... called Tandil, Argentina, a "tiny village" (its population is 110,000) ... confused coal with methane (don't make that mistake in a mine shaft!) ... on at least three occasions, published a correction of a correction; "misstated the year of the Plymouth Barracuda on which a model dressed as a mermaid was posed;" "mischaracterized the date when New York City first hired a bicycle consultant" and "misidentified the location of a pile of slush in the Bronx"...

And that's not even counting the editorial pages. OK, if the Times does go under, all this I'll miss!

We're not just talking about coyotes down here in lower Manhattan, where I live. ("Hey, kids, go out to the park and play!")

We're talking politics...

New York gone wild

Once a source of national leaders of both political parties, New York state has descended into a bizarre, riveting spectacle of corruption and political debasement ... [Politico]

Paterson, Rangel, Spitzer, Hevesi, Meeks, Estrada ... Illinois has nothing on us!

The Empire State once produced national leaders from Alexander Hamilton and John Jay through Teddy Roosevelt, Al Smith, Franklin Roosevelt, Tom Dewey ....

OK, we also produced Tammany Hall with Boss Tweed, Senator George Washington Plunkitt (of "honest graft" fame), Mayor Jimmy Walker ... and arguably they were much more truly New York than that Caribbean import Hamilton and those English bluebloods the Roosevelts.

So maybe we're just getting back to our animal roots around here.

If Joe Francis ever wants to start a "Politicians Gone Wild! Doing It ALL!" spin-off, here we are. (Judging from his record he'll fit right in among 'em. He could move here and run for office himself.)

Not Leno. Not Jimmy Kimmel, Conan, Charlie Rose nor even Larry King.

Staffers dish on sexual 'cult' of Letterman

David Letterman ... is a "Jesus"-like figure to his female staffers -- his sexual "electricity" driving them insane with desire, a new report says.

"It's like a cult," a former "Late Show" insider told Vanity Fair magazine for its feature on the 62-year-old Letterman. "You arrive as an intern and stay for life, and people do fall in love with Dave and behave in a way that might not be considered appropriate in a professional working environment."

"It was intoxicating to me, and I could see how someone could cross the line. It's like Jesus Christ saying, 'Hey, let's go to dinner!' You're going to go, 'Wow! He chose me!'...

"I've come in contact with countless celebrities, and only two emit a tangible, almost magnetic force, an electricity that draws you to them: David Letterman and Bill Clinton," former Letterman segment producer Madeleine Smithberg cooed to Vanity Fair.

"The man is electric! I was there for six years. You want to be with him, you want to be close to him. And when you are, you feel good..." [NY Post]

Between the 62-year-old Letterman and Peter Orszag, super-stud nerd of government accounting, maybe there's a whole new model of male sexual super-stardom emerging in the 21st Century.

Look out Brad Pitt & Co., hide your Angelina Jolies. Guys like me are coming to town!

News from The Bay State...

Last month, Democratic Governor Deval Patrick landed a neutron bomb, proposing hard price controls across almost all Massachusetts health care.

State regulators already have the power to cap insurance premiums, which Mr. Patrick is activating. He also filed a bill that would give state regulators the power to review the rates of hospitals, physician groups and some specialty providers. Those that are deemed too high "shall be presumptively disapproved."

Mr. Patrick ad-libbed that he had "a whole bunch of pals here who are in the health-care field, and I saw the color drain out of their faces."

It doesn't even count as an irony that former Governor Mitt Romney (like President Obama) sold this plan as a way to control spending. As with all new entitlements, the rolling cost crisis began almost immediately...

... average Massachusetts insurance premiums are now the highest in the nation. Since 2006, they've climbed at an annual rate of 30% in the individual market. Small business costs have increased by 5.8%. Per capita health spending in Massachusetts is now 27% higher than the national average, and 15% higher even after adjusting for local wages and academic research grants. The growth rate is faster too...

As in Washington, the political class and providers blame insurers, but a better culprit is the state's insurance regulation. Incredibly, the average "medical loss ratio" in Massachusetts for individual policies is 112% -- that is, insurers pay $1.12 in benefits for every $1 in premiums.

This is the direct result of forcing insurers to charge everyone more or less the same rate regardless of age or health status, which makes it rational for people to wait to enroll until they need expensive coverage.

It is also the result of the state's decision to merge the individual and small-group insurance markets, which transfers individual costs onto small businesses. Mr. Patrick actually justified his plan by citing small-business costs...

Another reason costs are so high is that state regulations have mandated that insurance coverage be far richer than the rest of the country. The average insurance deductible is 28% lower than the U.S. average, and the benefits are more generous with less cost-sharing. Patients are thus insensitive to the cost of care.

...the state's own reports mainly show that the dominant reason health costs are rising is medical progress and technological innovation. Massachusetts health care, with its abundance of academic medical centers and high-quality specialists, is the envy of the world.

This is the true target of Mr. Patrick's price controls: The goal is to engineer a cheaper system through brute force so government can pay for health care for all.

What inevitably suffers is the quality of care for individual patients. Thirty states imposed hospital rate setting in the 1970s and 1980s. Except for Maryland, every one of them eventually eliminated it -- including Massachusetts, in 1991 --partly because it didn't control costs.

And partly because it killed people. A 1988 study in the Journal of New England Medicine found that the states with the most stringent rate-setting had mortality rates 6% to 10% higher than those that didn't.

... Massachusetts is teaching the country a valuable lesson in how not to reform health care, if only anyone would pay attention.
[WSJ]

Rod Blagojevich, the impeached former governor of Illinois now awaiting trial on federal corruption charges, lectures on "Ethics in Government" at Northwestern University, tomorrow evening, March 2, at 7:30 pm.

This follows Eliot Spitzer, former governor of New York, lecturing at Harvard's Center for Ethics.

And about to make the community college circuit is David Paterson, New York's still-governor-for-the-moment, tour details to be announced, perhaps soon.

[] Canadian women's hockey team celebrates their gold on ice, with champagne, cigars and beer...






Possibly related...

[] Emergency shipment of condoms headed to Olympic athletes

As you read this, an emergency shipment of condoms is desperately making its way across Canada to this West Coast city. Health officials in Vancouver have already provided 100,000 free condoms to the roughly 7,000 athletes and officials at the Games. That's about 14 condoms per person. But as of Wednesday, those supplies started running dangerously low...

Possibly not entirely unrelated....

[] The 2010 edition of the Nude Women of Curling "Fire on Ice" Calendar reportedly is selling like the hottest thing on ice. (Order info -- video story)

OK ... I turned on my TV this week and every day there was curling on it. Curling? And almost always women's curling. Right away I could see why: it was a Russia-USA match and the Russians were gorgeous -- and made up and styled to look even more so.

This was not the curling of my medieval Scottish ancestors (nor of Scots today -- 2,000 guys on a lake risking crashing through the ice, oblivious to concern thanks to the warmth of native spirits).

Well, this is one way to promote a sport that nine of ten people previously never heard of (except perhaps in a joke). The government doesn't support your curling team (a complaint of Canadian curlers reported and dismissed by the Sports Economist)? Then gorgeous your own beautiful self up, put on a tight bodysuit and sell your calendar! People respond to incentives. Especially men people, TV producers and audiences, to incentives like this.

Now here's a thing: As a student I traveled across Soviet eastern Europe and Russia (Moscow, Leningrad, etc.) and never saw even one single woman who looked anything like anyone on today's Russian curling team. I mean, not one. (I'd have remembered!) Babushkas by the gazillion, yes. Women like this, none.

What happened? How could the children look so different from the parents. Genetic engineering?

No. The arrival of free markets and capitalism. Here's an article about how free markets made Russian women beautiful.

God Bless Capitalism. If Karl Marx had known about this he'd have been an investment banker.


[] More boringly and academically, J.C. Bradbury tracks how Olympic performance levels have changed over the decades, sport by sport. (After previously examining winners in different sports by age, and comparing performances of men and women.)

But maybe it is not so boring. Because as he points out, all these performance improvements are fundamentally the result of all of us enjoying, during the last 100 years, by far the greatest increases in welfare that any human beings have ever experienced -- the same process that transformed the former Soviet babushkas, writ large for all of us.

So enjoy it all and be thankful.

[] Does this tell us anything about Republicans?

Bizarre FEC find of the day: Someone at the RNC spent $15 at a pet store on 8th SE and listed the expense as "meals."

[] Does this tell us anything about Democrats?

Gallup: Majority of Dems View Socialism Positively

[] Does this tell us something about Canadians?

When asked to choose between bacon and sex, more than four in 10 (43%) of Canadians chose bacon!...

Ladies, thinking about which fragrance will woo a man? Think bacon. When asked to rank various aromas by preference, 23% of men ranked bacon as number one...

Nearly one in four of respondents (23%) from Manitoba and Saskatchewan wondered if 'my partner loves bacon more than me'...

[] Calculator of the week:

Men: Are You Old Enough to Propose Yet?

Possibly related calculators: What Are the Chances Your Marriage Will Last? ... Are You Whipped?


[] Urban legend of the month, or not? "Yeah, that's how girls get pregnant." (Although the medical journal report does exist [pdf]. )


[] "Would you like red or blue light with your wine?"

Drinkers' brains are tricked into thinking a glass of white wine is better and more expensive tasting when exposed to the red or blue background lighting than those in rooms with green or white background lighting.

Cconnoisseurs are warned to be wary of unscrupulous bar owners who try to pass off cheap plonk in trendy lit bars... [Telegraph.uk]

Another reason why I drink beer.

Democrats, in 2005, rise as one to defend the Constitution from the dreadfully dangerous prospect that Repubicans would try to get past the filibuster, and destroy our constitutional balance of power:

Enjoy it.

The Democrats now say they are going to make a big push to get Obamacare enacted through Congress via "reconciliation". To pass a bill via reconciliation instead of normal legislative rules requires only 50 votes in Senate (plus a vice presidential tie-breaker), instead of the normal filibuster-proof 60. So it ought to be easy, right?

Some on the left are now congratulating themselves that it is as good as done. "The remaining obstacles are puny". All the Democrats have to do is "walk through the door that's open to them".

Although, if reconciliation is so easy, a logical question to ask is: why did the Democrats so insist on doing things entirely the hard way until now? And why did Barney Frank say that if they lost the 60th vote Obamacare would be "dead". Do professional pols not know what's "easy" from what's "hard"?

How reconciliation works (via The New Republic, a pro-reform site):

the problems with reconciliation are legion...

of particular importance to a massive and open-ended bill like health care, the Senate’s PAYGO rule requires 60 votes for any provision that would increase the deficit by more than $5 billion in any ten-year period going all the way out to the year 2059. (You read that correctly: 2059.)...

in the Senate the authors of the Budget Act who drafted this provision back in 1974 neglected to limit the number of amendments that can be offered. This leads to perhaps the Senate’s most stupefying activity (in a chamber chock full of stupefying activity)--"vote-a-rama." ... senators can still offer an unlimited number of amendments ... And by "unlimited," I mean it is never less than dozens but could easily stretch into the hundreds...

reconciliation would give the minority party in the Senate a chance to force a separate roll call vote on every line of the bill...

[Also]

The requirement that every single provision in a reconciliation bill have budgetary impact means that the bill cannot address regulatory issues, consumer protection issues, or items like abortion.

The open-ended limitations on deficit increases sharply curtail any additional spending in the bill and mean that most changes made by reconciliation that affect spending and revenues must expire in ten years.

And the requirement that congressional committees hold a new two-stage markup process, combined with the usual (if time-limited) floor consideration and conference processes, means that using reconciliation would occupy all of Congress’s attention [for months]..."

That's just excerpts, read the whole thing.

Plus add the basic political fact that the whole attempt is plainly dishonest, as reconciliation explicitly by law is for budget-resolution matters, not policy matters .... a fact the Republicans will be pounding on every single day to an electorate that is already sick of Louisiana Purchases and Cornhusker Kickbacks, and majority-against the bill -- both the bill itself and Obama's direction if it.

As Hitler said to this idea a month ago: "Bull**it! If we could do reconciliation we'd have DONE it!"

Referring to a perhaps more reputable source, Keith Hennessey (former Assistant to the President for Economic Policy):

For now I continue to believe there’s a 90% chance of no law....

It is possible that we are witnessing uncoordinated Democratic leaders each pursuing their own exit strategy in anticipation of legislative failure:

•The President proposes a “compromise” and blames Republicans for being unreasonable and unconstructive. Legislative failure is the Republicans’ fault, not the President’s.

•Speaker Pelosi continues to press for a two bill strategy in which the House and Senate will pass a new reconciliation bill. If the Senate cannot or will not do so, legislative failure is the Senate’s fault, not the House’s or Speaker Pelosi’s.

•Supported by outside liberals, Leader Reid points out that the House could just take up and pass the Senate-passed bill. Legislative failure is therefore not his fault or the Senate’s.

Each of these strategies is consistent with telling your allies that you’re continuing to push forward, right up until the moment you give up and blame someone else.

... read the whole thing.

From the Democratic House leadership, enthusiasm already underwhelming:

Hoyer: Comprehensive health bill may be no go

Well, if Hitler, Hennessey and Hoyer are right, then in a couple of months the partisans on the left are going to be ramping it up from angry to screaming mad, after they are teased, led on, and frustrated all over again.

And with Obama already losing the center en masse (Scott Brown carried the independents in Massachussetts by more than 50 points) that could set up an interesting November.

[] Noted political analyst Charlie Cook is down on Democrats...

... the Republican Party, they've got some huge brand problems, where their brand got badly damaged during the eight years of President Bush and the six years the Republicans had the majority in Congress.

But if I had a choice of the Republican Party's problems right now or the Democratic Party's problems, I think you could triple the Republican Party's problems and I'd still rather have their problems than the problems facing Democrats.

It's been barely over one year since the declaration of the Permanent Democratic Majority and new America The Liberal. A year is a long time in politics.


[] Politicians and editorialists damn today the same arguments they embraced yesterday, just filling in the blanks to change the issues.

Really, it's nearly enough to make one cynical about politics altogether.


[] Hmm...

An important recent academic study called “Regulation and Distrust” shows that, paradoxically, the worse government performs, the more citizens demand greater government intervention. [EconLog]

Really, it's nearly enough to make one cynical about people altogether.


[] Well, it's not cynicism if you are right...

[Professors Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff have written the definitive survey of national insolvencies and financial crises, This Time is Different, Eight Centuries of Financial Folly. They say the U.S still has plenty of problems ahead of it regarding both debt and the economy. Interviewed in the Wall Street Journal, Prof. Reinhart has a final thought...]

WSJ: You and Ken Rogoff have been working together for nine years on these issues. What are the areas where you disagree most?

REINHART: I think Ken may have a little more faith in markets than I do. Unfortunately, I don’t have faith in the government either.

[] The real games at the Olympics are being played with 100,000 condoms.


[] Who killed Scandinavian figure skating? You'd think they'd be good at it, but Scandinavian figure skating success collapsed in the 1930s and never came back. Leading suspects -- the Communists, Capitalists, and Nazis (featuring Sonja Henie) -- get a good lookover from J.C. Bradbury. And yet...


[] A better NBA All-Star Team than the NBA selected last week -- and why -- from David Berri.


[] When do baseball pitchers hit batters? When they are Southern and the batter is white.


[] Does Joe Namath deserve his niche in the NFL Hall of Fame? Pro Football Reference.com brings up the issue and hosts a lively debate. (Though the obviously correct answer is "yes".)


[] Why New Orleans didn't get a pro football team sooner. As part of the city's lobbying to be awarded a pro franchise it hosted the AFL All-Star game in January, 1965. As always before such a game, the players arrived a week in advance intending to have a good time around town. But the city proved so hostile to the black players that all the players decided to leave, and the league on very short notice moved the game to Houston. NFL history tells the story. (HT: PFR.com)

Video, equally amusing and serious...

"Envy is the only one of the seven deadly sins that does not give the sinner even momentary pleasure. Now you're counting through the list..."
~~

"When the Agriculture Department was created it had one bureaucrat for every 227,000 farms. Today it has one for every 19 farms.

"A story is told about an Agriculture Department bureaucrat seen weeping in a Washington hallway. When asked, 'What's wrong?' he said 'My farmer died.'"

[HT: Viking Pundit]

[] How not to help Haiti. Also: as it happened, the aid rushed to help victims of the 2004 South Asian tsunamis exceeded the damage caused by them by $4 billion, 30%. William Easterly's blog is always worth reading.


[] Are we all just holograms?

The holograms you find on credit cards and banknotes are etched on two-dimensional plastic films. When light bounces off them, it recreates the appearance of a 3D image.

In the 1990s physicists ... suggested that the same principle might apply to the universe as a whole. Our everyday experience might itself be a holographic projection of physical processes that take place on a distant, 2D surface.

The "holographic principle" challenges our sensibilities. It seems hard to believe that you woke up, brushed your teeth and are reading this article because of something happening on the boundary of the universe.... [New Scientist]

Well, the next time someone accuses me of lacking depth, it'll be "right back at you!"


[] What's too crooked even for a New York City politician? Having taxpayers reimburse you $177 for a bagel.

... an exercise in bagel-nomics was necessary and noteworthy on Wednesday, the day after Councilman Larry B. Seabrook was charged with money laundering, extortion and fraud.

Among the items in the 13-count federal indictment was the curious case of the $177 bagel sandwich and soda. Mr. Seabrook, a Bronx Democrat and former assemblyman and former state senator, bought a bagel sandwich and diet soda for $7 one day and submitted a doctored receipt that inflated the cost to $177, according to the indictment...

What's the most expensive legit bagel in the city he could have lunched on at taxpayer expense?

At the Loews Regency Hotel on Park Avenue, where the city’s power brokers eat their power breakfasts, the most you can spend on a bagel is $28, for a toasted H & H bagel with smoked salmon, tomato, red onion and cream cheese... [NY Times]

Larry should have stopped there. "When a pig becomes a hog it gets slaughtered".


[] Outlook on climate change: Foggy. Roger Pielke Jr. points us to an example of how for some people all facts, no matter how contradictory, must have the same cause.

Declining fog cover on California's coast could leave the state's famous redwoods high and dry, a new study says.

Among the tallest and longest-lived trees on Earth, redwoods depend on summertime's moisture-rich fog to replenish their water reserves.

But climate change may be reducing this crucial fog cover ...[by] contributing to a decline in a high-pressure climatic system that usually "pinches itself" against the coast, creating fog, said study co-author James Johnstone, an environmental scientist at the University of California, Berkeley... [National Geographic]

Versus ...

The Bay Area just had its foggiest May in 50 years. And thanks to global warming, it's about to get even foggier. That's the conclusion of several state researchers...

"There'll be winners and losers," says Robert Bornstein, a meteorology professor at San Jose State University. "Global warming is warming the interior part of California, but it leads to a reverse reaction of more fog along the coast." ... [S.F. Chronicle]

Pielke:

More fog is consistent with predictions of climate change. Less fog is consistent with predictions of climate change. I wonder if the same amount of fog is also "consistent with" such predictions? I bet so.