Many museums, such as the Metropolitan Museum in New York, sell replicas of some of the historical jewelery in their collection. Typically the quality of the replica is significantly lower than the quality of the original—cast when the original was constructed, sometimes using glass instead of the original gemstones. Typically [...]
I've been reading Maimonides and came across two things that I found interesting.
Part I
Suppose you kill someone who is dying of a lethal disease. Maimonides concludes that that isn't really murder, since he would have died anyway—while pointing out that you have to be really sure [...]
In the U.S. and Europe, AIDS transmission via vaginal intercourse seems to be very low, with sexual transmission occurring mainly via anal intercourse—one reason why the infection rate is much higher among male homosexuals than in the general population. It is widely believed that this is not true in Africa, [...]
A while back, we replaced our dishwasher, which came with the house when we bought it some fourteen years ago. The new one, selected on the basis of a positive online discussion of the previous model in the (Bosch) line, turned out to be in almost all ways worse than [...]
It occurred to me, writing my previous post, that it might be read by someone who actually knew something about the subject, and who would object that I was in one way or another distorting the facts or biasing my discussion. To divert the attention of any such reader, here [...]
For some years, I have taught a law school seminar on legal systems very different from ours. Systems covered range from modern gypsies to classical Athens and imperial China. Curious readers may want to look at a past year's web page for the class.
I enjoy taking long baths, soaking in the hot water. For entertainment, aside from my thoughts, I can read a book—preferably a paperback, and one that I am willing to take some risk of getting wet.
Much of the rest of the time, my entertainment consists of doing things [...]
I was recently struck by the contrast between two news stories on the same event, the publication of thousands of emails and documents from a climate research group in Britain, obtained by hacking into their computers. The Wall Street Journal story described the contents of what had been taken [...]
In a recent discussion of E.U. legal issues, someone proposed a hypothetical—the U.S. joining the European Union. It occurred to me that reactions to that scenario provide an interesting slant on U.S. attitudes. To some, probably including a majority of those in the room, it sounds like a dream too [...]
Over the past few years, World of Warcraft has had two major expansions. Each raised the top limit on character level, added new areas to play in and new quests to do—targeted mainly at high level characters, since they were the ones who had already done most of the interesting [...]
This year I have been recording my public lectures—when I remember—and webbing them. So if you want something to listen to while driving, or in the bath, feel free.
Alternatively, you could listen to the podcasts of my novel. [...]
The term plays an important role in both philosophy and economics. In philosophy, it is associated with Jeremy Bentham and utilitarianism; in that context utility means, roughly, happiness. In Bentham's view, one ought to act so as to maximize the total of human utility, misleadingly described as "the greatest good" [...]
Characters in World of Warcraft are in one of two factions, Horde or Alliance. The game is designed to make communication and trade difficult or impossible between characters of different factions.
There is, however, a loophole—the neutral auction house. Goods can be put up by someone in one faction, [...]
In both my price theory textbook (webbed) and Hidden Order, I point out that one cannot safely assume that changing one thing in a system leaves everything else unchanged; the context there is the effect of changing one element in a transaction, such as the price, the terms the [...]
Friday I got a chance to play with the new Android phone at a local T-mobile store. For the most part, I like it. The one disappointment was the keyboard, which does not seem any better than the one on my G1. On the other hand, the D-pad on the [...]
On the whole, I'm reasonably happy with the Android OS, but there is one problem I have observed in two unrelated applications and so suspect is coming from the operating system.
One of the applications is DocsToGo, which provides, among other things, a word processor that can read and' [...]
In World of Warcraft, some characters are, among other things, crafters, can produce useful objects such as pieces of armor that they or others can wear. To do so requires some level of skill, obtained by in-game activities, mostly crafting, and ingredients ("mats" for "materials"). At a high level, the [...]
A Usenet post earlier this evening called my attention to an interesting congressional race in New York's 23rd district. The incumbent congressman in a solidly Republican district resigned to become secretary of the army. The Republican party nominated Dede Scozzafava, a relatively left wing candidate, at least by Republican standards.' [...]
In theory, private corporations are run for the benefit of their stockholders. Insofar as the theory is enforced in practice, it is through two different mechanisms. One is the fiduciary obligation of corporate directors, the fact that they are legally obliged to run the firm in the interest of its [...]
I graduated from high school in 1961; the school I went to was and is a top private school, the same one to which Barack Obama later sent his children. While I have no hard data, the impression I get from a variety of sources is that top schools today [...]
My seminar on "Legal Issues of the 21st Century" deals with technological revolutions that might happen and the legal issues those revolutions would raise. After teaching it for some years, I turned it into a book. I am teaching it again this spring and am in search of new [...]
As regular readers know, I have long been in search of the perfect pda/phone/web browser. The latest Android phone, the Motorola Droid, officially announced today, may bring that goal a little closer. The screen is substantially larger than the screen on my G1, the keyboard is said to be [...]
"Consider the curious argument by which he deduced the existence on Jupiter of hemp. Galileo had observed four moons traveling around Jupiter. Huygens asked a question of a kind few astronomers would ask today: Why is it that Jupiter has four moons? Well, why does the earth have one moon?" [...]
Suppose, optimistically, that a year from now the current recession is currently over, the economy more or less returned to normal. There are two opposite ways in which recent events can be, and will be, interpreted:
1. The U.S. faced the risk of another Great Depression and was saved [...]
Regular readers of this blog will remember a seriesofposts (the three links are to three different posts) a few months back dealing with the question of whether NASA/JPL was lying when they claimed on a JPL web page that:
An Australian navy ship has intercepted a boat carrying nearly 60 suspected asylum seekers - the fourth such incident in less than two weeks.
"Situations around the world mean that large numbers of displaced persons are looking for settlement in wealthy, developed nations like Australia and can be targeted" [...]
In the course of the healthcare debate, supporters of change along the lines proposed by the administration have called attention to a World Health Organization study ranking the health care systems of 192 nations. A common claim is that the U.S., despite spending more per capita than any other [...]
At least, that's how I interpret the descriptions I have seen of his current plan, although I gather any interpretation is pretty uncertain at this point. He appears to be proposing:
1. That everyone be required to have health insurance.
In the chapter on virtual reality in my Future Imperfect I suggested that if we could crack the dreaming problem, figure out how dreaming works, we could create a much richer form of virtual reality, sending sensory signals to the brain instead of merely beaming photons at the [...]
My friend Jeff Hummel has been arguing for some time that the U.S. is eventually going to default on its debt. Central to his argument is the fact that an increase in the perceived risk of default increases the risk premium the U.S. has to pay to lenders. Since the [...]
On one of the Usenet groups I sometimes read, someone posted an account of her life as child and parent that I found both impressive and moving. Here it is. [...]
The argument for doing drastic things to prevent global warming has two parts. The first has to do with climate change, with reasons to think that the earth is getting warmer and that the reason is human action, in particular the production of CO2. The second has to do with [...]
Paul Krugman, in one of his more inflamatory statements, claimed that congressmen who voted against cap and trade were guilty of "planetary treason."
The bill contains substantial support for biofuels, including a five year moratorium on letting the EPA decide whether, on net, producing ethanol actually reduces carbon dioxide. [...]
I'm not sure where I came across the phrase, but I think it embodies an important point. Most talk about sex in our society assumes the context of seduction, one night stands, affairs, short term relationships of one sort or another. Much, I suspect most,'" [...]
Judith Harris, in her very interesting The Nurture Assumption, argues that children's personalities are formed primarily by their peer group, not their parents, hence that parental child rearing has a surprisingly small effect on how the children turn out. By her account, the contrary opinion comes in large part' [...]
The frequencies used for both ordinary phone calls and 3G connections are different in different countries—one set in the U.S. and some other countries, a different set in Europe and much of Asia. A phone that can use four frequencies for phone calls and three for 3G can work just [...]
As long term readers of this blog know, I have for years been searching for a cell phone equivalent of my beloved Psion PDA's, a pocket computer with a useable keyboard. The closest I have managed so far is the G-1, which at this point it has most of what' [...]
I had a couple of recentposts, pointing out what appeared to be an inconsistency between the claim on a JPL page that the latest data showed arctic sea ice continuing to shrink and the publicly available data, which appears to show that a ten year [...]
As I mentioned in an earlier post, my online exchanges with T-Mobile support imply that T-Mobile does not object to my tethering my G-1, although they don't support it. I'm not sure if that's really the corporate view of the matter, but having been told so by two levels' [...]
Suppose something some people do has substantial, widely dispersed, negative effects on other people; the standard example is air pollution. Since I am not bearing the cost of my actions, I may do things, such as light a fire in my fireplace, even when the net cost, to me and [...]
Suppose you are the first city planner in the history of the world. If you are very clever you come up with Cartesian coordinates, making it easy to find any address without a map, let alone a GPS—useful since neither GPS devices nor maps have been invented yet.
Current economic problems have brought back beliefs and arguments concerning the Great Depression. One account I have encountered goes roughly as follows: "After the stock market crash, Hoover cut taxes and government expenditure in order to revive the economy. Instead of reviving, things got worse and worse until Roosevelt came" [...]
To increase agricultural output on a fixed amount of land, you increase labor and fertilizer. If a nuclear limitation treaty limits the number of missiles, a nation that wants to maintain its arsenal does it by increasing the size of warheads, the number of warheads per missile, or both.
Listening to satellite radio while driving, I occasionally come across the Cosmo channel. The assumed target audience seems to consist of women engaged simultaneously in a search for a long-term partner—a "keeper"—and a dating pattern involving a good deal of relatively casual sex. This raises an interesting question: does the [...]
One obvious, arguably ideal, solution to the problem of paying for healthcare is for the consumer to pay for ordinary costs out of pocket, just as we pay for food and housing, while using insurance to cover extraordinary costs, just as we use it in other contexts. That is not [...]
My previous post contained a graph of northern hemisphere sea ice from which it seemed clear that the past trend of declining area, rather than continuing as the JPL claimed, had reversed. The first comment on that post claimed that I had cherry picked my data, offering as evidence another [...]
Over the course of my life, I've spent a good deal of time in what I think of as "other worlds"--The Society for Creative Anachronism, World of Warcraft, interacting online in Usenet news groups, and the like. One thing that strikes me about such worlds is the presence of competent,' [...]
In a recent online exchange, a poster trying to defend Biden's mistaken claim that Article I of the Constitution put the VP in the executive branch argued that the VP's role in the Senate, which is what Article I actually describes, is a trivial one, since all he gets to [...]
Some time back, there were news stories reporting on studies of several communities that showed smoking bans to be followed by reductions in heart attacks. There are now reports of a much larger study done at the NBER which finds no such effect. How can one explain the [...]
Currently I am teaching a course in law and economics. Most of the reading for the course consists of a book I wrote—based on my lecture notes from previous iterations of the course. As in most courses, students are supposed to read each chapter before the first of the classes [...]
Yesterday I opened an envelope from Young America's Foundation, the successor organization to Young Americans for Freedom, a conservative student organization whose magazine I used, many years ago, to write a regular column for. It was a fund raising letter, obviously a mass mailing, and started "Dear friend."
I think it is a more plausible slogan than the usual version. If you and I disagree because I want an outcome more favorable to me and you want an outcome more favorable to you, there is room for compromise—as we see whenever people bargain over the price of a [...]
Suppose you make cars safer by requiring seat belts, collapsible stearing columns, and other changes that make it less likely that an auto accident will kill the car's occupants. The obvious conclusion, and the one many people reach, is that the highway death rate will go down.
My son Patri has an interesting essay up on Cato Unbound, dealing with the question of how to change the world in a libertarian direction. He views most of the standard approaches, such as persuasion and policy studies, as tactics that worked for changing policy in the hunter-gatherer [...]
There are lots of different versions of socialism and lots of different arguments against them. In this post, I am concerned with one particular question—whether, in order to get things produced, it is necessary to pay people to produce them. Some variants of socialism, typically decentralist and perhaps utopian, argue [...]
As those who have read the comments on the previous post know, there is now an open source program that is supposed to let a laptop connect to the internet via the G1, using WiFi from the laptop to the G1, 3G (or EDGE or ...) from the G1 [...]
The three applications I've been most wanting for my G1 Android phone are a word processor that doesn't (like Google Docs) require an internet connection to work, a tethering application that I can use to connect my laptop to the web through the phone, and software to let me use [...]
This semester I have been recording my classes for the benefit both of enrolled students who miss a lecture or want to review one and unenrolled students who want to follow along at a distance. I use an Olympus WS-110, a tiny digital recorder that I can plug into [...]
Last week I gave two talks in Oregon for the Federalist Society; I now have to send them documentation for my expenses--a motel, a rental car, and airport parking. I have not done so yet, but it did start me wondering about why that particular arrangement, a fixed payment [...]
The bonus debacle had prompted the approval of a bill by the US House of Representatives to impose a 90% tax on bonuses awarded by companies bailed out by the US government.
But President Barack Obama said such a measure would be unconstitutional. (BBC News Story)
I have been having a mild spam problem, "comments" with links in them that have nothing much to do with what they are supposed to be a comment on or are in a language, I think Chinese, that I cannot read. Removing them by hand is a pain, so I [...]
You read a newspaper or magazine and notice that it says something that is not true. Unless the statement is libelous and you are the victim, your only practical recourse is to write a letter to the editor which they may or may not print. That means that when such [...]
I've been reading an online discussion of the recent successful ditching of an airliner in the Hudson. If I am following it correctly, this is the first time anyone has succeeded in ditching a large passenger jet. Smaller planes and propeller planes have been ditched successfully but it sounds as' [...]
As any enthusiastic player of World of Warcraft—or other video games played on computers—knows, giving up the prehensile tail was a great mistake. Some things are best done from the keyboard, some with a mouse, and we only have two hands each. The problem exists for most things done on [...]
Television is largely paid for by advertising. Many consumers—I suspect a majority in developed countries—have equipment that lets them record a program when it is broadcast and listen to it later, fast forwarding, if they wish, over the ads. The smaller the number of people who watch the ads, the [...]
My casual impression is that successful authors of fiction do not have a very high opinion of college creative writing courses. Quite a lot of them, however, seem to have developed their skills in the context of Dungeons and Dragons or similar games, as dungeon masters and/or players. A role [...]
In an earlier post I proposed an economics course built around World of Warcraft. I have much less experience teaching statistics than teaching economics and I suspect the game is less suited for the former than the latter purpose. But it does occur to me that it provides quite [...]
When you are looking for a house, one of the first questions the real estate agent is likely to ask is how much you can afford to spend. The prudent customer will think twice before giving an honest answer. Realtors, after all, are paid a commission based on the price [...]
In a recent online exchange, one poster suggested that the unseasonably cold weather in Britain was evidence against global warming. The response from another was that it was actually evidence in favor, that global warming meant more energy in the weather system, which led to greater variability, hence extremes in [...]
A well chosen name wins an argument by assuming its conclusion. Label cash subsidies to foreign government as "foreign aid" and who can be so hard hearted as to oppose them. Call subsidies to the public schools "aid to education" and you neatly skip over the question of whether additional [...]
In order to explain and defend the economic approach to human behavior one must justify the assumption that individuals are rational, that they tend to take the actions that best achieve their objectives. One argument I have long made is that, while rational behavior is not a complete description [...]
Suppose you are teaching economics at a large university and want a new way of getting the interest of your students. It occurs to you that a substantial fraction probably play World of Warcraft. It also occurs to you—since you too play WoW—that the game contains a complex economy that [...]
The graph shows global temperatures over the past quarter of a million years; the horizontal scale is in thousands of years, the vertical in degrees C. The source is Jouel et. al. 1996. Two things strike me about it:
I've just been reading a column by Eric Boehlert in which he complains, at great length, that the media is propagating a false claim that auto workers get paid $70/hour. He writes "Simply put, GM's labor costs are not synonymous with hourly wages earned by UAW employees. Many in" [...]
Leo Rosten, in his (delightful) The Joys of Yiddish, tells the following story:
An official brought the chief rabbi of a town before the Court of the Inquisition and told him, "We will leave the fate of your people to God. I am putting two slips of paper" [...]
A physics professor my wife knows complains that few of his students have any idea of how to do plausibility calculations, how to figure out whether quantitative claims could be true. My wife suggests that it would be a good topic for a class in elementary school, since such calculations [...]
A very long time ago, when I graduated from high school, going to college meant an almost complete break with one’s previous life. There might be a few people from your high school going to the same college. One or two of them might be friends or at least acquaintances. [...]
"Following the verdict, the Acting Met Commissioner Sir Paul Stephenson said Mr de Menezes' death had been a "most terrible mistake", which he "deeply regretted".
"He was an innocent man and we must accept full responsibility for his death," he said.
I know very little about this particular case'" [...]
In a recent post I listed a number of pieces of software that did not yet exist for the G1 and, in my view, should. One of them was an ftp program. A few days ago, DroidFtp appeared in the Google market.
I have been engaged in a long Usenet thread (much of it here) coming out of my claim that hostility to evolution isn't limited to the religious right, that the left, although unwilling to reject the theory of evolution, is also unwilling to accept implications of evolutionary biology' [...]
One of the things legal rules do is to allocate risk, so one of the subjects covered in teaching the economic analysis of law is the economics of risk allocation, conventionally put in terms of the economics of insurance. Designing optimal rules in this context is hard, because there [...]
I recently had a conversation with a wealthy libertarian, a successful entrepreneur, who wanted ideas for how to use both his money and the talents that had made it for him to spread liberty. It is not an easy question, nor is it one limited to libertarians; the same problem [...]
So far as I can tell, Obama's solution to the current economic problem is a "stimulus package," increased federal spending and either a tax cut or at least no substantial tax increase in the near term. The money has to come from somewhere; even allowing for the possibility that winding' [...]
I don't know whether Barack Obama will do a good or bad job of being President. But I think it is already clear that listening to him will be a pleasanter experience than listening to most politicians.
My most recent basis for that opinion is an interview with Sarah' [...]
The CEO of a corporation releases an optimistic report on its future prospects; the stock goes up. Six months later the future arrives and the optimism turns out to have been misplaced. The stock goes back down. An enterprising lawyer sues the corporation in a class [...]
"When it strikes at 1000 local time, millions of participants across the region will 'drop, cover and hold on' - drop to the ground, take cover under a sturdy desk and hold on until the shaking stops."
(BBC news story on a planned massive earthquake drill in southern [...]
"Women have simple tastes. They get pleasure out of the conversation of children in arms and men in love." H.L. Mencken ---------------------------------------
My son Patri has a recent blog post raising the question of whether pornography may be harmful to relationships; he points out, correctly, that even [...]
According to Carl Cameron of Fox News, Sarah Palin did not know what countries were in NAFTA or whether Africa was a country or a continent. According to Martin Eisenstadt, he was Cameron's source and he more or less made up the story, having helped brief Palin on foreign [...]
Some years ago I took an online test for diagnosing Attention Deficit Disorder, did not score high enough to qualify, but came close. That, plus reading about the symptoms and noticing that some were familiar from first hand observation, led me to send an email to my father and my [...]
The audio of my talk at Oxford (and now a video), a video of my talk in London to the Libertarian Alliance, and an amusing Slate piece on my Cato talk. [...]
A few days ago I gave a noon talk on my new book at the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C. while on my way to a conference at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. I was due in Charlottesville by dinner time. Unfortunately, as I discovered, there was no public [...]
Quite a lot of people, commenting on the current economic difficulties, have suggested that we are at risk of another Great Depression. So far as the economics of the situation are concerned, I think they are mistaken. There is, however, a different and disturbing sense in which we might be [...]
The news today carries a story discussing what breed of dog Obama will have in the White House. Has anyone else noticed the gross, continued discrimination in this area? I haven't made up a complete list, but so far as I can remember every presidential pet in my lifetime was [...]
Move election day to April 15th. [...] 
This year I have been recording my public 
On one of the Usenet groups I sometimes read, someone posted an account of her life as child and parent that I found both impressive and moving. 
I have now recorded 
