Terence Tao (yes, again) has some thoughts on multiple choice tests. Of course he's right that more open-ended questions are better in some sense. But I wonder: here at CU, the applied math department takes great pride in administering open-ended tests where the work is graded to hundreds of engineers three times a semester. Are we sure that's better than giving, say, six multiple choice tests a semester?

Anyway, Tao might have a good claim to be the greatest living mathematician in the world, but I doubt any of his students have offered to start a riot on his behalf.

Terence Tao's trip through the airport leads him to a puzzle about moving sidewalks. I really like this problem. It's simple, related to real life, and the solution is not obvious.

Malcolm Gladwell on recruiting teachers:

In teaching, the implications are even more profound. They suggest that we shouldn’t be raising standards. We should be lowering them, because there is no point in raising standards if standards don’t track with what we care about. Teaching should be open to anyone with a pulse and a college degree—and teachers should be judged after they have started their jobs, not before

Top headlines on major news sites as I write this:

BBC: India police name Mumbai gunmen.
CNN: Gov. tried to sell Obama Senate seat.
New York Times: Illinois Governor in Corruption Scandal.

They're all missing the most important story of the day, and probably the month:

Malaria vaccine may be available by 2012.

Saving lives with checklists:

These are, of course, ridiculously primitive insights. Pronovost is routinely described by colleagues as “brilliant,” “inspiring,” a “genius.” He has an M.D. and a Ph.D. in public health from Johns Hopkins, and is trained in emergency medicine, anesthesiology, and critical-care medicine. But, really, does it take all that to figure out what house movers, wedding planners, and tax accountants figured out ages ago?

Think Starbucks drove little independent coffee shops out of business? Just the opposite:

Starbucks was the gateway drug to specialty coffee. Customers tried it there first and then graduated to the often-superior products sold by indie shops. Even Duane Sorensen, owner of the proudly anti-corporate Stumptown Coffee in Portland, Oregon, concedes that Starbucks raised standards in the industry. Ward Barbee, publisher of the coffee publication Fresh Cup, is even more effusive. “Every morning, I bow down to the great green god for making all of this possible,” he told the Willamette Weekly in 2004. In short, Starbucks and indie shops grew up side by side. Indie shops learned from Starbucks’s retailing genius and built off its customer base. Then the indie shops left Starbucks in the dust.

Pick up the trash in your neighborhood:

A fence partly closed off the main entrance to a parking lot. There was a narrow gap and a no-admittance sign that pointed out a new entry, 200 yards away. A second sign prohibited locking bikes to the fence.

When the fence was clear, 27 percent of people heading for their cars ignored the no-admittance sign and squeezed through the gap in the fence. But after several bikes were locked to the fence in defiance of that ban, 82 percent of people going to their cars squeezed through the prohibited entry.

This doesn't prove the broken windows theory, but it does make it more plausible. Public order matters.

Car horns are useless.

Interesting:

Washing with soap and water makes people view unethical activities as more acceptable and reasonable than they would if they had not washed themselves.

I'm not sure I buy it.

If you think the economic downturn is serious here, consider that it might cause a revolution in China.

Liberals and conservatives have different expectations from a dog. Alan Jacobs:

Do you want an animal companion who expects you to come when she calls as often as vice versa? Granted, it would be nice to have a dog who puts out food for me twice a day and picks up after me when I crap in the neighbor’s yard. . . . but overall, I don't think the equality thing is likely to work out, pet-wise.

Like Jacobs, apparently I'm a conservative. Who knew?

You're sitting, typing away, nursing your twelve-ounce drip coffee, and all of the sudden the coffee shop's wireless network changes its name to

BuyAnotherCupYouCheapskate

Personally, I think it's brilliant.

she said yes

Slate has polled all its staff about how they will vote:

Barack Obama: 55
John McCain: 1
Bob Barr: 1
Not McCain: 1
Noncitizen, can't vote: 4

Of course it doesn't matter:

But—for the millionth time!—an opinion is not a bias! The fact that reporters tend to be liberal says nothing one way or another about their tendency to be biased.

Says nothing one way or another? Are they actually serious?

But I'm glad they're transparent about it and actually do this poll. They encourage other news organizations and commentators to do the same. So here it is, the Evil Line staff poll:

I voted to remove Judge James Klein.

Nick Mamatas used to write term papers for extra cash:

Six pages by 6 a.m. — the kid needs three hours to rewrite and hand in the paper by 9 or he won't graduate. "Cool," I'd say. "A hundred bucks a page." I'd get it, too, and when I didn't get it, I slept well anyway.

This piece is both very entertaining and very depressing.

Paul Bloom on personality and morality:

The iconic image, from a million movies and cartoons, is of a person with an angel over one shoulder and the devil over the other.

The alternative view keeps the angel and the devil, but casts aside the person in between. The competing selves are not over your shoulder, but inside your head: the angel and the devil, the self who wants to be slim and the one who wants to eat the cake, all exist within one person.

This pull quote chosen from many good ones in the article because it echoes the quote at the top of this blog.

I hate PowerPoint, so I really wanted to link this essay. Unforunately, it's half a rant about how kids these days are stupid and should get off my lawn and half a description of how deep, inspiring humanities are better than soulless sciences.

You're better off reading this old but still relevant article, titled "PowerPoint is Evil":

Presentations largely stand or fall on the quality, relevance, and integrity of the content. If your numbers are boring, then you've got the wrong numbers. If your words or images are not on point, making them dance in color won't make them relevant. Audience boredom is usually a content failure, not a decoration failure.

Jeffrey Greenberg loads his carry-on bag with some liquids, boxcutters, a Hezbollah flag, and terrorist propaganda. Then he meets a collaborator who provides him with a forged boarding pass at the airport Starbucks:

He had taken the liberty of upgrading us to first class, and had even granted me “Platinum/Elite Plus” status, which was gracious of him. This status would allow us to skip the ranks of hoi-polloi flyers and join the expedited line, which is my preference, because those knotty, teeming security lines are the most dangerous places in airports: terrorists could paralyze U.S. aviation merely by detonating a bomb at any security checkpoint, all of which are, of course, entirely unsecured.

The collaborator, predictably, is Bruce Schneier. Even more predictably, he gets through security with no problem, despite declining to show ID.

It's local, it's about beer, it's about religion. What's not to like in this article?

Clay Risen, in an interesting article about the most important person in American education:

Behind the fighting lie basic questions: What makes a good teacher? And how do you recognize one? For Rhee and her fellow reformers, the answer is data. Lots of data. There may be many unquantifiables in teacher quality, but most of the traits that matter to reformers can be put into numbers.

I think she's right, but even if Michelle Rhee is on the wrong track, we still need lots of people like her. One of them will stumble on something that works.

Alan Jacobs writes about Mountains Beyond Mountains (which is a great book), and the idea of the "long defeat".

The expectation of victory can be a terrible thing — it can raise hopes in (relatively) good times only to shatter them when the inevitable downturn comes. Conversely, the one who fights the long defeat can be all the more thankful for victories, even small ones.

Voter registration drives are a fraud:

Having students learn more is a legitimate interest of schools, and if students learn more they should get better grades. But it is a fraud for schools to raise student grades when they have not actually learned more. Similarly, it might be good things if citizens were better informed and considered their political process legitimate, and these good things might show themselves via more votes. But just pushing more people to vote, without their actually becoming more informed or considering the process more legitimate, is also a fraud.

I react pretty strongly to this kind of thinking, where the underlying reasoning seems to be "everybody but me and my friends is stupid."

The future of NASCAR:

As the fans join in a full-throated cheer, 43 of the world's best drivers reach down and press a button. What follows is unprecedented: pin-dropping silence, save for 43 small clicks.

With any luck, the electricity will come from clean, safe, efficient nuclear power.

Survive the meltdown by living in a smaller house:

Homes 1200 square feet or smaller lost just one percent of their value over the previous year, compared to 3.1 percent losses for midsized houses and 2.8 percent losses for large homes.

A clever thief hires accomplices on Craigslist. The beautiful thing is, he doesn't even need to pay them. The really beautiful thing is, his getaway vehicle was an inner tube.

Sometimes I crack open the Wall Street Journal and am amused to find that some copy editor has decided to insert the word "mackerel" at random points in the story:

There's been a mackerel economy in federal prisons since about 2004, former inmates and some prison consultants say...

Current inmates can't discuss mackerel transactions without risking discipline, say several lawyers and consultants who represent incarcerated clients...

Ethan Roberts knows about mackerel discipline first hand...

At Lompoc, says spokeswoman Katie Shinn, guards "are not aware of such a problem with mackerel."

Then I find out it's not a mistake. This is actually an interesting article.

DARPA has a list of twenty-three mathematical challenges that they want solve. Some of them are interesting, some of them are vague:

Mathematical Challenge Six: Computational Duality
Duality in mathematics has been a profound tool for theoretical understanding. Can it be extended to develop principled computational techniques where duality and geometry are the basis for novel algorithms?

Overall, reading the document I'm not entirely convinced that the people putting it together know what they're talking about. Not that I would do much better with many of the topics, but still.

I think I'm going to tackle Challenge Ten, just so I can tell people I'm working on "algorithmic origami."

Environmentally aware people don't make real sacrifices:

The longest and the most frequent flights were taken by those who were most aware of environmental issues, including the threat posed by climate change.

I'm certainly a hypocrite in this regard; I fly more than average, and therefore pollute more than average, regardless of whatever other environmentally friendly measures I take.

Bruce Schneier thinks you should be arrested for trying to bring toothpaste on a plane:

If some copycat terrorists try to bring their liquid bomb through airport security and the screeners catch them -- like they caught me with my bottle of pasta sauce -- the terrorists can simply try again. They can try again and again. They can keep trying until they succeed. Because there are no consequences to trying and failing, the screeners have to be 100 percent effective. Even if they slip up one in a hundred times, the plot can succeed.

Too many people go to college:

We should look at the kind of work that goes into acquiring a liberal education at the college level in the same way that we look at the grueling apprenticeship that goes into becoming a master chef: something that understandably attracts only a few people. Most students at today’s colleges choose not to take the courses that go into a liberal education because the capabilities they want to develop lie elsewhere. These students are not lazy, any more than students who don’t want to spend hours learning how to chop carrots into a perfect eighth-inch dice are lazy. A liberal education just doesn’t make sense for them.

Paul Tough likes Obama's education plan. Megan McArdle doesn't. The funny thing is, they both offer their own idea of what we should do about education, and they both say the same thing. Here's Tough:

Help persuade teachers to give up some job security in exchange for more pay. Help the school systems get rid of poor-performing teachers—not just a few of them, but a big swath, the whole bottom tier.

And here's McArdle:

Scarsdale knows that if it doesn't keep the schools successful, middle class parents will leave, taking their lavish tax dollars with them. Riverdale, too, knows that it needs to keep parents happy and test scores high. The New York City public school system, on the other hand, mostly has to get butts in seats, because that's how they get their money. It's not that the teachers don't want to teach kids; it's that they don't have to.

I agree with both of them.

Walmart is making you thinner:

We estimate the impacts of Wal-Mart and warehouse club retailers on height-adjusted body weight and overweight and obesity status, finding robust evidence that non-grocery selling Wal-Marts reduce weight while grocery-selling Wal-Marts and warehouse clubs either reduce weight or have no effect. The effects appear strongest for women, minorities, urban residents, and the poor.

Upset that kids in his inner-city district go to underfunded schools, James Meeks buses a thousand black students to the suburbs:

He bused them all to Northfield, a wealthy, mostly white Chicago suburb, to the lavish campus of New Trier Township High School, a public school with four orchestras, a rowing club, a course in "kinetic wellness," and AP classes in French, Spanish, German, Japanese, Latin, and Chinese. You know, your basic American public school. The Chicago kids lined up and tried to enroll for classes.

Germans make good board games. They like rules, apparently.

Bruce Schneier on the no-fly list:

How to fly, even if you are on the no-fly list: Buy a ticket in some innocent person's name. At home, before your flight, check in online and print out your boarding pass. Then, save that web page as a PDF and use Adobe Acrobat to change the name on the boarding pass to your own. Print it again. At the airport, use the fake boarding pass and your valid ID to get through security. At the gate, use the real boarding pass in the fake name to board your flight.

Remember to vote Schneier for Secretary of Homeland Security.

One is offering change and hope to millions, defying the conventional way things are done. In response, the other makes a surprise attempt to attract the young and hip, but it comes off as just a lame imitation.

Yes, Mazda is working on an almost-electric car in a desperate move to steal some of the buzz from the Chevy Volt.

Megan McArdle on shared-space traffic control:

What are we trying to consume: actual safety, or the feeling of safety? This is a more important question than it looks like.

It's good. Read it.

In the morning, before I drive to work in my Mini Cooper, I listen to music on my iPod Mini while I milk my mini cow.

Using incentives to boost production and exploit immigrants:

The researchers responded by linking managers' pay to the daily harvest. The result was that managers started favoring the best workers rather than their own friends, and productivity rose by another 20 percent.

This is actually pretty interesting. I'd rather see it used for politicians than fruit pickers, though.

I like to say that I'm religious but not spiritual. So does Julie Burchill:

Say the word "atheist" 100 years ago and it conjured up a vision of sexy, freewheeling rebels celebrating life, love and creativity in their rejection of a higher power. Say it now and a vision of fun-hating killjoys, desperately scared that somewhere a Christian is having a good time by singing lustily in church on a Sunday morning, comes to mind.

Another botched no-knock police raid.

Yes, Evil Line is becoming the all-Bjorn Lomborg all the time channel. The latest:

In poor countries, where heart disease represents more than a quarter of the death toll, these cheap drugs are often unavailable. Spending just $200 million getting them to poor countries would avert 300,000 deaths each year. The lower burden on health systems, and the economic benefits, mean that an extra dollar spent on heart disease in a developing nation would achieve $25 worth of good.

When I started my research related (indirectly, yes, but still) to cardiovascular disease, I felt a little guilty because I thought it was a rich person's disease. That, of course, is false.

Feeling guilty about the carbon footprint of that apple that came from New Zealand? You'd feel better if it was shipped by sail:

He said CTMV had chartered five sailing ships to transport products such as Fairtrade coffee, jam and alcoholic drinks. “We are 5 per cent more expensive than standard merchant shipping companies at the moment. But we are going to build our own ships and when they enter service, we will be cheaper.”

As far as I can tell this is not a joke.

Carl Wieman, a Nobel prize winner who until recently was here at CU, has thoughts on improving undergraduate science education.

The Chevy Volt:

Next to me was a 23-year-old grad student who thought the car was historic; next to him, a 21-year-old network engineer who said he loved the car and would buy one now if he could; next to him, a 59-year-old foreman (and grandfather) who said, “I just want to be a part of this.” None of them were car people or GM people, at least not before the Volt. Glancing at the concept car on the dais, I realized I was looking at the Barack Obama of automobiles—everyone’s hope for change.

This is a good article. It's hard to paint the ninth largest corporation in the world as a plucky underdog facing one chance at redemption, but Jonathan Rauch pulls it off.

This is exactly the kind of internet rant that I don't like to link, but I haven't posted in a while, so here goes:

The Starbucks I go to is next to a Burger King, a muffler shop, a Chaldean hooka joint, a dirt cheap barber shop you could clear out instantly by shouting "La Migra!" and some sort of store front holy rolling student ministry. On a typical 102 in the shade summer day, with the 18 wheelers rolling by on their way to El Cajon, I can do with the AC blasting and some gal crooning about whatever is troubling her sensitive soul at that moment. It may not be America. I live in America and I want a place I can get away from it for 45 minutes and pretend I'm in Portland or wherever.

A person by themself is fine. It's in groups that we become cruel:

Now, you look on with all the brilliance of hindsight and say you would have done it differently. You would have called for help the moment the woman collapsed on the hospital floor. You would have pulled the man out of the street after the car hit him and other cars just passed him by.

Or would you?

The article is chilling.

In the local paper - and in the online world too, to some extent - there has been a lot of discussion about pedestrians, bikes, and cars sharing roads. Yesterday's Daily Camera editorial says you should be careful. Well, I'm in favor of apple pie too, but is there some policy change we should make in Boulder?

One letter writer to the Camera thinks the current blinking light crosswalk system is too ambiguous, and should be replaced with a standard green-yellow-red pedestrian crosswalk.

This is exactly backwards. The whole problem is the perception that pedestrians are strange and don't belong on the road, that we need to shunt them to specially marked crosswalks with giant red and white signs and blinking yellow lights. If streets are designed so pedestrians are normal and expected instead of a weird anomaly, everyone will be safer.

What you do is slow traffic down (use roundabouts if you have to), make streets part of the environment instead of a barrier, and give drivers less rather than more guidance in the form of lights, signs and signals.

If you hadn't already guessed from the length of this post, this is one of my favorite topics.

Improving education is simple. Fire bad teachers. But it turns out that simple is not easy.

William Deresiewicz can't talk to his plumber, and he blames Yale:

Because these schools tend to cultivate liberal attitudes, they leave their students in the paradoxical position of wanting to advocate on behalf of the working class while being unable to hold a simple conversation with anyone in it.

The article is a thoughtful but not very focused description of what's wrong with elite education.

The problem in China is that there are a lot more boys than girls. The solution:

Our national ability to pick up chicks will reach heights unparalleled in human history.

Self service:

Critics scornfully call such trips "religious tourism" undertaken by "vacationaries." Some blunders include a wall built on the children's soccer field at an orphanage in Brazil that had to be torn down after the visitors left. In Mexico, a church was painted six times during one summer by six different groups. In Ecuador, a church was built but never used because the community said it was not needed.

Silly Christians. They try to feed the hungry and help the poor and end up making mistakes. Better to sit at home on the couch and drink fair trade coffee.

Language Log likes to highlight strange translations. The latest one is classic - almost as good as my all-time favorite.

James Cason is the US ambassador to Paraguay. His agenda: meet with Paraguayan officials, represent US interests, negotiate trade agreements, promote cultural understanding, and release a bestselling album.

I check the arXiv fairly often to follow the most recent, cutting edge, brand new research in my field. Today there was a paper from the year 1735.

Okay, I'm a big Bjorn Lomborg fan, but this is a bit much:

I sat there throughout, mesmerised and sometimes lost for words under the gaze of the handsome, trim 43-year-old blond’s intensely sincere Danish blue eyes which never leave yours for one second.

The first two paragraphs are like this, but once you get past them this article has some good stuff. Including my favorite bit:

We tend to think in terms of absolute magnitude, so people will say, “Global warming is overall a bigger problem than micronutrition so we should deal with that first.” But what economists say is, “No. If you can spend a billion dollars and save 600,000 kids from dying and save about two billion people from being malnourished, that’s a lot better than spending the same amount to postpone global warming by about two minutes at the end of the century.”

Millions of poor people, mostly women, spend hours carrying water. And it's not even good water. Tyler Cowen wants to sell it to them instead. And he doesn't even want it to be cheap:

Carrying water on your head costs much more--in terms of both money and effort--than piped water. If you're a poor person, wouldn't you rather face a private monopolist, selling you water through pipes, than not have any water company at all? Whether we like it or not, those are the real world alternatives.

The idea here is not that greedy soulless monopolistic corporations are good, but that greedy corrupt incompetent governments are even worse.

Is the universe made of mathematics?

No. Mathematics is made of the universe. Next question?

There's a more serious discussion of this at the Secret Blogging Seminar. I'm gratified to see that Terence Tao agrees with me. If he didn't, I would of course change my opinion, but luckily I don't have to do that.

After we get rid of bumper stickers, we should go after road signs:

When you’ve trained people to drive according to the signs, you need to keep adding more signs to tell them exactly when and in what fashion they need to adjust their behavior. Otherwise, drivers may see no reason why they should slow down on a curve in the rain.

Give that guy with the "Visualize World Peace" bumper sticker a little extra space:

Drivers of cars with bumper stickers, window decals, personalized license plates and other "territorial markers" not only get mad when someone cuts in their lane or is slow to respond to a changed traffic light, but they are far more likely than those who do not personalize their cars to use their vehicles to express rage -- by honking, tailgating and other aggressive behavior.

Want public policies that help the poor? Promote globalization and lower the minimum wage.

I like Oregon, but at least here in Colorado my health insurance doesn't threaten to kill me:

After her oncologist prescribed a cancer drug that could slow the cancer growth and extend her life, Wagner was notified that the Oregon Health Plan wouldn’t cover the treatment, but that it would cover palliative, or comfort, care, including, if she chose, doctor-assisted suicide.

One of the problems with physician-assisted suicide is that it leads to creepy financial incentives. After all, a dead patient is cheaper than a live one.

The 2008 Copenhagen Consensus is out. The most cost-effective way to make the world a better place is vitamin and mineral supplements for the world's poor:

The cost is $60 million per year, yielding benefits in health and cognitive development of over $1 billion.

Number two is free trade, number seven is expanded access to education for women. At the bottom of the list, at number thirty, is global warming:

Nobelist and University of Maryland economist Thomas Schelling noted that part of the reason for the low ranking is that spending $75 billion on cutting greenhouses gases would achieve almost nothing. In fact, the climate change analysis presented to the panel found that spending $800 billion until 2100 would yield just $685 billion in climate change benefits.

I'm a big fan of the Copenhagen Consensus, at least the idea of it if not always the conclusions. Turning human misery into numbers seems a bit heartless, but it can turn our attention away from the sexy topics that bother us rich Americans and toward more mundane but truly life-saving possibilities.

I guess if you have one of those "No blood for oil" bumper stickers you can't enter this contest.

47:36. I met my goal pretty easily, and it's certainly better than last time.

Keep the riff-raff out:

Districts from Florida to California are hiring private investigators, creating anonymous tip lines and imposing penalties when they believe people have registered at false addresses. The measures often are spurred by parents who feel they pay a premium in property taxes to get their children into good schools.

Because heaven forbid that the public school you paid so much money for would be, well, public.

The science and ethics of meat:

Despite the eagerness of the food industry to exploit these concerns with a full range of "correct" meats (organic, cruelty-free, local, even soy-based), the result has been a confusing cacophony of choices whose benefits—to health, to the animals, to the planet—are hard to discern. Is, say, a Tofurky burger made from organic soybeans grown in Argentina really that much better? Is it still ethical, even, to eat grass-fed beef when the worldwide supply of sustainable pastureland is so small that only the rich can afford it?

Alan Jacobs, my undergrad English professor, makes fun of everyone's favorite linguist:

Stephen Pinker actually thinks that the dignity assumed by tyrants is the same thing that Kass et al. are writing about. What a shock Pinker will receive when, someday, he opens a dictionary and discovers that some words have more than one meaning.

I actually like Pinker, but he probably deserves this.

Your cartoon for the day.

Apparently my prestigious institution wants to hire a chair of "Conservative Thought and Policy":

The University of Colorado is considering a $9 million program to bring high-profile political conservatives to teach on the left-leaning Boulder campus.

My favorite response is from Colorado's own anti-immigration zealot Tom Tancredo, who is "proposing a 20-foot-high fence around the border of the university’s Boulder campus." Keep out the undocumented students, I guess. Slightly more serious commentary from Ilya Somin.

I have two thoughts.

One. Lack of political diversity is actually a problem for universities. There is a systematic bias in the academy; of course it's mostly self-selection, but self-selection also explains the lack of women in math, and that's certainly not a good thing. CU would be a better and richer institution if it had more conservative faculty.

Two. This way of addressing the problem is just silly.

Seth Stevenson on procrastination:

You will dabble at the crossword for a while. Later, you might get a yogurt. Eventually, you'll start reading pointless crap on the Internet. You see, you're doing it as we speak! Because: You are lazy.

The fear tax is expensive:

The journal Tourism Economics gives the predictable answer: "The perception that U.S. visa and entry policies do not welcome international visitors is the largest factor in the decline of overseas travelers." Two-thirds of survey respondents worried about being detained for hours because of a misstatement to immigration officials. And here is the ultimate irony: "More respondents were worried about U.S. immigration officials (70 percent) than about crime or terrorism (54 percent) when considering a trip to the country."

And it doesn't make us safer. Vote Bruce Schneier for Secretary of Homeland Security.

The Boston Celtics are, so far, doing well against the Cleveland Cavaliers. Stephen Dubner explains, with this final paragraph:

But maybe, just maybe, some kid somewhere in America this morning has decided to spend a little less time working on his jump shot and a bit more time working on his math skills.

Wikipedia is a waste of time. But compare it to television:

So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project--every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in--that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it's a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it's the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.

And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads.

Rising food prices could be helped by free trade. There's some debate about this, of course, so if you're interested start clicking on links here.

Building an atheist church.

Happy Earth Day.

Should you hand wash or use the dishwasher? Dishwasher, probably.

How do we get people to drive less? Charge by the mile for insurance.

How do we satisfy the energy needs of a growing population without destroying the environment? Nuclear power.

I'm really glad that Sholto Byrnes, in his profile of Bishop N.T. Wright, helped us poor helpless readers see that Wright is a far right-wing neoconservative nut, by pointing out that he "declares war on militant atheists and liberals", that he "would like to see nothing less than an end to the Enlightenment split between religion and politics", that his "views come across as hardline, explicit and specific, verging on the fundamentalist". I especially needed the unsourced assessment from "a senior lay Catholic" saying "He is mad, you know". If some random Catholic said it, it must be true.

You see, if Byrnes hadn't pointed all that out in his commentary, Wright's words and actions from the article might have given me a different impression. Things like this:

A year and a half ago a group of evangelical leaders threatened the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, with a revolt unless he created a parallel structure so their churches could bypass the authority of liberal bishops. The rebels included the pugnacious Bishop of Rochester, Michael Nazir-Ali, but not Tom Wright. He condemned their demands as "arrogant and self-serving", "unbiblical" and "a covenant with chaos".

And this:

When we continue to talk about the Eighties and I suggest the left-wing view of Margaret Thatcher's policies was not just that they were wrong, but that they were immoral, he cuts in. "They were wicked. Yup."

And this:

Wright identifies global debt as "the dirty enormous scandal of glitzy, glossy western capitalism" that must be corrected. To those who think that "taking the Bible seriously meant being conservative politically as well as theologically", he says: "The truth is very different."

And this:

Wright's belief in the Resurrection also provides an injunction to be green; it is this earth, after all, that is going to be remade. "If it is true that the whole world is now God's holy land, we must not rest as long as that land is spoiled and defaced," he writes. "This is not an 'extra' to the Church's mission. It is central."

And finally, this:

"Public discourse needs to catch up with the fact," he sighs, "that doing God in public is not about someone kneeling down and saying their prayers, and God saying, 'Go and bomb Iraq.'"

Seriously, did Byrnes even read his own article?

More on biofuels, from Popular Science. A while ago they were going to save the world, yesterday they were a terrible evil that would make the world starve, now they're maybe good again. I'm so confused.

Nick Paumgarten on elevators:

The elevator, underrated and overlooked, is to the city what paper is to reading and gunpowder is to war. Without the elevator, there would be no verticality, no density, and, without these, none of the urban advantages of energy efficiency, economic productivity, and cultural ferment. The population of the earth would ooze out over its surface, like an oil slick, and we would spend even more time stuck in traffic or on trains, traversing a vast carapace of concrete.

This is one of those articles that you look at and think, "No way I have time to read this," and then you start it, and then an hour of your life is gone forever. Don't say I didn't warn you.

Lenore Skenazy gives her nine-year-old twenty bucks and a subway ticket. Then she leaves him:

We become so bent out of shape over something as simple as letting your children out of sight on the playground that it starts seeming on par with letting them play on the railroad tracks at night. In the rain. In dark non-reflective coats.

The problem with this everything-is-dangerous outlook is that over-protectiveness is a danger in and of itself. A child who thinks he can’t do anything on his own eventually can’t.

Discipline in one area is discipline everywhere:

People who stick to an exercise program for two months report reducing their impulsive spending, junk food intake, alcohol use and smoking. They also study more, watch less television and do more housework.

If you're poor, you don't try to get a job because a job actually won't help you that much. You've got so many problems that fixing one of them doesn't help:

If, for example, our car has several dents on it, and then we get one more, we're far less likely to get that one fixed than if the car was pristine before.

The solution is to just give the poor cash, instead of all this job training and drug counseling and education.

Vaccinate your kids:

The unvaccinated 7-year-old boy, who had rash onset 12 days after returning to the United States, infected at least 11 additional children ranging in age from 10 months to 9 years. Four were infected in the pediatrician's office that the child had visited the day before he was taken to a hospital emergency department for high fever and generalized rash. Another two cases were the boy's siblings, while five attended his school.

The 2008 Abel Prize winners are John Griggs Thompson and Jacques Tits. Apparently they were involved (Thompson more so) in the classification of finite simple groups. I'd never heard of them, since I don't know anything about group theory, but it's still my duty to spread the news of mathematical accomplishments as widely as possible.

Microloans miss the middle.

I just finished reading Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell, in which he pleads for a more careful scientific study of religion. An article in the Economist looks at just that. The brain scan studies are completely worthless, but I like the game theory approach that looks at group cooperation:

The splendour of a peacock's tail and the throaty roar of a stag really do show which males are fittest, and thus help females choose. Similarly, signs of religious commitment that are hard to fake provide a costly and reliable signal to others in a group that anyone engaging in them is committed to that group. Free-riders, in other words, would not be able to gain the advantages of group membership.

A writeup of a related study, on the ever-present problem of cooperation in the Prisoner's Dilemma, is here.

I'm going to do the same thing I did last year and stop reading blogs for Lent. It will be good for me, and I'm sure my audience will survive. Check back in about 40 days.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again. It's not about talent, it's about hard work:

Epiphany has little to do with either creativity or innovation. Instead, innovation is a slow process of accretion, building small insight upon interesting fact upon tried-and-true process.

Lots of creative people report going to bed thinking about something and waking up with an insight. I make a point of not thinking about stuff for an hour or so before bed. I'm sure this decreases my stress and improves my quality of life, but does it make me less creative?

Eliminate cafeteria trays to reduce waste. It's a little bit of a hassle, I suppose, but it beats eating dirt.

Walter Kirn on multitasking:

“Where do you want to go today?” was really manipulative advice, not an open question. “Go somewhere now,” it strongly recommended, then go somewhere else tomorrow, but always go, go, go—and with our help. But did any rebel reply, “Nowhere. I like it fine right here”? Did anyone boldly ask, “What business is it of yours?” Was anyone brave enough to say, “Frankly, I want to go back to bed”?

This article is quite entertaining. I would make more witty comments about it, but I just got a text message.

The perils of good intentions:

The highest level of assurance that a property owner will not face an E.S.A. issue is to maintain the property in a condition such that protected species cannot occupy the property.

Global warming is my fault.

Steven Pinker on morality:

Though voluntary conservation may be one wedge in an effective carbon-reduction pie, the other wedges will have to be morally boring, like a carbon tax and new energy technologies, or even taboo, like nuclear power and deliberate manipulation of the ocean and atmosphere. Our habit of moralizing problems, merging them with intuitions of purity and contamination, and resting content when we feel the right feelings, can get in the way of doing the right thing.

It's long, but Pinker is a good writer and the mix of biology, philosophy, and even a little game theory make it worth your time. Another excerpt:

The moral sense, we are learning, is as vulnerable to illusions as the other senses. It is apt to confuse morality per se with purity, status and conformity. It tends to reframe practical problems as moral crusades and thus see their solution in punitive aggression. It imposes taboos that make certain ideas indiscussible. And it has the nasty habit of always putting the self on the side of the angels.

A positive, but pretty lukewarm, take on microcredit:

Though its users avoid the kind of intimidation employed by moneylenders, microcredit could not work without similar incentives. The lender does not demand collateral, but if you can’t pay your share of the group loan, your fellow borrowers will come and take your TV.

Even after explaining, convincingly, all the ways microcredit doesn't work as advertised, Boudreaux and Cowen still come away saying it's a good thing.

Also from the making-the-world-better department, consider this profile of Norman Borlaug:

If he'd killed someone instead of saving hundreds of millions of lives, then they'd have been interested.

It's worth noting that "hundreds of millions" may not be an exaggeration here.

William Poundstone says our voting system is the worst of all possibilities. I had been a fan of the instant runoff, but this interview has persuaded me that approval voting may be better. Either one is an improvement over the current system.

And, in case you didn't already know, touch-screen voting is risky at best.

The Edge question for 2008 is up. They ask people what they've changed their mind about, which is a great question.

My favorite responses are from Stewart Brand, who says that they don't make stuff like they used to, which is a good thing, and Sherry Turkle who says - well, just read hers, it's good.

The theme I've caught this year is a certain disillusionment with science. Rebecca Goldstein argues that falsifiability is not that important, and Irene Pepperberg is against hypothesis testing. With just those two, the scientific method is crumbling. Add in two shocking realizations, one from Colin Tudge who no longer thinks science is omnipotent and the other from Ken Ford who has figured out that sometimes scientists do bad things. Also in this category is Karl Sabbagh, who doubts the value of expert opinion, and Rupert Sheldrake, who makes the broader and valuable point that skepticism is never from a neutral point of view, and is never an unqualified good thing.

I appreciate the people who make a focused point rather than a broad philosophical statement. Unfortunately, these people are relatively few. Lisa Randall talks about neutrino mixing, and Helena Cronin discusses how differences in variance rather than in mean explain the over representation of men in the sciences.

Keith Devlin argues that math is socially constructed rather than some manifestation of absolute truth; I agree, of course. Finally, we have Daniel Gilbert, who says being able to change your mind is maybe not a good thing, and makes a connection to love and romance.