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.