48:25. It's just a little bit worse than last year, so I'm just a little bit disappointed. I started out way too fast.

The new Honda Insight:

And the sound is worse. The Honda’s petrol engine is a much-shaved, built-for-economy, low-friction 1.3 that, at full chat, makes a noise worse than someone else’s crying baby on an airliner. It’s worse than the sound of your parachute failing to open. Really, to get an idea of how awful it is, you’d have to sit a dog on a ham slicer.

This is the most entertaining car review I've read in a while.

In 1937, researchers did a comprehensive survey of a group of Harvard sophomores, with the goal of continuing to follow them throughout life. The study is still going, and its long-term nature provides results that are hard to find in more standard social science research. For example:

The Harvard data illustrate this phenomenon well. In 1946, for example, 34 percent of the Grant Study men who had served in World War II reported having come under enemy fire, and 25 percent said they had killed an enemy. In 1988, the first number climbed to 40 percent—and the second fell to about 14 percent. “As is well known,” Vaillant concluded, “with the passage of years, old wars become more adventurous and less dangerous.”

Mark Oppenheimer is a good atheist with a Jewish background. His daughter is surprising him:

Until we begin, Rebekah is in a state of heightened, fidgety anticipation—and after we begin, she is happy, happy, happy. She loves the songs, loves babbling along with the few Hebrew words she has almost memorized, and especially loves marching around the room with a plushy stuffed Torah. Synagogue, along with Monday gym class and her daily DVD viewing of a trippy mid-1970s children's show that her mother loved as a child, is one of Rebekah's favorite rituals.

A town in Germany with (almost) no cars:

Street parking, driveways and home garages are generally forbidden in this experimental new district on the outskirts of Freiburg, near the French and Swiss borders. Vauban’s streets are completely “car-free” — except the main thoroughfare, where the tram to downtown Freiburg runs

The article mentions play dates, and IKEA, and shops, but not commuting to work, which seems like a pretty big omission.

Francis Fukuyama reviews two books on the problems with development in Africa:

Natural resources, whether diamonds or oil or timber, have quickly turned into a curse, because they greatly raise the stakes of the political struggle. Ethnicity and tribe, social constructs of often dubious historical provenance, have been exploited by political leaders in their quests for power. The advent of democracy has not changed the aims of politics but simply shifted the method of struggle. Only thus can we explain a phenomenon like Nigeria, which took in some $300 billion in oil revenues over a generation and yet saw declining per capita income during that same period.

Also note this interesting piece, arguing that you should support small, and only small, NGOs.

Apparently it's almost impossible to fire a public school teacher in LA:

The district wanted to fire a high school teacher who kept a stash of pornography, marijuana and vials with cocaine residue at school, but a commission balked, suggesting that firing was too harsh.

Last week my housemates and me had a taste-test party. We found that our test subjects had difficulty telling store-brand cola from Coke, could not at all tell sugar Coke from corn syrup Coke, could not tell Evian apart from tap water, but could easily tell the difference between 3.2% ABW beer and the same beer at full strength.

We didn't test if our guests could tell pâté from dog food, but luckily some scientists have done it for us:

Newman's Own dog food was prepared with a food processor to have the texture and appearance of a liver mousse. In a double-blind test, subjects were presented with five unlabeled blended meat products, one of which was the prepared dog food [...] subjects were not better than random at correctly identifying the dog food.