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.

Corporal punishment at a school in South Carolina:

According to school statistics, referrals to the principal's office have dropped 80 percent since 2006. So far this school year, there's been fewer than 50. "I've had parents say 'thank you for doing this'," says fifth-grade teacher Devada Kimsey. "And look at the behavior charts now—there's nothing on them."

Saving Africa. Or improving your corporate image. But hey, it's better than nothing.

This piece on global warming is full of quotable, uncomfortable lines. So I'm going to repeat all of them. First:

If you decline to write your own check while insisting that to save the world we must ditch the carbon, you are just burdening your already sooty soul with another ton of self-righteous hypocrisy. And you can’t possibly afford what it will cost to forgive that.

And then this:

Ostensibly green antinuclear activists unwittingly boosted U.S. coal consumption by about 400 million tons per year. The United States would be in compliance with the Kyoto Protocol today if we could simply undo their handiwork and conjure back into existence the nuclear plants that were in the pipeline in nuclear power’s heyday.

And this:

The oil nasties will celebrate the green war on carbon as enthusiastically as the coal industry celebrated the green war on uranium 30 years ago.

And finally, the conclusion:

Green plants currently pump 15 to 20 times as much carbon out of the atmosphere as humanity releases into it—that’s the pump that put all that carbon underground in the first place, millions of years ago. At present, almost all of that plant-captured carbon is released back into the atmosphere within a year or so by animal consumers. North America, however, is currently sinking almost two-thirds of its carbon emissions back into prairies and forests that were originally leveled in the 1800s but are now recovering. For the next 50 years or so, we should focus on promoting better land use and reforestation worldwide.

For Earth Day, some thoughts about crop yields, environmental impact, and genetic engineering.

About one percent of the stimulus package is allocated for high-speed rail. Christopher Beam says we should go directly for super-fast Japan-style trains:

Eventually, the United States could have a countrywide network of bona fide bullet trains. And as Obama likes to reiterate, no one said this would be easy. But upgrading our existing rail lines to support slightly faster trains doesn't bring that future any closer. In fact, it may postpone it. Instead of spending money making small upgrades to a flawed system, the government might get more mileage, so to speak, by starting from scratch.

But S.E. Kramer says exactly the opposite.

I wanted to link this, about sex selection and abortion in China, but didn't know what to say about it. I still don't know what to say about it, so that's all.

What you missed over the last forty-odd days:

How sailing works, explained by a mathematician. This article was the first time I understood tacking against the wind.

Think humans are successful because of our brains? Nope, it's our running ability.

Professors publish too much useless research and don't teach enough.

A profile of the man who oversaw a miraculous turnaround in the Indian railway system:

Every year, Indians take 5.4 billion train trips, 7 million per day in suburban Mumbai alone. New Delhi Station sees daily transit of 350,000 passengers, which is roughly five times more than New York’s LaGuardia Airport, and enough to make Grand Central look like Mayberry Junction. The railways’ total track mileage rivals the length of the entire U.S. Interstate Highway system, even though the United States is three times the size of India. Among human resource problems, the railways of India are an Everest. Its employees outnumber Wal-Mart’s by a figure comparable to the population of Pittsburgh. The world’s only larger employer is the People’s Liberation Army of China.

The plan of action seems to have been this: First, hire a supremely competent deputy. Second, drink tea and watch TV.

Five myths about prison, with this refreshing conclusion:

We need to focus less on high-profile drug statutes and more on the ways small-fry drug convictions cause later crimes to result in longer sentences. Once we start admitting fewer people to prison, we should shift money from prisons to police. If this seems like tinkering, rather than a sweeping fix, that's because it is.

It's only February, but I'm already prepared to give out the Evil Line award for best sportswriting of 2009. A taste:

It is in basketball where the problems are most likely to be in the game — where the player, in his play, faces choices between maximizing his own perceived self-interest and winning. The choices are sufficiently complex that there is a fair chance he doesn’t fully grasp that he is making them.

Taking a bad shot when you don’t need to is only the most obvious example. A point guard might selfishly give up an open shot for an assist. You can see it happen every night, when he’s racing down court for an open layup, and instead of taking it, he passes it back to a trailing teammate. The teammate usually finishes with some sensational dunk, but the likelihood of scoring nevertheless declined. “The marginal assist is worth more money to the point guard than the marginal point,” Morey says.

I found it hard to get a quote that did this article justice. Do yourself a favor and go read it, even if you don't like basketball or math. But especially if you're like me and enjoy both.

The economy's bad, but it's not that bad: a lesson in using graphs.

Some physicists at UT Austin claim to have invented a way to incinerate nuclear waste while producing power. I'm skeptical, just because of what they named it. The Super X Divertor? Really?