1.21 Gigawatts!

Wouldn't it be nice?

2007-03-06T14:23:00.000-05:00

If a tax on gasoline consumption led directly to a reduction in global warming. That a policy instrument as elegant as that (often referred to as a Pigouvian Tax) probably wouldn't work should be self-evident. From Alex Tabarrok:

The result is a simple application of the theory of tax incidence. The burden of a tax falls on those who can least afford to escape the tax. The world's demand for oil is inelastic but the supply is even more inelastic. What is Saudi Arabia, for example, going to do with its oil except sell it? The oil is already fetching a price well above cost so if there is a world tax on oil that's like a tax on land - Saudi Arabian land to be precise - and a tax on land is born by land owners not by consumers.

More here. He doesn't mention, moreover, that the marginal cost of consumption (in terms pollution) is most likely higher in less developed countries because they are least likely to have developed or atleast be using relatively more efficient technologies.

2007-03-06T12:38:00.000-05:00

Facebook Infomercial Parody

So true.

[HT: Karisa (yes, she is a Facebook friend)]

Yay Baseball season!

2007-03-03T15:37:00.000-05:00

"Daisuke is the pitching master!" said Boston Globe baseball columnist Bob Ryan, hopping from one foot to the other as he described videotape footage of Matsuzaka's otherworldly pitching power and control banishing a flock of evil, conniving, left-handed-batting carp-spirits to the netherworld during a 2003 Seibu Lions game. "His Ultimate Galactic Dragon Gyroball Pitch Power Explosion breaks three feet inside before cutting sharply toward the dugout, where falsehood and cowardice are forced to shrink before it!"

Rest of the story here.

Matt Drudge as the Long Tail?

2007-03-01T18:19:00.000-05:00

This piece on ABCNews.com (by Michael Malone) takes an honest and humiliating look at what exactly is news, and who should be the ones purveying it. This section grabbed me:

We are in a perpetual race to get to the news as early as possible....The result is a behavior that I can only describe as "surfing upstream". That is, we surf the cable stations on television even as we race around the net, trying to capture the latest update the instant it appears.

...The problem is that in going this far up the news cycle, we are also usually by-passing all of the standard intermediators that we normally depend upon to do our filtering for us... Needless to say, that's led to a lot of disenchantment with the traditional media. And rightly so.
Yet, by surfing ever further upstream, we go past not only analysis to news to breaking news, but all of the way to the raw information streaming off the event in real time.... Downstream, in the world of long, leisurely feature stories and news analysis, the current is wide and slow and fairly predictable. But up at the source, information and data is blasting out of spillway like an immense firehose; all is confusion, energy and chaos.
Most of have neither the time nor the inclination to navigate against this torrent; yet, that is precisely where most of us want to be. The result is a paradox, and one that is rapidly destroying traditional media.
Put simply: we want the news as it happens, but we also want it to be intermediated by some sort of objective, professional news filter. The Internet, cell phones and digital cameras have gotten us unprecedentedly close to the real-time unfolding of news events around the world. But only rudimentary institutions - notably the blogosphere — have yet appeared to deal with the problem of filtration. Thus, our current behavior: channel surfing cable news, dropping into places like the Drudge Report fifteen times per day, and bouncing around the Web to the blogs we trust the most.

I think that's about right. [HT to (who else?) Matt Drudge]

"Please be sure to answer all questions."

2007-03-01T14:29:00.000-05:00

Oscar predictions

2007-02-25T16:50:00.000-05:00

3 hours or so til showtime. We'll see if I'm correct.

Best Picture: The Departed
Director: Martin Scorsese (The Departed)
Best Actor: Forest Whitaker (The Last King of Scotland)
Best Actress: Helen Mirren (The Queen)
Supporting Actor: Eddie Murphy (Dreamgirls)
Supporting Actress: Jennifer Hudson (Dreamgirls)

Sources of my predictions here.

Just thought I'd let you know

2007-02-22T17:01:00.000-05:00

In Atlanta today

You said it

2007-02-22T16:49:00.000-05:00

From Dana Stevens' Oscar predictions dialogue on Slate:

Best documentary: An Inconvenient Truth. This is a little unfortunate, given that it's the only doc in the category that doesn't need the word-of-mouth boost at the box office. But wouldn't it be a blast to see Al Gore step up and accept that award while the Hollywood establishment solemnly applauded the planet? Yay, globe! Sorry about that whole warming thing. [Emphasis mine]

Are movie critics becoming even more cynical? Is that even possible?

All good things shall pass: Eddie Murphy edition

2007-02-20T23:00:00.001-05:00

It probably isn't possible for a single movie to reverse all social progress made since the civil-rights era, but Norbit, the latest broadside from Eddie Murphy, does its best to turn back the clock. There's enough material here to add another hour to Spike Lee's "reel of shame" in Bamboozled.

--Scott Tobias, review of "Norbit," The Onion A.V. Club

Rotten Tomatoes has the movie at a solid 9%. Eddie Murphy is still a clear favorite to win Best Supporting Actor for his role in Dreamgirls. My guess is the more people who see Norbit, the less this will be true.

Chomsky meets Schoolhouse Rock

2007-02-15T23:21:00.000-05:00

"Pirates and Emperors." This is an animated video criticizing aspects of the US's foreign policy, inspired by the writing of Noam Chomsky. Agree or disagree, it's a pretty catchy tune.

"...cause there are pirates and emperors, but they're really the same thing..."

As you can imagine, the usual suspects make appearances: like Noriega, Hussein, Superman, and so on.

[HT: EspressoPundit]

2007-02-15T18:37:00.000-05:00

Team America II: The Invasion of Bonnaroo

The Police's announcement of a reunion tour, including a stop at Bonnaroo, reminded me of a highlight of last year's festival.

In the late afternoon, on the main stage before Radiohead came on, Beck gave one of his usually energetic, novel, and unserious performances. This time, as you may have seen on SNL, his band was accompanied by 1.5 ft. puppet replicas of the band members themselves--complete with the same outfits and instrument motions.

This is a video that played about half way through their set, about five puppets lost in the middle of Tennessee.

2007-02-15T01:06:00.000-05:00

Pi - The Music Video

By Hard'n Phirm. By the way, the song is exactly 3:14 long.

A Day with Chris Thile and Edgar Meyer

2007-02-14T01:36:00.000-05:00

A few weeks ago, in a semi-semester tradition, Emory's music department hosted a reknowned musician or group to be the Coca-Cola Artists-in-Residence. Chris Thile (mandolin) and Edgar Meyer (upright bass).

As part of their stay, they usually do some kind of master classes, performance clinics, and finally a formal performance in Emerson Hall. Though I don't take playing guitar very seriously, I thought it would be a unique opportunity to get into the head of modern virtuosos.

Chris Thile you may know as the mandolin player for Nickel Creek, and more recently the How to Grow a Band. Everyone from Sam Bush to Bela Fleck sing high praises about this kid (he's only 26). Edgar Meyer is a regular collaborator with Bela, and has recorded muktiple times with the likes of Mike Marshall, Alison Krauss, and Yo-Yo Ma. Their performance to a packed house that night was the kind of dedication to an instrument that only comes at the expense of indulging less vigorous interests.

A couple pointers Chris and Edgar made that afternoon:

1. Picking is not the most efficient way to get sound from a string: a bow is. So you should keep that in mind in creating dynamics with a pick.

2. The "correct" way to hold a pick is that which economizes motion.

3. Nobody has really explored the technique of picking. It's sort of an afterthought, and even though some people do it well, few focus much energy figuring it out.

4. Part of being good at an instrument is playing the one that is most appropriate for your body size/structure.

5. Both the bass and mandolin, properly speaking are rather underexplored instruments. That is, there are no timeless etude books written specifically for either (especially mandolin), but rather they borrow heavily from violin and guitar. As such, this leaves both open to innovate more freely and achieve new levels of skill then say on violin. As Edgar put it: "I don't have to worry about waking up tomorrow and some 8-year-old Korean kid being better than me."

6. Audience member: "How do you avoid injury when you have to play several hours a day, every day?" Chris: "Look, this is what I do. If you play a couple hours at the end of the day and are sore, it's cause you spent eight hours doing non-music stuff. This is my eight-hours-a-day responsibility and I would probably get sore typing."

(A week later, we were fortunate to host singer Jon Hendricks. In April, we will have Dizzy Gillespie alum and nine-time Grammy nominee Kenny Barron).

Will the real Ayn Rand please stand up?

2007-02-14T01:00:00.000-05:00

[Ayn] Rand’s own choices seem less the product of a self-reliant woman comfortable accepting her own desires, and more the genuine confusion of a girl who refused to grow out of emotional adolescence. When Rand sensed that her lover’s attention might be directed elsewhere, she responded by writing a flurry of “papers” analyzing [Nathaniel Branden's] psychology in Objectivist terms. Branden, always the good disciple, responded with equally solemn “papers” that were equally beside the point – until he finally delivered one that attempted to explain, in “rational” terms, why he was no longer sexually attracted to a sixty-one-year-old woman.

[From "Randy Girls – Adolescent females love Ayn Rand – wonder why?" by Amy Benfer]

What is health care like?

2007-02-14T00:27:00.000-05:00

Somehow, health insurance has become a social fetish. I could travel to the far reaches of the globe, and almost everywhere I would find merchants where my credit is good and my dollars are welcome. But here at home, trying to enter a local hospital with nothing but a wad of cash and a credit card would be like urinating on the sidewalk.

[From "The Five Big Questions about Health Care" by Arnold Kling]

Inequality Fades (in three charts)

2007-02-13T15:40:00.000-05:00

[From Chapter 1 of the 2007 Index of Economic Freedom]

You've Been So Helpful -- Thanks!

2007-02-13T00:42:00.000-05:00

Thug teen: I wanna take out this fuckin' book.
Librarian: Okay, well, go to the check-out desk.
Thug teen: I got to go to the other fuckin' desk, mothafuckah?
Librarian: Yeah, motherfucker. The other fuckin' desk.

--overheard at the Brooklyn Library

From awkward freshmen to fake news anchor fresh

2007-02-05T21:44:00.000-05:00

I looked like a Peanuts character. Peanuts characters had terrible acne. But what I lacked in looks I made up for with a repugnant personality.
In 1981 I lost my virginity, only to gain it back again on appeal in 1983. You could say that my one saving grace was academics where I excelled, but I did not.

(From Jon Stewart's 2004 William & Mary Commencement Address)

Prince Reigns Supreme

2007-02-05T04:15:00.000-05:00

I may have been the only one in my Super Bowl gathering that wasn't ironically hypnotized by Prince's performance, but sincerely so. As Haahnster has pointed out, Prince probably doesn't get enough credit for his incendiary guitar playing, probably in part because it is consistently overshadowed by his theatrical on-stage presence.

Kalefa Sanneh registers her early edition thoughts at the New York Times. She basically mirrors my thoughts, but goes one step further to point out, that at age 48 Prince has defied becoming a novelty, having made "that familiar journey from pariah to American treasure."

UPDATE: Apparently Yahoo! Sports' Dan Wetzel was not as impressed.

UPDATE 2: The AP weighs in on the "is he?/he couldn't be" aspect of Prince's Cirque de Soleil-like phallic shadow dance. To begin, I thought that was intentional and more to the point, I was under the impression that it went without saying. Everyone around me while watching seemed to get it; but it may be solely to our uncontrollable instinct to snicker at public mention of sexuality. But come on, it's the Purple One--do we not think he knows what he's doing (atleast along these lines)? And shouldn't we expect this as a minimum...from the guy who brought us "Darling Nikki" and "Pussy Control?"

Stephen Colbert's reaction may be the best so far: "'They knew that they were dealing with a lustful, pansexual rock 'n' roll deviant,' said Colbert, who joked that the sheet hid (not enhanced) Prince's 'demonic guitar phallus.'"

With Teeth

2007-01-29T14:01:00.000-05:00

Apparently the breakout hit of this year's Sundance Film Festival is Teeth, about a girl with choppers in her vagina.

It sold for $2.5 million.

John Stossel on "Uncle Milton"

2007-01-24T21:01:00.000-05:00

Monday is Milton Friedman Day.

His interests were not narrowly focused on economics. He pointed out the folly of the government's so-called "war on drugs." His ideas helped create the school-voucher movement. And when the Vietnam war raged in the 1960s and early 1970s, no one argued more eloquently for ending the draft, and he helped bring about the all-volunteer army.

More on Milton Friedman Day here.

[HT: Carpe Diem]

Elevator of Death

2007-01-24T12:30:00.000-05:00

I've got this elevator at work that likes to scare the shit out of me frmo time to time. It rattles and shimmies. Soemtimes the doors don't open. Sometimes it almost crashes through the roof. When I step on the elevator from my [32nd], it sometimes drops a good inch or so. Freaky shit.

Here's some interesting info on elevator and escalator-related deaths and injuries:

Incidents involving elevators and escalators kill about 30 and seriously injure about 17,100 people each year in the United States, according to data provided by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Consumer Product Safety Commission. Injuries to people working on or near elevators – including those installing, repairing, and maintaining elevators, and working in or near elevator shafts – account for 14- 15 (almost half) of the deaths. The two major causes of death are falls and being caught in/between moving parts of elevators/escalators. Incidents where workers are in or on elevators or platforms that collapse, are struck by elevators or counterweights, or are electrocuted are also numerous.

People save less in light of nuclear threat

2007-01-24T08:38:00.000-05:00

Well, duh. An economist posits that the U.S.'s notoriously low savings rate may be due to the risk of nuclear annihilation.

The hypothesis of this article is that the performance and, in particular, the rate of saving in the postwar U.S. economy has been influenced by the changes in the public perception of the threat of a catastrophic nuclear war. An increased threat shortens the expected horizon of individuals, and thus reduces their willingness to postpone present consumption in favor of investment. The hypothesis is tested by expanding a standard savings function estimation technique to include a measure of the perceived threat of nuclear war.

More here.

[HT: Greg Mankikw]

Why (most) CEOs deserve what they are paid

2007-01-23T23:49:00.000-05:00

Thomas Sowell explains what he calls "The 'Greed' Fallacy."

What price nostalgia?

2007-01-22T22:01:00.000-05:00

When will trade protectionists get the lesson: industries change and disappear. EspressoPundit has a succinct and eloquent elegy on the people and companies that will no longer exist:

Time's Running Out

This just in from Time magazine.

Time Inc., the country's largest magazine publisher, spent the morning telling hundreds of staffers their jobs were being eliminated -- in its latest and largest yet round of staff cuts -- for the company's good.

Meanwhile, the sale of the LA Times is going badly. An analysts on Public Radio's "Market Place" was asked to describe the auction last night and simply said "Ouch!"

We learned in high school that industries become obsolete and disapear--bugy whip makers, milk men and movie theater ushers are gone. The Oldmobile went the way of the Nash, but no one seemed to realize the speed with which the internet would wipe out businesses and indeed entire professions. Tower Record's business model became obsolete and it folded. My kids have never seen a "Record Store." Travel agents are nearly gone. Call a broker to buy stock? Give me a break.

Just as I marvel that a man in a green truck used to bring milk to my door each morning, my children will marvel that a someone used to bring a 5 pound stack of paper to our door step at 5:00 every morning.

I don't know what will surprise them more, that I paid to buy it, or that