In the years since the Cold War, the threat of imminent global thermonuclear war has receded in the popular imagination. Computer hackers are buying up abandoned missile silos. It’s been almost a decade since a major Hollywood film revolved around a U.S.-Russian nuclear exchange. But that doesn’t mean deterrence has succeeded in finally staving off nuclear war. Stanford University Professor Emeritus Martin Hellman, comparing his love of gliders with his interest in nuclear deterrence, wants to remind you that when a system is 99.9 percent safe but the remaining 0.1 percent contains an absolutely catastrophic outcome, it’s not a great system. Sound familiar?
Social psychologist Malcolm Klein devised a test for Los Angeles that he says predicts how likely a child is to join a gang, reports the Wall Street Journal. The test, which can be found here in its entirely, asks kids questions like whether they have just broken up with a boyfriend or girlfriend and how many of their friends have used marijuana. The problem: the city won’t know for several years if the predictions are accurate.
A website called sellyourgoldteeth.com; among rappers, a sudden interest in cubic zirconia; and an auction of storied hip-hop jewelery canceled for lack of potential buyers: the Wall Street Journal reports on how the recession is damaging bling culture. (Whatever happened to Roland Fryer‘s paper that was to be called “Bling-Bling”)
We’ve written before about the occasional hyper-critical comments on certain blogs, but such comments are like valentines compared to what some Amazon.com customers heap upon The Rolling Stones, The Godfather, The Dairy of Anne Frank, and other standards. The Cynical-C blog lists the most caustic of these every day.
That’s what Obi-Wan Kenobi really said in Star Wars (1977), according to AMC’s list of famous film misquotes, not the popular variant, which is properly attributed to Han Solo. The list also includes famous quotes that, AMC claims, were never actually spoken in the films to which they’re linked: “Me Tarzan, you Jane,” for example. For the doubters — run them past Fred Shapiro.
We’ve blogged repeatedly, and somewhat skeptically, about the “peak oil” frenzy. Chris Turner of The Walrus recently profiled Dave Hughes, a Canadian geologist who has crisscrossed North America lecturing on the end of the fossil-fuel age. Hughes, who spent 32 years mapping Canada’s coal reserves, believes that “there’s no possible way to keep running the engine of a modern global economy for much longer at the pace we’re burning [hydrocarbons].”
Tato, maker of the world’s cheapest car, is turning its attention to low-cost housing. The company plans to build 1,000 apartments outside Mumbai. The units range in size from 218 square feet to 373 square feet and will sell for $7,800 to $13,400.
Implanting false memories of childhood tastes can affect adult food choices.
The Obama administration this week unveiled its new proposal to raise fuel efficiency in American cars. Clear as smog, right? Well, Freakonomics Q&A guest Keith Hennessey, a former economics adviser in the Bush White House, has written up a detailed post on the proposal’s complications and its likely unintended consequences.
To ward off brain drain, Google has developed an algorithm to determine which employees it most risks losing.
When it’s paired with a book of photographs by filmmaker David Lynch and an invitation to fill the blank CD with tracks from an illegally downloaded album. That’s the weird new distribution scheme being floated by musicians Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse.
The We Are Supervision blog has a collection of business cards used by Chicago street gangs during the 1970’s and 1980’s. They are extremely interesting as well as — depending on where you work — extremely NSFW.
A paper by a team of scientists and analysts maps out how fields and subdisciplines emerge in 21st-century science. One of the main findings: much like trendy baby names boom and bust, the most high-influence subdisciplines also tend to be the most short-lived.
The economist Anne Sibert hypothesizes that gender inequality in the finance industry is partly to blame for the financial crisis. She points to evidence that men are less risk-averse in financial decision-making, more overconfident, and perhaps susceptible to testosterone-fueled feedback loops in asset bubbles.
When the Financial Times decided to run its first piece of short fiction, it chose “The Great Hargeisa Goat Bubble,” a story of economic intrigue in Africa by Julian Gough. The BBC has just turned the story into a delightful radio play, which can be found (for a limited time only!) here.
In his new book Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics, and the War on Terror, Mahmood Mamdani “attacks the Save Darfur Coalition as ahistorical and dishonest, and argues that the conflict in Darfur is more about land, power, and the environment than it is directly about race.” Guernica magazine interviewed the controversial author about the historical roots of the Darfur conflict, the similarities between Darfur and Iraq, and the proper role of the International Criminal Court (ICC) in Sudan and elsewhere.
Each year, a million or so high school students pay $45 for the chance to prove themselves with the College Board’s SAT. A good percentage of those students pay for the College Board’s test prep courses as well. All that testing adds up.
In a new interview with Foreign Policy‘s Elizabeth Dickinson, Tsvangirai discusses his old rival, the frustratingly slow progress of the Zimbabwean unity government, his beef with the international community, and his plans for Zimbabwe’s battered economy.
This photo, sent to us by blog reader Mike Martin, shows how some residents of Newtown, Australia, deal with their junk mail. The sign says it’s a science experiment, but we’d imagine that impaling your junk mail on a fence can also be highly therapeutic.
Listeners of “The Numbers” segment on NPR’s Marketplace, a daily recap of the stock market’s action, thought its upbeat version of “We’re in the Money” as background music is inappropriate for the times.
History is full of half-forgotten tales. That time, for instance, when the British thought Ben Franklin was helping the French build a death ray. Or when everyone in the Netherlands accidentally got high for a year on rye bread tainted by a psychedelic mold. Or how a dentist’s visit to Carlsbad Cavern inspired a doomsday weapon that could have ended World War II, if the atom bomb hadn’t done it first. Nate DiMeo has been collecting these stories, in short, wonderful podcasts, on a site called The Memory Palace.
Oregon’s House recently passed the “Honest Pint Act,” which would allow drinking establishments to display state-issued stickers certifying that their pint glasses actually hold 16 ounces, as opposed to the 13- and 14-ounce glasses that some bars try to pass off as pints.
In a new paper, Gavin Kennedy argues that Smith actually had no invisible-hand theory, pointing out that the phrase appears only three times in Smith’s writings. One scholar believes that Smith’s use of the phrase was a “mildly ironic joke.”
Recent studies suggest that exorbitant C.E.O. compensation isn’t primarily produced by greed or even the need to compensate invaluable talent, but rather firms benchmarking C.E.O. pay against other firms’ pay. That’s what Ray Fisman writes in Slate. One prominent C.E.O.’s raise therefore sends ripples of pay hikes through competing companies.
But now Sean Gourley has derived a formula that not only describes how insurgent groups work, but could predict future attacks.
We’ve blogged repeatedly in this space about happiness. An essay in The Boston Globe describes some interesting new happiness research with diverse policy implications.
Violent crime in New York has decreased steadily even as the recession has deepened, further disproving the conventional notion that crime increases in recessions.
In 2001 Portugal, facing one of the most serious drug problems in Europe, decided to decriminalize drug possession, including marijuana, cocaine, and heroin. People caught with small quantities of drugs were no longer sent to prison; they were sent to rehab. Since then, drug use in the country has plummeted, along with the HIV infection rate from addicts sharing dirty needles.
The OECD has released its Society at a Glance survey, which reveals some interesting social trends in OECD member countries. Floyd Norris points out that countries with fast eaters, including all of North America, have higher economic growth rates than slow-eating countries like France.
Photographer Anna Skladmann‘s “Little Adults” portraits feature children of Russia’s Nouveau-Riche who have “been raised to become ‘Elite’ and behave like little adults.” But as Very Short List wonders, with a financial crisis underway, will Russia’s rich kids start behaving more like kids? (Related: Russia moves ahead of De Beers as the world’s largest diamond producer — and immediately starts . . .
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