| You’re so frustrated by the stock market that you want to break something, so you insert a coin into this objet/vending machine, which slowly spins out a piece of china until it drops to the ground, shattering. But the market (like all complex human systems) is more like these sculptures by Michael Kontopoulos, which whack themselves into instability, teeter . . .
| In its highly anticipated series finale, Battlestar Galactica ended with a meditation on humanity’s evolutionary baggage and our tendency toward technology-driven, apocalyptic violence. That’s where this episode of Carl Sagan‘s groundbreaking public television series Cosmos picks up. Happily, Sagan’s entire series is now available free on Hulu. [%comments]
| Does panhandling work better through the web? A Houston father and son team thinks so. They gave a homeless man named Timothy Dale Edwards a sign to hold while panhandling; it directed passersby to his website, PimpThisBum.com. In less than two months, the site has garnered $50,000 in pledges and donations. The project’s creators believe its success has to . . .
| Every weekday in March, a judge at The Morning News has pitted against each other two novels published last year, with one emerging as the winner and going up against the next book. The winning book of the championship match will be announced tomorrow — and its author, per the website, will receive a live rooster. [%comments]
| “I think we will look back in 10 years’ time and say we should not have done this, but we did because we forgot the lessons of the past, and that that which is true in the 1930’s is true in 2010.” That’s Sen. Byron Dorgan (D.-North Dakota), from a 1999 Times article on the repeal of the Glass-Steagall . . .
| A California pornography company that owns the trademark Virtual Sex lost its bid to take over ownership of the domain name virtualsex.com from another company. The World Intellectual Property Organization ruled that Network Telephone Services, the current owner of the domain, “offered all the appropriate merchandise to match its namesake.” Might “Freakonomics” one day face a similar challenge from . . .
| For 16 years, police in Germany hunted a female serial killer whose DNA was identified at 40 crime scenes, including six murders. Exasperated, investigators dubbed her “the phantom of Heilbronn,” after the town in which she allegedly killed a policewoman. A state prosecutor on her trail said he “just couldn’t believe that the same woman could be capable” of . . .
| A California-based company took millions of dollars from infertile couples, matched the couples with surrogate mothers, and agreed to use the money to pay the surrogates until their children came to term. Only now the company has vanished, along with the money, and the surrogate mothers are no longer being paid. What will happen to the children they carry? . . .
| A challenge for our readers: the Fraser Institute is offering a $1,000 top prize for proposals on what economic or public policy issue it should try to measure. More information is here. Submit a brief essay or video with a clear thesis on what should be measured, why it should be measured, and how it might be measured. Let . . .
| For admirers of Indexed, we bring you: New Math. On this site, Craig Damrauer offers up one new formula each Monday to describe our world. In case you were wondering: Carjacking = Can I borrow your car? – No, you can’t. [%comments]
| It’s been a year since the American Journal of Psychiatry tried to have the internet committed — O.K., well, since it published an editorial arguing for the classification of internet addiction as a certifiable mental illness. The editorial isn’t clear about what exactly constitutes “excessive” internet use, but it points to a number of internet-related deaths in South Korea. . . .
| Google doesn’t know why, but China blocked the entire YouTube site on Monday, cutting off access for all Chinese citizens. Maybe, posits Wired‘s Eliot Van Buskirk, one of China’s censorship workers mistakenly blocked the entire site (instead of just select URL’s, as had been done in the past); maybe a single video really offended the Chinese government; or maybe . . .
Last week’s news about the Obama family vegetable garden shows how far locavorism has come since the term entered the foodie lexicon in 2005. It also shows how Americans’ food supply has changed — and not changed — since Eleanor Roosevelt planted the last White House garden in 1943. Back then, Victory Gardens helped fend off wartime food shortages. Today’s rake-wielding first lady is waging war against obesity.
| You might have learned about the hidden elves of Iceland if you read the Michael Lewis article we blogged about recently. (Note: for Icelandic pushback to Lewis’s colorful tales, see here.) The Icelandic government apparently takes these elves very seriously, and often requires that new construction sites be certified as clear of elves before building begins. So how do . . .
| As the economic slowdown wallops the “world’s factory,” some people think China is like the Soviet Union in the 1980’s, or like Japan in the 1990’s. James Fallows has a more sobering comparison: America as it entered the Great Depression. If so, is the upcoming production of Das Kapital — The Musical China’s answer to The Cradle Will Rock? . . .
Are such products too weird to take hold in the U.S.? Remember that the Walkman, the great cassette-tape ancestor of portable CD players and iPods, also started out as one of those wacky Japanese inventions.
| Alison Flood, writing on The Guardian‘s Books Blog, asks why Freakonomics and most other books that make “serious non-fiction subjects accessible and popular” weren’t written by women. She theorizes that either women are better at storytelling (think Factory Girls and The Big Necessity) than “sell[ing] our hypothesis about the world” — or it’s just a “numbers game,” as male . . .
| A Shanghai theater company has announced that it will produce and stage a musical adaptation of Karl Marx‘s Das Kapital next year. Its creators say their project was inspired by a recent Japanese manga adaptation of Marx’s anti-capitalist tome. Does this mean we’ll have to sit through an operatic adaptation of The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money . . .
| Music has power. We’ve blogged about David Gray‘s “Babylon” being used as a tool of torture, and how Barry Manilow records were played in Sydney, Australia, to flush teenage loiterers from its parks. But music can also heal, of course. A team of London neuroscientists is claiming that playing Kenny Rogers songs for stroke victims speeds their cognitive recovery. . . .
| Say your evil twin successfully completes a multimillion-dollar jewel heist but leaves a DNA-tainted glove at the crime scene. The police have your DNA on file, because you and your twin have both been arrested before. Lucky for you, your twin’s genetic markers are so similar to your own that no test can tell them apart. Since the DNA . . .
| While A.I.G. continues to dominate the news, it’s worth reading this 2002 Economist article, which cast doubt on the insurance giant’s early forays into the derivatives market. Back then, A.I.G. argued that “derivatives play an important part in reducing the company’s overall risk.” By 2009, those same investments had left the company so badly damaged that it posed a . . .
| He didn’t announce it via cake, but Doug Bowman quit his job as head of Google’s visual design team last week, citing the company’s “reliance on data” for design decisions as the main reason for his departure. Bowman writes on his blog that he’ll miss Google’s “incredibly smart and talented people” and the “occasional massage,” but not “a design . . .
| The proprietors of the Name of the Year contest “can’t imagine topping last year’s death struggle between Destiny Frankenstein and Spaceman Africa.” But these are hopeful times. They’ve collected and verified 64 of the weirdest names they could find. They’re now taking your votes for a winner. (HT: MJS) [%comments]
| Why write a college term paper when you can pay $20 for someone in Nigeria, Ukraine, or — well, O.K., Texas to do it for you? The Chronicle of Higher Education took a look at a leading essay mill with international ties. Says one writer-for-hire: “I took [an assignment] on Christological topics in the second and third centuries. I . . .
| A shop owner in England is tackling the litter problem in her neighborhood by marking sweets wrappers and drink bottles with the names of the children buying them. This way, she tells the BBC, she can easily identify and reprimand litter “offenders.” Waste-personalization is hardly a novel ideal; it’s been done before (to Dubner’s delight) with dog poo. Perhaps . . .
| Does the 3,250th review of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows have any influence on an Amazon customer? An Economist article says it does. In fact, says the article, the more online reviews a product has, the more likely people are to buy it. If reviewers know the reviews they write have influence, it may help answer Levitt’s earlier . . .
Blog reader Dan Ciruli emailed us this photo from a California cemetery as another candidate for a recession magazine cover: Dan Ciruli It may be prematurely optimistic, but after last week, should it look more like this? If you have a Freak-worthy photo of your own, send it along here.
| When Stephen Colbert promised to lead an angry, pitchfork-wielding mob to A.I.G. headquarters last week, he was joking. The actual angry mob that stood outside A.I.G. headquarters yesterday chanting “shame on you” wasn’t. Nor are the literally bus-loads of protesters scheduled to visit A.I.G. executives’ homes in Connecticut this weekend. No wonder the company has issued a security memo . . .
| Say you’ve just bought a new suit to spruce yourself up on the job. The next morning, your boss calls you into his office, compliments you on your fashionable duds, and with a heavy heart, lays you off. To address this very situation, the Jos. A. Bank menswear chain is running a “Risk Free Suit” promotion. Buy a suit . . .
| Can sound waves win the war on drugs? The Sound Advice Project, an anti-drug campaign, lets parents record a six-second message of support for their kids, then mails them a 3D plastic representation of the recording’s unique waveform for their kid to wear as a bracelet. It’s a cool commitment device, but also a cool birthday gift to a . . .
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