Photo: lilivanili and shawnzam Yesterday I suggested that tastes may not be stable. And then last night, I had the chance to confront the data directly; my local restaurant was serving bacon ice cream. Bacon: Delicious! Ice cream: My favorite! The combination of bacon and ice cream: a direct threat to my views of economics. You see, every bite was . . .
Here are the stats and algorithms that explain why Kevin Garnett is an MVP. (HT: Phil Notick) (Earlier) Justin Wolfers‘s alumni magazine dubs him “The Seeker.” (Earlier) Who’s making the fat jokes? Stanley Druckenmiller is happy he didn’t buy the Steelers. Chicago’s schools have third-world math scores. (Earlier)
Photo: davidsilver Americans are eating out less, driving down restaurant profits around the country. But some eateries are doing better. The first is McDonald’s, where profits grew 11 percent last quarter. A recession would seem to be good news for inexpensive food. The second is a plucky, five-year-old community kitchen in Salt Lake City called the One World Cafe. Thanks . . .
Do you ever feel the guilt-stare from a barista as you’re sitting in a cafe enjoying its free wireless? The cheapest patrons will nurse a coffee for three hours, while many will cave at the rate of roughly one beverage (or baked good) per hour. Rather than guilting e-freeloaders (which puts strain on customer-barista relations), some cafes ban laptops or . . .
I’ve been mystified by the abundance of beauty parlors/barbershops in Germany — and by the low prices I’ve paid for their services. At home I pay $35 for a haircut by my wife’s hairdresser (nearly $1 per hair). Here, for an equal-quality haircut I pay $13 ($17). Why so low a price; why so many shops? Apparently haircuts used to . . .
Photo: Michael (mx5tx) Every time the subject of guns comes up, whether on this blog or elsewhere (see here, here, and here for a few examples), the resultant discussion is predictably passionate. I am guessing that passionate gun discussions are taking place all over the country today with the news that an 8-year-old boy accidentally shot and killed himself over . . .
Many of us spend a lot of time giving away our creative and intellectual labor for free: editing Wikipedia entries, putting our music on MySpace, blogging, micro-blogging, uploading photos to Flickr, putting videos on YouTube, and pasting goofy phrases onto cat pictures. Plenty of web sites make a living from the content that people provide for free. But Andrew Keen . . .
Photo: la cola de mi perro Supporters and critics of physician-assisted suicide agree on at least one thing: terminally ill patients who take an early exit save the health care system money. Nationally, legal euthanasia for terminally ill patients could cut American health-care costs by $627 million per year (less than one-tenth of 1 percent of total expenditures), according to . . .
San Franciscans will soon vote on whether their city should decriminalize prostitution. Supporters say that taking prostitution out of the black market will improve the safety and health of sex workers, and shave $11 million per year off the city’s law-enforcement expenses. Opponents say the measure would encourage human trafficking, raise crime, and generally turn San Francisco into a magnet . . .
Photo from the University of Washington. If you’re reading this post on a laptop computer, rest easy. Your computer may have just become far less appealing to thieves. The University of Washington has released a free program that will track your laptop if it’s stolen. If the program is installed on a computer with a built-in camera, it will . . .
Last year on this blog, Ian Ayres wondered why, to truly keep their opponents guessing, football teams don’t pick plays at random. Two California high school football coaches have taken the thought one step further and randomized the plays themselves — by scrapping the traditional starting formation and making every player a potential receiver (normally, only five players can receive . . .
My friend who reviews New York City cafes came across this at Bouchon Bakery in the Time Warner Center: Photo: Ana Dane According to Bouchon’s website: “Some people wish for their pets to take as much pleasure in food as they themselves do.” But are excesses like this actually selling right now? A recent survey by American Express Publishing and . . .
Photo: freeparking Paul Kimelman lives in Alamo, Calif., and is C.T.O. of the Texas-based microcontroller company Luminary Micro. He is the sort of blog reader we are very fortunate to have. He writes to us now and again with such interesting queries that they’re worth putting up on the blog in their entirety. Here’s his latest: I was speaking with . . .
I was reading People magazine the other day, and it got me thinking about the following question: Why would an expectant mother have amniocentesis performed? Far and away, the most important reason for doing amniocentesis must be that knowing there are abnormalities early provides the option to get an abortion. The reason I was thinking about this question is that . . .
Photo: soldiersmediacenter How do we know that parachutes are really a good treatment for preventing serious injury in someone falling from an airplane? That’s the subject of this tongue-in-cheek paper on the limits of evidence-based medicine, written by two physicians and published in the British Medical Journal. After applying to parachutes the guidelines usually used to test new drugs, the . . .
William Tucker, author of the forthcoming book Terrestrial Energy, blogged here earlier this week about nuclear power. This is his second of three guest posts here on the subject. A year ago, Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt wrote a New York Times Magazine column entitled “The Jane Fonda Effect,” in which they argued that Fonda’s efforts in the movie The . . .
The more beer scientists drink, the less likely they are to have a paper published or cited, according to a new study by Thomas Grim, an ornithologist at Palacky University, Czech Republic. Grim surveyed the behavior of Czech scientists and found a correlation between amount of beer consumed and papers published. But the Czech Republic may just be an strange . . .
What’s it like to grow up with one parent who is black and another who is white? In a recent paper I co-authored with Roland Fryer, Lisa Kahn, and Jorg Spenkuch, we look at data to try to answer that question. Here is what we find: 1) Mixed-race kids grow up in households that are similar along many dimensions to . . .
From airbedandbreakfast.com Social networking websites have changed the way we view our reputations, the way we organize protests, and now the way we … couch surf? AirBed&Breakfast lets travelers meet locals in 20 countries and book a few nights in their guest rooms, as an alternative to sleeping in a hotel. They are hoping to fill the gap as hotels . . .
Brock Lesnar The Ultimate Fighting Championship (a mixed martial arts organization) began in the early 1990’s with the motto “There Are No Rules!” but a variety of fouls have since been established: 1. Butting with the head. 2. Eye gouging of any kind. 3. Biting. 4. Hair pulling. 5. Fish hooking. 6. Groin attacks of any kind. 7. Putting a . . .
Photo taken from Kathleen and May Levitt recently sang the praises of cheap wine. But how can wine stay cheap when oil prices keep pushing up the cost of transportation? Sailing ships might be the answer. Last Friday, a 108-year-old British sailing ship delivered 30,000 bottles of French wine to Dublin. It was the first time since the 1800’s that . . .
Blog reader Chris Harris raises an interesting question in an email to us: Why do mortgage brokers get paid everything up front when they originate a deal? This sort of contract gives brokers terrible incentives. They just want to get a deal done. It matters very little to them whether the borrower eventually defaults or not. (It is possible that . . .
I blogged last week about blind wine tastings — my own casual experiments as well as some more serious academic ones. The bottom line is that in blind wine tastings, there is a zero or even slightly negative correlation between the ratings of regular people and the price of the wine they are drinking; for experts the relationship between rating . . .
The answer: in prisons, where CDs are routinely banned because they can be shattered and the shards refined into shivs. MP3 players are unavailable in most prisons, as are, one imagines, turntables. California-based entrepreneur Bob Paris got the idea five years ago to sell cassettes by mail to the 2.3 million people locked up in federal, state, or local prisons . . .
On one level, quantifying racism doesn’t make much sense. From the standpoint of individual experience, two people who suffer discrimination based on their ethnic status might feel equally violated even if the incident differs. Who can say one experienced “more racism” if both feel hurt? But let’s consider the question at the macro level. Specifically, what is the most racist . . .
We’ve tackled the future of music distribution and we’ve taken on the War on Terror. But what happens when the two intersect? Apparently, guards at Guantanamo Bay have been playing David Gray‘s “Babylon” at all hours of the day and night, to distress detainees and soften them up for interrogation. Since this arguably constitutes a public performance of Gray’s song . . .
Driving a car can be depersonalizing. That’s why drivers use bumper stickers, bobble-heads, fish brake lights, racing stripes, etc. to show others on the road their personalities, explains Tom Vanderbilt in his book, Traffic. A recent study by Colorado State University psychologist William Szlemko found a link between road rage and the number — but not content — of personalized . . .
A recent study found that most amateur singers can carry a tune just as accurately as trained professionals, suggesting that singing may be as universal a human trait as talking. But good pitch doesn’t always mean good music — Bob Dylan, for example, seems to have gotten along just fine without perfect pitch. So what makes a singer “good?” (HT: . . .
Newspapers trumpeted a landmark event last week: a computer program beating professional poker players head-to-head at Limit Hold-Em. Parallels have been drawn to Big Blue‘s victory over Gary Kasparov roughly a decade ago. Those parallels are not very meaningful. First, heads-up Limit Hold-Em is a very simple version of poker — exactly the kind of game that a computer should . . .
Photo: Rhett Redelings Yes, it’s because of climbing gas prices. And yes, it’s because of environmental concerns. And yes, maybe I’m just noticing these things because gas prices and environmental concerns have primed us to notice such things. (This is called confirmation bias, and it probably afflicts us all.) But doesn’t it seem as if some U.S. cities are starting . . .
You want to listen to Freakonomics Radio? That’s great! Most people use a podcast app on their smartphone. It’s free (with the purchase of a phone, of course). Looking for more guidance? We’ve got you covered.
Stay up-to-date on all our shows. We promise no spam.
