I really like my dentist, Dr. Reiss. He’s in his late 60’s, maybe even in his early 70’s. To say that he knows his way around the mouth is an understatement. But that’s not the only reason I like him. A couple years ago, he told me how he solved a particular problem. Because he’s getting on in years, a . . .
That’s the question posed by a reader named John from New York City. I am not sure whether he wrote in response to our New York Times column on hand-washing, which has prompted a lot of e-mails on all matters medical. Regardless, John raises an intriguing and important question whose answers I know nothing about, but I’d love to learn . . .
Our latest “Freakonomics” column in the New York Times Magazine is about hospital-acquired bacterial infections, and how doctors don’t always do a very good job of washing their hands, and how one hospital set out to fight this problem. As always, we’ve posted some of the research behind the column elsewhere on this website.
Just arrived in the mail is a handsome new book called Freakonomics: Revised and Expanded Edition, which should be in stores in a week or two. (Here is the Amazon link.) As the name implies, it is a little bit revised (mostly correcting errors or things that have changed in the world since the book was originally published, in April . . .
If anyone is still reading this blog, let us offer our apologies for a couple of weeks’ worth of very buggy behavior. The site has often been inaccessible, even to us, which is why we have barely blogged in recent days. The problem seems to be largely the fault of — well, of you. When we started this blog and . . .
The final chapter of Freakonomics is about first names — whether they have an impact on a person’s life and how they travel through the different strata of society. While it’s true that most popular names start out among the middle and upper classes and then travel downward, it’s also true that some old-fashioned names (we cite Max and Sophie . . .
A few days ago, I posted about GetHuman and Bringo!/NoPhoneTrees.com, two sites that help people deal with customer phone support. I then received this follow-up e-mail from Clement Wang, one of the founders of Bringo, who wanted to respond to some of the reader comments on this blog and elsewhere. It read, in part: I’d like to make a few . . .
… is an e-book version of the North American Business Islamic Directory. One likely reason it’s ranked so high on Amazon is the price: one cent. (So much for my support of the penny’s extinction.) But does anyone have any idea why this unusual book is ranked, as of this writing, at No. 5? In related news on book pricing, . . .
I am probably typical in that I hate making a customer-service call to just about any large company. The odds of getting useful information in anything under a half hour are pretty slim. One problem is that many companies’ “phone trees” — the automated menus that ask you to mash one button after the next — are silly mazes that . . .
The Asian Sex Gazette, an online (and perhaps offline) publication whose content is a bit risque for this PG-rated blog (I found the link over at the excellent Marginal Revolution website, which plainly has a pervier crowd), reports that some Chinese funerals feature graveside strippers: The more people that come to a funeral in China, the better the deceased is . . .
There are three key words missing from this news report about a new Al-Qaeda videotape: Osama bin Laden. He is generally assumed to be alive but doesn’t it seem fairly likely that he may already be dead? If he can’t be found in order to be captured or killed, how are we to know that he’s still alive? But here’s . . .
For the record, I like Wikipedia just fine, as long as people understand what it is and what it isn’t. What it is: a useful and engaging enterprise in user-generated content about a mind-blowingly diverse range of subjects. What it isn’t: a dependable substitute for a reference work, at least not in many cases. We have touched on this dichotomy . . .
As of today, Google Book Search affords you the opportunity to read or even download the complete text of many out-of-copyright books, including Hamlet, Aesop’s Fables, the Inferno, and many more. Here’s the news on Google’s own blog. If you’re looking for a current book, and you also don’t want to pay a penny, you might consider Book Mooch. And . . .
One of the regular commenters on this blog, who calls himself Zbicyclist, has a very interesting post on his own blog about how and why Floyd Landis may have doped himself up for that miraculous Tour de France stage. (For previous posts about the TdF and/or sports doping, see here and here and here.)
It’s one man’s invention, called the Shovelglove. Here’s how he came upon it: It was a rainy Sunday. I hadn’t gone to the gym in over three months, and I was feeling painfully out of shape and antsy to do some kind of exercise. But I didn’t want to go out in the rain, and the prospect of subjecting myself . . .
In our continuing effort to bring you news of interesting first names from around the globe (see here and here and here and here), please consider this recent e-mail from an Australian reader named Alex Lasky: Gents: I write regarding the effect of names on the performance of those who bear them as discussed in “Freakonomics,” particularly when it comes . . .
In today’s New York Times comes word that Kenneth Y. Tomlinson, an old friend of Karl Rove who was booted last year from running the Corporation for Public Broadcasting with a political agenda, has run into trouble again in his current job, as the overseer of Voice of America and other government broadcasts to foreign countries. This time he is . . .
… then you have to admit that this one is pretty good: sending a piece of bogus research material to a biographer whom you happen to hate. In this case, the biographer is A.N. Wilson, who was writing a book about the poet John Betjeman. Wilson made use of the bogus letter, only to discover too late that the letter . . .
Here is a very interesting and, to my mind, useful letter to the editor of Sports Illustrated, written by Brandon Gaut of Irvine, Calif., whose home page is here: As a scientist and a sports fan, I believe the current doping scandals compromise science as much as sports. The tests are performed by entities motivated by and funded to achieve . . .
Matthew Broderick just broke his collarbone while riding a horse. This makes Broderick the fourth or fifth person I have heard of in recent months who was injured while riding a horse. This got me to thinking: how dangerous is horseback riding, especially as compared to, say, riding a motorcycle? A quick Google search turns up this 1990 CDC report, . . .
Today’s New York Times has a long and very interesting article on the recent plot by radical Muslims in Britian to blow up a bunch of airplanes. But the article, written by Don Van Natta Jr., Elaine Sciolino, and Stephen Grey, is not available online (not yet, at least), because of legal concerns. As the Times explains, “This arises from . . .
In the epilogue of Freakonomics, we admitted that we had written a book that had no unifying them and which probably didn’t help a reader solve any real problems. The best we could hope for, we wrote, was that “You might become more skeptical of the conventional wisdom; you may begin looking for hints as to how things aren’t quite . . .
From A Treatise on Diseases of the Nervous System, by William A. Hammond (published 1871), here are some of the then-known causes of dementia: Among the physical causes, drunkenness, the use of opium, and other narcotics, excessive veneral indulgence, masturbation, blows on the head, exposure to severe heat or cold, the puerperal state [being pregnant], and certain diseases may be . . .
One of my favorite blogs is OrthoMom, the musings of an Orthodox Jewish mom. It is nicely written, almost always interesting, and intimate in the best sense of the word — as if it were a conversation between friends. (And I love her “Heroine of the Day” series.) The most recent posting is about the real-estate needs of Orthodox Jews, . . .
Mark Cuban, who is the richest blogger that I know of, and also one of the most prolific, shares a story about the Wikipedia entry about himself. To all you Wikipedia fundamentalists: I do not hate you, or Wikipedia. (If I hated it, I probably wouldn’t have called Wikipedia “generally fun, sometimes useful, often entertaining” in my last post on . . .
Because I am not left-handed, I have never taken much pleasure in the endless parade of studies, articles, and anecdotes about how left-handed people are better at everything than right-handed people. But that doesn’t mean the studies stop coming; here’s the latest, by the economists Christopher S. Ruebeck, Joseph E. Harrington, and Robert Moffitt. At least we righties can console . . .
Thanks to the section of Freakonomics that dealt with unusual first names, we regularly get e-mails from readers telling us about a particularly good example. (Maybe we should make such submissions a regular feature of this blog?) Anyway, I don’t think there’s been a better submission that the one that came this morning, courtesy of David Tinker of Pittsburgh. He . . .
I think that every son, and especially every male writer, has an awful lot to say about his own father. My father died when I was a kid; I wrote quite a bit about him in this book and in this one. One of my favorite father-son memoirs of all time is The Duke of Deception, by Geoffrey Wolff, who . . .
Grigori Perelman is the 40-year-old Russian mathematician who has been credited with resolving the Poincare Conjecture, one of the most important questions in math. But Perelman chose not to attend the International Congress of Mathematicians in Madrid, where he was to be given a Fields Medal by Spanish king Juan Carlos. Perelman has also neglected to pick up the $1 . . .
Anybody care to know the most common first names of Liverpool’s criminals? Martin Rosenbaum, on his BBC News blog, has posted such a list, including types of offenses. Now all someone has to do is cross-index the most popular criminal names with the most popular names in general and break them out according to socioeconomic status, etc. As it now . . .
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