… 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 . . .
In New York City, at least, it sometimes seems that way. Not long ago, we wrote a column about how a real-estate boom actually lowers median Realtor income because of all the new agents who rush in to join the boom. Homethinking.com, a new website that allows customers to rate Realtors, has posted an interesting item on Realtor density. It . . .
A 30-year-old Belgian municipal worker named Reno has a website called Shoot My Blog, a sort of meta-site on which he posts user-submitted photos of computer monitors showing his blog page. I am particularly fond of the family of computers in bed together. Reno says he is running this submission contest merely to engender creativity (and promote his own website), . . .
If there is a more insightful, interesting, appealing, or prolific writer on pro football than Peter King, someone please point me to him.
My son Solomon turned six the other day. This morning, he watched me on Good Morning America. My wife Ellen and four-year-old daughter Anya were also watching at home. Ellen later reported Solomon’s reaction: When Diane Sawyer said the word “economics” during the segment, Solomon turned to his mom and said, “Hey, why’d that lady say economics? Didn’t she mean . . .
I recently got an e-mail from someone who works for the Community Financial Services Association, the national trade group of payday lenders. She is unhappy that Congress wants to put a cap on the rates that payday lenders can charge. The proposed cap is 36% APR. If this legislation were passed, the CFSA woman writes, “Payday advance lenders could not . . .
Here’s a quasi-serious letter, putatively written by a Marylander named Paul McGlaughlin, asking his senator (Paul Sarbanes) to revoke his status from legal citizen to illegal immigrant. He’s after the tax break, of course. You have to admit, it’s a pretty clever ploy. (HT: Chris Albon)
David Cay Johnston, who does an incredible job covering U.S. tax policy and other business issues for the N.Y. Times, today has an interesting article about how the I.R.S. is outsourcing the collection of back taxes to third parties — i.e., collection agencies. “The private debt collection program,” Johnston writes, “is expected to bring in $1.4 billion over 10 years, . . .
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