Jamie Hyneman (left) and Adam Savage; photo: Discovery Channel. Last week, we solicited your questions for MythBusters Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage. You came up with more questions for them than for any previous Q&A — which connotes, among other things, how interesting their TV show is. Here are their answers. I think you will agree that their answers, even . . .
Video For the past couple of months, we’ve been regularly posting short FREAK-TV videos, made by resident young genius Nick Graham, in a box on the right-hand column of our home page. The problem was that the video itself couldn’t be housed within a blog post, so you had to scramble over to the right-hand column to watch the video . . .
Whenever I see a poker tournament on TV or wander through a casino, I am always struck by a particular absence: there seem to be very few Indian-Americans playing poker. Considering that there are so many Indians of poker age in this country who thrive in finance, computer science, engineering, and other fields that incorporate math, probability, risk, etc. — . . .
We’ve blogged in the past about the Undercover Black Man blog and its regular feature called Misidentified Black Person of the Week. Last week, I had the singular good (bad?) fortune to come across two instances of misidentification, in two different newspapers, within about 5 minutes of each other. The first was in a USA Today article about New York . . .
You may remember Paul Feldman as the Bagel Man we wrote about in Freakonomics. You may also remember that he was an economist before he got into bagels, with an interest in agricultural, medical, and military issues. He recently wrote to us about an environmental issue he’s been looking into: the abundance of underground coal fires in abandoned mines and . . .
Last week, I requested your suggestions for things to do with 24 spare hours in Las Vegas. This is what’s known as a bleg — i.e., using your blog to beg for something. You were so smart and generous with your suggestions that we’ve decided to try out the bleg as a regular feature, though probably not quite in the . . .
(Photo: Courtesy of The Discovery Channel) It’s time for another Freakonomics Q&A, in which you guys ask the questions. If you haven’t seen it, MythBusters is a really good TV show. Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage make science happen in front of your eyes as they systematically test all sorts of conventional wisdoms to see if they are at all . . .
Last week, we solicited your questions for Frank Warren, the founder of PostSecret. Here are his answers. Q: What gave you the idea to start this project? A: There are two kinds of secrets. The ones we keep from others and the ones we keep from ourselves. I think I began collecting secrets from strangers as a way to explore . . .
By now we’ve run quite a few Indexed posts by Jessica Hagy, whose online home can be found here. With today’s installment, “Golden Oldies and Glass Ceilings,” I believe she has outdone herself:
My son’s first-grade teacher recently held an open house to tell the parents what their kids will be learning this year, and how they’ll be going about it. I have to say, it was pretty impressive. My favorite part had to do with turning the kids into first-grade (if not first-rate) empiricists. The teacher, a wonderful veteran from Texas named . . .
Have you all played around with Zipskinny? It’s a site that takes data from the 2000 census and lets you search by ZIP code to see demographic information in your area, and compare it to others: income levels, racial breakdown, unemployment, education level, marital status, etc. It’s pretty basic information, little more than a snapshot, but it’s a good snapshot . . .
We have posted in the past about Amazon.com reviewers — their motives, their celebrity, and even some reviewers who seem to game Amazon’s commenting system. Much more recently, I blogged about a strange shakeup in the Amazon best-seller rankings. From the comments that followed, it appears that the Amazon algorithm wasn’t re-jiggered, and that the change had nothing to do . . .
We’ve blogged quite a bit about airline travel over the past couple of years, covering everything from the future of pilotless airplanes to security snafus to the likelihood of an all-business-class U.S. airline. I don’t think this reflects our overwhelming curiosity about the subject as much as the fact that we both happen to be on planes a lot. That . . .
My travel schedule has me plunking down in Las Vegas this week with 24 hours to kill. I’m looking for advice: what should I do? I’ve been to Vegas probably 8 or 10 times in the last 5 years, but it’s always been for one kind of work or another, and I’ve never had much free time. I often don’t . . .
Online education is seriously on the rise, garnering praise from congressmen and even gaining share among elementary school students. In the realm of higher education, more and more schools are offering online degree programs as an alternative to in-class courses, with some schools creating online-only engineering and law degrees as well as bachelors’. But have you ever wondered who’s on . . .
When someone writes a comment on this blog, it goes into a moderation queue — where, if everything is working right, it gets promptly approved and shows up on the blog. (The moderation process is the Times‘s measure against spam and outrageousness.) Usually it is our site editor, Melissa Lafsky, who moderates the comments, but occasionally I do it too. . . .
That’s really all I have to say. The rest is commentary — i.e., yours.
Courtesy of HarperCollins In 2004, Frank Warren, the owner of a medical information company in Germantown, Md., had an idea for a project. He bought 3,000 blank postcards and wrote two things on the back: his home address and an invitation to anonymously share a secret. He passed the cards out on the street, stuck them in library books, left . . .
Decades of research has convinced just about everyone that a child with a single parent is, on average, more likely to have worse outcomes in life than a child with two parents. These outcomes are seen in a variety of channels: education, income, health, and crime. But what are the mechanisms that actually produce a worse outcome? Exactly how, in . . .
Portal? Or how about: A Confuser… the Screen … the Box … God … HAL … or how about Abra, short for “artificial brain.” These were among the many suggestions you wrote in response to our contest asking readers to rename the computer. Let me say it once again: our readership is awesomely creative, smart, and funny. Thanks for all . . .
Despite Fred Thompson‘s so-so performance in his first presidential debate, and despite his serious lag on InTrade (Giuliani, 39; Romney, 24; Thompson, 19.5), the blogger Noele Kensut is calling for Thompson to win the White House. Why? Because he has blue eyes. Eye color is one trait, Kensut writes at Mijka Samora‘s Reality Journal, that every president since Richard Nixon . . .
Seth Schiesel wrote a fascinating piece in the Times about a new collaboration between game maker Electronic Arts and the energy company BP in designing the latest version of E.A.’s SimCity computer game. In case you don’t know, SimCity “focuses on building and managing a modern metropolis.” As Schiesel tells us, “coping with environmental pollution has long been part of . . .
Whenever we run a contest or quiz on this site, we offer the winner/s some kind of prize. Until now, we’ve never gotten around to showing what the prizes look like. So here, friends, is our current assortment of Freakonomics schwag. The T-shirt and yo-yo are, as they say, unavailable in any store. (So is Don King, as far as . . .
Courtesy of Craigslist Last week, you submitted lots and lots of questions for Craig Newmark and Jim Buckmaster, the founder and CEO, respectively, of Craigslist. They couldn’t answer every question but I think you’ll agree they’ve given us a lot of good answers, time, and ideas. I was particularly intrigued by Jim’s statement that investigative journalism has actually been damaged . . .
I recently blogged about a suboptimal customer service experience with Delta Air Lines. (As a couple of commenters pointed out — see Nos. 28, 36, and 44 — one of my assumptions was probably wrong, but that doesn’t change the thrust of the story very much.) So it’s nice to report a really good customer service experience. We recently had . . .
I first met Liz Seymour some 20 years ago. She lived then in the same house where she now lives, in Greensboro, N.C. She was (and still is) roughly ten years older than me, a Smith grad with a bohemian streak who wrote freelance articles for national magazines and newspapers, often about the home furnishings industry that had a strong . . .
We have temporarily floated our tag cloud up to the top of the right-hand column of our home page so you can take a good look at it. We haven’t tagged our entire archives yet, but we’re getting there. So feel free to play around with the tags to see what’s in the vault, and know that there’s more to . . .
That is the very good question posed on the British Psychological Society’s research blog. The answers, provided by leading psychologists, are even better. In many cases, it’s not that the experiments haven’t been done, but that they can’t be, often for ethical or practical reasons. But even if the proposed experiments are only thought experiments, they are well worth reading. . . .
The British Medical Association calls attention to a new study in the Postgraduate Medical Journal that assesses the efficacy of individually tailored herbal medical treatments. The outcome? “There is no good evidence to suggest that individually tailored herbal medicine treatment works well,” the BMA declares. The nuances here are interesting. While studies on the efficacy of herbal medicine have grown . . .
In today’s Washington Post, George Will profiles Austan Goolsbee, a colleague of Levitt’s at the University of Chicago and an economic adviser to Barack Obama. (You can see what we’ve written in the past about Goolsbee here.) Will’s piece contains Goolsbee’s interesting take on imports from China and elsewhere, with facts that I am sure most Americans don’t know: As . . .
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