We’ve posted several times about interesting odd pairs and strange promotional gimmicks. Now hotels, facing persistently low occupancy rates, are getting in on the act. The Hotel Erwin in Venice Beach now offers a package with a new tattoo and a bottle of tequila (to numb the pain).
A while back, I invited readers to submit quotations for which they wanted me to try to trace the origins, using The Yale Book of Quotations and more recent research by me. Hundreds of people have responded via comments or e-mails. I am responding as best I can, a few per week.
Alex asked:
“There’s more than one way to skin a cat.” Who said it, and why are all these people skinning cats?
The Independent featured a series of before-and-after photos from photographer Lois Hechenblaikner’s book Off Piste: An Alpine Story that show “how skiing changed the Alps” during the last few decades.
Most of us must admit that in many cases we really haven’t a clue if the local farmers we support run sustainable systems.
For a few months now, we’ve been soliciting reader questions for Captain Steve, a pilot with a major U.S. airline. You can find his first few batches of answers here, and he’s back now with another round. You can leave new questions for him in the comments section below.
Ever since I was a child, I’ve known my father as the King of Farts. It was a matter of great pride in the family. After all, if he was the King, that made me the Prince of Farts, of course. Who wouldn’t want to be royalty?
Only recently, however, did I discover the not-so-fragrant story as to how my father became King.
Women are lighter and thus cost less than men to transport to space, they’re less prone to heart attacks, and they do better in isolation tests, reasoned Randy Lovelace when he founded the Women In Space Earliest program in 1959 to test women for their “qualifications as astronauts,” as this Wired article reports.
Is this the only academic paper ever written where the total number of letters of the abstract (36) is less than the number of letters in either the title (42) or the authors’ names (46)?
A young economist I know, Patrick DeJarnette, believes a much more radical change in currency is warranted. Here is what Patrick writes:
Late one night I was curious how efficient the “penny, nickel, dime, quarter” system was, so I wrote a little script to compare all possible 4-coin systems, with the following stipulations:
I sang this past weekend at the Whiffenpoof Centennial Reunion Concert (you can hear examples of recent groups singing, here). And I had a chance to sing with probably the best selling Whiff, Joseph Finder. Joe is the author of 9 corporate thrillers. (My favorite is “Company Man”). It will not surprise you that, like Levitt and Dubner, his webpage offers free book plates. But you might be surprise when you see his “Bad Apple” bookplate:
Our new book comes out on October 20.
If you’d like to own this first copy and be a good citizen at the same time, here’s your chance: it is being auctioned off on eBay, with the proceeds going to The Smile Train, a charity which performs cleft-repair surgery on poor children all over the world.
Researchers at the University of Tokyo say they’ve created a paint that blocks out wireless signals, reports the BBC. You can use it, for example, to make sure your neighbor doesn’t steal your wi-fi, and movie theaters can use it to stop cell-phones from interrupting films.
We recently posted about a taxi driver who runs his business on a pay-what-you-wish (PWYW) model. In response, a few readers sent along interesting notes.
Gregory Taylor tells us about a law firm in Chicago called Valorem that pitches itself as revolutionary on several fronts, including its use of “Value Line Adjustments” in its pricing:
Hedgeable.com is holding a contest to find the American investor who lost the most during the recession, reports The Economist; they want the “financial world’s equivalent of Paris Hilton” (named worst actress at this year’s Golden Raspberries).
Here’s an interesting article by a man who says he has slept with over 1,300 prostitutes.
If he were an economist, he would have kept track of the data and gotten a nice academic publication out of analyzing it.
Texas allows you to transport open but covered bottles of wine in your car. Even when there are only two of us at dinner, rather than buying a glass of wine for each, we buy the whole bottle and take home what’s left.
Nairobi’s City Council recently made life a little more difficult for the city’s residents by outlawing a wide variety of mundane activities. Things like blowing your noise without a tissue, spitting in the street, crossing the road while talking on the phone, and making loud noises will now result in a fine or jail term.
A while back, we gave you a sneak peak of the SuperFreakonomics book cover. Your comments were a blast to read. Who knew there were so many graphic designers among our readership?
Alas, we didn’t change a thing about the cover. Here’s a brief video clip, shot by Meghan Shupe, of the cover being printed. The machine is in Maryland and shoots out 900 jackets a minute.
Muammar el-Qaddafi, the leader of Libya, recently attracted attention for his colorful speech to the United Nations General Assembly. He was hardly the first world leader to go off the reservation while addressing the U.N.
Many of my more extroverted friends wouldn’t care if their farmer-friend was hawking shriveled turnips dusted in cow dung. They’re there to have a social experience. Their aim is to personalize shopping in a way unachievable at Wal-Mart. In this sense, I suppose, a farmers’ market can foster community ties in the ways conventional grocery stores cannot.
It is fascinating to poke through history and see how often cheap and simple fixes solved problems that were routinely thought to be either unsolvable or, at best, solved by very expensive, complicated, and invasive means.
When athletes are exposed as dopers, we heap scorn and doubt on their accomplishments. What about college students? An estimated 25 percent of them now illegally use concentration- and memory-boosting drugs to help them make the grade. One researcher wonders if academics are willing to subject themselves to the same anti-doping circus now dogging sports.
Who originally said, “A government big enough to give you everything you want is strong enough to take everything you have,” or “A government big enough to give you everything you want, is big enough to take everything you have”? My search has attributed this quote to Thomas Jefferson, Barry Goldwater, and Gerald Ford. The truth?
The winner of food writer Michael Ruhlman’s “BLT from Scratch Challenge,” Jared Dunnohew, harvested his own salt from sea water (25 liters for one kilo of salt), smoked his own bacon (with wood gathered from local parks), and made his own mustard and vinegar for homemade mayonnaise.
Contributions are down, and an unusually large number of religious-based schools have closed.
My initial thought was that those religious organizations that encourage tithing would have fewer problems; but a bit more reflection might suggest the opposite. If every member of a religious group always tithed, the income elasticity of demand for religion would be +1.
I visited Bogota, Colombia last week. When I was introduced to my translator, he told me how good it was to see me again.
I complimented him on having a great memory (my last visit to Colombia was almost a decade ago) and made the usual sorts of excuses I make when I can’t remember someone I should clearly remember. (By now I have a great deal of practice with this particular line of conversation.)
It’s a well-documented truth that long commutes are bad for both the environment and emotional well-being of the commuter. So policy interventions aimed at reducing traffic and, by extension, commuting time have the potential to significantly improve welfare.
Yahoo recently ran a story entitled “Surprising Jobs that Pay $25 an Hour.”
The poorer you are, the fatter you’re likely to be, and the fatter you get, the poorer you’re likely to become. Slate’s Dan Engber has more on what this means for health reform.