Pareto Parking
We parked our car at the Austin airport for six days, and my brother then picked it up to use during his three-day visit to my mother. He left it in airport parkinglot when he flew off three days later, a few hours before we returned.
We parked our car at the Austin airport for six days, and my brother then picked it up to use during his three-day visit to my mother. He left it in airport parkinglot when he flew off three days later, a few hours before we returned.
From a Wall Street Journal article by Betsy McKay come these tantalizing facts (emphasis added):
The medical costs of treating obesity-related diseases may have soared as high as $147 billion in 2008, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Monday, as its new director set a fresh tone in favor of more aggressively attacking obesity.
During a visit last year to the London School of Economics, the Queen of England asked why economists failed to predict the credit crunch.
If you like cheating, you have to love British rugby player Tom Williams‘s ploy last week.
Apparently there is a rule in rugby, as in soccer, that once a substitution is made to take a player out of the match, that player can’t return to the game. The exception to this rule is “blood injuries,” in which case a player can come off until the bleeding is stopped and then return to play.
The product recalls of 2007 covered 276 toys and focused primarily on toys manufactured in China, including Thomas the Tank Engine. A working paper by Seth Freedman, Melissa Kearney, and Mara Lederman examines the effects of those recalls.
This is the best explanation I have ever read of why I hate meetings so much, and why other people love them. If you are like me, you should save this link and simply forward it to anybody who asks if you’d like to “grab coffee” or “have a quick phone call to pick each other’s brains” or, God forbid, actually go somewhere and sit around a table with a lot of other people and have a proper meeting.
Japan’s Keihin Express Railway Co. has set up “smile scanners” at 15 of its stations, where railway employees have their smiles assessed by software in the hopes of perfecting a customer-friendly look.
On his blog about living in Delhi, Dave Prager tries to figure out why 100-plus citizens are killed by that city’s blue buses each year:
In his very good baseball Q&A the other day, Buster Olney didn’t address the questions some of you asked about how sportswriters vote for the Hall of Fame.
For what it’s worth, however, Zev Chafets, author of the recent book Cooperstown Confidential: Heroes, Rogues, and the Baseball Hall of Fame, recently wrote an interesting piece for the Wall Street Journal about how much players benefit financially once they are elected to the Hall, especially if they are only marginally famous.
While we’ve been hard at work answering your flying questions, Slate has taken a look at the history of airport design
My guess is that many senior discounts are anachronisms from times when seniors were scarce and generally poorer than the average American. I don’t expect senior discounts to disappear during the recession, when firms are competing especially hard for customers; but I wouldn’t be surprised to see many disappear in the next boom, as I believe they should.
You responded with vigor when we asked for your favorite weird promotional pairings. Our favorites are the edible/inedible pairings.
I am writing this at 4:25 a.m. on Friday and I’m a bit woozy. On Wednesday afternoon, my body seriously crashed. On very short notice, my beloved spouse got me in to see to see a physician, who told me I definitely had a bad flu and the only one going around was the swine flu.
The good news is that I’ve been recovering just as quickly as I crashed. By Thursday morning, my 101.3 fever had broken, and while I still have a cough, the aches and chills are now largely gone. My body just feels extraordinarily tired. I tried going to sleep Thursday night without any cold medications.
If you couldn’t see the eclipse firsthand, you can see a collection of photos from Flickr users in India and China, posted on Flickr’s Group Pool. Here are some of our favorites:
You probably know already that 44 people were arrested yesterday, mostly in New Jersey, for corruption and money-laundering. They included mayors, rabbis, and assemblymen (oh my!).
The story is simultaneously vast and banal, seeming to illustrate every cliché of politicians and the people who seek to grease their palms. There are many, many angles to be discussed. A few thoughts that sprung to mind include:
One of the less-publicized components of the stimulus package was an $8 billion commitment to develop a high-speed rail (HSR) network in America. This is no more than a down payment, given the very large sums needed to build HSR (University of Minnesota transportation scholar David Levinson estimates that the proposed California segment alone will cost $80 billion, or more than $2,000 per Californian; given my state’s financial problems, this is going to require a very large bake sale).
Tokyo’s police force has developed a new method of fighting crime in the city’s Kitashikahama Park, popular with teenagers late at night. A machine emits a high-pitched frequency, which most adults can’t hear, from 11:00 p.m. to 4:00 a.m. every night.
Do you have trouble making sense of U.S./Iranian relations? Clearly, you haven’t been following the byzantine freestyle campaign between the rap world’s hegemon, Jay-Z, and rising power The Game. Word-slinging MC’s are a great model for nations locked in high-stakes diplomacy, as explained by George Washington University professor Mark Lynch.
Texas has a very high sales tax at 6.25 percent, and Austin adds on 2 percentage points. I’ve always thought we were high in this category.
Before our current vacation in Colorado, I was pleased to notice that its sales tax rate is only 2.9 percent. On my first purchase in Steamboat Springs, though, the tax rate was 8.4 percent — the town adds 5.5 percentage points to the state rate.
The State Department revised the transcripts of the Nixon White House tape recordings when it found that parts of the transcriptions didn’t match the original recordings. One example, according to a Secrecy News article:
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 researches by me. Hundreds of people have responded via comments or e-mails. I am responding as best I can, a few per week.
If it’s not caffeine or alcohol, it’s Xanax or marijuana or morphine or cocaine or crack. There’s a apparently universal human drive to alter our consciousness, to a greater or lesser degree, whether it’s legal or not. How we go about doing that is the subject of Ryan Grim‘s new book This Is Your Country on Drugs, reviewed here.
Referring to a new tax that will fall squarely on the shoulders of his business and just a few others, Steve DeAngelo said in a CNN article,
A new N.B.E.R. working paper finds a link between health insurance and obesity, and suggests that the better insured you are, the fatter you’re likely to be. We already knew that people with health insurance consume more healthcare resources than the uninsured; it appears they’re consuming more calories, too.
Last week we solicited your questions for ESPN baseball reporter and analyst Buster Olney. There were a lot of really interesting questions, and I think Buster chose well; moreover, his answers are excellent — especially, in my view, his last one. Along the way, he addresses the Steroid Era, budgetary and expansion issues, and how he came to be called Buster. Thanks to all for participating.
Over at FiveThirtyEight.com, Nate Silver challenged bloggers to stand behind their beliefs on climate change by wagering money and risk shaming by Silver if they back out. No takers.
A new study finds that monkeys can distinguish between “right” and “wrong” grammatical patterns.
I’m troubled by news reports that Antoine Walker was arrested for writing $1,000,000 in bad checks. The ex N.B.A. star — Employee Number 8 — was forced to do a perp walk as he apparently was led out of Harrah’s Tahoe in handcuffs. The criminal complaint alleges that from July 27 to January 19, he wrote 10 separate $100,000 checks with insufficient funds to Caesars Palace, Planet Hollywood, and Red Rock Resort.
When the crime statistics for 2006 were released, the news media had no trouble declaring that the next big crime wave had hit (even though violent crime had just ticked up 2 percent; property crime fell by the same amount). So what’s happened since?
This morning, my paper copy of The Times included a replica of the paper’s special section on the moon landing from July 21, 1969. You’ve probably seen the iconic main headline: “MEN WALK ON MOON.” The lead article is by John Noble Wilford (who’s still going strong, btw), and includes one of the most elegant little uses of data I can recall seeing in a news article: