Here’s my nominee for quote of the day, from a (gated) front page article in today’s Wall Street Journal: “This plant will save humanity, I tell you.” The person who said that is O.P. Singh, a horticulturist for the railway ministry of India. What plant is he talking about? A shrubby weed called jatropha, whose seeds contain an oil that . . .
I blogged recently about a linguistics paper so stuffed with jargon that it read to me as if it had poorly translated from the original Croatian. I also wondered what the paper had to do with belly buttons, as was suggested by its title (“Have You Noticed That Your Belly Button Lint Colour Is Related to the Colour of Your . . .
August 24 is the day in 1989 when then-MLB commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti announced that Pete Rose was banned from baseball for gambling. His apologies are now available on eBay.
Are cows really the next energy source? U.S. Internet surfing time to surpass TV time. Good thing stars don’t care about privacy: Google Earth launches. (Earlier) Do Jim Cramer’s picks make money? (Earlier)
Is cheating really so bad, particularly when there’s no punishment involved? Dubner discusses the vote rigging scandal behind the winners of Fishbowl DC’s “Hottest Media Types” contest.
Is data taking over the world? Ever wonder how Amazon knows what books you’ll like before you do? Melissa Lafsky discusses Yale law professor Ian Ayres’ fascinating new book, “Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-By-Numbers Is the New Way to Be Smart.”
If you had to guess when the Texas Rangers scored last night’s 30 runs over 9 innings against Baltimore, how would you distribute the runs? Dubner analyzes the answer, which will likely surprise you.
August 23 the day in 2000 when the first season finale of CBS’ Survivor attracted 51 million viewers, a record audience at that time for a reality show. Only seven short years later, we’re willing to believe a reality show offering a kidney giveaway.
Freakonomics video introduces its mysterious new on-screen talent, who will explore the theory that playing sports may actually encourage teenage boys to commit crime, contrary to the conventional wisdom that athletics instill values and discipline.
“So You Think You Can Be President?” (Related.) From nose to wallet: sellers embrace “scent marketing.” It’s just business: new mob rises in Italy. In MA, minority teacher applicants hurt by licensing test. (Related.)
Is obesity really the Black Plague the media makes it out to be? Is the “overweight epidemic” real? We’ve assembled a team of prominent economists, doctors, authors and experts to offer inside views on health, nutrition, and whether America is eating itself to death.
The post that follows isn’t likely to make anyone happy. It is our third recent post about Freakonomics.com’s RSS feed. Here is No. 1 and here is No. 2. For the readers who have no idea what a feed is and don’t care, this post is probably of zero value. Feel free to skip it. The people who do read . . .
August 22 is the day in 2003 when Alabama chief justice Roy Moore was suspended from the bench for refusing to obey a federal court order to remove a Ten Commandments monument from his courthouse. No word on whether he’d read Dawkins.
Play Warcraft, study pandemics. (Related.) “Bueller? Bueller? Retirement?” (HT: Consumerist.) Cell phones & driving not so dangerous after all? (HT: MR.) In Denver, feeding the meter feeds the homeless. (Related.)
I always love it when I see a paper that only an economist could write. An ingenious new study by Stefano DellaVigna and Eliana La Ferrara definitely fits that description. The issue they tackled is detection of illegal arms trades that defy United Nations embargoes. Their idea was to use the information embedded in stock markets to tease out indirect . . .
I am delighted to report that the economics paper on AC/DC I blogged about yesterday was meant as a joke. It takes a lot of work to run an experiment on real people, just for a gag paper. It turns out they meant to play the same AC/DC song in both treatments, but made a mistake and accidentally played two . . .
August 21 is the 21st anniversary of the Hubbard Glacier’s sudden and rapid shift, threatening the Alaskan town of Yakutat with an eco-disaster. Two decades later, the story would have been just one in the slew of climate change headlines.
A while ago, we wrote a New York Times Magazine column about talent — what it is, how it’s acquired, etc. The gist of the column was that “raw talent,” as it’s often called, is vastly overrated, and that people who become very good at something, whether it’s sports, music, or medicine, generally do so through a great deal of . . .
They grow up to write economics papers like this one, which looks at whether participants in lab experiments get closer to efficient outcomes when exposed to one lead singer of the rock band AC/DC versus another. I hope for this guy’s sake he has tenure. (Hat tip to Joshua Gans.)
Bruce Wydick, a professor of economics at the University of San Francisco, has written an interesting OpEd in USA Today about sunk costs and the Iraq war. Here is his lead: Our inability to think clearly about sunk costs is impeding our ability to make clear decisions about our involvement in Iraq. Failing to correctly identify sunk costs (those that . . .
Back in the day, when people noted that Diet Coke was 99% water, it was an insult. The point was that water was free, and Diet Coke was just free water plus a little bit of artificial this and that — so you would have to be a fool to pay so much for it. Of course, times have changed. . . .
August 20 is the day in 1938 when Lou Gehrig hit his record 23rd career grand slam. At least that is one home run record that seems well out of reach of Barry Bonds (though hardly so for Manny Ramirez).
Freakonomics and High School Musical have a lot in common. Both were surprise hits that had no reason to be commercial successes, but managed to do well by not taking themselves too seriously. My kids and my wife love the original High School Musical. I kind of like it myself. It is played an average of three times a day . . .
It has recently come to our attention that roughly 90% of the people who read this blog via RSS feed had their subscriptions interrupted when we moved our blog to NYTimes.com about 10 days ago. (If you don’t read this blog via feed, you probably have no idea what I am talking about, and nothing in this post will matter . . .
Video In the video player over to the left, you’ll find a new short video that’s a brain tease about your brain. Go give it a click, and then leave your answer in the comments section of this post.
A one-time religion student at Columbia University, Chris Napolitano took a job at Playboy in 1988 as an editorial assistant in the fiction department. He went on to become features editor, executive editor, and in 2004 reached the top job, editorial director. (The editor-in-chief title remains reserved for founder Hugh Hefner.) In the spirit of Jim Cramer, Mark Cuban, and . . .
One of my favorite people from graduate school (a writing program at Columbia) was Peter Temes. He worked incredibly hard, writing and teaching and raising a family all at once, which meant that he kept his head way out of the clouds, which couldn’t be said of all of our peers. He has gone on to write some books (including . . .
For reasons that may not make sense to anyone else, I recently performed a Google search for “They Might Be Giants” and “Belly Button.” This was the second hit: a paper by a Stanford linguist named David Beaver (that’s not an aptonym, is it?) called “Have You Noticed That Your Belly Button Lint Colour Is Related to the Colour of . . .
Does the President matter? Levitt continues the discussion