For the next five days, I will be forced to live without my laptop. It is an IBM (Lenovo) ThinkPad, machine type 2687 for those of you who care about such things, and I love it to death. My wife is a Mac devotee — a Maccabee is the term of affection in our home. I am perhaps less hip . . .
I have never been a huge video gamer but, having run into the Nintendo Wii a few times in the past couple of months, I can see why it is beloved. But here’s the question: why is the Wii, which was famously scarce before Christmas this year, still so hard to buy? Paul Kimmelman, a technical architect who has guest-blogged . . .
In my research with Chad Syverson on real estate agents, which is also discussed in Freakonomics, we argue that the current system doesn’t do a great job of aligning the interests of the agent and the homeowner. Consequently, you may not want to believe what your real estate agent tells you. So how else are you going to figure out . . .
We have written before about advertising in strange places — on fresh eggs, on airplane barf bags, on time itself. There is now an effort to advertise in [the place we used to think of as] the final frontier: space. The Wall Street Journal‘s Andy Pasztor has this to report: California Rep. Ken Calvert, ranking Republican on a House Science . . .
M. Scott Taylor, an economist at the University of Calgary, argues in a new working paper that the epic 19th-century slaughter of American bison — with 10 to 15 million buffalo killed on the Great Plains in barely a decade — was driven by a technological advance and a profit motive that both came from Europe. (Incidentally, this makes me . . .
Seeing this article about drones today reminded me of a conversation I recently had with a man I met at a conference. I would identify him by name, but I left his business card in my jacket pocket which is at home, so I won’t be able to give him direct credit until I get back home later. This gentleman . . .
That is my conclusion after seeing this Google Book Search Page for a book called How to Build Your Own Furniture. The page lists three “Related Books,” including How to Make Your Own Recreation and Hobby Rooms, How to Build Your Cabin or Modern Vacation Home, and … Freakonomics. Huh? I am trying to think of what may have fooled . . .
Our post last week about the possibility of pilotless commercial airplanes produced a vigorous, fascinating, and civil discussion in the comments. Here’s a bit of followup for those of you who are still interested. My brother the pilot, a.k.a. Joe Dubner, wrote to tell me that “about 80% of commercial airliner takeoffs and landings are already remote-controlled” is not quite . . .
According to CipherTrust, a company that makes its money protecting computers from viruses and spam, all the phishing attacks in the world are issued by a mere five “zombie” networks. Even more interesting is the fact that their targets are just as concentrated. Here, from CipherTrust’s page of spam statistics, are the top 5 targets and the percentage of phishing . . .
Some interesting e-mails turn up in the Freakonomics in-box. Here’s a recent one: I downloaded your book FREAKONOMICS on Limewire. Can I pay you something for this great book? Call it guilt or trying to use file sharing in an honest way, but I’d like to pay you something. This is also an experiment in how accessible famous people are. . . .
There is something called the TED conference, held annually in Monterey, California, which brings together a very high-powered audience of technology big shots and an amazingly diverse set of speakers. When I spoke there a few years ago, the guy best known for being the voice of Roger Rabbit was the speaker who followed me. (Let me just say that . . .
We have twice blogged — here and here — about Moodgrapher, a mood-tracking site built by Gilad Mishne at the University of Amsterdam. It tracks the blog entries of Live Journal users and aggregates their mood indicators to see how a given event (a terrorist act, a natural disaster, an election) influences societal mood. Levitt proposed that corporations might employ . . .
An amazing website that the guys at Marginal Revolution blogged about. It is called www.scipionus.com. It is a map-based wiki where regular people can insert information geographically about the effects of the storm. There are thousands and thousands of entries. Surfing around, the devastation doesn’t seem as bad on the wiki as it does on TV. Houses a block or . . .
I love to gamble. Personally, I’m pretty content with the menu of bets you can find at the typical internet sports book: NFL, Nascar, the next winner of American Idol, etc. But for the deeper thinkers among you, there is a great “betting” site called www.longbets.com. The wagers there are a little more exotic. Mitch Kapor and Ray Kurzweil, for . . .
On the surface, not much. The Kansas City Royals have lost 19 straight games and are threatening to break the all-time record for futility in major league baseball. My iPod, on the other hand, has quickly become one of my most beloved material possessions. So what do they have in common? They both can teach us a lesson about randomness. . . .
I know, I know, I know: Wikipedia is one of the wonders of the online world. I hear this regularly, especially from young journalist friends and also in e-mails concerning Freakonomics. A casual mention in our book concerning the derivation of the Chicago Black Sox’ nickname began a debate chronicled here, a debate in which participants regularly cited the Wikipedia . . .
Here is a little creative application of freakonomics to address the music-downloading mess.