« WSJ article on the economics blogosphere | Main | Markets in everything, human carpet edition »
Assorted links
1. The new Lars van Trier film is extreme.
2. John Nye: an economist walks into a bar, short podcast, direct link here.
3. There are seven years of health reform benefits, not ten.
4. Unusual hypotheses about John Milton.
5. Via Bamber, which is the most humane state? And would you rather lose the right to vote or the right to bear arms, state-by-state? Do note this is user-submitted data and not a random sample; here are more results.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on July 16, 2009 at 11:30 AM in Web/Tech | Permalink
Comments
It took some diging to find the Nye podcast. Direct link here
Posted by: James Joyner at Jul 16, 2009 9:24:41 AM
I just see a "Real Audio" and a "Windows Media" link there. Is it, technically, still a podcast if it cannot be listened to using an iPod? ;-)
Posted by: arne at Jul 16, 2009 12:19:24 PM
Apart from the self-selection issue, the guys at OKTrends have access to a very cool dataset.
What kind of hypotheses should we be testing?
Posted by: londenio at Jul 16, 2009 12:30:07 PM
Antichrist--so Mike Myers wasn't too far off with his "Sprockets" skits on SNL, was he? Kiss my monkey.
Posted by: blades at Jul 16, 2009 12:47:52 PM
Sigh, so much revisionist idiocy results from applying modern nonverbal signals to texts that have different nonverbal signals.
Posted by: Doc Merlin at Jul 16, 2009 1:51:13 PM
3. Well, sort of.
About a week ago, I predicted the healthcare debate would jump the shark within a week or so. Is this it?
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/CBO-Health-reform-bills-cnnm-847945793.html?x=0&sec=topStories&pos=main&asset=&ccode=
Posted by: Andrew at Jul 16, 2009 3:30:14 PM
Or, was it when Megan McArdle started discussing Fluffy's lack of coverage?
Posted by: Andrew at Jul 16, 2009 3:31:40 PM
From #5:
I put this up because the question was interesting and also implies a paradox. If the people who most love guns were offered this choice, the rest of us could pass real gun control. Voila.
Except for the fact that I'd like to see somebody try to enforce gun control on the people who preferred gun rights to voting rights.
Or, more to the point, once you lose your guns, the right to vote is easy to take away. Not so much the other way around ;)
Posted by: Granite26 at Jul 16, 2009 3:38:51 PM
That last question about losing the right to vote : I wonder if the author meant that I would "personally" get to choose for myself as an individual, or whether I'd be choosing for the population as a whole. In other words, do I give up my personal right to vote or use guns - or am I choosing one or the other option for everyone? This is critical because the personal choice is dead obvious (your personal "right to vote" is nearly worthless in a country with so many voters) while the system-wide choice is much less clear.
Posted by: Max M at Jul 16, 2009 4:12:35 PM
I think the real question should be: Would you rather give up your right to bear arms or be made to sit through a Lars van Trier film?
Posted by: Tim at Jul 16, 2009 4:23:48 PM
Correction: "von Trier", not "van Trier".
Posted by: PR at Jul 16, 2009 10:41:00 PM
This Milton stuff is an oldie. Everyone has talked about this for eons. Here's what we know:
1) The angels have bodies, although it is important that they are presented as SPIRIT bodies, not MATERIAL (like the Mormons, who in fact reject the idea of spirit). Milton goes through a lot of boring stuff on the relationship between matter and spirit, which he sees as a continuum with angels at the purest end and things like dirt at the other. We're in the middle. 2) The angels do make love.
Here's what we don't know: Does Milton imagine angels as having more than one gender? The sex is presented as mutual blending of substance, pure and total interpenetration. It's a marriage of true minds, etc. It's a lot more than one genital set going into another.
There's no question that the only angels we see in the poem are male. But did Milton imagine lady angels in writing this passage? _Possibly_, although Milton being Milton, it's hard to imagine that he wouldn't have mentioned it if it had occurred to him. His answer would be that since it is all spirit and intellectual blending, albeit real and not metaphorical, the question is irrelevant. But I also think that given Milton's very low opinion of women's intellect--Eve's stupidity gets us all into a lot of trouble--he may well have imagined it as a blending of fundamentally male entities. But since it isn't genital, but fully corporal, does that count as gay?????
Posted by: Eddy Elfenbein at Jul 17, 2009 9:27:28 AM
