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Assorted links
1. The vote to defund political science: how it went.
2. Jason Kottke doesn't read books anymore.
3. "Food rewards obsessiveness," the best eater in the United States. The full article is gated (the link offers only an excerpt), so buy the 9 November New Yorker. I don't usually link to gated material of this kind, but this was one of the three or four best magazine pieces I'll read in a year.
4. Why Buffett bought that railroad.
5. Weird stuff McDonald's sells around the world. In the Philippines it is "spaghetti soaked in sugar."
6. Fruitless endeavors, or not?: translating works of literature into games of chess against each other, using a computer program.
7. Were the Neanderthals just unlucky?
8. Françoise Sagan: an appreciation.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on November 7, 2009 at 07:47 AM in Web/Tech | Permalink
Comments
Jason Kottke only reads mainstream books and books by people he knows.
Posted by: tom s. at Nov 7, 2009 8:18:06 AM
2. This happens to a lot of people who read for a living. I've known newspaper editors and lawyers who rarely read for leisure. Of course, I also know many who read all the time, for both work and pleasure.
Posted by: Ted Craig at Nov 7, 2009 9:12:44 AM
The ''defund poli sci'' chart is terrible... What would Andrew Gelman say?
Posted by: Jack at Nov 7, 2009 9:41:42 AM
that's FrançoisE Sagan, the final E indicating a female.
Posted by: pat toche at Nov 7, 2009 10:35:50 AM
1. "So tell me again why they want to defund pointy-headed political scientists?"
Because they produce charts like that.
Posted by: Andrew at Nov 7, 2009 10:49:35 AM
4. It's usually a good bet when some says why Warren Buffett did something they are not correct. The good news is that it is usually simpler. My bet is that he bought the railroad because he could.
Posted by: Andrew at Nov 7, 2009 10:51:38 AM
I think James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock defunded political science a loooong time ago. OH SNAP!
Posted by: John Pertz at Nov 7, 2009 12:43:50 PM
Is Warren Buffett a capitalist?
Wouldn't a capitalist have used the existing equity holding in rail to borrow $40B, pay $5-8B of that in fees to do a leveraged buyout and thus increase the return on capital which would boost the price of the equity, thus creating far more wealth? Then, he could borrow against the equity to pay a dividend of perhaps $10B to BH, then IPO it, so the market cap would be $30B with $50B in debt on its balance sheet, and over time sell 40% making another $12B will retaining control.
What capitalist would actually lock up cash in a firm? That is a waste of good capital that can be leveraged to produce far greater returns!
Posted by: mulp at Nov 7, 2009 6:19:51 PM
Were the Neanderthals just unlucky?
I like how the popular press will jump thru hoops to avoid the uncomfortable thought that natural selection might apply to humanity. So Neanderthals didn't die out due to a selective disadvantage vis a vis modern humans - the latter were merely "lucky" that an entire continent decided to physically rearrange itself in a way that just happened to suit them better.
Had modern humans not come along, there's no reason to think Neanderthals would not have adapted to the changing environment, but come along we did, and Neanderthals did not survive.
Posted by: ziel at Nov 7, 2009 7:33:31 PM
Buffett may be tripped up by the environmentalists war on coal.
Posted by: jorod at Nov 7, 2009 8:09:03 PM
"What capitalist would actually lock up cash in a firm? That is a waste of good capital that can be leveraged to produce far greater returns!"
Indeed, it has been said that this is Buffett's managment style: Extract cash from the firm, and raise prices. Oh, and don't invest in any technological innovation.
Posted by: IWantCookieNow at Nov 7, 2009 8:52:07 PM
Marathon running capability, optimized for distance rather than speed, is a key characteristic of modern humans that distinguishes us from other animals and other primates. It defines us, no less than high intelligence and opposable thumbs and bipedalism. We don't live as hunter-gatherers anymore, and most of us don't run, so it's easy to overlook just how remarkable our endurance running capacity is. Most of us aren't even aware we have it, although barring health problems or handicap or obesity nearly all of us at any age could run a marathon after less than a year of training.
It's certainly plausible that Neanderthals, evolving in thickly forested lands rather than grasslands, were much less capable distance runners and could not compete at hunting after the climate changed. If the rules of the game shift heavily in your biggest competitor's favor, you are probably going to lose. If your home turf turns into something that that competitor has had a hundred-thousand-year head start adapting to, they'll invade your turf and push you aside. It's a story that has been repeated millions of times with countless other species.
It's pointless to philosophize over whether this constitutes luck. Natural selection doesn't take place in a static landscape and it isn't necessarily "fair"; slow climate shifts no less than sudden asteroid strikes are constantly tilting the playing field.
The question of "luck" is uninteresting. The article does, however, present a rather plausible theory of how and why we won and the Neanderthals lost.
Posted by: anonymous at Nov 8, 2009 12:59:08 AM
Buffett is betting on several things:
1. The price of energy will remain high and go higher. Railroads move goods with much greater fuel efficiency than trucking.
2. The stock price of his Berkshire Hathaway company will not grow as fast as it did historically. Otherwise, he would be making an all-cash offer instead of giving away shares.
3. The Pacific Rim will prosper and its trade with the US will continue to matter greatly. The railroad in question connects to the Pacific coast and not to the Atlantic.
4. The US will remain favorable to deregulation and market pricing, in which case owning a railroad will be a great inflation hedge. But if inflation flares up, his railroad's customers will lobby heavily for price controls and re-regulation, back to the same environment in which railroads struggled financially some decades ago.
5. As in #4, he may be betting on high inflation in the future (exchanging his cash reserves for hard cashflow-producing assets) and quite likely on a fall in the US dollar versus the renminbi and other Asian currencies.
Buffett likes companies with "moats" that keep out potential competitors, and railroads certainly fit that bill, since it's pretty impossible to build any new ones. His only competitors in serving the Pacific coast are Union Pacific and the two major Canadian railroads.
He is also idiotproofing Berkshire Hathaway as part of his succession plan, tilting his conglomerate more towards traditional industry and less towards insurance and the rest of the financial industry.
Posted by: anonymous at Nov 8, 2009 1:35:18 AM
a must read on how policy trumps evidence
David Nutt, professor of neuropsychopharmacology at Imperial College London, was chairman of the UK government's Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs until he was dismissed last week by the UK home secretary
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18099-david-nutt-governments-should-get-real-on-drugs.html
Posted by: bgreen at Nov 8, 2009 6:10:27 AM
(3) Great piece indeed. The New Yorker is too damn good to cancel (aha! a revenue model!), and that guy can write about food in a way that makes you *emotional* about it... (also a good example of a "do what you love..." kinda career :)
Posted by: David Zetland at Nov 8, 2009 11:11:17 AM
In the Philippines it is "spaghetti soaked in sugar."
It's called Pinoy-style spaghetti and is a somewhat common snack or side dish in the Philippines. Filipinos like to add sugar to spaghetti sauce and a lot of the pre-packaged spaghetti or tomato sauce you can buy in the country is already sweetened. "Soaked in sugar" is hyperbole, though.
Posted by: Ricardo at Nov 8, 2009 11:17:48 PM
What Tom S. said. I'm a huge fan of his blog but rarely look to him for any book recomendations.
Posted by: joe at Nov 9, 2009 7:13:20 AM
3. "Food rewards obsessiveness,"
Sorry, although his recommendations might be interesting, Gold sounds like a pretentious ass. And neither Sietsema is/was a great reviewer, IMHO.
The best recent mainstream restaurant reviewer, by far, has been Eric Asimov, who now reviews wine.
But I prefer to read the "amateur" restaurant reviewers, like Tyler. Who, btw, does not appear to detest "ethnic".
Posted by: anon at Nov 9, 2009 9:35:19 AM
Is there any point to plugging two novels into a chess program? Surely the author felt a need to justify this project--perhaps my eyes just glazed over before I read that far? Shall we next assign values to sports scares and plug two teams' seasons into a poker game?
Posted by: Laserlight at Nov 9, 2009 9:58:25 AM
3. I confess, I found the free snippet almost unreadable. Mentions Anna Karenina. There were these sentences - about every other one - that weren't quite sentences and that almost had something to do with the topic, but not quite. Describing holiday in France on meth. And this is one of the best articles you read? Mentions Val Lambson. Under what typology, pray?
Posted by: D. Watson at Nov 9, 2009 1:55:24 PM
The linked article suggests that humans prevailed over Neanderthals because we had better endurance running capability. Were there perhaps other differences?
According to a recent article in The Atlantic, humans apparently have "orchid gene" characteristics that cause a wide variation in personality types, which may in turn make the species more adaptive in a wide range of environments. Apparently only humans and rhesus monkeys have this characteristic, and not chimps or gorillas or similar species. It seems to be a characteristic that evolved in humans only in the past 50,000 years (so it would have evolved independently in rhesus monkeys).
The article in The Atlantic doesn't mention anything about Neanderthals, but perhaps it could be a candidate for another key difference between them and us?
Posted by: anonymous at Nov 13, 2009 2:39:34 AM
