CapitalistImperialistPig

Paul Krugman reports: This is too weird not to share: guess who was named by one survey as the most influential left of center European thinker ?

The Daily Beast and their panel of MacGeniuses came up with a list of twenty " smartest people of 2010 ." Nobody I actually know made the list, but I have some opinions on some of them. Of course the really smart people of 2010 are probably toiling in utter obscurity in some math or physics department, but we are sticking with just the public types here. #15 Christopher Hitchens. A very clever, passionate, and erudite fellow who manages to be wrong about a lot of stuff. If I had to be stuck on a long ocean voyage with only one person to talk to, he would be my choice from this list. #14 Kanye West. WTF? #8 Felisa Wolfe-Simon. Probably a good scientist who did some nice work with the arsenic tolerating bacteria, but this story was so absurdly hyped by NASA and the press that it really has become something of an embarassment. The bottom line seems to be that she and colleagues do not seem to have proven metabolic replacement of phosphorus in cellular processes. #5 J. Cra...

Tucker Carlson, who so far as I know is not a vegetarian, thinks Michael Vick should have been executed. This sentiment is probably widely shared by NY Giants fans, but I think that rather, the Eagles' offensive line ought to execute their blocks.

OK, maybe not so much here in southern New Mexico, though I suppose you could get a sunburn if you left your shirt off too long outside - but Europe is having its third tough winter in a row and the eastern US is also in the fridge again. So what does it mean? Proof of global warming or disproof (I couldn't bring myself to say "a refudiation", but I was tempted). Judah Cohen, a commercial weather forecaster, offers a interesting meteorological theory in the NYT . Annual cycles like El Niño/Southern Oscillation, solar variability and global ocean currents cannot account for recent winter cooling. And though it is well documented that the earth’s frozen areas are in retreat, evidence of thinning Arctic sea ice does not explain why the world’s major cities are having colder winters. But one phenomenon that may be significant is the way in which seasonal snow cover has continued to increase even as other frozen areas are shrinking. In the past two decades, snow cover has ex...

Paul Krugman looks at the housing bubble in Ireland and Nevada ... The populations are similar; the housing bubbles were comparable in their extremity; both currently have roughly 14 percent unemployment. .... Fiscally, Nevada’s retirees can count on Washington to keep paying their Social Security and Medicare, which amounts to a big transfer into the state now that it’s paying much less in federal taxes. Oh, and Nevada is in effect getting a federal bank bailout — not so much directly via the FDIC, although there’s some of that, as via Fannie and Freddie: with less than 1 percent of the US population, Nevada is generating more than 5 percent of the F&F losses — losses that are a problem for taxpayers in general, not specifically in Nevada. So there you have it: optimum currency area theory in action.. Ireland is faced with the combined disadvantages of sharing a currency with Germany but not a budget. *Yes, I've heard that it's not supposed to rhyme with "fire."

Prof. Steve Landsburg, AKA "The Burg" has a response of sorts to criticism of his "percentage of girls" puzzle from yours truly and Lubos Motl . That response was to challenge Lubos (I am the blogger-who-may-not-be-named) and all comers to a \$15,000 sucker bet. Lubosh has called the bet a "borderline cheat" but I don't see any border at all. The problem is that the subject of his bet is quite different from the original puzzle and his answer to his new problem is different than his original answer - and, not incidentally, now correct in a certain approximation. Here is the original problem: There’s a certain country where everybody wants to have a son. Therefore each couple keeps having children until they have a boy; then they stop. What fraction of the population is female? Well, of course, you can’t know for sure, because, by some extraordinary coincidence, the last 100,000 families in a row might have gotten boys on the first try. But in expect...

I had my teeth cleaned the other day. The tech managed to convince me that it was time to expose my head to some more ionizing radiation, so I submitted to X-rays. I had mixed feelings about the fact that they still used film. My previous dentist had gone to a CCD system which, while requiring less radiation per shot, also convinced my idiot tech that it wasn't really necessary to get the shot right the first time, since she could always get a do-over - one good reason I left that dentist. After the cleaning, the dentist looked at my X-rays and said somewhat wistfully: "Nothing really terrible happening to any of these teeth on the X-rays." Afterwards he carefully inspected my wisdom teeth, and said with still more apparent disappointment: "Nothing really going on to justify pulling them - YET." Am I getting more paranoid in my old age or does the guy really need that boat payment?