Events

Can anyone figure out the Best Picture voting, and why they changed it? One economist tried: To dig deeper into the radical change made by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Scientists we turned to Justin Wolfers, associate professor of economics in the Business and Public Policy Department at the Wharton School. This year's Oscar voting is, Wolfers says, "a fairly common election system. We call it the 'exhaustive preferential' system, or 'instant runoff system,' and it’s the way we elect our...

A North Carolina congressman wants to put Reagan on the fifty: It's a Republican -- Rep. Patrick McHenry -- who has introduced the bill to replace the general who led the Union to victory in the (War Between the States) and led the nation as well with another more modern president, the late Californian and great communicator, Reagan. Reagan transformed the nation's political and economic thinking, the way McHenry sees it. He maintains that "every generation needs its own heroes." Grant may have had his...

Also as promised, I've finally gotten around to converting and uploading video from Delhi. I'll have more later this week; here's the first:

As promised, some photos of our trip to dog heaven, the B&B at Ponder Cove up in Mars Hill, N.C.: Did I mention dog heaven? That is one happy dog.

This may be the coolest computer ever:

Citizens of the District of Columbia are now free to marry: The U.S. Supreme Court has refused to stop same-sex marriage in the District of Columbia, clearing the way for couples to register to wed beginning Wednesday. Equal-rights opponents in the capital had asked Chief Justice John Roberts to prevent the issuing of licenses until residents had voted on the issue. Lower courts had denied requests to place a moratorium on issuing of licenses. "It has been the practice of the court to defer to the...

Columnist Jonah Lehrer thinks about insomnia: [W]henever we try not to think about something that something gets trapped in the mind, stuck in the recursive loop of self-consciousness. Our attempt at repression turns into an odd fixation. This human frailty has profound consequences. Dan Wegner, a psychologist at Harvard, refers to the failure as an "ironic" mental process. Whenever we establish a mental goal — such as trying not to think about white bears, or sex, or a stressful event — the goal is...

"[I]f James Carville and Jim DeMint are correct to argue that failing to pass HCR will be 'Obama's Waterloo' then the converse must also be true and, therefore, passing the bill could also be 'Obama's Waterloo' because, you know, Waterloo was a significant victory for some of us." —British journalist Alex Massie. She goes on to say: "And even if it's not a final, crushing victory on the scale of Waterloo, it might be considered 'Obama's Peninsular War.' That's not nothing, either. Right?"

Diane and I completely unplugged this weekend so I'm spending the evening catching up. I'll have photos probably Tuesday, depending how crazy tomorrow goes for me. Meanwhile, a joke from one of my clients: A noob used the following password: "MickeyMinniePlutoHueyLouieDeweyDonaldGoofySacramento" When asked why he had such a long password, he said he was told that it had to be at least 8 characters long and include at least one capital.

Paul Krugman has a review posting explaining the concept: Core inflation isn’t supposed to measure the cost of living, it’s supposed to measure something else: inflation inertia. Think about it this way. Some prices in the economy fluctuate all the time in the face of supply and demand; food and fuel are the obvious examples. Many prices, however, don’t fluctuate this way — they’re set by oligopolistic firms, or negotiated in long-term contracts, so they’re only revised at intervals ranging from months...