Sun, 08 May 2005
Walter Block on Walmart and Banking
Liberty Guys points us to a clip from CNBC in which Walter Block, Austrian economist, smacks down a congressman and a banking trade group representative who are whining about Walmart wanting to get into the banking industry. Good stuff.
My local Walmart has a Mexican bank in it for some reason, next to the McDonald's.
Sun, 01 May 2005
The God Delusion
Salon recently published an interview
with evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins who has written a number of
books explaining evolution. I hadn't heard of Dawkins until a few months ago
when I saw him on NOW
with Bill Moyers. I've been meaning to pick up one of his books.
Some choice quotes from the interview:
For a long time it seemed clear to just about everybody that the beauty and elegance of the world seemed to be prima facie evidence for a divine creator. But the philosopher David Hume already realized three centuries ago that this was a bad argument. It leads to an infinite regression. You can't statistically explain improbable things like living creatures by saying that they must have been designed because you're still left to explain the designer, who must be, if anything, an even more statistically improbable and elegant thing. Design can never be an ultimate explanation for anything. It can only be a proximate explanation. A plane or a car is explained by a designer but that's because the designer himself, the engineer, is explained by natural selection.
You are working on a new book tentatively called "The God Delusion." Can you explain it?
A delusion is something that people believe in despite a total lack of evidence. Religion is scarcely distinguishable from childhood delusions like the "imaginary friend" and the bogeyman under the bed. Unfortunately, the God delusion possesses adults, and not just a minority of unfortunates in an asylum. The word "delusion" also carries negative connotations, and religion has plenty of those.
Sat, 30 Apr 2005
American Housing Statistics
Mother Jones has collected some interesting housing statistics.
- 1 in 4 Americans want at least a 3-car garage.
- Extreme Makeover: Home Edition recently gave a 6-bedroom, 7-bath, 7-television house to a family of 4.
- 1 in 5 new homes is larger than 3,000 sq. ft. the size at which it becomes unmanageable to clean without hired help.
- Only 2.7% of San Francisco?s teachers, 5.7% of its cops, and 4.2% of its nurses can afford to buy a home there.
Clever 3M Ad
Apparently, only some of the money is real, but it's a brilliant idea
nonetheless.
business » marketing » advertising | Permanent Link
The Housing Bubble in Pictures
From Calculated Risk
From Northern Trust
From The Miami Herald
Thu, 28 Apr 2005
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
I read Eats, Shoots & Leaves last weekend. I suspect that it's one of the few books on the reference/humour shelf at the bookstore. It's a book about punctuation. Remarkably, it was a best seller in Britain and has received a number of good reviews. The author, Lynne Truss, rants about poor use of punctuation by shopkeepers (and, based on the number of times she complains about greengrocers, she must live in the vegetable capital of the UK), gives some history about how various punctuation marks came into being, and gives some tips on how to use them correctly.
I found some comfort in learning that nobody agrees on the proper use of commas, and, so, I will use them aggressively, as I see fit. I will also try to incorporate more colons and semicolons into my writing; a key that was, up until now, largely reserved for writing code will be set free. I was also happy to learn that British authors, like any programmer, know that it's proper for trailing punctuation to appear without quotation marks.
One bit of punctuation that I would like to bring back is two spaces after a period (full stop). I learned it in typing class in high school, and didn't realize that it doesn't exist in books until Ms. Truss pointed it out.
Tue, 26 Apr 2005
Email Security Silliness
It's amazing the number of times I've received email saying something like, "Here's the first eight digits of my credit card number. I'll send the second eight in another email (for security)."
This is not security. I wonder how people come up with these ideas. Do they think criminals accidentally intercept random emails sometimes? Or that they are able to intercept some messages, but there's no way they would be able to get two in a row?
If you're concerned about security, ask someone who is knowledgeable about the subject. In the case of email security, use PGP/GPG or S/MIME.
Tue, 19 Apr 2005
My iPod Shuffle Doesn't
I got my free iPod
Shuffle yesterday. I spent way too many hours trying to get it working.
On my laptop, with a 2.6.9 kernel, hotplug loaded the ub
module instead of usb-storage. I upgraded makedev and created
the /dev/ub* devices, but I couldn't access the /dev/uba device.
Finally, I tried it on my desktop with a 2.6.10 kernel, and after plugging it
in a second time, I was able to access the Shuffle's vfat filesystem as a scsi
device.
I installed gtkpod, and was able to create the appropriate directory structure and copy over some mp3's to the Shuffle. I plugged in the headphones, turned it on, and it played. It sounds decent with the headphones Apple supplies, but better with my Sony ones. Apple really should have integrated the headphones into the lanyard it comes with. Or there should be a spring-loaded device to coil up the wires.
One thing my Shuffle doesn't do is shuffle. It works in normal, linear mode, but in shuffle mode, it won't play anything. Perhaps gnupod didn't create the directory structure correctly or something. I'm an album listener rather than a single listener so it's not a big deal, but I don't like knowing that my new gizmo isn't functioning properly. One other problem is that when it's plugged into my usb port, the light always blinks orange. It's supposed to be green when fully charged, but I left it plugged in all night, and it greeted me with flashing orange in the morning.
Sat, 16 Apr 2005
Irrational Real Estate Exuberance
Robert Shiller, the author of Irrational Exuberance, was on NPR's Talk of the Nation last week to discuss the housing bubble and to tout the second edition of his book. You can listen to it online.
One caller was a real estate agent who claims there's not enough land in Las Vegas and that it will become a land of high-rise living. Another said that Cleveland was becoming too expensive. As an aside, I spent a couple hours in Cleveland in 2000, and left with a favorable impression. Downtown seemed to be undergoing a lot of development.
From the book:
Irrational exuberance is the psychological basis of a speculative bubble. I define a speculative bubble as a situation in which news of price increases spurs investor enthusiasm, which spreads by psychological contagion from person to person, in the process amplifying stories that might justify the price increases and bringing in a larger and larger class of investors, who, despite doubts about the real value of an investment, are drawn to it partly through envy of others' successes and partly through a gambler's excitement.
iPod Shuffle On Its Way
My free iPod Shuffle from ex24 is on it's way. Like Jonathan, I bought one share of Costco. At its current valuation, the iPod cost me between $2 and $3.
