Category Archives: Links

Links: Your house, cars, dubious campus policies, nuclear power, NIMBYs, and more

October 24, 2015 By in Links Tags: , , Leave a comment

* “The most disruptive technology of the last century is in your house,” an underappreciated and lovely point: “The number of hours that people spent per week preparing meals, doing laundry and cleaning fell from 58 in 1900 to only 18 hours in 1970, and it has declined further since then.”

* Europe’s love affair with diesel cars has been a disaster.

* The Little Disturbances of Man.

“The Limits Of The Digital Revolution: Why Our Washing Machines Won’t Go To The Moon:” On the future of work and why innovation may be slowing.

* For Students Accused Of Campus Rape, Legal Victories Win Back Rights, which makes too much sense; see also “‘Have We Learned Anything From the Columbia Rape Case?’ Not at the New York Times.”

* “You’ll Be Able to Buy Any Volvo as an Electric by 2019,” though I wonder if this is true.

* “Nuclear power is cheap, reliable, emissions-free–and struggling to keep up.” Nuclear power should be at the top of the agenda, especially when combined with electric cars. By the way, the next edition of the Chevy Volt is getting great reviews, and the development process behind the car is detailed in The Powerhouse: Inside the Invention of a Battery to Save the World. The Powerhouse is not a Tom-Wolfe-quality book but is interesting throughout and will make you respect the Volt.

* FYI for the grad students among you:

The decline of school-age children has important implications for colleges. College enrollment fell over the past few years just as the college-age population peaked. According to Census projections, the college-age population won’t return to the 2012 peak for more than 20 years.

* Students don’t seem to be learning anything in school, globally, which ought to depress those of us who do classroom work.

* Depressing, but: “This speech convinced me Israel’s wave of violence is so much worse than it looks.”

* How NIMBYs make your paycheck smaller.

* “Free” college tuition for everyone is not a good idea:

A more pressing issue is that community college is already close to de facto free for lower-income individuals, if they piece grants and aid together. Yet the completion rate at these colleges is at best approaching thirty-eight percent. The real problems come before college, and encouraging more people to attend four-year colleges is unlikely to do much good. In any case, here is further evidence that higher subsidies to community college attendance very often do not lead to more actual education. The same or worse is likely to hold for state universities.

Links: Electric cars, the booming erotic toy industry, academic freedom’s worst enemies, iMacs get love, and more

October 17, 2015 By in Links Tags: , , , Leave a comment

* In California, Electric Cars Outpace Plugs, and Sparks Fly.

* “The Race to Build the Perfect Couples’ Sex Toy,” conceivably NSFW but there are no photos or drawings of humans. I found it interesting throughout.

* “Cinemas must ‘drastically improve’ or lose audiences, says Christopher Nolan.” He’s wrong about the “real film” issue: he should be more worried at the shocking level of dilapidation at movie theaters, and the worse level of food available.

* “Professors teach students how to stifle academic freedom, U.K. scholar argues in new book,” and students are oddly eager to do whatever authority figures tell them to do.

* “Inside the lab: Why Apple still sweats the details on iMac,” a fascinating story; Apple also updated iMacs on October 13. I use a 5K iMac, and it’s an amazing machine. If you order one, make sure you get the Fusion drive upgrade. The 21.5″ models are now reasonably affordable.

* What a city designed only for bikes would look like.

* How Harvard fights unions; it is entertaining to me how university people, who are probably the most theoretically pro-union group in the U.S., can’t or won’t allow unions in their institutions, or actively fight against them.

* “The Porn Business Isn’t Anything Like You Think It Is,” which is safe-for-work.

* “Why ‘game’ and ‘pickup’ are popular in the Anglo-sphere” (otherwise titled “The Male Hunger For Endless Shallow Relationships Is A Symptom Of A Fundamentally Broken Society”); speculative. See also “The appeal of ‘pickup’ or ‘game’ or ‘The Redpill’ is a failure of education and socialization.”

Links: The intellectual foundations of American democracy, parking costs, more on “Mate,” Neil Strauss of “The Game” is back, and more

October 10, 2015 By in Links Tags: , , , , 1 Comment

* “American democracy is doomed;” don’t attend too much to the clickbait headline, but this may be the most important thing you read all day, week, or month.

* Parking costs are eating our housing.

* Robin Hanson on Mate, and also Tyler Cowen on Mate (see also me on Mate, though note too that I was the precise target audience for this book when I was younger).

* Why aren’t America’s ports automated? Short answer: Unions.

* “How Tasteless Suburbs Become Beloved Urban Neighborhoods.”

* “America: Abandon Your Reverence for the Bachelor’s Degree: Many high-school graduates must choose between two bad options: a four-year program for which they’re not academically or emotionally prepared, or job-specific training that might put a ceiling on their careers.” This should by now be obvious, and I argued the same in “Taking Apprenticeships Seriously: The need for alternate paths.”

* “Soldiers of Reddit who’ve fought in Afghanistan, what preconceptions did you have that turned out to be completely wrong?” The answers are fascinating throughout and demonstrate the total folly of trying to impose democracy on a country that in some respects resembles many “countries” of 3,000 years ago than countries of today. Sample:

I’d have to say this is not a perception but rather a culture shock. I was never part of any interrogations but I was told that some of the Taliban we had been fighting believed we had force fields that were causing their weapons, most notably RPGs, to not hit us.

It had nothing to do with skill of the user or the weapons capabilities. They actually believed our technology was that superior.

And a follow-up:

One of the guys in my unit was monitoring enemy radio traffic with an interpreter. They were flying around a Raven, and listening to the chatter about it. The conversation went something like this:

“Where do they find pilots to fly such a small plane?”

“They have trained mice to fly them, you fool!”

* Neil Strauss, who wrote The Game, is back with a new book and publicity for said book: “Neil Strauss: ‘My thinking was: If this woman’s going to be naked with me – I must be OK. It doesn’t last.’ His book The Game made him a fortune, but left Neil Strauss in treatment for sex addiction. Ten years later, he’s a changed man.” Here is another review / discussion on Slate. Here is a post in which I discuss The Game.

I’m not convinced “sex addiction” exists. I did pre-order The Truth: An Uncomfortable Book About Relationships.

Links: The Power Broker, bogus pre schools, Conrad, email, sugar, and more

September 28, 2015 By in Links Tags: Leave a comment

* “‘The Power Broker,’ 40 Years Later,” which is much more moving than it sounds.

* “Preschool Can Be Worse Than the Alternative.” We’ve worked on numerous proposals for New York City’s Universal Pre-Kindergarten (UPK) program, and some of that experience has made us… skeptical… of the push for more structured education for everyone, everywhere, all the time.

* “Joseph Conrad’s powerful novels anticipate the bloody political conflicts of the modern world;” a more accurate essay I’ve rarely read.

* “The Real Anti-Facebook Is Good Old Email.” Which I still use more than any other online system, though sometimes I feel out of time for doing so. I do use Dropbox for distributing pictures, though.

* Terence Tao successfully attacks the Erdős discrepancy problem by building on an online collaboration.

* “The Rise and Fall of Erdogan’s Turkey: No other state has catapulted itself into the future quite as rapidly, nor relapsed back into its dark past as suddenly, as Turkey. First there was modernization, and now the beginnings of a civil war. The country is divided by mistrust and hate.”

* The Money Spent Selling Sugar to Americans Is Staggering: Why do we eat what we eat? Three experts attempt to answer.

* The Case of Richard Glossip, who is about to be murdered by the state—in the United States.

Links: Standing desks, Elmore Leonard, leaving academia, bogus sexual assault numbers, and more

September 23, 2015 By in Links Leave a comment

* A review of studies of standing desks; as you know I use a GeekDesk and am standing as I type this.

* An excellent piece on Elmore Leonard, one of my favorite writers, ever: Start with Get Shorty and Out of Sight, in that order. Like many writers and especially prolific writers his work is uneven, but as always the best more than excuses the worst. Few of us hit the high notes even once.

* “‘Quirkyalone’ Is Still Alone:” note this: “Lately I’ve been having a lot of conversations with friends who find themselves still single in their 30s and 40s and are starting to worry that it’s not [. . . ] New York City’s cruelly Darwinian dating scene or bad luck. It’s just them.” NYC isn’t “cruelly Darwinian:” it has the shape it does because of sex ratios and preferences. The article could be read profitably in tandem with my post on Date-onomics.

* Utter absurdity in the UN: “Fury after Saudi Arabia ‘chosen to head key UN human rights panel.’” This in a country where at least 50% of the population is systematically oppressed in a shocking, breathtaking way.

* The Plot Twist: E-Book Sales Slip, and Print Is Far From Dead.

* Hemingway in love.

* That college sexual assault survey you’ve seen going around? Likely bogus.

Links: Leaving academia, conversations with Tyler, Internet degradation, hello rail, dematerialization, and more!

September 17, 2015 By in Links Tags: 1 Comment

* “I have one of the best jobs in academia. Here’s why I’m walking away.”

* Tyler Cowen in conversation with Luigi Zingales, by far the best link in this set.

* The Victory of Oliver Sacks.

* “We’re heading Straight for AOL 2.0.” Except for me: I’m still using blogs when no one else is.

* “The Future of New York City Transportation: Goodbye Cars, Hello Rails: Young people are driving the city towards a carless future.”

* “Did Scarlett Thomas Miss Her Chance? What happens when the stars don’t align for a gifted novelist.” I find these “dark matter” stories as fascinating if not more so than the major success stories.

* Maybe this global slowdown is different; the de-materialization angle, particularly in conjunction with the proliferation of buying off the Internet, is particularly plausible.

* “Bret Easton Ellis, The Art of Fiction No. 216.”

* “There Is No Excuse for How Universities Treat Adjuncts.” Except, you know, supply and demand.

* “America’s Fragile Constitution: The Founders misread history and established a dysfunctional system of government. A case for a little less reverence.” Or, things I’d never considered and now can’t un-consider.

Links: Houellebecq, literary fame, food, dating, language, and more!

August 25, 2015 By in Links Tags: Leave a comment

* The next Houellebecq, Submission, comes out in the U.S. on October 20. I’ve not surprisingly preordered.

* “How Literary Fame Happens;” “luck” and “utility to future teaching priorities” are big parts of the answer.

* Why Millennials may be into food, from the comments.

* “What two religions show us about the modern dating ‘crisis;'” the scare quotes are mind because no “crisis” exists, but the data is interesting throughout. This article could be profitably read with Christian Rudder’s excellent Dataclysm: Love, Sex, Race, and Identity–What Our Online Lives Tell Us about Our Offline Selves.

* Edmund Wilson’s Big Idea: A Series of Books Devoted to Classic American Writing. The result of the Library of America, whose books I really like (as objects, I mean: their contents are wildly variable, unsurprisingly).

* “The Limits of Language: Wittgenstein explains why we always misunderstand one another on the Internet.” I especially like this: “Since pretty much no one can agree on anything about Wittgenstein, I’m going to present things in the spirit of Pears’ interpretation, with the caveat that you could probably find a philosopher somewhere who would disagree with every following sentence.” Literary critics suffer from the same problem. No one can even agree what’s good, let alone right!

* College Calculus: What’s the real value of higher education?”

* “This week, I resigned from my position at Duke University…”

Why aren’t there women on Ashley Madison?

August 22, 2015 By in Links, sex Tags: , , 1 Comment

A couple people wrote me about this, from the last links post: “Perhaps the least surprising point is that [Ashley Madison] has almost no women on it,” and said that that was surprising, and/or that I’m a jerk for what that implies.

Surprise is to some extent in the eye of the surprised party, so I won’t argue with that, but I will note that “Attractive women who have NSA, one-off sex with a large number of total strangers” is actually a job description (one could even strike the word “attractive”). Which is fine—I’m not against that job and support legalizing it and other freedoms, but whenever possible look at what markets say about what people or groups of people want in the aggregate. Plus, women who want to meet strangers on the Internet for those sorts of things, one-off or ongoing, can do so easily through more conventional methods (OK Cupid, Tinder, whatever—ones that are said to be less gross and more normal). As I understand it, the honestly dishonest ones can disclose their status pretty easily on Tinder and elsewhere, and guys looking for that sort of arrangement appear to be not hard to find, per the first sentence of this paragraph. Generalizations allow of course for exceptions, and at least one or two of the people writing to me sound like they are exceptions, or they are portraying themselves as exceptions.

The “look first to markets for data” point is useful in all sorts of contexts. The other day I was chatting with a friend who said there are already “Too many people” in New York City; I observed that, if that were true, we’d see housing prices falling, and we in fact see the opposite—implying that most people think there are too few people in New York, and are willing to pay for all the people here. One does not have this issue in, say, Detroit, or Cincinnati. My point did not go over well, but perhaps that’s why people who use markets to extract and act on data make a lot of money doing so.

Edit: “Almost None of the Women in the Ashley Madison Database Ever Used the Site” provides more detail, especially how virtually none of the “millions” of supposed accounts created by women had ever checked their internal mail or chat.

Links: Why intellectuals hate capitalism, fusion power, forgotten works, news on the news, Ashley Madison, and more!

August 21, 2015 By in Links Tags: 4 Comments

* “Fiction, like sex, is messy. It’s complicating. Achieving softness and fluffiness doesn’t seem like much of a substitute.” Alain de Botton is so good. The book he is reviewing sounds less good.

* “Whole Foods’ John Mackey: Why Intellectuals Hate Capitalism,” a question that has interested me as long as I’ve heard English professors’s irrational slams on markets and commerce. “Understanding Elite Discontent” is also good on this subject.

* “New design could finally help to bring fusion power closer to reality.” Commercial-scale fusion would ameliorate numerous political and environmental problems.

* New York Review of Books Fills a Niche by Reviving Forgotten Works.

* “In substantial part, we like news in order to support talking about the news, and not so much because news communicates important information or insights.”

* “Take your unwanted dog to a shelter. If you have no other choice euthanize him. PLEASE, PLEASE, don’t “drop him off in the country.” A brutal story, which I’m tempted to quote from.

* “The Nearest Thing to Life by James Wood review – ‘the foremost literary enthusiast of our time.’” The book is excellent.

* “How RED Cameras Changed The [Movie] Game.”

* “Why Are Millennials So Obsessed With Food? The author Eve Turow argues that a generation’s taste for natural ingredients will shape the future of restaurants, grocery stores, and agriculture.” Still, I’m not convinced the underlying trend is correct; it’s always dangerous to generalize based on friends and acquaintances, but I appear to cook more than anyone else I know, and by a lot.

* The most interesting piece I’ve seen on the Ashley Madison hack, which is by Megan McArdle (the piece, not the hack; at least so far as I know she’s not behind the hack). Perhaps the least surprising point is that the site has almost no women on it. Edit: “Almost None of the Women in the Ashley Madison Database Ever Used the Site” provides more detail, especially how virtually none of the “millions” of supposed accounts created by women had ever checked their internal mail or chat.

Links: The dating / casual sex “apocalypse,” Scandimania!, photography, technology, cameras, and more

August 9, 2015 By in Links Tags: , , , , , Leave a comment

* “Tinder and the Dawn of the ‘Dating Apocalypse,'” and, already, the first rebuttal. The lack of the words “revealed preferences” in the first article is revealing about the writer’s priors. I read “Dating Apocalypse” as comedy.

* Stop the Scandimania: Nordic nations aren’t the utopias they’re made out to be.

* Interview with Stephen Wolfram on AI and the future, interesting throughout, note especially this:

One of the things I was realizing recently—one of the bad scenarios, for me, looked at from my current parochial point of view—is maybe the future of humanity is people playing video games all the time and living in virtual worlds. One of the things that I then realized, as a sobering thought: looked at from 200 years ago, much of what we do today would look like playing video games, as in, it’s a thing whose end, whose goal, is something almost intrinsic to the thing itself, and it doesn’t seem related to—it’s like, why would somebody care about that? It seems like a thing which is just taking time and putting in effort; proving mathematical theorems, why would people care about that? Why would people care to use endless social media apps, and so on, and why would people care to play Angry Birds?

* Similar to the above: “The Next Wave,” on the end of Moore’s Law, its implications for science and everyone, and much more. The most important recent link I’ve posted, though admittedly not as funny as the “Dating Apocalypse” link.

* “The Suicide of the Liberal Arts;” maybe, though I’ve never found The Iliad compelling.

* That’s Not Funny! Today’s college students can’t seem to take a joke.

* “Sony a7R II: A Brief Review,” though this camera is far too expensive for normal people. Normal people are better served by Sony’s a6000. Whoever names and markets cameras should be fired: everything about the naming conventions is a confusing hodgepodge.

* “The age of loneliness is killing us;” overly polemical in my view and yet I see the trends described in my own life and my family’s life.