Gifted Slacker

Robin and I are going to take a jaunt around central Europe over holiday break. We’re going to spend four days at the Boathouse Hostel in Prague. That’s where I stayed when I went there for a visit around New Years 05/06. Then we’re going to spend Christmas in Vienna, where we’ll see the Lipizzaner Stallions. We head to Brussels after that, with a potential one-night stop-off somewhere in Germany. We’ll celebrate New Years in Brussels and then head on home.

Since I’m under 26 I can ride the Eurostar back England for about £60 pounds. Robin would have to pay something like £250. So I’m not real sure if that will be our mode of return.

I’m really excited. Hopefully I can finish most of my work for the term before we head off. It’d be nice to relax for the entire trip.

This entry sponsored by Jennifer Feagans.

Old News from Tim Harford here:

But what might raise the odd eyebrow is the discovery that speed-daters systematically change their standards depending on who shows up for the speed date. Although women prefer tall men rather than short men, on evenings where nobody is over six feet, the short guys have a lot more luck. Most people prefer an educated partner, but they will propose to school drop-outs if the PhDs stay away.

I would like to think I’m more consistently descriminating than the folks described in the above article. But, of course, I’m biased.

Okay, I was reading this (Robin, you don’t want to follow that link. Stop it! Don’t even think about it.) post at one of my favorite blogs, Overcoming Bias.

Most of the time, when reading heavy blogs like OB or MR (or something they link to), I either understand it right away or it’s way out of my league. This one is on the border of my comprehension. I sort of get it. I understand the message, but the reasoning is a bit fuzzy to me.

Any help?

Cringley writes:

Take all the web usage and YouTube video data Google has been acquiring about us all, glue it to our data down at the credit bureau, tie it to our mobile phone number and our mobile activity, then use the resulting product as both an information service and a database for targeting ads and you have Super Google — the most valuable company on Earth and entirely based on metadata.

The only thing we won’t be able to do is hide.

This is the scariest and most interesting thing I’ve read today. I can’t decide which feeling is stronger.

Mark Bernstein describes a fabulous sounding Thanksgiving meal. Grilled turkey, sweet potatoes, and chocolate pecan pie. All good stuff, especially the gravy recipe. But toward the end of his list of dishes there’s a hideous beast: StoveTop Stuffing. Seriously gross.

Why go to all that effort to use cheap, nasty croutons? Croutons are so easy, and you can do the seasoning 100% to taste with homemade croutons. I’ll never understand some people . . .

Update: You’ll notice in the comments that Mark has corrected me. He meant dressing made in a skillet on a stovetop, not the horrible packaged dressing. Sorry about that.

I no longer have to feel bad about not giving a shit about not buying into the whole “fair trade” scheme. Fair trade (and similar fads) always seemed a bit fishy to me.

Peter Boettke wonders if the content of the above Starbucks marketing message is just an application of material learned in an introductory economics course. And, Matt Dobra replies in a comment on this The Austrian Economists post:

(…)
First, this “fair trade” coffee business is mostly a response to the huge drop in wholesale coffee prices between 1997 and 2004, where prices dropped by about 66%. According to ECON 101, some curve probably shifted. In this case, it was the supply curve, as Vietnam entered the coffee market with surprising efficiency, meaning existing, higher cost producers were pushed out of the industry. So fair trade is little more than subsidizing inefficient producers. Fair trade coffee is about as good an idea as trade protection for the sake of saving jobs in a country that is an inefficient producer, and what grade do you give a ECON 101 student who advocates that?.
(…)

I love Matt’s parting shot, too:

(…)
In the end, it is the ECON 101 student who tells me this is a good marketing ploy that plays upon both the misguided social conscience and the economic illiteracy of the masses is the one that gets the good grade.

When I star a post in Google Reader, I would like some sort of analysis to generate tags and add the post to my del.icio.us account.

I’ve tagged hundreds upon hundreds of bookmarks on del.icio.us. Software should be able to determine what I’m going to tag things, with pretty decent accuracy.

When I bury some of the work I’m dealing with I’ll have to look into implementing something on my end… Maybe a Greasemonkey script, or perhaps, the Google and del.icio.us APIs would allow me to create my own personal Reader mash-up application to do this.

Anyone else have any ideas?

On the Supreme Court review of the law banning handguns in Washington D.C.:

Assistant police chief Alfred Durham says 80 percent homicides in the district this year have been committed with firearms. He says the way the Supreme Court rules in this case is literally a matter of life and death.

No wonder so much of law enforcement is ineffective. This man is an idiot and should lose his job.

I don’t think you have to be Catholic to enjoy these seriously funny mini-biographies of “badass” Popes (via Ezra Klein):

Pius II (1458-1464)

Pius II proves that appearances can be deceiving. At first glance, he’d seem to be in the running for biggest fancy lad in the history of the Papacy. He was a “humanist,” which means that he read every bit of fruity Latin poetry he could get his hands on and then made ever-so-clever jokes about it with his similarly overeducated friends. Oh, how they giggled!
He seems like the kind of guy whose head you’d like to flush in a toilet, doesn’t he? Well, it’s a damn good thing you didn’t try it, because Pius had a very powerful, very spooky man who was willing to do whatever the pope told him: fucking Dracula. Seriously.

Despite the uneven tone, they’re relatively well written. I think the first two or three are strongest.

(Note, to those of you that might say that England is hell: I can’t argue. Point taken.)

Stephen Fry’s latest blessay is incomplete, inaccurate, repititious and belaboured.

He admits as much (at least those last two) at the end of the post. So, why did he still post what he knows isn’t work done to the standard of his previous blessays? It’s not like he has any obligation to post them on any sort of timetable.

I know my posts suck, but that’s fully in line with my track record in blog-world.

Update: After noticing 10 referees from Fry’s post (not insignificant in my world), I wonder if I should write a fuller review. Wouldn’t want to offend anyone by not offering the basis for my opinion. . .