Interesting news in this WaPo story: thereâ??s a site in the works, to be housed at regulation.gov, where anyone will be able to submit comments on pending federal regulations. Now, I am most assuredly not one of those people who finds appealing a vision of government as some godawful interminable PTA meeting â?? the kind […]

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When measuring velocity, “at rest” is defined by the observer’s frame of reference. The universe does not come with fixed points and fulcrums built in. Forget this, and it’s possible to get trapped in fruitless puzzlement over which of two objects in space is “really” moving and which standing still. Just such a memory lapse […]

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I’ve just noticed the funniest little coincidence. You see, in the comment section to this post, someone named “Mary Rosh” rather fervently defended Dr. Lott, which is not very odd, and in particular excoriated me for posting about the controversy without doing research and contacting the parties involved first. (There was actually a third comment […]

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A report on PRI’s Marketplace today focused on child unions in the developing world. American trade unions, longtime leaders in organizing anti-sweatshop boycotts, regards such unions as repugnant, and would like to see them done away with. This despite the fact that children like Aima, a union member NPR reporters spoke with, say that such […]

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My economic researcher friend, who works at another think tank I won’t name (because it’s already named the Urban Institute), writes the following about the Lott Affair: I don’t know if it’s that much better to publish a number that you know is statistically meaningless–and it is meaningless if you can say 98% isn’t significantly […]

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So regular readers may recall seeing me kvetch about the “Tracy Chapman Problem” — to wit, you couldn’t have written Ms. Chapman’s “Talkin’ About a Revolution” as an ode to comparative advantage and the invisible hand. But where folk falls short, perhaps hip hop can provide a solution. A Tanzanian rapper (and Masai warrior!) who […]

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In a win for Marvel, but a setback, no doubt, for Professor Charles Francis Xavier, a court has ruled that mutants aren’t human. Or, anyway, their action figures aren’t.

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So as I’d suspected might happen if John Lott’s claims were true, the Internet hubbub about his 1997 survey has prompted someone to come forward. We have what looks like confirmation that such a survey was, in fact, conducted. A person whose name and other identifying details I’ll omit for privacy’s sake wrote Lott: This […]

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Amy notes a puzzling asymmetery in the way doctors approach young women’s reproductive choices. If someone in her early twenties wants help conceiving a child, say via fertility treatments, then the medical profession is only too happy to oblige. Perhaps that’s still on the young side to be having children these days — I’ve no […]

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Aaron of God of the Machine posed a question in the comments to the post on free will below that struck me as worth repeating here. (I see he’s also blogged it.) Some people have apparently offered the following thought experiment as an argument that we must have the capacity for free choice. You tell […]

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