Accusations of plagiarism have gotten stupid; the latest involves a scholar who repeated the biolerplate description of a major dataset. Commentator says, "We need to clarify that datasets in common usage ought to be described exactly the same way every time." More from Alex Tabarrok.
David French in the NY Times on what he says is actually America's most important political divide: "Only a minority of Americans are truly active in political debates, and they’re exhausting and alienating the rest of the country." Says about 1/3 of Americans describe themselves as thinking and caring a lot about politics, and they are much more radical than the rest; also, the vast majority of these partisans are white.
Some weird, whimsical art by Marcel Dzama.
For the past decade, real medical costs in America have been *falling.* (That is, the rate of increase in medical costs has been lower than overall inflation.) I remember when ever-rising medical costs seemed to present us with an unsolvable future crisis.
Another Italian town tries selling its vacant houses for one Euro but finds few takers. Incidentally Baltimore has been trying to sell vacant houses for one dollar, but it turns out there are a whole lot of conditions (designed to deter speculators and other undesirables) that make this tricky.
Restoring the Hallaton Helmet, a Roman find in Britain.
Personality traits and income; according to this study, people who overestimate their own competence earn 23.5% more than those who estimate accurately.
Ben Pentreath, early spring in Scotland. And a January visit to Sydney.
Excavation of a building site in Pompeii shows how Roman builders went about renovations.
And at Must Farm, British archaeologists find a bucket full of scrap bronze pieces probably destined to be remelted and recast.
New twist on the Hungarian corruption scandal; why are right-wing populists so corrupt?
Right-wing X/Twitter has gotten so bad that even conservative pit bull Cristopher Ruffo says it is "insane"; Ruffo particularly cites antisemitism and conspiracy mongering.
When the rest of suburban America was going to single family zoning, Palisades Park, NJ – for reasons no one remembers – decided to allow two dwellings per lot. For decades that didn't matter, but now hundreds of houses in the town have been replaced with duplexes, the population has risen, tax rates are down, and maybe this is a model for providing America with more housing. Increased density doesn't have to mean big apartment buildings. (NY Times)
Georgia Republican Party official Brian Pritchard, who has spent the past four years loudly arguing that the Democrats stole the 2020 election through fraud, has been found guilty of illegally voting nine times while on probation for felony convictions.
CERN’s Super Proton Synchrotron has long been troubled by a "ghost", a mysterious phenomenon that sometimes led it to generate bad results. Now the ghost has been isolated and modeled, and it turns out to be a strange resonance effect.
A judge finally gets tired of "judge shopping," that is, filing lawsuits in the jurisdiction where the plaintiffs hope to get the most favorable judge.
Greek funerary sculpture featuring twin babies.
Short video showing a long-range Ukrainian drone precisely striking a tower in a Russian oil refinery.
2 comments:
Personality traits and income; according to this study, people who overestimate their own comptence earn 23.5% more than those who estimate accurately.
No surprise there. People have been complaining about how our society encourages "failing upward" for a long time now. We reward confidence, even (or perhaps particularly) when it's misplaced confidence.
New twist on the Hungarian corruption scandal; why are right-wing populists so corrupt?
I would argue it's because when the ring-wing leans into populism, they lean into Fascism specifically.
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