“David Bernstein”:http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2006_02_26-2006_03_04.shtml#1141069946 quotes from a _National Review_ article on GMU law school:

bq. “If the market discriminates against conservatives, then there should be good opportunities for hiring conservatives,” says [current Dean Daniel] Polsby. This is exactly the sort of observation one would expect a market-savvy law-and-economics scholar to make. Manne and his successors were able to act on this theory, and though Mason has in recent years expanded its recruitment of non-economics specialists [in part because law and economics scholars have gone from undervalued in the market when Manne was dean to a highly desired commodity], it has stuck by the core observation that law schools routinely overlook raw talent. Associate professor Craig Lerner, for instance, studied under the political theorist Allan Bloom at the University of Chicago and worked for Kenneth Starr on the Whitewater investigation. Listing either of these experiences on a résumé might easily turn off a hiring committee dominated by liberals, which is to say a hiring committee at just about every other law school. And so Lerner turns out to be exactly the type of candidate that attracts GMU. “Have you read Moneyball?” asks Todd Zywicki, another one of Mason’s bright young profs, in reference to the best-selling book by Michael Lewis on how the Oakland Athletics franchise assembled playoff-caliber teams on a limited budget. “We’re the Oakland A’s of the law-school world.”

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Linda Smith is dead.

I saw her only once, when she was unkown, as the cabaret act at a Socialist Outlook conference in the 1980’s. A small and intimate setting and she was simply one of the funniest people I’d ever seen in my life. I couldn’t believe it when I subsequently saw her on afternoon TV some 10 years later. She was terrific on The News Quiz, especially, for some reason, when Alan Coren was on too. Only, in my opinion, A Brief History of Time Wasting was not so good, but even that I’m pleased to have a bunch of tapes of. A nice tribute by Jeremy Hardy here. Obit here.

Sometime in the next couple of days, the one-millionth article will be added to the English-language version of Wikipedia. It’s an impressive achievement for a project that’s only five years old , and it’s already clear that Wikipedia has surpassed its main competitors, Encyclopedia Britannica and Microsoft’s Encarta in many important respects. Neither Britannica’s 200-year history and expert staff nor the Microsoft juggernaut have proved a match for Wikipedia’s ten thousand or so regular contributors, and thousands of occasional helpers. While many criticisms of Wikipedia have been made (as with most things, the most comprehensive source for such criticisms is Wikipedia, none has really dented either Wikipedia’s credibility or its growth.

Still, as Bismarck is supposed to have said

If you like laws and sausages, you should never watch either one being made.”

The process by which Wikipedia entries are produced is, in many cases, far from edifying: the marvel, as with democracies and markets, is that the outcomes are as good as they are.

I’ve been active on Wikipedia for several months now, and had some interesting experiences.

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Microsoft redesigns the iPod package. Hey, it’s funny, so it “must be true”:https://crookedtimber.org/2006/02/28/if-its-funny-must-it-be-true/, right? (Actually in this case that’s correct.) Via John Gruber.

Looks like the site is getting killed right now. “Try this link”:http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4313772690011721857&q=microsoft+ipod.

On occasion, I get emails in which people address me as Mrs. Hargittai. I’m not suggesting that people need know my personal history or preferences. However, if you are going to contact someone in a professional context and they have a Ph.D. and they teach at a university (both of which are very clear on their homepage where you probably got their email address in the first place), wouldn’t you opt for Dr. or Professor?

Most of the time when someone contacts me and says “Dear Dr. Hargittai” or “Dear Professor Hargittai” the first line of my response is: “Dear X, please call me Eszter.” So the status marker that comes with these is not what’s of interest to me. Rather, I’m intrigued by how gender ties into all this and would love to hear how male junior faculty get addressed in such situations.

Today, I received a message that had an interesting additional component:

Dear Mrs. Hargittai,

Professor Name-of-one-of-my-senior-male-colleagues recommended that I get in touch with you.

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So far as I know the following fallacy has no name: ‘if x is funny, there must be a grain of truth to x.’ It’s sort of like affirming the consequent, but for ‘it’s funny because it’s true’. If you see what I mean. (You have to think of ‘it’s funny’ as the consequent.) It’s part positive ad hominem. Rather than proving what he says is true, the speaker generates a sense of himself as a clever, sharp, perceptive person. The audience then infers that there must be something clever, sharp and perceptive about the position taken. But mostly the fallacy works because funniness is next to truthiness. The mechanisms of stand-up comedy and propaganda are not fully distinct. What makes you laugh has a certain kinship to that which causes the crowd’s madness. When you put it that way, it’s darn obvious what I am talking about. You have read something Mark Steyn wrote in the last several years, I take it? As Hume writes:

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Kieran might have opened a Pandora’s Box here. I am, more or less, obssessed with old children’s TV shows, so my own kids get to watch a great variety. It is easy to watch a region 2 DVD in the US if you have a DVD-Rom and an S-video outlet from your laptop (there is, to my surprise, no PAL/NTSC problem), so I order DVDs from the UK, and they watch them on our TV (though, as my 9 year old points out, this is slightly ridiculous, since my laptop screen is as big as our TV screeen. I’ll devote a couple of future posts to the joys of nostalgic children’s tv, but first I have a question. Why is Champion, the Wonder Horse available only on region 2, PAL, DVD through Amazon.co.uk, but Larry The Lamb available only on region 1, NTSC, DVD through Amazon.com (you can get it through the UK site, but it ships from the US)?

I got an email asking me about the Iranian Oil Bourse, which is causing great excitement among the Peak Oil crowd. Here’s my draft response. Comments appreciated.

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You Passed 8th Grade Math

Congratulations, you got 10/10 correct!

Via Pharyngula. I have to say that having “None of the Above” as the second option out of four on Q7 caused me some concern.

This NYT piece about America’s emptiest county starts off with the usual stuff about closed-down schools and vanished churches. Then, without any warning, it segues into a story about Libertarians plotting to take over the county and legalise cannibalism (no, really!).

As they say, read the whole thing.

Lawrence Kaplan (with Irving William Kristol) selling The War over Iraq

The United States may need to occupy Iraq for some time. Though the UN, European and Arab forces will, as in Afghanistan, contribute troops, the principal responsibility will doubtless fall to the country that liberates Baghdad. According to one estimate, initially as many as 75,000 US troops may be required to police the war’s aftermath, at a cost of $16 billion a year. As other countries’ forces arrive, and as Iraq rebuilds its economy and political system, that force could probably be drawn to several thousand soldiers after a year or two. After Saddam Hussein has been defeated and Iraq occupied installing a decent democratic government in Baghdad should be a manageable task for the United States. (pp19-20) quoted here

Lawrence Kaplan presenting “The Case for Staying in Iraq” in TNR

The administration intends to draw down troop levels to 100,000 by the end of the year, with the pullback already well underway as U.S. forces surrender large swaths of the countryside and hunker down in their bases. The plan infuriates many officers, who can only say privately what noncommissioned officers say openly. “In order to fix the situation here,” Sabre Squadron’s Sergeant José Chavez says, “we need at least 180,000 troops.” Iraq, however, will soon have about half that. An effective counterinsurgency strategy may require time and patience. But the war’s architects have run out of both.

Maybe if Kaplan, Kristol and others had told us this in the first place, there wouldn’t have been a war.

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Poetic justice as fairness. Thanks, I’ll be here all week. Actually, my first thought, on hearing that the UAE company had edged out Singapore’s hometown PSA was, “shit, they should have had Singapore do it!” Say what you like about Singapore’s idosyncratic form of government, they a) run the most kick-ass port in the world and b) can really be counted on to deliver efficient government services, without either the corruption which plagues such services in other SE Asian nations, or the general how-can-I-make-this-person’s-life-worse attitude which often seems to prevail in such places as, oh I don’t know, say the Washington, D.C. DMV? On the question of whether it’s a good idea to allow a UAE state-owned company to control (in whatever attenuated way) our port security, I’m kind of of two minds. On the one hand, if some other foreign company would otherwise be running the show, and if the same US, union-member stevedores will be doing the actual work, then maybe its not that big a deal. On the other hand, it seems that the US actually had to refrain from bombing bin Laden (pre-9/11) at some falconing retreat because a good portion of the “emirs” who make up the Emirate in question were there too. I don’t know why that makes me feel dubious…On the gripping hand, I have a perverse sense of pleasure as I watch Bush twist in the wind of the very anti-Arab, our-oceans-no-longer-protect-us bullshit the rest of us have had to hear for the last 5 years. Enjoy! (Unlike during the cold war, where naiads festooned with the stars and stripes were on constant call to toss back offending ICBM’s from their dophin-pulled-seashell mobile tactical units.) But his latest defense is, “I didn’t know anything about it.” Whaaaa? “The president is a sock-puppet moron” is supposed to be a snide criticism, not an exculpatory point. In general I am confused and await further information. Matthew Yglesias rightly notes that the alert citizen will have learned not to trust the administration to make S’mores without plunging half the nation into a sticky-sweet inferno of death. Death that’s sandwiched between Graham crackers! Food for thought.

Horowitz has now given us the opportunity to “vote for the worst of the worst”:http://www.frontpagemag.com/survey/vote.asp , and Michael Bérubé is way out in front. Keep the votes pouring in and expose this dangerous radical as the dangerous danger he is to apple pie and all that.

I must confess: since I can’t really tell the difference between the method these folks used and the method these folks used, I should probably just stop having intuitions about the universe since “often deviates from intuitive reasoning, leading to some surprising effects” isn’t the half of it. Because, granting that they did what they did, my intution is that they can go on to develop infinite improbability computing, relying on the fact that their experiment cannot be scaled up to cause the scaled-up algorithm not to run, thereby producing the answer. Am I right (or am I right or am I right?)

Here’s a link to the Nature paper. (above link via boingboing.)