Garbage cubes of NYC

Justin Gignac has sold over 1,200 of his 'Garbage of New York City' cubes. Proof that it's all in the packaging, I guess.

NYCGarbage homepage

More from PSFK

Shrinking Detroit [infographic]

From TIME.

(Hat tip: chart porn)

Econ 101 as taught by nature

Forsyth and Miyata's 1984 book Tropical Nature is unintentionally loaded with basic economic principles housed within ecological anecdotes. Take this one, for example:

Lesson 1: Living things are self-interested, and that's OK.
Lesson 2: With enough trials, competition forces trading parties to be honest. {Emphasis is mine...}

The congruence between the behavior of flowers and their pollinators has led students of pollination ecology to speak of the "harmony" between the two groups. But if such harmony exists it is purely of a self-serving sort. The bats are interested only in filling their stomachs, and it is no concern of theirs that they may be doing a favor for the plant. Indeed, a hungry bat may eat the flowers and large quantities of pollen. Some bats are reported to dine exclusively on pollen, and any plant that depends on these species for pollination is clearly willing to pay a steep price for gene dispersal. Selfishness is characteristic of other pollinators. Bees that happen across flowers whose nectaries are too deeply recessed to reach with their tongues will often crawl to the side of the blosson and chew their way to the nectar, depleting and damaging the flower without transferring any pollen. When hummingbirds set up a territory over a patch of the banana-like Heliconia plants that occupy light gaps in the rain forest, they pugnaciously evict other visitors and thereby may impede the plant's gene dispersal.

Animals are not the only selfish parties in pollination systems. The plants are equally self-serving. Some flowers attract their pollinators by deceit. Orchids are masters of this art. Some offer what appear to be nectaries but turn out to be just artful pigments. Others have hairs that resemble pollen-rich anthers but are really a ruse to lure bees where they can be dabbed with the orchid's pollen without being able to pack any away to take back to the nest. Some orchids lure bees into trap blossoms that force them against pollen-bearing structures and pollen receptors without offering any real rewards. Other orchids mimic nectar-bearing flowers, and some even play on the indiscriminate lust of male tachinid flies by mimicking females. When the male attempts to copulate with the pseudofemale, he actually pollinates the orchid. Other orchid flowers flutter in the breeze, producing a movement that male Gentris bees perceive as a territorial challenge. When they aggressively sally forth, plowing into the presumed intruder, they pick up the orchid's pollen. However, deceptive seductions like these are dependent to some extent on naive pollinators and may not work on an insect that has been duped often enough to learn to avoid the flowers. The majority of flowers, even orchids, must still offer significant rewards if they are to get dependable service.

Playing audio 40% faster

I was completely oblivious to this time saver until now, so thought I would pass it along in case others were in the dark... (and if you were not in the dark, I am mad at you for not telling me earlier.)

In Windows Media Player press ctrl+shift+g to play video and audio 40% faster. Or, if that's not fast enough, in WMP version 10, go to Now Playing > Enhancement > Play Speed Settings and set your own speed. (More instructions from Microsoft, if you need them.)

The average person speaks at about 150 words per minute, so 40% faster = 210 words per minute, which is still slightly below the average speed at which most people read (250 to 300 words per minute). To get to the same speed at which most people read, you would have to double the playback speed, but this makes comprehension more difficult. At +40%, though, the mind can easily pick up all the words. In fact, I will probably elect to play most around +70% or +80%.

Bloggingheads is the only podcasting service I am aware of that currently offers faster playback, so for all the other podcasts and lectures I listen to, this has the potential to save me many hours with zero loss in comprehension.

Update 11/19: To do the same thing in Quicktime, go to Window >> Show A/V Controls. See the comments for other useful advice on how to do this on your iGadgets.

Public outrage vs. actual hazard [chart]

Susanna Hertrich's Reality Checking Device. (Hat tip: Information is Beautiful)

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Earlier:
Odds of dying visualization plus rant
Media scare stories over time [infographic]

Kafka makes you smarter

Or, in technical terms: "surrealism enhances the cognitive mechanisms that oversee implicit learning functions."

ScienceDaily 9/16:

The idea is that when you're exposed to something that fundamentally does not make sense, your brain is going to respond by looking for some other kind of structure within your environment.

A group of subjects were asked to read an abridged and slightly edited version of Kafka's "The Country Doctor," which involves a nonsensical –– and in some ways disturbing –– series of events. The subjects were then asked to complete an artificial-grammar learning task in which they were exposed to hidden patterns in letter strings.

People who read the nonsensical story checked off more letter strings –– clearly they were motivated to find structure, but what's more important is that they were actually more accurate than those who read the more normal version of the story. They really did learn the pattern better than the other participants did.

Public privacy

Sculpture of a Plattenbau by Dagmar Schmidt in Halle, Germany. Plattenbau is a structure characteristic of East Germany residential buildings constructed of large, prefabricated concrete slabs.

(Hat tip: anArchitecture)

Executed prisoners' last words

The Texas Department of Justice website has executed prisoners' last statements going back to 1982, from which a 9/19 NYT Op-Ed collected some quotations. (Hat tip: Tyler Cowen)

I read through quite a few and I must say, if you are hoping to find some profound statements about the meaning of life, this is not the place to look. Many take the opportunity to apologize, often noting that the word "sorry" does not suffice. Some say they are nervous, some say they are calm. Some say nothing at all. By far most common (at least from the ones I read) was to, ironically, thank God.

To me, the absence of profound statements says something interesting. But I'm not sure what.

Sky at night [time lapse]

Some incredible time lapse videos of the night sky can be found here or at Tom's Vimeo page.

City at night [photos]

Working through the night, Will Steacy walks from airport to inner city, past abandoned factories, down deserted streets and through neglected neighborhoods, stopping to photograph scenes and people illuminated only by streetlamps, neon signs, headlights and moonlight.

(Hat tip: New Shelton)

Whoa, Pablo.

There’s a great story about Pablo Picasso. Some guy told Picasso he’d pay him to draw a picture on a napkin. Picasso whipped out a pen and banged out a sketch, handed it to the guy, and said, “One million dollars, please.”

“A million dollars?” the guy exclaimed. “That only took you thirty seconds!”

“Yes,” said Picasso. “But it took me fifty years to learn how to draw that in thirty seconds.”

(Hat tip: New Shelton)

US business climate map

The map comes from the Tax Foundation's 2010 State Business Tax Climate Index report. The Triangle Business Journal has a brief summary from the NC perspective.

It is clear that there is a negative correlation (but by no means perfect correlation) between population density and business tax climate. It's also interesting how neighboring states seem to cluster together in groups of 2 or 3 in offering similar business tax climates.

One design critique: It would have been better to shade the states based on the index rather than state rankings.

US change in income map

From Creative Class blog.

Nifty food labels

PSFK 9/17:

TO-GENKYO has designed an innovative hourglass shaped label for packaged meat which uses a special ink that changes color as ammonia is released inside the package. As the meat ages, it releases increasing amounts of the substance, obscuring the barcode at the bottom. Customers can quickly see if the meat is going bad – and when the barcode becomes completely covered, it can’t be scanned.

If you ask Seth Roberts, he would not buy the meat until the label had gone completely dark.

LA brush fire time lapse

Fast Company 9/4: Five Incredible Timelapse Videos of the Station Fire in Los Angeles

The last one is my favorite.

Word of the week

Witzelsucht: a set of rare neurological symptoms characterized by the patient's uncontrollable tendency to pun, tell inappropriate jokes and pointless or irrelevant stories at inconvenient moments. The patient nevertheless finds these utterances intensely amusing.

(Hat tip: Best of Wikipedia)

Global brand popularity [infographics]

Tim Graham has a guest post on the tableau software blog with visualizations of brand popularity using Google search data.

Here is a small sample:



Although he does not post often, Tim's Data Blog is high-quality and one of my favorite visualization blogs.

185 uses for a pig

Pig 05049:

Christien Meindertsma has spent three years researching all the products made from a single pig. Amongst some of the more unexpected results were: Ammunition, medicine, photo paper, heart valves, brakes, chewing gum, porcelain, cosmetics, cigarettes, conditioner and even bio diesel.

Meindertsma makes the subject more approachable by reducing everything to the scale of one animal. After it's death, Pig number 05049 was shipped in parts throughout the world. Some products remain close to their original form and function while others diverge dramatically. In an almost surgical way a pig is dissected in the pages of the book - resulting in a startling photo book where all the products are shown at their true scale (1:1).

(Hat tip: Kottke)

Football in super slow motion

Last week I showed you an entire football game in 50 seconds.

Now, take a look at a video of football 50x slower than normal at the Redskins' training camp, brought to you by NFL Films. [90 seconds]

Water polluters near you [map]

The New York Times comes up with another rich information display, this time the location of water polluters in the entire United States.

Job Voyager

I love visualizations like this.

The Job Voyager is an interactive time series of occupations going back to 1850. Type an occupation in the search box to get a closer look at how it has changed over time, for example "economist":



(Hat tip: chart porn)

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If you like visualizations like this, check out Wattenberg's Baby Name Wizard. (Or check out my Q & A with Martin Wattenberg.)

Football more popular than ever

Opening weekend's 4pm Fox telecast drew 25.1 million viewers -- possibly a record -- and increases in viewership from last year in both pros and college range from 12% to 55%.

More from NielsenWire.

The End is ... not for awhile

(Hat tip to my lady, who is not sure where she found this)

Kanye? What are you doing here?

Link

(Thanks, dear)

Things not seen [TED talk]

This 10 minute video released yesterday is one of my favorite TED talks to date. That's saying something. I watched it twice in a row, pausing throughout to digest.

Scientific Discovery

Science requires skepticism, and yet discovery, more often than not, requires a temporary relaxation of that skepticism. To discover something, you first have to believe it is possible.

-Rob Dunn in Every Living Thing

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Earlier:
Q & A with Rob Dunn
The Discoveries Not Yet Made

Parenthood and politics

Research from NC State in ScienceDaily 9/9:

Parenthood seems to heighten the political ‘gender gap,’ with women becoming more liberal and men more conservative when it comes to government spending on social welfare issues.

Seeing as I oppose government spending on social welfare issues more than most republicans, it's scary to think what would happen if I had tots. Or if my hippie sister did.

Strumming the tune of birds on wires [video]

Birds on the Wires from Jarbas Agnelli.

(Hat tip: PSFK)

The big post of book recommendations

At risk of overwhelming readers, here are the books I have read or skimmed that are still relatively fresh on my mind -- 95%+ were read in 2009 -- ordered roughly by how much I took away from them. (Please note that this ordering has nothing to do with the quality of the book, nor with how much you might take away from them.)

A Ton

The Creative Habit, Twyla Tharp.
As the Future Catches You, Juan Enriquez.
Every Living Thing: Man's Obsessive Quest to Catalog Life, Rob Dunn.
Predictably Irrational, Dan Ariely.
How We Decide, Jonah Lehrer.
Edward Tufte's four books.
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, Stephen King.
Proust was a Neuroscientist, Jonah Lehrer.
The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance, Anders Ericsson.

A Good Amount

Discover Your Inner Economist, Tyler Cowen.
Luxury Fever, Robert Frank.
Welcome to the Genome: A User's Guide to the Genetic Past, Present, and Future, Rob DeSalle.
Rich Dad, Poor Dad, Guy Kawasaki.
Fooled by Randomness, Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
The Logic of Life, Tim Harford.
Wisdom of the Crowds, James Surowiecki.
Yes! Fifty Scientifically Proven Ways to be Persuasive, Robert Cialdini.
Exodus to the Virtual Worlds, Edward Castronova.
Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor, Sudhir Venkatesh.

A Fair Amount

Create Your Own Economy, Tyler Cowen. (This is likely to ascend the rankings as I think about it more.)
Nudge, Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein.
Oblivion, David Foster Wallace. (The only fiction on the list.)
Tropical Nature, Forsyth and Miyata.
The Black Swan, Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell.
Information Visualization: Design for Interaction, Robert Spence.
Things that Make Us Smart: Defending Human Attributes in the Age of the Machine, Donald Norman.
Push Comes to Shove, Twyla Tharp.
Authentic Happiness, Martin Seligman.

Not Much

Thinking Like Einstein: Returning To Our Visual Roots With The Emerging Revolution In Computer Information Visualization, Thomas West.
Cities and the Creative Class, Richard Florida.
Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy, Carl Shapiro and Hal Varian.
Getting to Yes, Fisher, Ury and Patton.
Good & Plenty: The Creative Successes of American Arts Funding, Tyler Cowen.
The Economic Naturalist, Robert Frank.
Creative Destruction: How Globalization is Changing the World's Cultures, Tyler Cowen.
The Millionaire Next Door, Thomas Stanley and William Danko.
The Economics of Happiness, Mark Anielski.
A Writer's Life, Gay Talese.

A football game in 50 seconds [video]

A time lapse of the opening game of the college football season: NC State versus South Carolina (which unfortunately ended 7-3 in favor of SC). (Hat tip: yet another NC State sports blog)

The crowd standing and sitting in unison creates a very cool effect.

For years, NC State has had a hard time trying to get students in the stands by kickoff because tailgating at NC State has special importance. NC State went to a new system a few years ago that rewards early-arriving students with better seats. This sounds nice in theory, but you can clearly see the perverse results in the video: The students who care most about their seats arrive early, ridiculously early, well before any other sections are filled. The tailgaters know they are going to get the worst seats in the house, so there is no reason to hurry, and the upper part of the student section is that last place in the stadium to fill -- well past kickoff.

The ticketing people should consider talking with one of the many brilliant economists at NC State who would be happy to share some better ideas. One idea would be to penalize late-arriving students by, for example, suspending ticket rights for the next game. This would create a disincentive for late arrivals while eliminating the incentive for excessively early arrivals.

First billionaire athlete

Michael Jordan is the first billionaire athlete.

It's a safe bet that Tiger Woods and LeBron James will be #'s 2 and 3.

Even for the most legendary athletes, huge salaries will not propel them into the billionaire category because their careers are too short and the amount of money, amazingly, not nearly enough. (A billion is a thousand millions.)

Although entertainers are often held as examples of ridiculous wealth, only a few have made it into the billionaire category, and even then only by selling products outside of the entertainment sphere (e.g., Air Jordans, Oprah's many business ventures).

Wikipedia's list of richest billionaires. Note that Jordan and Oprah are not even close to the top 100.

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So how are billionaires made? My own observations...

1. Most commonly by selling something that is ubiquitous and cheap, and hard to replicate.
2. By inheriting money from from a rich relative who let their investments grow.
3. By making some great (or really lucky) investment decisions.
4. Least commonly by government sponsored monopolies.

Government Health Plan odds fall from 40% to 15%

History on Intrade

(Hat tip: Carpe Diem)

Authoritarians

Which is more important for a child to have...

Independence or respect for elders?
Obedience or self-reliance?
Curiosity or good manners?
Being considerate or being well-behaved?

Your answers to these questions are likely to predict your kids' political leanings, and your parents' answers to these questions are likely to predict your own partisanship.

Interestingly, this is a relatively recent phenomenon. While degree of authoritarianism persists across generations, only recently (past 50 years) has degree of authoritarianism predicted party alliances. I learned this and much from a fascinating State of Things interview 9/10 with the authors of Authoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics.

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I might be biased but I seriously believe Frank Stasio, host of the little WUNC radio show The State of Things, might be one of the best interviewers anywhere. The quality of his interviews continues to amaze me. It is to the point that even if the guest bores me, I can study the types of questions he asks and the way he phrases them and be fully entertained.

John Stossel leaves ABC for Fox

To me it is a shame that TV's lone voice of libertarianism (and arguably TV's best mustache) is leaving for a station where he might be seen as nothing more than another Bill O'Reilly conservative, bitter that liberals get all the media attention.

I miss Milton Friedman.

Federer's Streak

I did not even know about this streak. From Chris Chase's list of the all-time greatest streaks in sports:

Roger Federer, 22 consecutive Grand Slam semifinals -- Consider that the next closest man on the list is Ivan Lendl, and he made 10 straight semis. (Lendl broke his own record with his run from 1985-1988. Before that the mark he set was six.) To not lose 110 matches from the first round to the quarterfinals is a testament to Federer's greatness and versatility. (Note: There were a number of women in the Open era with streaks over 10.)

Photoshop as a diet plan

Springwise profiles ThinnerView 8/20: Morphed photos help dieters visualize a thinner self

StrongerView, anyone? HappierView? RicherView?

TV remote that blogs what you're watching

Triangle Business Journal 8/31:

IBM has applied for a patent on a network-enabled smart remote control that sends out a message to Twitter, Facebook or a blog when you start watching a TV show. Users can choose from a list of installed text messages or they can type in something themselves. They can also embed a snapshot from the show. The remote would also show messages between Facebook friends, bloggers and Twitterers.

IBM is probably targeting heavy social-networking teens with this device, but I believe self-trackers and productivity nuts will find more use for it.

I like the idea but I am not sure it is quite as good as the device that "single-handedly justifies Twitter's existence," a chair that tweets farts.

Sleep as time management tool

New York Times 8/31:

Jerome Siegel, a professor of psychiatry at the University of California, Los Angeles, argues that sleep evolved to optimize animals’ use of time, keeping them safe and hidden when the hunting, fishing or scavenging was scarce and perhaps risky. In that view, differences in sleep quality, up to and including periods of insomnia, need not be seen as problems but as adaptations to the demands of the environment.

More on time management

I came across these sentences on the time management wikipedia page and found them interesting enough to pass along.

Task lists aren't the key to productivity they're cracked up to be. An estimated 30% of listers spend more time managing their lists than they do completing what's on them. This could be caused by procrastination by prolonging the planning activity. This is akin to analysis paralysis. As with any activity, there's a point of diminishing returns.

Rigid adherence to task lists can create a "tyranny of the to-do list" that forces one to waste time on unimportant activities.

Pareto analysis is the idea that 80% of tasks can be completed in 20% of the disposable time. The remaining 20% of tasks will take up 80% of the time. This principle is used to sort tasks into two parts. According to this form of Pareto analysis it is recommended that tasks that fall into the first category be assigned a higher priority.

Using the Eisenhower Method, all tasks are evaluated using the criteria important/unimportant and urgent/not urgent and put in according quadrants. Tasks in unimportant/not urgent are dropped, tasks in important/urgent are done immediately and personally, tasks in unimportant/urgent are delegated, and tasks in important/not urgent get an end date and are done personally. This method is said to have been used by US President Dwight D. Eisenhower, and is outlined in a quote attributed to him: What is important is seldom urgent and what is urgent is seldom important.

Book ban map

Fortunately, it seems people are staying away from challenging books in public libraries (only 2 books challenged since Dec '06), but there are many more challenges to school libraries and curriculum.

Wikipedia has a list of books banned by the government and a list of most commonly challenged books in the US.

(Hat tip: DataViz)

NFL's Wildcat formation

The Wildcat formation was introduced to the NFL last season by the Miami Dolphins, but this season, there might not be a game that goes by without it. The play has been remarkably successful and defensive coordinators have been losing sleep over it. In the formation, the running back lines up as the quarterback, and the quarterback lines up as a wide receiver. The animated graphic from the AP demonstrates what the play looks like as a hand off, pass, or run.

But what does the Wildcat formation offer over a traditional formation? Wikipedia explains:

The virtue of having a running back take the snap in the Wildcat formation is that the rushing play is 11-on-11 (although different variations have the running back hand off or throw the football). In a standard football formation, when the quarterback stands watching, the offense operates 10-on-11 basis. The motion also presents the defense with an immediate threat to the outside that it must respect no matter what the offense decides to do with the football.

Yahoo! Sports has their own animated graphics of the Wildcat, along with a description of how defensive coordinators hope to defend it.

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A few thoughts:

Why keep the quarterback in the formation and not put an extra wide receiver or tight end in his place? I understand it keeps the defense off balance when the offense starts in a traditional formation and switches to Wildcat, but the Wildcat formation has been effective even when defenses are expecting it, so why not add more power to the play by adding a better receiver/blocker?

It is bizarre to me how one formation can have such influence on a game that has been played for 140 years. What took it so long?

If the formation is so effective, why is it only used a couple times a game? Why don't we see offenses built around the formation?

Price of energy alternatives [infographic]

Where's solar?

(From the Financial Times Dec '08, hat tip: DataViz)

Musicians are a curious bunch

If you look up the biographies of your favorite musicians, you are bound to find some surprises. I went through the biographies of my top 20 most played musicians on Last.fm and two, in particular, stuck out.

Exhibit A: Cat Stevens

Yusuf Islam, best known by his former stage name Cat Stevens, is a British musician. He is a singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, educator, philanthropist and prominent convert to Islam.

Stevens converted to Islam at the height of his fame in December, 1977, and adopted his Muslim name, Yusuf Islam, the following year. In 1979 he auctioned all his guitars away for charity and left his music career to devote himself to educational and philanthropic causes in the Muslim community. He has been given several awards for his work in promoting peace in the world, including 2003's World Award, the 2004 Man for Peace Award and the 2007 Mediterranean Prize for Peace. In 2006, he returned to pop music, with his first album of new pop songs in 28 years, entitled An Other Cup. He now goes by the single name Yusuf.

In 1985, Yusuf decided to return to the public spotlight for the first time since his religious conversion, at the historic Live Aid concert, concerned with the famine threatening Ethiopia. Though he had written a song especially for the occasion, his appearance was skipped when Elton John's set ran too long.

Stevens was living the fast-moving life of a pop star, and in early 1968 at the age of 19, he became very ill with tuberculosis and a collapsed lung. Near death, at the time of his admittance to the King Edward VII Hospital, Midhurst, he spent months recuperating in hospital and a year of convalescence. During this time Stevens began to question aspects of his life, and spirituality. He took up meditation, yoga, metaphysics read about other religions, and became a vegetarian. As a result of his serious illness and long convalescence, and as a part of his spiritual awakening and questioning, he wrote as many as 40 songs, which were much more introspective than his previous work. Many of those songs would appear on his albums in years to come.

Estimating in January 2007 that he continues to earn approximately $1.5 million USD a year from his Cat Stevens music, he decided to use his accumulated wealth and continuing earnings from his music career on philanthropic and educational causes in the Muslim community of London and elsewhere.

Exhibit B: Ray LaMontagne

Raymond Charles "Ray" LaMontagne is an American singer-songwriter who lives on a farm in Maine with his wife and two sons.

Because of his father's background in music, LaMontagne refrained from most musical activity, instead spending much of his time reading fantasy novels in the forest. LaMontagne attended high school at Morgan High School in Morgan, Utah, but frequently ditched class, wrote stories, or got into fights with other students. As a result of these interactions, his grades were poor — LaMontagne barely graduated.

LaMontagne found a job at a shoe factory in Lewiston where he worked 65 hours a week. One morning at 4 a.m., LaMontagne heard Stephen Stills' song "Treetop Flyer" on the radio as it awoke him for an early work shift. After purchasing the Stills Alone album, LaMontagne decided that he wanted to quit his job at the shoe factory and start a career as a singer-songwriter. LaMontagne began touring in 1999, although he maintained a side job as a carpenter.

LaMontagne refers to himself as a "very private person", and rarely gives interviews. He also usually does not interact much with the audience between songs during his live shows and has been known to perform in the dark to separate himself from the audience.

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Related:
Colin Marshall describes another fascinating case study: Nick Drake.

The effect of recessions on health

ScienceBlog 8/31:

Paradoxically, mortality rates during economic recessions in developed countries decline rather than increase. [...]

Studies show that unemployment can be bad for people's health, yet smoking, excessive alcohol consumption and overeating decline during recessions with beneficial impacts on health. Perhaps even more importantly when unemployment rates soar, people have more time for friends and family (especially children) which results in lower mortality.

SAT scores and family income [chart]

One complaint: Where are the error bars?

Also, I wonder whether family income correlates more or less strongly with SAT scores than does parents' SAT scores (or IQ or whatever).

From NYT's Economix blog.

The evolution of the book on evolution [infographic]

One of the best infographics I have seen this year: Ben Fry's The Preservation of Favoured Traces.

We often think of scientific ideas, such as Darwin’s theory of evolution, as fixed notions that are accepted as finished. In fact, Darwin’s On the Origin of Species evolved over the course of several editions he wrote, edited, and updated during his lifetime. The first English edition was approximately 150,000 words and the sixth is a much larger 190,000 words. In the changes are refinements and shifts in ideas — whether increasing the weight of a statement, adding details, or even a change in the idea itself.

More from Ben Fry's blog.

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Earlier:
The importance of externalizing ideas: Quotes from Ben Fry's dissertation.

Measuring GDP growth from space

ScienceDaily 9/6 reports that Brown University economists suggest a new framework for estimating a country or region’s GDP by using the density of an area’s nighttime lights.

I think this measures population growth more than economic growth, but it's about time something is measured with nighttime lights.

'The reprisal' [photo]

The reprisal. 10 x 12 inches diameter. 2006.

Artist Thomas Doyle (Hat tip: the New Shelton wet/dry)

An interview with the artist from Nouveau Magazine

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P.S. - If you are at all interested in miniature sculpture, you will want to see this TED video with artist Willard Wigan.

Timelapse of Chapel Hill move-in

Watch through the 1 minute mark to see Mother Nature's reaction to the insurgence of smurfs.

From Daily Tar Heel via 30 Threads

Federer as Religious Experience

2 minute 21 second video from the New York Times analyzing Federer's nearly flawless footwork. (Hat tip: Kottke)

If you're like me, you will appreciate Federer, tennis, and writing orders of magnitude more after taking some time to read this one: David Foster Wallace's 2006 Federer as Religious Experience. His 1996 The String Theory might be the single best piece of writing on tennis any sport.

Cool down your car as quickly as possible

A simple 6 step process from Lifehacker 7/13.

(Hat tip: Newmark's Door)

The four domains of life satisfaction

The abstract of a working paper from RAND:

The authors analyze the determinants of global life satisfaction in two countries (The Netherlands and the U.S.), by using both self-reports and responses to a battery of vignette questions. They find global life satisfaction of happiness is well-described by four domains: job or daily activities, social contacts and family, health, and income. Among the four domains, social contacts and family have the highest impact on global life satisfaction, followed by job and daily activities and health. Income has the lowest impact. As in other work, they find that American response styles differ from the Dutch in that Americans are more likely to use the extremes of the scale (either very satisfied or very dissatisfied) than the Dutch, who are more inclined to stay in the middle of the scale. Although for both Americans and the Dutch, income is the least important determinant of global life satisfaction, it is more important in the U.S. than in The Netherlands. Indeed life satisfaction varies substantially more with income in the U.S. than in The Netherlands.

Full-text available here.

Bananas

Damn Interesting 8/24: The Unfortunate Sex Life of the Banana

The short article covers everything from how the current breed we are all so familiar with, the Cavendish, was produced as the strange (but magnificent) hybrid of two wild plant species and selectively bred over many generations, to the all-too-possible event of 'bananagedden' occurring as the result of the Cavendish's susceptibility to insects and disease.

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Possibly related: An unidentified gentleman in his aptly-themed boxer shorts explains in a 56 second video with over 1 million YouTube hits how monkeys open bananas.

Engineering new forms of life

Guardian.co.uk 8/23: It's time to play God, subtitle: If Craig Venter's research leads to engineering new forms of life, mankind has hope for the future.

Engineering living organisms isn't new. Scientists have been genetically modifying microbes, plants and animals for decades. GM crops are grown on more than 2bn acres of the world's surface. But this is a kind of genetic tinkering. What Venter and many other scientists envisage is far more revolutionary: engineering entirely new forms of life.

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Earlier:

Algae powered cars

The central ethical issue of genetics

A tour of Venter's research lab

Concrete hall illusion [photo]

Felice Varini (Hat tip: New Shelton)

A cold-hearted economist on marriage

Betsy Stevenson on Marketplace 8/27:

If you get a reasonable rate of return, investment in your relationship will make it truly better than any other relationship you could have. And that's why I listen to people's vows: to understand what they want out of their marriage or in economist-speak, what they are contracting over.

How important are fidelity, loyalty, generosity, kindness? As an economist I think that a good marriage, like a good employment relationship, has shared vision, common interests, complementary abilities, and gains from specialization.

Read (or listen to) the whole thing.

Betsy Stevenson, by the way, is not married to her long-time beau and fellow cold-hearted economist, Justin Wolfers.

The arrow of time

Time as a concept frustrates me. If its paradoxical qualities drive physicists batty, how can a poor boy like me be expected to understand it?

Ars Technica tries to explain in layman's terms why the arrow of time may no longer be double-sided (8/18), but of course I still don't get it.

(Hat tip: Newmark's Door)

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From the wikipedia page on time:

Among prominent philosophers, there are two distinct viewpoints on time. One view is that time is part of the fundamental structure of the universe, a dimension in which events occur in sequence. Time travel, in this view, becomes a possibility as other "times" persist like frames of a film strip, spread out across the time line. Sir Isaac Newton subscribed to this realist view, and hence it is sometimes referred to as Newtonian time. The opposing view is that time does not refer to any kind of "container" that events and objects "move through", nor to any entity that "flows", but that it is instead part of a fundamental intellectual structure (together with space and number) within which humans sequence and compare events. This second view, in the tradition of Gottfried Leibniz and Immanuel Kant, holds that time is neither an event nor a thing, and thus is not itself measurable nor can it be traveled.

A $20 cure for tennis elbow

NYT's Well blog:

Researchers recruited 21 people with chronic, debilitating elbow pain. Ten of them were assigned to standard physical therapy treatment for tennis elbow; this was the control group. The other 11 also received physical therapy, but in addition were taught a choreographed exercise using the rubber bar that they practiced at home. After less than two months of treatment, the researchers terminated the experiment. The early results had been too unfair. The control group had showed little or no improvement. But the rubber-bar-using group effectively had been cured. Those patients reported an 81 percent improvement in their elbow pain and a 72 percent improvement in strength.

Visit the link for a 16 second video demonstration of the <$20 Flexbar.