Links for 2010-01-01

“Grace is snoozing away in Anne’s arms while our lunch (rice and dumplings) and dinner (roast chicken with pesto) cook away. This will be the first non-hospital food we’ve had in two days, though I recall us sneaking in a patty melt and milkshake from Izzy’s the night she was born. Really, this is all a blur of plastic bassinets, rotating nurses, and a tiny, tiny person with a mighty grip.”

“Indeed, even if we restrict ourselves to hypothesizing that women are simply better at everything, then the theory of comparative advantage could still lead us to gender disparities in different professions: You’re best off doing what you do best and paying somebody else to do the other stuff, even if you are also better than them at the other stuff. Any time that you spend doing the other stuff is time that you could have spent making lots of money off of what you do best. So, if women were (on average) better than men at task A and task B, but they were (on average) best at task A, then most women should specialize in A and leave task B to men. This will result in a shortage of women in field B despite the fact that they are better at it than men, and it will be rooted in genetics. So, are they absolutely certain that they want people to speculate on innate cognitive differences that manifest in the workplace?”

“It’s not that I didn’t expect much out of him — I did, and do — but I didn’t expect it overnight, or contrary to the political realities in which the man has to work. To be sure, I get exasperated that he’s not doing all the things I want him to do when I want him to do them, and there are lots of things I wish he’d do differently, including stop being so goddamned conciliatory to a political right which so clearly wants to stab him through the eyeballs and then rush to Fox News (where the news crawl will say “OBAMA: Was he asking to be stabbed?”), to bleat about how they’re the victims in this whole unseemly stabbing incident. As much as I recognize a strategy there on the part of the administration, I think there’s only so long you act in good faith with people who have no intention of offering the same courtesy, ever. But I don’t confuse my exasperation with a sober assessment of what the man’s getting done in the environment in which he has to work.”

“The semiotics of the ad [showing pink telescopes and microscopes] having been discussed well elsewhere, I’d like to take a look at the practical flip-side of the discussion. If you’re buying microscopes or telescopes for yourself or your children, how important is magnification?”

“The more I study the history of aether physics, the more I feel that modern physicists underappreciate both the huge influence the theory had on the development of physics and how it indirectly spurred many positive scientific discoveries, even though it is an incorrect theory. The “aether”, for those not familiar with it, was a hypothetical substance theorized in the early 1800s to be the medium in which light waves propagate, just as water waves travel through water and sound waves travel through air. Many papers were written speculating on the nature of the aether before Einstein’s special theory of relativity (1905) argued convincingly that the aether was unnecessary.”

“For some of us there may be no such thing as a bad detective novel, but there are none as good as Raymond Chandler’s. Even if you are unfamiliar with Chandler and have not read his Philip Marlowe novels, such is the shadow he cast that you will recognise his universe: a dark corrupt world where men are weak-hearted tough guys, women are available vixens and Hollywood dreams are dashed by ugly reality, while a wisecracking, chain-smoking detective hero stands up for what’s right. ‘I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country’, says Marlowe in a crisis: ‘What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun. I put them on and left the room.'”

“[T]he statistical authority, the creators and guardians of the game’s official record, sit elsewhere at the scorer’s table, huddled around a laptop. Every point, rebound, block, foul, steal, turnover and assist are recorded by Stat Crew, a standard software program used from coast to coast. It is on this record that boxscores are built, and no matter if the stats are individual or team-based, standard or tempo-free, here is their genesis and basis. Player accomplishments and admonishments are entered, one at a time, by an uncredited and anonymous army of work-study students, graduate assistants and SID’s. And for one evening, I joined that group.”