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My friend Gerry Pareja sent this article by John Naughton from The Observer, responding (I think very well) to Nicholas Carr’s ‘Is Google Making Us Stupid?‘ in The Atlantic, but I can’t say that its arrival is what distracted me from my previous line of thought. In fact I was just tired, but feeling my [...]

Hedonic Man is the title of a review by Alan Wolfe of two books on the “new economics”. Like Wolfe (and probably countless others) I am sure that the science of economics is sorely lacking, but also like him I am more than skeptical of the ideas of these revolutionaries (which I must admit I [...]

The Science of Racism is an odd title for an article in which Henry Louis Gates identifies James Watson’s view as something he calls “racialist” and distinct from “racist”.

The Question of Global Warming - The New York Review of Books

Heavyweight physics prof weighs into climate/energy scrap [printer-friendly] | The Register

Michael Geist - Taking Stock of My Fair Copyright for Canada Principles

I was led to this Sunday Times profile of Taleb via Arts&Letters Daily.
Taleb’s view that market collapses are more sudden and extreme (though less frequent) than rises seems believable to me but is presumably easily checked from the record, (and could presumably be built into the modelling of risk if true).
On a completely different tack [...]

Toronto Star reporter Lesley Ciarula Taylor took issue with the idea of a language test for immigrants, citing a silly question about whether standard-of-living should be said to increase or to rise, but blogger Brett disputes the source of the question. Arnold Zwicky clearly doesn’t understand how to evaluate sources. The question was reported in [...]