voluntaryXchange

Carnival of the Capitalists

Carnival of the Capitalists is up for this week at Selling to Small Business (another blog by Anita Campbell).

(Ugh - get rid of the pale tangerine links on a white background.)

Anyway, I recommend J. Timothy King's post on 10 good reasons to be a wage slave - entrepreneurship isn't for everyone.

Mitt Romney Is Out

I think we are going to see that if you say "tar baby" in any context, as Mitt Romney did this past weekend, you can't make a viable run for President.

Remember, this is a country in which resignations have been forced over the use of the word niggardly. Unlike that, tar baby actually does have racist interpretations.

Sorry Utah ...

The Economics of World War I

I recommend The Economics of World War I, edited by Stephen Broadberry and Mark Harrison for specialists and folks interested in history. This is mostly an exercise in descriptive cliometrics, so the reader needs some interest in World War I, some recognition of the fact that wars are not always won on the battlefield, and some tolerance for dry statistical tables.

Click through for stuff I got out of the book.

Cedar City Makes the Wall Street Journal

Terry Teachout, the theatre critic for The Wall Street Journal made a trip out to Cedar City to see the Utah Shakespearean Festival.

It sounds like he had a pretty good time.

He followed the drive I'll take to this autumn's night class:

... I drove north through the most spectacular countryside imaginable, a gaudy parade of red cliffs, mesas and buttes ...

He touches on the essential history:

The Utah Shakespearean Festival, which runs from June to October, puts on four Shakespeare plays, three revivals and two musicals each season. The company, which performs on three different stages on and around the campus of Southern Utah University, won a Tony in 2000 for outstanding achievement in regional theater. [link added]

He apparently caught the not-so-subtle theme:

Big-city visitors may well find its Ye Olde Renaissance Faire atmosphere a bit on the twee side -- the snack bar actually serves turkey legs and Cornish pasties -- but most of the onstage offerings I saw were solidly entertaining.

A bit on the twee side? A bit?? The more arch locals are calling the new tourist condos with faux Cotswold stylings Elizabeethland!

He caught three performances:

... The director, opted for a straight-down-the-center "Antony and Cleopatra" very much in keeping with its old-fashioned setting.

I had planned to catch a matinee of "The Merry Wives of Windsor," but a theater-savvy local advised me not to miss "On Golden Pond," ... I still think it's twaddle ... brilliantly realized by an ensemble of festival regulars, is an object lesson in how a good director can make a bad play worth seeing.

Music is often the weak link of regional companies located well away from major metropolitan areas. Such was the case with "H.M.S. Pinafore," ... and the production as a whole wasn't strong enough to surmount its weak musical values.

He hits the nail on the head here, although I don't know how he missed the umpteen Mexican restaurants that all taste almost exactly like all the other "Mexican" restaurants in the country:

Outside of the Utah Shakespearean Festival, Cedar City hasn't much to offer in the way of culture (though the Neil Simon Festival is performing three Simon plays in repertory through Aug. 12) or haute cuisine (the local restaurants specialize in tasty steaks and ribs).

We're so far below haute that my colleague Earl Mulderink likes to note that Cedar City may be the only college town in the world where you can't get a pizza and a beer in the same joint.

On the other hand, a half-hour's drive up twisty, ear-popping roads will bring you to the Cedar Breaks National Monument, a 2,000-foot-deep natural amphitheater scooped out of the 10,000-foot-high Markagunt Plateau. It's almost as handsome as the Grand Canyon, and not nearly as crowded. [links added]

Poor guy apparently missed the 75 minute drives to Bryce Canyon and Zion Canyon National Parks.

The full piece, entitled "Where the Scenery Competes with Shakespeare" appeared on July 28 and is only available by subcription.

Sorry folks ... I can't recommend any of the shows just yet - I usually don't go until sometime in August.

The Day Is Coming When ...

A headline from The Onion:

Professor Is Pressured to Sleep with Student for Good Course Evaluation

Via Newmark's Door.

Diplomacy Quote

From David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas: A Novel:

Only professional diplomats, inveterate idiots, and women view diplomacy as a long-term substitute for war.

Via A Constrained Vision.

Some Economics of Sight Evolution

Research on how visual neurons work reveals some interesting Marshallian economics.

Sight is obviously of high utility in most situations. However, the amount of resources we spend on sight is constrained by our metabolism.

Our brain uses up about 20% of our energy, and sight is an energy intensive part of that.

Nature manages this by providing us with two types of visual neurons. The economics is that they have different features, and nature appears to trade them off.

Brisk neurons capture movement. They can send more data per second, but they send it in smaller packets. This means they potentially need to send information often, with each firing requiring energy.

Sluggish neurons capture capture edges and borders. They send less total information per second, but they send it less often in bigger packets. Less often means less energy.

Even so, both types of neurons could fire 150 to 250 times more often than they do. They don't because they are constrained by the metabolic constraints of the body.

This is the Marshallian aspect. Marshall pioneered the use of partial equilibrium, in which all other things are equal. This is a pedogical technique to assume away broader details that are not relevant to the situation at hand. In the case of individual neurons, the metabolic constraint imposed by the body is exogenous; we don't have to worry about it too much to highlight the tradeoff.

You'd expect the result to be a more sparing use of the brisk neurons, and that is exactly what is found: in guinea pigs (where spotting movement might be critical for survival) only 30% of the visual neurons are brisk.

Are We Just Imagining Black Holes?

A new result suggests that black holes may not exist.

The big problem with the theory of black holes - and part of their romance - is the idea that something can collapse into lack of existence; like the dinosaur that eats everything (including itself) in Yellow Submarine.

The new evidence suggests that quasars may not be infinitely dense black holes sucking in matter violently, but rather extremely dense objects called MECOs in which quantum fluctuations yield radiation. The evidence is that a quasar has been observed with a clear ring surrounding its center - suggesting the object in the center is putting out a magnetic field rather than sucking it out of existence.

The Second Quarter Growth Grade

The advance estimate of real GDP growth in the second quarter came out this morning (long before some of us get out of bed out here in the high desert).

The 2.5% annualized rate grades out as a C using a grading scale comparable to what I do in my classes.

Using the more liberal scale I derived from an actual set of university-wide grades, the economy gets a B.

40 Year Old Virgin

I watched The 40 Year Old Virgin last night.

I'm all weirded out because I used to live next to a guy like this. He was quite a bit older than I was, and I was 24 when I moved from that place. My neighbor lived by himself in an apartment full of action figures and books. He had built extra shelves everywhere to hold them. He rode his bike to work in all weather - about 7 miles in Buffalo - and did not own a car. He'd worked at an off-campus bookstore for at least 15 years when I met him. He did not work the floor. This was almost 20 years ago, so he's probably a 60 year old virgin by now.

(On my recommendation my good friend Howard later lived in the same building - if you're reading this Howard, you know who I'm talking about.)

It's so uncanny I am seriously wondering if someone involved with the creation of the movie knew my old neighbor. Hmmm. Judd Apatow, the movie's writer and producer, is from Long Island ... and Long Islanders are pretty common at the University at Buffalo, and there's a lot of off-campus housing near that particular bookstore.