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A Really Worthwhile Macroeconomic Opinion

There are not many people I will defer to on business cycles; James Hamilton of Econbrowser is one of them.

Last week he upgraded his view of the economy from sour to neutral:

Let's admit it-- the other shoe is not yet dropping.

I'm not happy with the U.S. economy now, or over the last 3-4 quarters. But, the longer this soft period (or growth recession) persists without a devolution into full-blown recession, the more likely it is that we will be talking about the soft landing of 2006-7 when 2008 rolls around.

But, these sort of predictions are dicey, so do check back in 6-12 months. I've been wrong before (as have all business cycle forecasters).

Do keep in mind that Econbrowser also upgraded their recession probability last week, but the key thing to look at is the last figure of the post: we are still pretty low on the graph, run-ups in the probability of a recession are very dramatic when there really is a recession, and small run-ups that don't lead to a recession are fairly common.

This Hurts

The advance release of U.S. real GDP growth in the first quarter of 2007 came out this morning at 1.3%. This is the worst performance in 4 years, although not yet in recession territory.

On my preferred scale this grades out as a D.

Believe it or not, coddled college students are used to getting a C for this level of output.

Bush isn't helping, but this is the real reason everyone is bummed out. The threshold for most people to generally feel like the economy is improving is sustained growth of 2%.

One Big Fungus

Fossils of Prototaxites are found worldwide, and they are a fixture of museum dioramas of the Devonian Age. Now it appears we know what they were.

Four hundred million years ago, Prototaxites was the biggest thing on land: plants were mostly moss-like, and animals were mostly scorpion-like. Over them towered 25 foot plant-animal-thingies - 100 million years before trees started to evolve.

It now appears that Prototaxites was a fungus. Evidence on the uptake of carbon into the living thing is preserved in the fossils. Prototaxites looks like a plant, but plants get all of their carbon from the atmosphere, and Prototaxites did not. This means that it was consuming something in the ground nearby, without being able to move - thus, a fungus.

New Scientist has photos a fossil, and an artist's rendering.

Eel Trivia

The vXboy asked "Do eels have bones?"

Hard to say. Wikipedia says they are fish, and that they lack certain bone structures that other fish have, but it didn't exactly say that they do have bones.

Next Generation Abdominal Surgery

Doctors are experimenting with improving upon laparoscopic surgery - by inserting instruments through body orifices.

In particular, a doctor removed a woman's gall bladder by introducing surgical instruments through her vagina. The mouth has been used in China, and they are considering using the rectum.

The advantage of this is that there are far fewer pain sensing nerves on the interior of the body, so the long recovery period associated with cutting the abdominal wall could be eliminated.

Laughing At My Own Joke

I saw at The Little Green Blog that Dictionary.coms Word-of-the-Day is "circumspect".

How times have changed.

My mother still tells the story of how, when she was what we now call a tween (around 1940), she asked her father what circumspect meant, and he was so embarrassed he had to leave the room.

Disturbing Advertising

This is one example of how Kohler is advertising plumbing fixtures:

The caption reads "The fluid lines and graceful curves ...".

So ... I'm wondering why have they a woman who looks neither fluid nor graceful? Skeletal is the first word that comes to mind. Then fake - the waist is too narrow, and the skin to ... creepy looking.

There's even a whole expensive Kohler campaign of this nonsense.

Either Kohler is a ripe takeover target, or zombified women make do-it-yourselfers buy pedestal sinks and institutional looking toilets.

The 69 Minute News Cycle

Researchers have shown, using data from Digg, that the half-life of interest in a typical post is 69 minutes.

FTNITK: the half-life is the length of time it takes interest to decline by half. The concept is multiplicative, so in 138 (2 times 69) minutes you lose half of the half that were left, so that interest is down 75% in total.

Read the whole thing, entitled "Novelty and Collective Attention", by Fang Wu and Bernardo A. Huberman.

Migraines May Be Good for You!

It isn't particularly strong research, but migraine sufferers appear to suffer less cognitive decline as they age.

Hurray for me! As a migraine sufferer since the age of 7, I would appreciate any silver lining.

Addendum to "Retaining Menses ..."

The previous post may actually be a good example of 2 features for economics and business students:

• It is a bundled good that is undesirable because buyers don't want those features bundled (i.e., birth control and period elimination).
• It is a case where the absence of something has non-zero value (e.g., the absence of most things leaves your situation unchanged).