voluntaryXchange

20 Worst Logos

The 20 biggest logo design fails, from Demilked. Here’s a sample:

Makes you wonder if the artists get enough second opinions about their work.

Technorati Tags: logo,design,fail

Maybe That Mold Is Drunk Because It’s French

Here’s a cute longread about fungi that eat ethanol: a distillery worries about its neighbors, who’ve complained about a fungus infestation, and an investigator finds out what the fungi are eating.

Via Cold Spring Shops.

Technorati Tags: mold,fungi,ethanol,angel's,share

Deborah Senn and Free Speech

I had not heard this story:

… in the 1990s … Deborah Senn, the Washington State Insurance Commissioner, when she publicly put the word out that insurance agents were not allowed to say that any of the rate increases of that time were due to the laws and regulations recently created in the state.

Yet another bureaucrat with control issues. She needed to take a pill – no doubt provided at low out-of-pocket cost by public healthcare.

Technorati Tags: senn,insurance,commissioner,washington,free,speech

Connect the Dots: Zipcode Edition

Zipscribbles: what if you put a dot on the map for every zip code, and then connected the dots in order, and shaded them by state?

Via Gongol via Wired Science via Robert Kosara of Eagle Eyes.

Technorati Tags: zip,code,scribbles,colors,connect,dots

Wow: The Summers Memo

The New Yorker has obtained a 57 page “memo” written by Larry Summers in December 2008.

Summers, a very well-known Harvard economist, former Clinton administration Secretary of the Treasury, and President of Harvard University, was part of Obama’s transition team before becoming the White House’s most trusted economic advisor.

And the memo says …

Mr Summers told the president that it would be hard to spend more than $300bn on government investment and anything above that would have to come from transfers to the states and tax cuts. He also said that a giant stimulus of more than $1,000bn aimed at rapidly reducing the unemployment rate “would likely not accomplish the goal because of the impact it would have on markets”.

… It suggests that Mr Obama’s economic advisers recognised that the economy needed a bigger boost, but did not think they could design one and feared a backlash from bond markets.

“While the most effective stimulus is government investment, it is difficult to identify feasible spending projects on the scale that is needed to stabilise the macroeconomy,” Mr Summers wrote. “To get the package to the requisite size, and also to address other problems, we recommend combining it with substantial state fiscal relief and tax cuts for individuals and businesses.”

Read the whole thing.

This is confirmation of what has been broadly suspected: that the final $800 billion stimulus package was mostly political pork barrel to reward loyal constituents.

That supposition has been a topic of discussion in every macroeconomics class I’ve taught since the Obama administration took office.

Technorati Tags: obama,stimulus,package,summers,memo

Empathy FOR Doctors

Looking for asymmetric viewpoints is a good way to spot nonsense.

In this case, we hear a lot about how doctors are supposed to have empathy for patients, but should patients have empathy for doctors?

My guess is that almost no one has ever even thought about this. I can’t say that I did before reading Patrick Barkus’ letter to The Wall Street Journal:

… Do patients empathize with doctors?

This is a question one seldom hears asked, and it seems symmetry would demand that it at least be considered. Without the hint of an equivalency between patient and doctor it is doubtful that empathy exists as much more than an abstraction and rarely on a one-to-one basis.

A further point. One could argue that physicians reluctance to discipline each other is a sign of real-world empathy in practice. A reluctance often criticized but rarely praised. …

As a scholar, I have heard this in the academy: professors are endlessly encouraged to have empathy towards students problems, but we do at least pipe up to each other that students ought to have more empathy towards us.

Technorati Tags: empathy,doctor,patient

Why Is Macro So Hard: What Passes for Expertise

One reason that macroeconomics is hard is because everyone has an opinion (which is OK), but sometimes those opinions are supported by credentials which encourage people to stop asking tough questions.

Here’s what a Republican got away with:

Dave Spence is a Republican running for governor in Missouri.  He has gone around the state for weeks on end, talking about his economics degree and how he’s a perfect fit as governor because he’ll know how to tackle the state’s budget woes.  He’s Dave Spence, economics degree holder, and he’ll fix your fiscal insolvency!

Oops.

Poor Dave, he’s not an economics degree holder, he’s a degree holder in HOME economics.

To be even-handed, the Democrats got away with appointing Jared Bernstein as Chief Economist and Economic Policy Adviser to Vice President Biden. Bernstein’s qualifications were his degrees in Fine Arts, Social Work, and Social Policy.

To be fair, Bernstein has some interesting ideas, and his stuff is worth reading. I can’t speak for Spence.

P.S. I am not advocating credentialism here, but rather better investigative work on all sides.

Technorati Tags: why,macro,so,hard,expertise,bernstein,spence,missouri

Good Work In Cedar City

Here’s Newmark’s Door writing about good manufacturing jobs, and we have a place just like this in Cedar: Metalcraft.

Time reports that manufacturing "precision toolmaker" is one of the "nine jobs of the (near) future"

Technorati Tags: jobs,labor,skilled,unskilled

Critical Information That’s Been Missing: How the Costa Concordia Ended Up Where It Did

Finally.

Note that in this map, north is at the bottom.

If you’re like me, it took you about 2 seconds to look at the map of course of Costa Concordia’s route northward along the east side of Isolo Giglio, and the photos showing the ship listing towards the island on the starboard with a gash in its port to realize there was a huge part of the story going completely unreported.

This is the first report I’ve seen explaining how the crew took a ship without power and prevented it from sinking in almost certainly deeper water miles from shore.

There’s also a huge story here, again, completely missed by the dim bulbs that pass for journalists that the hour or two “wasted” before evacuating the ship was being used to get it much closer to shore, and in shallower water. Please recall the initial reports that many people were able to swim from where the ship beached.

Read the whole thing, and see a bigger version of this diagram at The National Post.

My late father always insisted the newspeople in Canada were better than those in the U.S., and this proves it once again.

And FWIW, here’s a satellite image from Google Maps showing the coordinates of the reef that was hit:

View Larger Map

This image has north at the top. The ship entered from the lower right corner, hit the marked rocks, swung out my text above, and is now resting to the left of the “T” in Tyrrhenian, facing towards the bottom of the image. From Wikipedia:

The initial impact was at a point 8 metres (26 ft) below water at the Scole Piccola 42°21′20″N 10°55′50″E, the most seaward rock of Le Scole.^[23] There, underwater 92 to 96 metres (302 to 315 ft) away from the main island, divers were later to discover^[23] two long, curled strips of steel shorn from the ship’s hull as the reef tore a 48.8-metre (160 ft) gash on her port side below the water line.

Technorati Tags: costa,concordia,sinking,reef,rocks,giglio,direction

AutoHotKey Tip # 1: Toggling Windows Explorer

Don’t use AutoHotKey?* You need to start.

Anyway, this script works to toggle the view in Windows Explorer.

I’ve needed this script for years: I constantly need to see the “Details” view in Windows Explorer.

P.S. You might want to edit the third one. It retasks CTRL+I from itaclicizing. I don’t know about you, but I use that a lot.

* AutoHotKey is a program put together by the folks at LifeHacker to automate repetitive computer tasks. It couldn’t be simpler to use, is easy to code, and has a large community of users developing new macros. I have about 30 bits of boilerplate programmed: addresses, URLs, keywords, and so on. I also have a few togglers like this one mentioned above: show/hide files, and show/hide file extensions are some of them.

Technorati Tags: autohotkey,toggle,windows,explorer,views