voluntaryXchange

Libertarian PBS Video

Loved this:

Loved This

Humans do the best shit:

I’m glad this guy is doing it for a neighborhood kid. I don’t have a handy kid around for this. But here’s my post from 10 years ago about doing something like this with my kids.

FOH for FMOOWMP (Office Hours)

Students have big trouble with this … especially early in their college careers.

Hat tip to these two pieces from NPR on how to overcome your fear of office hours, and how office hours are particularly foreign to students from rural areas.

Cross-posted from SUU Macroblog, which is required reading for my macroeconomics classes.

Environmental Puritans

You can now be against internet port by claiming that it uses too much energy (no pun intended).

Worldwide porn viewing:

… Generated carbon emissions of the same magnitude as that of the residential sector in France.

The report is not mostly about porn, but about online video usage more generally. But, of course, porn is estimated to be more than half of that.

And, they recommend … “digital sobriety” to save the planet.

Without advocating for porn, as an economist it seems clear that online videos exist as a substitute for other things, and as a newer one, they succeed because of overall lower cost (it’s hard to claim that most online digital video is of higher quality). Given the relatively known externalities of the alternatives, I think the claim that the externalities of online videos are problematic is puritan in the extreme.

Cool Science: Tiny Robots Swimming Through an Eye as a Delivery Mechanism

Check it out:

Little corkscrew robots (think: sperm analogue) that can swim through an eye. The goal is to deliver medications directly to the retina.

Continental Drift and the Formation of Britain

Here’s a cool video showing new research that Cornwall (and parts of Devon) were originally part of what is now France, before they were part of what is now England.

A Simple Video Proving the Pythagorean Theorem

This is very clever:

The big insight — which no one told me about until I was about 45 (even though I’m a math nerd) — is that the square of a number is literally a square geometrically. Thus the 3 squares around the triangle, and the flowing liquid to prove the point.

For those who don’t recall, the Pythagorean Theorem says that the squares of the lengths of the two shorter sides of a right triangle equal the square of the length of the longer side.

FWIW: this echoes a clever proof constructed out of paper in one of Edward Tufte’s books.

Via bookofjoe.

Gashoax

This isn’t so much a pro-fracking video, as a video about whether a particular anti-fracking video activist is being truthful.*

There’s some interesting economics in here, particularly about the rates of workplace absence. These are higher in industries like entertainment and education than they are in oil and gas.

Honestly though, one of the reasons I like this video is because I grew up in one of those places where you could light the water on fire. This was not hard to do, and I did it the first time at an age when my parents would have freaked if they’d known I was even lighting matches … decades before horizontal drilling or fracking became available.

*

Fracking is a word that is misused.

Most of the increases in oil and gas production over the last decade are due to horizontal drilling rather than fracking. Horizontal drilling is going straight down (old-fashioned vertical drilling), and then turning sideways and drilling some more. This offers a huge advantage because most oil is found in pools that spread horizontally when some geologic formation keeps them from rising. Another huge factor in horizontal drilling is the splitting of the well into many horizontal wells, creating a network that reaches all parts of those underground pools. There is no alternative to horizontal drilling, which is why it such a big deal.

Then comes fracking, which is pumping stuff down a well (vertical or horizontal) that expands underground, fracturing the rocks to get the oil and gas to flow out more readily. The alternative to fracking is rarely mentioned: strip and open pit mining down to the level where the rocks are, and crushing them up on the surface. Most people don’t want that, but they aren’t aware that it is the alternative choice.

This video is cross-posted from Tufte’s Curated Economics Videos.

Technorati Tags: gashoax

Later That Same Life

You’re going to wish you could do this for real:

How did he make this?

Stoney Emshmiller did the interview of his future self in 1977. Then he kept it for almost 40 years, and edited his older self into it.

If it were me, I think I would have been most surprised at 18 to find out, not that I wasn’t famous in my 50’s, but rather that I lost interest in being famous by the time I was 21 or so, and even stopped worrying about it by the time I was 35.

P.S. I love the part where he tells his 18 year old self that he knows he’s still a virgin. Nothing like calling someone on the biggest teenage self-delusion of them all.

Via Kottke.

Technorati Tags: stoney,peter,emshmiller,later,that,same,life,interview,older,self

Cool Video: Milky Way from the Cockpit

A pilot took a video from the cockpit as they flew from Zurich to Sao Paolo:

FlightLapse #01 - MilkyWay from SkyProduction on Vimeo.

Via bookofjoe.

Technorati Tags: milky,way,stars,cockpit,pilot,flight,video