Clik here to view.
Obedience on the Job
(Photo: Jon Mountjoy) On America’s first subway, Boston’s Green line, the middle doors stopped opening. When I asked the driver to open the doors, he said that he couldn’t: now all boarding and...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Division, Not Long Division
Division is the most powerful arithmetic operation. It makes comparisons. When the numerator and denominator have the same units, the comparison makes a dimensionless number, the only kind that the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Why My Favorite American Cities Have a Chinatown
(Photo: Bruce Fingerhood) Relatives from South Africa were visiting and we got to talking about which cities to visit in America. I shared my list: San Francisco, New York, Boston, Washington, DC,...
View ArticleBeware the Weasel Word "Statistical" in Statistical Significance!
As Justin Wolfers pointed out in his post on income inequality last week, the Census Bureau was talking statistical nonsense. I blame the whole idea of statistical significance. For its weasel...
View ArticleClik here to view.
A Tax Taxonomy
(Photo: Hemera) Dan Hamermesh’s much-discussed post about taxing capital gains brought to mind my own taxonomy of taxes, so to speak, from least to most progressive: Poll tax. Everyone pays the same...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Saving Boston's Long Wharf Park From Extinction
Have you visited the beautiful and historic Long Wharf Park on Boston Harbor? And what do you do when the government goes rogue? Area of Long Wharf to be leased to the private restaurateur. The covered...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Absurdity of U.S. Air Travel: Baggage Fees
(Photo: ellenm1) On the way home from visiting my brother-in-law’s family in Ohio, we changed planes in Chicago. To avoid the baggage fees, we, like most of our fellow passengers, schlepped our luggage...
View ArticleClik here to view.
We Once Had Self-Driving Cars
(Photo: Elliott Brown) A frequent response to the dysfunctions of American air travel is technological: namely, self-driving cars (also see this article). In a self-driving car, you can relax, even...
View ArticleThe Quants and the Airlines Versus the Public
Baggage fees are a small part of the misery of American air travel. There’s also connecting flights, which, to paraphrase the Nuremberg judgment, contain within themselves the accumulated evil of the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Why Are Restroom Hand-Washing Signs By the Sinks?
Photo Credit: akeg via Compfight cc All over America, restrooms for the public (for example, in restaurants or public parks) have signs warning and exhorting us that “Employees must wash hands before...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Aaron Swartz Versus the Bankers
(Illustration: DonkeyHotey) A New Yorker article on Aaron Swartz, who committed suicide while under federal investigation for bulk downloading academic articles, leaves little to disagree with. But it...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Minute-Wise, Hour-Foolish
(Photo: Dave Stokes) In my kitchen cabinet, with the richest aroma, live baggies of ground cumin, coriander, turmeric, curry powder, cinnamon, and cloves. Four feet away are their labeled spice jars....
View ArticleThe Ultimate Telemarketing Database
Playing “My Country, ’Tis of Thee” on the piano for my evening relaxation and hearing my daughter sing about the “sweet land of liberty,” I thought of the NSA’s Prism surveillance system. The U.S....
View ArticleTitles of Laws as Propaganda
How illiterate do our politicians think we are? In the old days we had plain titles of laws, such as the Voting Rights Act or the Civil Rights Act. In the United Kingdom, the titles of laws still...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Why It's Hard to Find a Used Bicycle in Denmark
(Photo: king_david_uk) Visiting friends in Copenhagen and cycling around the city, I wondered why so many bicycles were new (and, having experienced Scandinavian pricing, expensive). When I lived in...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Nobel Prize in Physics and Traffic Priority at Roundabouts
(Photo: Andrew Skudder) The 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics was recently awarded for symmetry breaking and its consequence, the Higgs boson—a particle so well known that, according to the president of the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Transaction Costs: The American Way
(Photo: shane_d_k) The rest of the world likes to say that everything in America is big: the cars, the CO2 emissions, the buildings, even the hamburgers. The farce at the U.S. government’s website for...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Marketing of Dogfish
(Photo: Biodiversity Heritage Library) In New England, cod and haddock are overfished and, according to WBUR, fishermen and restaurant owners are seeking cheaper and more plentiful fish like dogfish....
View ArticleClik here to view.
U.S. Math Education Still in the Doldrums
(Photo: arjin j) Every three years, the OECD, in the PISA assessment, studies 15-year-olds around the world to measure performance in reading, mathematics, and science. The results of the 2012 PISA...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Street-Fighting Math MOOC Is Open
My mathematically inclined readers are cordially invited to enroll in “6.SFMx: Street-Fighting Math,” which starts today on EdX. Like most (all?) MOOC courses, it is free and open to world, as are all...
View Article