Daily Links From Glimpse From a Height

• The Moral Case for Conservatism
  Arthur Brooks, President of the American Enterprise Institute, is the most articulate advocate out there for the moral and community case for capitalism and fiscal responsibility.  In Tuesday’s Coffee and Markets podcast, he presents the case about as succinctly as I’ve heard it made, perhaps as succinctly as it can be made. Key to his worldview […]
• Benford’s Law Wins Another Round
  There are more quantities that start with 1 than start with  2.  Those that start with 2 in turn outnumber those that start with 3, and so on.  This is true for just about every measurement – from the size of asteroids to financial ledger entries to economic statistics. Why?  Because there are more small […]

Daily Links From Glimpse From a Height

• The Libya Fallout Spreads
  Walter Russell Mead notices that the French may have bitten off more than they can chew in Mali: France needs US help, and the US should give it. Just as France’s Libyan intervention failed because the country ran out of military supplies, France’s Malian adventure could collapse without our support. But the situation nevertheless raises alarms. I […]
• So Much for Red Lines
  Chemical weapons used in Syria? United States diplomats in Turkey conducted a previously undisclosed, intensive investigation into claims that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad used chemical weapons, and made what an Obama administration official who reviewed the cable called a “compelling case” that Assad’s military forces had used a deadly form of poison gas. The cable, […]
• A Debt Ceiling Negotiating Strategy
  Keith Hennessey has some suggestions for how the Republicans should approach the debt ceiling: He is afraid of getting jammed by small short-term debt limit increases (as I have recommended). Really afraid. This path would keep fiscal issues front-and-center when he wants to punt them, and it would force him to pay a price every […]

Daily Links From Glimpse From a Height

• Will Gutenberg Laugh Last?
  Don’t assume not.  Among the reasons: 1. We may be discovering that e-books are well suited to some types of books (like genre fiction)  but not well suited to other types (like nonfiction and literary fiction) and are well suited to certain reading situations (plane trips) but less well suited to others (lying on the […]
• 3D Cameras Bringing That Minority Report Screen Closer
  Yes, the premise of Minority Report is creepy – using telepaths to predict criminal behavior and lock up the malefactors before they do anything wrong.  But the things that everyone remembers are Tom Cruise manipulating a wall-sized screen with his hand like a conductor, and his being relentlessly bombarded by personalized ads.  The second would get […]
• Partners For Peace
  “Eschewing the traditional snowman, sculptors utilized Jerusalem’s snowfall to fashion a replica M-75 rocket on the Temple Mount, causing a flurry of activity on the social media network Facebook on Thursday. The large replica of the missile, of the sort fired by Hamas at Tel Aviv and Jerusalem during the November 2012 mini-war Operation Pillar […]
• With Friends Like These…
  …Hagel may not need any enemies: Iran’s Foreign Ministry dumped more fuel on the fire of former Senator Chuck Hagel’s (R–NE) nomination for Secretary of Defense by announcing its approval for President Obama’s pick. It’s no secret that Hagel, an outspoken critic of sanctions on Iran, has preferred a policy of engagement and direct talks […]
• Golden State Exodus
  Not exactly news to many of us, but explained well: The number 1 topic of conversation amongst the despised 1% in California today is when you are leaving California or whether you can leave. Property owners who cannot move their apartment building or office complexes can move their homes and change their residency. On a […]
• Innovation Decline
  Feeling smug about our innovation compared to the Chinese?  Don’t: In short, the United States does not have a tech sector. It has mature consumer businesses operating under the technology label. They walk like mature consumer businesses, quack like mature consumer businesses, and fly like mature consumer businesses. They are run by patent lawyers rather […]
• New York and Fracking
  As Gov. Cuomo considers his fracking options: Oil and gas drilling companies are increasingly finding it more economical to recycle drilling water for future jobs rather than disposing of it in the injection wells, which has enraged environmentalists. More than 16 percent of water used in Marcellus Shale fracking operations is being recycled, up from […]
• Papayan Politics
  And empty Golden Rice bowls: In the absence of access to Golden Rice and similar nutritionally enhanced foods, the world’s poor are suffering and dying unnecessarily, but not because of the failure of intellectual property. A far more critical factor is the gratuitous regulation demanded by activists and created and maintained by bureaucrats. This is […]
• Who Really Cares?
  That’s the title of an excellent book by AEI’s Arthur Brooks showing the baleful effects of trying to replace friends, family, and community with government services.  Melanie Phillips shows how far Britain is down this path: Another example occurred at Mid-Staffordshire NHS Trust, where over three years from 2005 between 400 and 1,200 patients died […]
• India Slowing Down?
  It certainly looks that way.  It could be cyclical, of course, but these growth economies are supposed to slow their growth, not actually slow down. Cars, housing, and now, investment: India has a number of structural problems, mostly a dysfunctional political class that makes our look efficient, and corruption that makes Maxine Waters look honest.  […]

Daily Links From Glimpse From a Height

• Going South By Southwest?
  OK, maybe it’s not that bad.  But their oil-price hedging strategy really isn’t an advantage for them: This situation should be easy to visualize because the hedges are on oil rather than jet fuel and because they are settled for cash rather than physical delivery. But even if the hedges were denominated in physically delivered […]
• Laptop Touchscreens Make Inroads
  I’m not in the market for a new laptop yet, moslty because  I really don’t want to re-install a whole helluva lot of server software, but these look tempting: Starting now, all of its all-ones and Thin + Light laptops will come standard with touchscreens and quad-core processors, including some from AMD (a first for […]
• Game of Drones
  China and Japan escalate confrontation over islands using drones…for now. Tensions over the islands – called the Diaoyu by China and the Senkaku by Japan – have ratcheted up in past weeks. Chinese surveillance planes flew near the islands four times in the second half of December, according to Chinese state media, but were chased […]
• See Asteroids From Both Sides
  This is getting a little too close for comfort: On February 15, a 57-metre (185-feet) asteroid, 2012 DA14, will skim the planet at just 34,500 kilometres (21,600 miles). In other words, it will spookily fly by inside the orbit of geostationary satellites. “It’s going to be the closest predicted flyby of an asteroid,” says Mark […]
• London Underground 1932-33
  An oldie, but goodie: I’ve always read how well designed HC Beck’s 1933 version of the London underground was. It only occurred to me the other day that I never had seen the old version for comparison. There are definitely significant improvements (…improvements that have proven very useful as the system grew further), but I […]
• 50 Vintage Bathroom Sinks — New Old Stock — lots of color — in Denver
  Mid-century modern plumbing, for sale locally here in Denver, in case you’re into that sort of thing.
• Mind-Bending Illustrations by Oscar Ramos
  A modern-day Escher, with a twist.

Daily Links From Glimpse From a Height

• Driverless Cars Heading Commercial
  CES is going to feature a little commercial toe-dipping into the driverless car market: While Google’s self-driven Prii have been stealing headlines for the better part of two years, upcoming offerings from Audi and Toyota will likely focus on vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communication technology. Details are still under wraps, but this five second clip reveals what appears to be […]
• Socialist Amusement Parks
  Detritus from the heart of Berlin: Like most things socialist, it’s better in the imagination than in reality, and tends not to be well-maintained.
• The Union Pacific Railroads and Steamships (1900)
  Another cool map from the Big Map Blog:  
• Igloo Village Boasts 20 Thermal Glass Dwellings
  This hotel got some publicity last week.  Here’s the inside:

Daily Links From Glimpse From a Height

• Last Week in Amazing Photos
  From NASA’s Dawn mission, the Cornelia Crater on the Vesta asteroid: More from Popular Science.
• Opera: The Strangest Art
  Opera certainly is odd, if taken at face value: The formal rules disguise the strangeness. The unnatural is successfully passed off as routine. It is to Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker’s credit that in their new book,A History of Opera: The Last 400 Years, they notice all this. Despite their evident love of their subject, […]
• ARPA Still Working on Solar
  ARPA is still funding solar research: They suggest that by using precisely structured materials to sort sunlight into several different wavelengths, it should be possible to direct each to a semiconductor that has been tuned to be the most efficient for that wavelength. The end result should be the absorption of more energy overall, allowing […]
• The Most Popular College Majors 2012
  Some of these students will find jobs.
• New High Speed Liquid Splash Photographs by Markus Reugels
  Edgerton reimagined:

Daily Links From Glimpse From a Height

• The Bad Guys Get Smarter…
  Iran’s developing smarter Internet censoring software: For the moment, Iran deals with the nuisance of social networking largely by blocking the sites. Facebook and Twitter, for example, are completely banned. As such, many savvier Iranians are turning to VPNs, and the hope seems to be that limited social networking would bring them back into the […]
• ST:TNG NG
  5 Ways Star Trek: TNG would be different if they made it now: Semantic search is the great goal in the world of search: making computers understand not just what humans say, but what we’re really asking. And anyone who’s used Google daily over the past 15 years (meaning most of us) knows that semantic […]
• Roll Over Beethoven: Four Famous Musical Notes
  The history Beethoven’s Fifth in performance and in popular imagination: One key to the Fifth’s own cultural malleability—or ambiguity—is found in those first four measures, a masterstroke of misdirection. We tend to remember the four notes as severe and brooding, with a ponderousness that sits at extreme odds with the allegro con brio marking. That […]
• Majority Rules and the Filibuster
  Over at the Liberty Law Blog, Mike Rappaport argues that the Senate must be able to change the filibuster rule with a majority vote: The main reason why a majority of the Senate needs to be able to change the filibuster rule is that otherwise a simple majority of the Senate could effectively amend the […]
• The Student Loan Bubble
  It’s the financial portion of the higher ed bubble, and it’s about to get ugly.  Either defaults will begin in earnest, or you and I will be forced to subsidize them through a bailout.  Of course, since student loans are now exclusively financed through the government, anyway, we’re holding the bag, either way. Which is […]
• Pythagorean Theorem
  H/T Chart Porn:
• 1.8 million LEGOs Used to Create Map of Japan
  Celebrating the 50th anniversary of the LEGO equivalent of Commodore Perry’s Black Ships: Dubbed “Build Up Japan,” the event – rather than recreating existing landmarks – encouraged kids to picture what they want Japan to look like, and to create imaginary structures. The future of Japan was, quite literally, in their hands. And the kids […]
• The British Navy and the Slave Trade
  Via Lawfare: In the early 19th century the British government, responding to strong domestic pressure, undertook to suppress the transatlantic slave trade. Although the Royal Navy dominated ocean travel, Britain faced important legal obstacles. The slave trade was conducted on the high seas by vessels sailing under the protection of other sovereigns and was not […]
• The Founders and Finance
  Definitely on the reading list, Michael Greve reviews.  Among other points: To build a financial system meant building institutions (foremost, the Bank), and that in turn meant constitutional construction. Everyone on all sides eagerly mobilized the “original public meaning” of the Constitution, only to discover that it would carry only so far. Those arguments, moreover, were part […]
• Nanny State Goes To College
  Via Overlawyered: According to the U.S. Department of Justice, Lesley University in Cambridge, Mass. was in violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act because it failed to * Continually provide ready-made hot and cold gluten- and allergen-free food options in its dining hall food lines; * Develop individualized meal plans for students with food allergies, and […]
• Manufacturing Slipping?
  The Journal of Commerce is reporting that steel imports were up slightly month-to-month in November, but up 25% year-over-year.  This tracks with manufacturing, reports of the death of which have been greatly exaggerated.  But it’s not a good sign for the upcoming year.  Even as economic activity has rebounded, manufacturing has levelled off below its […]
• The Best Infographics Of 2012
  Still not too late to look back at the year’s greatest hits. Data viz has to be considered one of the fastest growing segments of design today, and thankfully, it’s growing in some exciting new ways. Where the Internet infographic was defined, for a period, by the dense, super-long column of facts and figures, we’ve […]
• FRED Excel Add-In
  I love the St. Louis Fed’s FRED database.  They now have an Excel plug-in, to let you import their data directly, without having to go to the site and save it as as Excel file first.  This is incredibly useful if you use the same series over and over, and don’t want to have to […]

Daily Links From Glimpse From a Height

• You Keep Using That Word…
  In this case, “justice,” which doesn’t really mean what the left thinks it does. An interesting experiment is about to be conducted in London. A public-housing authority has constructed exact replicas of elegant early-Victorian townhouses on one side of Union Square in Islington, of the kind much coveted by bankers and lawyers in the nearby […]
• Debt Limit Chicken
  Professor Bainbridge takes a game theory approach, wherein the Republicans must persuade the Democrats that they really are crazy enough not to raise the debt ceiling, barring serious spending cuts.  Last time, given the election schedule, I thought the deal was defensible.  But Bainbridge’s reasoning now is sound: So there are the GOP’s choices: Give […]
• Bitterness, Cynicism Don’t Work Well
  Here, or in Israel:  A poll publicized in Haaretz last week found that more than half the Israelis who vote for left-leaning parties (54.4%, to be pedantic) “would leave the country if they could.” That’s twice the rate of right-wing voters. According to the survey, it is the economy, rather than politics, that accounts most for the […]
• Obama’s SecDef Nominee: ‘Let the Jews pay for it’
  According to JINSA official Marsha Halteman: “He said to me, ‘Let the Jews pay for it’,” said Marsha Halteman, director for military and law enforcement programs at the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), which led the battle to keep USO Haifa operational. Hagel’s campaign to close the storied USO port struck many observers, […]
• National Debt – Tennessee Ernie Ford Edition
  Via the Eeyores over at Zero Hedge, this cheery thought about the $1 Trillion coin: It was already a bad idea.  Now, it’s just stupid.
• The Great Swindle
  Roger Scruton asks how we ended up with so much fake culture: Hence for a long time now, it has been assumed that there can be no authentic creation in high art which is not in some way a ‘challenge’ to public culture. Art must give offence, stepping out armed against the bourgeois taste for […]
• US Shale Oil Reducing Direct Dependence
  Via Mark Perry: Prices are still largely a function of world markets, but the idea that Keystone XL, for instance, won’t help this is just silly.  And the Left keeps touting boutique energies like solar and wind as means to “energy independence.”  Can we please stop the ethanol mandate now? Note also that this peaked […]
• Mandatory Gun Insurance?
  This strikes me as a terrible idea, since there are already plenty of laws on the books that make gun owners liable for the misuse of their weapons, either by themselves or other, but they’re asking economists, so Russ Roberts provides the coup de grace: But the logic is not quite as neat as it […]
• The Palestinian Authority’s Inconvenient Truths
  Khaled Abu Toameh highlights the seamier side of the world’s favorite underdogs: – Out of the 600 Christians from the Gaza Strip who arrived in the West Bank in the past two weeks to celebrate Christmas, dozens have asked to move to Israel because they no longer feel comfortable living under the Palestinian Authority and […]
• Afghan Documents and Ancient Jewish Life There
  A find to rival the Cairo Genizah, maybe the Dead Sea Scrolls? The Afghan collection gives an unprecedented look into the lives of Jews in ancient Persia in the 11th century. The paper manuscripts, preserved over the centuries by the dry, shady conditions of the caves, include writings in Hebrew, Aramaic, Judea-Arabic and the unique […]
• Ted Cruz – Tie Policies to Opportunity
  Ted Cruz invokes lefty favorite John Rawls (albeit somewhat inaccurately) in setting up new messaging for the GOP.  But he hits the right notes: Opportunity conservatism is a powerful frame to explain conservative policies that work. It covers the gamut of issues. Republicans shouldn’t just assail excessive financial and environmental regulations; we should explain how […]
• Not Surprising: Government Spending Destroys Wealth
  Via James Pethokoukis at AEI, a new study strongly suggests that the so-called fiscal multiplier for “stimulus” spending is less than 1, even in periods of high unemployment, meaning that even in a those situations where stimulus spending is supposed to do the most good, it still destroys vast quantities of wealth: We have investigated the proposition […]
• Ideology, Income, and Size of State Government
  As states become wealthier, ideology of the state government becomes more important in determining the size of that government: This paper theorizes that the impact of ideology on the size of US state governments increases with state income. This idea is tested using state-level ideology data derived from the voting behavior of state congressional representatives. […]
• More Evidence that CO2 Isn’t Causing Warming
  Via Powerline, Watts Up With That reports on a new study that claims to show that warming and CO2 emissions are perhaps correlated, but not causal: We use statistical methods for nonstationary time series to test the anthropogenic interpretation of global warming (AGW), according to which an increase in atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations raised global […]
• Oriole Cafeterias’ Map of Baltimore (1947)
  The Browns wouldn’t arrive until 7 years later: Follow the link, see the whole map.
• Mark Lamster: I Love New York at Night
  A non-skyline slideshow:

Daily Links From Glimpse From a Height

• “Proust is important for everyone”
  Mario Vargas-Llosa is no man of the right, but even he worries about cultural amnesia: If culture is purely entertainment, nothing is of importance. If it’s a matter of amusement, an impostor can undoubtedly amuse me more than a profoundly authentic person. But if culture signifies more than this, then it’s worrying. And I believe […]
• Government Motors, Government Airplanes
  Airbus and GM are both getting beaten like a drum by their competition.  At least Airbus admits government interference is part of the problem: But the fact that executives at Airbus concentrated so myopically on the A380 jumbo jet was also a product of politics at parent company EADS, where the French and German governments […]
• Turn, Turn to the Anglosphere
  Conservative MP Dan Hannan lays out the reasons why Britain shouldn’t fear leaving the EU if a new relationship can’t be negotiated.  Where it’s liable to stick? Hardest of all is the issue of the single market. Almost everyone agrees that Britain should remain part of a European free trade area. The trouble is that […]
• Calibrating The Messaging
  The Diplomat takes us through the problems in calibrating your rhetoric to signal just the right level of commitment to both friends and enemies. Messaging with adversaries can be just as fraught with problems.  Robert Dreyfuss’ recent post on how the United States and Iran managed to avoid a fracas over an air combat scrum in the Gulf […]
• 20 Breathtaking Examples of Winter Landscape Photography
  Yes, it’s cold.  But without winter, we’d never get shots like this: Go look at the rest.
• The Fiscal Cliff Deal From Overseas
  Mostly, and understanding that not much has really been resolved, and the President, like it or not (not), and despite promises that he’s “not gonna play that game again,” will have to negotiate with Congress over spending. Britain’s The Commentator: Megaphone politics doesn’t work and Obama should know this. Or at least he would if he […]
• Death Panels and CLASS
  Controlling only the House, Republicans will, for a little while at least, have to be satisfied with rear-guard actions against Obamacare, at least at the federal level.  But there is some small good news on that front. First, the CLASS Act, which was sold as reducing the deficit but would have ended up increasing it, […]