Bun Arbitrage

It is left as an exercise to the reader to show that, under the law of one price and the absence of arbitrage, the market-clearing price of a hamburger bun in Heidelberg is zero.

More Gold

It always warms my heart when the mere title of an essay makes me laugh. Herein, the estimable Theodore Dalrymple, with 'Your Dad is Not Hitler'. His other recent essay, 'A Sense of Others' is also fantastic.

Honestly, if Taki's Magazine had Moldbug and Heartiste writing for it, one would scarcely need to go anywhere else.

A thing I did not know until recently

The word 'se'nnight'. It's an archaic word for 'week', being a contraction of 'seven night(s)'. The most interesting thing is that it makes it immediately clear where 'fortnight' comes from, being a similar contraction of 'fourteen night(s)'. The more you know.

Via the inimitable Mark Steyn.

The best poem title ever

Making this a double dose of Hal G.P. Colebatch, if there has been a better poem title than:

'Observing a thong-shod pedestrian's reaction to catching his toe in the ring of a discarded condom'

I certainly haven't come across it.

Snappy responses you weren't hoping for that nonetheless answer the question quite well

From the New York Times

In the last few years, unable to hold a list of just four grocery items in my head, I’d begun to fret a bit over my literal state of mind. So to reassure myself that nothing was amiss, just before tackling French I took a cognitive assessment called CNS Vital Signs, recommended by a psychologist friend. The results were anything but reassuring: I scored below average for my age group in nearly all of the categories, notably landing in the bottom 10th percentile on the composite memory test and in the lowest 5 percent on the visual memory test.

All this means that we adults have to work our brains hard to learn a second language. But that may be all the more reason to try, for my failed French quest yielded an unexpected benefit. After a year of struggling with the language, I retook the cognitive assessment, and the results shocked me. My scores had skyrocketed, placing me above average in seven of 10 categories, and average in the other three. My verbal memory score leapt from the bottom half to the 88th — the 88th! — percentile and my visual memory test shot from the bottom 5th percentile to the 50th. Studying a language had been like drinking from a mental fountain of youth.

What might explain such an improvement?

Regression toward the mean.

Things that need no elaboration to explain why they're awesome

'Vaguely Rude Place Names of the World'

It's good to see Australia get some decent representation in there.

It's white, Jim, but not as we know it

What happens when the whitest band in history covers the second whitest band in history?

A whole metric buttload of awesome, that’s what.

\

24 carat solid rolled gold.

Thought of the Day

"Better to live under one tyrant a thousand miles away, than a thousand tyrants one mile away."

-Daniel Bliss

Briefly

1. Just $10? Why not $50? Now THAT'S a living wage! It's free, after all.

2. Physicists discover that nominal interest rates are indeed positive.

3. It's not quite as good as Garfield Minus Garfield, but Calvin and Hobbes mashed up with Dune is still quite excellent.

Short answers to stupid questions

"Because they enjoy it. Why does anyone do anything?"

True Story

Ha!

(via SMBC)

42

Apparently they're making a movie called '42'.

Knowing only this much about the movie, it's a useful way to segment people into a couple of groups based on the first association that comes to your mind from that number, either

a) Ah, that's Jackie Robinson's old number.

b) That movie must be about the answer to life, the universe and everything.

If I ranked people according to the chances that I'd find them interesting based on whether they thought of various combinations of a) and b), it would probably go:

1. b) only

2. Both a) and b)

3. Neither a) nor b)

4. a) only.

Your mileage may vary, but if you're reading this blog, I'm wager that it probably won't vary much.

Facts I Challenge You To Explain

In the USA, the portion sizes of nearly every food item are significantly larger than in the rest of the world.

Except for sugar packets.

For some reason, those need to be half the size of everywhere else.

La Dolce Vita

If there is a more reliable way to produce contentment than to graze under a large mulberry tree for 20 minutes and slowly eat one's way around, I'm not sure what it is.

It is now safe to return to social media

I logged on to facebook today for the first time in months, and I had to scroll through several pages of updates before coming across the first posts of inane election boosterism. Looks like from here on out we're in the clear again!

Now I can get back to my regular schedule of checking it once a month or so, and being reminded of why I don't bother going on there very much.

The Zeroth Rule of Presentations

"Put your most important content at the top of your slides."

Interesting.

Great Question

From Pax Dickinson:

"Mr. President, would the US be better off today if you'd been prosecuted for smoking pot as a youth, or are you a total hypocrite?"

 Don't hold your breath waiting for it to be asked, let alone answered.

Call Their Bluff

Do it.

I dare you.

Methinks the douchebag doth protest too much...

If you've ever had cause to say 'I'm not like those other guys', it is certain beyond a shadow of a doubt that you are, in fact, exactly like those other guys.

The guys that are truly different almost never need to explicitly state this. It's just one more example of the 'Message: I Care' mistake, which Jonah Goldberg calls "reading the stage directions".

You'd think they'd learn...

I keep telling 'em, but they just don't listen.

Not a Shylock Holmes reader, clearly.