The Adventures of Shylock Holmes

"To die well, we must know first what we have lived for." - Theodore Dalrymple

Back during the debt ceiling debate, one of the key components of the compromise agreement between Democrats and Republicans was that a fabu...

The law of diminishing returns is called a law for a reason. The more of something you do, eventually the payoff decreases. It might increas...

(After the plane has landed): "You may now use your cell phones but all other electronic devices must remain off." Gotcha. Now...

Over at Hacker News, there's a fascinating article  discussing the prospects of Raystream , a company that claims to have a new video co...

From a spam site commenter calling itself 'Wastewater Training' (no link for the spam site): "A lot of water is wasted in thos...

In Australia, today they voted in the Senate to pass a tax on carbon dioxide. Now, there are some reasonable argument for having a world-w...

This is one of the most hilarious heckles on the repulsive Westboro Church cult. Unfortunately, these clowns are too obtuse to even be e...

The problem with giving to the homeless is twofold. First, how do you tell which people are truly in bad shape, as opposed to merely being...

- A wonderful, rambling essay  about crows as a metaphor for the working poor. There's plenty in The Exiled to disagree with (including,...

Something I was put on to recently - Felonious Munk. He has a whole series of interesting rants full of common sense and gratuitous swearing...

Ho hum, another six asylum seekers drowned while on the way to Australia . I wrote about this at some length last year when another bunch...

Let me explain briefly some logic that may seem superficially appealing, but is in fact catastrophically wrong: Nobody wants to play goalie...

So over the weekend, Qantas Airlines grounded all of its planes, without any warning. This of course stranded thousands of passengers, and d...

A statistic that I had a strong hunch was true as soon as I heard it : The suicide rates are at all time highs and rising in the Army and ...

Western society has seen enormous changes in its attitude towards animal cruelty over the last 150 or so years. In a rural setting, if you w...

It is a sound rule for those with any understanding of probability that the only real mistakes are ex-ante mistakes. Put simply, you should ...

Opening someone else’s mail. This used to be a big deal. But think about it – how much important personal business is actually conducted by ...

In each period, different combinations of political beliefs tend to go together. These days, for instance, a belief in the importance of gen...

McDonalds is an astonishingly successful franchise. If you need to get a clear example of this in practice, just look at the distribution of...

This  hilarious story  from the Consumerist provides a clue: The Styrofoam cube enclosed in this envelope is being included by the sender t...

The Greek:   [Subject: 'The Glory of Australia'] It's stunning to me that you consider yourselves an independent country. At l...

-What would the world look like as you approached the speed of light? Apparently, it would look like this . -Gary Brecher continues to pro...

The police medic: Comedy gold! And if you're in the mood for a gratuitously harsh but hilarious heckle by Ace of Spades, this was ...

First State Superannuation  is a company in Australia that provides superannuation funds (the equivalent of America's 401K-type plans fo...

I don't know about you, but my brain has a category of thoughts that I describe as 'semi-conscious'. These are the cases where y...

In reference to the 'Occupy Brisbane' protests, smurray38 had this zinger: I think even Lenin would be hard pressed to find anythi...

Politicians are, for the most part, suspicious of decentralised controls of any sort. Instinctively they tend to reach for technocratic solu...

People worry about all sorts of ridiculous small probabilities. Small probability events tend to loom large in their minds, making them worr...

This was the prediction, regarding the leaked nude photos of Scarlett Johansson: I'm going to go out on a limb here, and make a wild p...

Steve Sailer's take . I really liked this anecdote: When my son was ten, his baseball coach—inspired by Michael Lewis’s bestseller Mone...

Suppose it's late at night, and you're walking along a street alone. You see up ahead of you a group of three rough-looking male you...

I've never met anyone I actually was sure was a psychopath. I've known people that I suspected of it, but perhaps in its milder form...

A day is the length of time it takes a planet to rotate once on its axis. A year is the length of time it takes a planet to orbit a star. ...

John Nash would be proud . Today is clearly a double-dose of Yank Sports + Economics. In other news, penalties for 'excessive cele...

Let me start with the punchline: If you've ever run a regression in your life, you should definitely see the movie  Moneyball . This...

-Some Chinese restaurant in Beijing decides to market itself as Obama Fried Chicken, complete with a mockup version of Obama as Colonel Sand...

Are there any serious doubt that Theodore Dalrymple is the most interesting writer alive today? Here is his latest offering in the New Engl...

Thinking about Steve Jobs reminded me of this XKCD comic describing how cancer survival rates actually work . This is why you can be cured...