The Adventures of Shylock Holmes

At some point, the incremental loss of liberty in Britain becomes such a constant depressing dripping that it's hard to maintain the in...

The BBC has a classic case of 'English Majors Trying To Write About Finance', with this clanger of a headline: Black-Scholes: The m...

Radical .

From the latest Bon Appetit issue , a thoroughly under-utilised strategy: "In the summer of 1970, my mom, Helen, went to visit a frien...

I was in the gym with SMH and we'd adjourned to the locker rooms to shower. SMH is American, and a fairly organised kind of fellow. As...

Venice is a strange place. I get this sense every time you see paintings of it from hundreds of years ago. This, for instance, is St Mark&#...

1. If you want another great example of historical applications of  the curse of knowledge (how much you take for granted that everyone kne...

I confess to not really understanding the whole social marketing idea. I mean, I understand how it's meant to work. Apparently we'...

"The hour for your departure draws near; if you will but forget all else and pay sole regard to the helmsman of your soul and the divin...

On April 4th, a Greek man named Dimitris Christoulas shot himself in a square in Athens, in part as protest for the government's austeri...

I'm always impressed with the engineering associated with ATMs. Think about it - they have some of the smallest margins of error of just...

Apropos nothing, the great Robert Graves : Despite and Still Have you not read The words in my head, And I made part Of your own heart? ...

I've often wondered about the mindset of people who embark on extra-marital affairs. In particular, I wonder how they feel when they ...

Andrew Breitbart may be gone, but Breitbart's legacy lives on. Investigative journalist and serial annoyance to the political left James...

Via Ace of Spades , @politicalmath has a classic graph describing the estimated fiscal impact of the Buffett Rule  that President Obama prop...

You might be  almost certainly are an economist if you've ever got irritated at an establishment because their prices were too low. I ...

In honour of world backup day  being a mere three days ago, the hard drive on my 8 month old Dell laptop decided to die. The answer to the...

Reading up on the writings of Mencius Moldbug .I'm about halfway through the 'How Richard Dawkins Got Pwned' essays, where he cl...

Over at reddit a few days ago, there was this thread where a guy talks about how his daughter has cerebral palsy , and now at age three is d...

Justin Wolfers likes the fact that Australia has compulsory voting. I share Tom Friedman's view that the divisive nature of U.S. democ...

Via jwz  comes this story of a crazily effective birth control method for men : The procedure called RISUG in India (reversible inhibition o...

-In favor of my revised definition of why LA seems spread out , comes this:  the 50 densest cities in America : . Clocking in at number 1: T...

The second effect of overconfidence on the sports field is that people over-invest in the sport. In other words, when you think you have h...

Statisticians rarely make good members of sports teams. I found this out the hard way when I used to be on a frisbee team. Most people run...

Apparently the War on Drugs has ended! I know this because I read as much from Gil Kerlikowske, director of the Obama administration's ...

- Steve Sailer catches the New York Times with their preconceptions being hilariously disproved. A shooter had being going around in France...

In New York, Mayor Bloomberg has stood behind a policy to refuse private food donations to the homeless , on the basis that they might not m...

I've previously written about how I wouldn't have any desire to organise a massive wedding celebration that lasts many days . These ...

If you ever want an example of just how fickle people's preferences really are, look no further than their choice of holiday destination...

I was going to write about this piece at the New York Times  where this guy called Greg Smith writes about how he's leaving Goldman Sach...

"In death, Alexander of Macedon's end differed no whit from his stable-boy's. Either both were received into the same generativ...

Via Drudge comes a story of our time , of Scott O’Neil,   a cop in Mount Sterling, Ohio dealing with an arrest of a 9 year old boy for skipp...

Every now and again, I find myself rather impressed at just how adaptable the human body is. A great example of this is jet lag. This is a...

Via Jason Kottke , apparently one of Stefani Germanotta's co-workers shot a bunch of photos of her in 2005 in her apartment. Not long af...

One of the things I find unfortunate among American society is the inherent suspicion of unstructured recreation time. There seems to be a l...

Do you want the bad news, or the bad news? The bad news is that the TSA is still insisting on the right to   look at electronic pictures o...

In Australia, the Labor Government and Greens have been unhappy with the press coverage they've been receiving in various newspapers, ma...