Category: Random

I was talking to my daughter about how anybody could put anything on the Internet. She was surprised by that, and indeed it is kind of incredible. There was nothing like that when I was young: a way for any random person to speak to any other random person. Of course, as I’ve said before,…

I recently read “In Defense of Food” by Michael Pollan. It’s not as weirdly fascinating as his earlier book “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” but it has a lot of interesting information. What I found most interesting was the shift in the recommendations of the McGovern commision on nutrition in 1977. This was the first attempt to…

Visiting Maine at this time of year reminds me how winter is the limiting factor for life in the north. Every plant and animal which lives there has a complex and energy intensive survival mechanism for the cold: insulation, hibernation, migration, etc. Where I live now in California the limiting factor is the long, dry,…

Are economic sanctions a good idea? Sanctions were applied to Iraq between the two Gulf wars. They had no obvious effect on the leadership. They inflicted significant harm on ordinary citizens of Iraq. We are currently applying sanctions to North Korea. Again, it is not obvious that the leadership is affected, and, again, the ordinary…

There is some interesting research by Duncan Watts which seems to show that popular songs are popular because they are popular. He ran some experiments which showed that when people rank songs, the dominant effect is other people’s rankings. Thus even a small recommendation for a song by a couple of people can translate into…