Month: November 2007

  • Gone Baby Gone

    I grew up just outside of Boston. Boston is one of few places in the U.S. where people are from a very definite area, and you can hear it in their accent. New York may be like that too–certainly there are distinctive patterns of speech in Brooklyn and Queens–and not doubt a few places in…

  • Future Fishwrap

    I still read a daily newspaper, but we all know that newspapers are in decline. Their circulations are dropping slowly but steadily. I haven’t seen any data on the average age of newspaper readers, but I’m sure it must be increasing. Over time newspapers will have fewer and fewer readers. As technology advances, they will…

  • All the Myriad Ways

    Larry Niven’s classic science fiction short story “All the Myriad Ways” points out a problem with the Many-Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics: if there is no collapse of the quantum wave function, then all possibilities actually happen. That would seem to imply that we make all possible personal choices, including the really bad ones. This…

  • On Being Wrong

    A few years ago, when my daughter was 2 years and 2 months old, my grandmother died. My daughter and I flew to Sweden for the funeral. As we were flying home, there was a blizzard in Boston, and our plane was diverted to Bangor, Maine. After we landed at Bangor, I told my daughter…

  • Utility Deregulation

    The New York Times ran an article today pointing out that in states with competitive electricity markets, rates are higher. Standard market ideology argues that when you have a competitive market, prices will always go down. However, this often fails to happen for utilities like electricity or water. Why doesn’t the market work? First I…