Sun 05 September 2010 | -- (permalink)

... to an excess of classical economics.

Renowned economist Greg Mankiw, in the New York Times.

Tue 31 August 2010 | -- (permalink)

(dot-com billionaire and owner of the Dallas Mavericks).

1. Pay off your debt
2. When faced with uncertainty, prefer cash

He says it with more force and panache. Worth reading.

Sun 29 August 2010 | -- (permalink)

As recently blurbed at Bakadesuyo, a difficult initiation makes us more likely to think positively about the group later. My corollary: given that groups are in competition with each other for people's time, attention, and loyalty, groups that have more difficult initiations are more likely to persist than those with …

Fri 27 August 2010 | -- (permalink)

The word "rather". It has no real meaning; it's just thrown in to make the writer sound more distinguished. As in, "I was rather surprised to discover how educated I sound when I say 'rather'." Blech.

Sat 21 August 2010 | -- (permalink)

Megan McArdle and Alex Tabarrok tipped me off to a new project by the LA Times to rate and compare every teacher in the LA Unified School district for which they could get standardized test data.

I'm a little unsettled about the idea of publicly releasing all those teacher names …

Sat 21 August 2010 | -- (permalink)

Since the last time I posted here, we've had a new baby, I started a new job, and after tomorrow we'll be in a new apartment. Ten feet below the old one, but two bedrooms bigger.

In the meantime I tried blogging on Tumblr for a while, but it didn't …

Tue 27 April 2010 | -- (permalink)

Apache.org, which makes the world's most popular web server, was recently hacked.  Their public post-mortem of the event is impressive in its frankness and completeness.  The hack itself was made possible by a variety of vulnerabilities including software bugs (XSS exploits in JIRA), misconfigured security settings (leaving UsePAM enabled …

Tue 20 April 2010 | -- (permalink)

That's Ben Casnocha after recalling a couple of embarrassing experiences from (very) early in his professional career.  He says they helped him become better.

I think the term "humility" better conveys the value of such experiences. Ideally we'd be able to strive for improvement and learn from others without having …

Thu 15 April 2010 | -- (permalink)

No, really.

Wed 14 April 2010 | -- (permalink)

I hadn't heard about this until today.  Man do I hate the Lakers.