Here are a couple of sentences I found surprising: The studies examined were conducted between 1987 and 1999 and covered Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft, Celexa, Serzone, and Effexor. They found, on average, that placebos were 80 percent as effective as the drugs. Update: I wanted to pull up a link from the comments to a blog post the Public Library of Science that sheds more light on this issue.
Ezra Klein’s post on Israel’s assault on Gaza is the smartest thing I’ve seen written about Israel and Palestine in a long time. It doesn’t lead to any conclusions, but his observations are incredibly important. The bottom line: One important disconnect in Israel/Palestine debate is that Israel’s supporters tend to focus on what the Palestinians want while Palestine’s supporters tend to focus on what the Israelis do. Israel’s defenders, for instance, make a lot of Hamas’s willingness to kill large numbers of civilians. Palestine’s defenders make a lot of the fact that Israel actually kills large numbers of Palestinian civilians. ...
Paul Krugman posts a graph of housing prices in Las Vegas, relative to the prices in 2000. It’s interesting if only because it’s actually bubble-shaped.
James Britt has this to say on the Rails/Merb merger: Because Merb was essentially (as best I could tell) a variant of Rails (with ideas from Nitro, Ramaze and other frameworks), it seemed easer for ideas to trickle back and forth between Merb and Rails. Rubyists had more options, and both Merb and Rails could feed off of each other. It seemed a win all around to have them independent. The consolidation removes this useful competition. This is maybe a plus for folks who prefer Rails, and a gain for people who want to do things the Merb way but can now say they are using Rails. Less useful to people who want to see more distinct options. ...
I like Tim O’Reilly’s definition of Web 2.0 better than the accepted definition: Aside: I seem to have lost the battle to define Web 2.0 as “the use of the network as platform to build systems that get better the more people use them.” Perhaps it’s the lure of the obvious: companies and products that harness explicit user contribution are easier to recognize than those that pursue the more subtle and difficult task of harnessing implicit contribution. Or perhaps it’s the persistent gravitational tug of the idea that the heart of Web 2.0 is ad-supported business models; therefore, enterprise features that look like those of well-known companies featuring user contribution and ad-supported business models must by definition also be “2.0.” For me, the far more profound and powerful systems come from harnessing both explicit and implicit human contribution. ...
I’m finding it interesting to read the debate on economics blogs about how effective the stimulus package that the government will pass early next year is likely to be in addressing the economic collapse that we all hope won’t linger for ten years. For what it’s worth, I think Tyler Cowen is close to the truth when he writes this: Note that under standard theory neither monetary nor fiscal policy will set right the basic problems from negative real shocks and indeed the U.S. economy is undergoing a series of massive sectoral shifts. That includes a move out of construction, a move out of finance, a move out of debt-financed consumption, a move out of luxury goods, the collapse of GM, and a move out of industries which cannot compete with the internet (newspapers, Borders, etc.) ...
This weekend we got a rolled rib roast on sale at Whole Foods. Since I wanted it to be good, I decided to do some research before we cooked it. I looked up the cooking method in the Doubleday Cookbook (a great reference cookbook), the Joy of Cooking, and On Food and Cooking. I also found a pointer to the article on standing rib roast at Cooking for Engineers. When it comes to roasting meat, you set the oven to the proper temperature and take the roast out when it reaches the desired internal temperature. Some people make it fancy and start the oven out at a high temperature to sear the outside of the roast initially and then let the temperature fall to the roasting temperature. The one trick is that the larger the roast is, the lower your roasting temperature should be. For a large rib roast, the guy at Cooking for Engineers recommends 200 degrees. For our roast, we went with 325 degrees, the temperature recommended by Doubleday if you want a nice crusty exterior. ...
The Rails team has just announced that Merb, an alternate MVC framework for Ruby, is being merged into Rails 3. Given some recent angst about the splintering of the Ruby Web development community, this is probably good news. I haven’t used Merb, but I was all for more competition. In the open source world, the best developers steal every good idea from their competitors anyway. Between this announcement and the announcement of Rails Metal, it’s looking like the end of year trends in the Ruby Web development community are toward harmony. ...
It’s interesting to see price-rent ratios flagged everywhere as the clearest sign that we were in a housing bubble over the past decade or so. It reminded me that the first place I saw this indicator mentioned was at Winterspeak.com in January, 2004. The post is about Boston housing prices, but the metric applied in many markets. Just goes to show you that the housing bubble was never a mystery to those who were paying attention. ...
Tim O’Reilly posted a transcript of a long email thread among O’Reilly personnel on the subject of practice. It’s a wide ranging discussion on the value of practice and how people learn among people whose job it is to teach (usually through books). One thing I’ll add is that practice by itself is almost never as effective as it is with a good coach or teammates who can offer useful feedback. I’ve seen programmers who have written huge amounts of code over the years in isolation who progress very little in their overall skills. That’s why even someone like Tiger Woods, who knows as much as anyone in the world about how to play golf, still has a coach. He needs someone who can help him catch problems that would take him a lot longer to notice on his own. ...