Dr. Josef Oehmen explains the nuclear accident in Japan: I am writing this text (Mar 12) to give you some peace of mind regarding some of the troubles in Japan, that is the safety of Japan’s nuclear reactors. Up front, the situation is serious, but under control. And this text is long! But you will know more about nuclear power plants after reading it than all journalists on this planet put together. ...
I happened to pick up a dead trees copy of the New Yorker this week and found in it a massive article on the BP oil spill written by Raffi Khatchadourian. I wouldn’t be surprised if he were working on a book on the same subject. In it, he brings the perspective that only the passage of time can give to a situation that was very hard to judge at the time. ...
Tyler Cowen’s The Great Stagnation argues that economic growth in advanced nations is slowing because we haven’t seen any innovations in the past few decades that encourage economic growth. Ezra Klein’s review provides a solid synopsis of Cowen’s argument. In Slate, Annie Lowrey looks at a variety of explanations for why the Internet hasn’t proven to be a GDP-boosting invention. I tend to agree with the argument that economists aren’t very good at measuring the value of the Internet: ...
I’ve been reading the new Bleeding Heart Libertarian blog with interest. I’m not a libertarian by any stretch of the imagination, but I find myself in agreement with many of the principles that underpin it as a political philosophy. Jacob Levy gets at the heart of the differences between liberals and libertarians and then explains why, from a political perspective, they are not really very important: So libertarianism as a doctrine in political philosophy had this distinctive contribution to make: it rejected state activity to increase the material well-being of the poor. I think by gradual drift, that came to seem like all libertarianism was concerned with. ...
It seems like almost everyone with a blog is captivated by the debate over Apple’s new policies related to in-app purchases. I read at least one good post on the subject every day. The money issues are important but not really interesting. Apple is leveraging its absolute control over which applications can be installed under iOS to pry away a big chunk of the revenue from application vendors. The one rationale for the new policy I best understand is that application vendors will modify their pricing model so as to pay Apple the smallest amount possible. So if Apple charges 30% on direct purchases through iTunes and 15% for in-app purchases, many developers will distribute their application for free and then unlock the good features through an in-app purchase. If the percentage is different for subscriptions and for standalone in-app purchases, developers will try to switch to subscription-based pricing. In that sense, Apple has a strong incentive to charge the same price across the board. ...
Freeman Dyson’s recent New York Review of Books article on information science is one of the most interesting things I’ve read lately. Where else are you going to read about the similarities between Wikipedia and Congolese drum language? These days, the ways that big data is changing how businesses operate is widely discussed. He explains how big data is changing how science is conducted and indeed how biological evolution is moving more toward big data. It’s a must read. ...
Yesterday Ezra Klein flagged a study that shows that health insurance aside, the rich and better educated tend to live much longer, healthier lives than the poor: The researchers ran the data two ways: High-income patients vs. low-income patients, and highly educated patients vs. less educated patients. Over the course of the study, the high-income patients were only 35 percent as likely to die as the low-income patients, and the highly educated patients only 26 percent as likely to die as the low-income patients. And the problem wasn’t that the low-income and low-education patients were hanging back from the health-care system. Because they were getting sick while their richer and better educated counterparts weren’t, they actually used considerable more in health-care services. ...
Andy Baio explains how he captured and published the list of stories in The Daily, the iPad-only newspaper, on a Tumblr blog.
Ezra Klein has a good response to the Mark Bittman piece on McDonald’s oatmeal that I linked to earlier in the week. Here’s his conclusion: That gets to the part of this that I think Bittman is really right about, though. His post is basically an attempt to shame McDonald’s into making its “healthy” options, like oatmeal, less unhealthy. And that seems to me to be the key to better eating: better eating out, and better snacking. My lunchtime diet has gotten a lot better since Devon and Blakely opened on 15th and H, as I can now get soup that isn’t terrible. I’d eat less of Kelly’s chocolate if the other choice wasn’t Oreos in the vending machine. My hunch is that a lot of people are willing to opt for a slightly healthier option when they eat out during the day. The success chains like McDonald’s have had with faux-healthy foods suggests I’m right. But when they quietly make the seemingly healthy options into unhealthy foods, they’re making it very difficult for consumers to make better choices. ...
Cookbook author and food activist Mark Bittman has a piece in the New York Times taking McDonald’s to task for adding oatmeal to its menu as an ostensibly healthy breakfast alternative and then loading it up with fat and chemicals to the point that from a nutritional standpoint it’s not significantly better than a sausage biscuit. To me, this says less about McDonald’s than it does about the typical McDonald’s diner. If the restaurant could sell oatmeal that’s actually healthy in the same volume as the unhealthy oatmeal that they offer, they would probably do so. What we can infer from the composition of McDonald’s oatmeal is that the people who order it want to feel like they’re making a positive choice, but that when it comes down to it, their main interest is in eating something that satisfies their craving for fast food. That’s why they’re eating McDonald’s as opposed to making a bowl of cheap, healthy oatmeal in their own home. ...