Jul
25
2006

URLs du Jour

2006-07-25

  • I've been successfully nagged by close relatives and health professionals to undertake regular gym trips. Greg Mankiw brings his skeptical economist's eye to the claims about exercise's benefits. He quotes an NYT article:
    Over all, each hour spent exercising (up to 30 hours a week) adds about two hours to a person's life expectancy, according to the Harvard Alumni Study, which has tracked deaths among 17,000 men for more than two decades.
    You should check what Greg says about this, but he doesn't mention what really stood out: 30 hours a week! That's three-quarters of a fulltime job! Do a lot of Harvard alumni really have that kind of free time?

    Of course, if I'm reading this right, they only looked at dead Harvard alumni … anyway, maybe I'll skip the gym tonight.

  • Bryan Caplan went to Comic-Con. Among other things, he reports this q-and-a between Samuel L. Jackson and a fan in the crowd about the upcoming movie Snakes on a Plane:
    Audience Member: But is the behavior of the snakes at all... realistic? Is that really what snakes on a plane would do?

    6,500 Fans in Unison: Boo! Boo!

    Jackson Are you high? Because we asked every [expletive] snake expert in the world, and every [expletive] one of them said that this is EXACTLY what snakes on a plane would do!

    So there you go. It's a scientifically accurate must-see, like March of the Penguins.

  • According to an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, at Elon University, they apparently have psych profs teach freshman about "globalization." (No word on whether they have math profs teaching poetry.) Dan Drezner deems the article "one of the more useless acts of self-flagellation about globalization I've seen in quite a while." Very much worth reading, and sufficient reason to attend Tufts over Elon, if you're in the position to make that choice.