URLs du Jour

2006-10-10 (PM Edition)

  • Actually a URL du Yesterday: Bryan Caplan considers the leftwing take on Christopher Columbus, and deems it pretty much on target. You know what they say about stopped clocks.

  • Thomas Sowell's column today is titled "Frivolous Politics".
    You may deserve whatever you get if you vote frivolously in this year's election. But surely the next generation, which has no vote, deserves better.
    Gulp! Good point. Professor Sowell is probably the least frivolous person in California.

  • Both Donald Luskin and Virginia Postrel are pretty darn happy with this year's choice for the Econ Nobel, Edmund Phelps. Donald is overjoyed that it didn't go to Paul Krugman; Virginia is pleased with the occurrence of the word "dynamism" in Phelps' work. And rightly so. The lads at the WSJ's opinion site have an op-ed from Edmund Phelps today.

  • The perky news team at Madison's WKOW-TV have laid hands on a proof of a required textbook for 9-11 conspiracy loon Kevin Barrett's class at the University of Wisconsin. If you're wondering if it's got overheated fact-free deranged rhetoric: why, yes it does, in spades. (Via Prof Althouse.)

  • George Lakoff (a linguistics prof at UC Berkeley) has recently written a book entitled Whose Freedom?: The Battle Over America's Most Important Idea. Peter Berkowitz (via Powerline), writing in Policy Review deemed it "embarrassing", a "dismal performance" that "dishonors scholarship". In an outtake from a forthcoming Reason article, Will Wilkinson calls Lakoff's major conjecture "astoundingly empirically ill-supported"; aside from that, there's only a "tired philosophical core." Stephen Pinker, in a New Republic review (quoted here), calls the book a "train wreck"; Lakoff's depictions of both allies and adversaries are "cartoonish"; his "advice doesn't pass the giggle test".

    Other than that, though, I understand it's pretty good.


Last Modified 2006-10-11 8:04 AM EDT

URLs du Jour

2006-10-10 (AM Edition)

  • It's a funny old world, as Patterico discovers a recursive relationship between the New York Times and censorship.

  • Steven den Beste, taking a break from not-blogging, points out that the FTC maybe should be investigating the "reality-based community" for false advertising.

  • Virginia Postrel reports that spam with the subject line
    SELDON is great hogs of dull witted donkey when it was
    … got through her spam filter. Here's one that the spam filter here (Bogofilter, specifically) caught:
    of. Could live Mallow stopped himself in the tech man's blaster can
    Yes, they're using character names from Asimov SF novels to evade spam filtering. Bastards!