I said, "There's no soap," not, "There's no hope."
Interesting things about Bollywood#
Andrew Moroz quotes a story on the use of force in fighting terrorism and a justification for accidents.#
Tim Hartford reports on the diversity of choices available in the prostitution business.#
The Club for Growth honors Minnie Driver.#
Wally writes about War of the Worlds and Dakota Fanning:#
Dakota Fanning terrifies me. She was funny and interesting, but I have this feeling she's going to grow up completely bonkers, useless to the world. I don't get that sense from Haley Joel Osment, for what it's worth.
Bryan Caplan: Build a better llama and the Incas will beat a path to your door.#
Maybe he's right, but I'm worried that Diamond's suffering from hindsight bias: If the Eurasians domesticated the horse, it must have been inevitable, right? But if the Incas had shown up in Europe in 1492 with deadly llama cavalry, and mowed down backward European infantry, I suspect modern Incan historians would have declared the horse a hopeless candidate for domestication too.
Sepia Mutiny has an interesting discussion of Katrina Kaif. I saw Maine Pyar Kyun Kiya, and could not tell it wasn't her who was speaking, although her voice did seem a bit soft for her.#
Keith and the Girl: The Fuck Paris Hilton Show#
Paul Graham: What Business Can Learn from Open Source:#
Most articles in the print media are boring. For example, the president notices that a majority of voters now think invading Iraq was a mistake, so he makes an address to the nation to drum up support. Where is the man bites dog in that? I didn't hear the speech, but I could probably tell you exactly what he said. A speech like that is, in the most literal sense, not news: there is nothing new in it. [3]
Nor is there anything new, except the names and places, in most "news" about things going wrong. A child is abducted; there's a tornado; a ferry sinks; someone gets bitten by a shark; a small plane crashes. And what do you learn about the world from these stories? Absolutely nothing. They're outlying data points; what makes them gripping also makes them irrelevant.
Tyler Cowen wonders where to leave his discarded books:#
One radical option is to leave the book, well...in a bookstore. Most likely, the book will be sold. If you bring it to the counter they will be puzzled but I suspect will be willing to ring it up and punch in a code.
Of course now the book has a price, which can restrict the chance it is ever read. But the chance of it getting into the right hands -- the high-valuing user -- has gone way up. This is a testament to the role of middlemen in a capitalist economy. The book is probably worth more to the world at full price, in a bookstore, than lying on a bench for free.