Links for 2009-10-13

"To amplify what Kieran has just said - political scientists are going to be very, very happy today. I had seen Lin cited as a 50-1 outsider by one betting agency a few days ago, and had been surprised that she was at the races at all, given that economists tend (like the rest of us) to be possessive of their field's collective goodies. I'm delighted to see that my cynicism was completely misplaced."

"Fudoki is a very unusual fantasy novel. Harueme is an elderly princess in Heian Japan, and she thinks she's dying. She starts to sort out her belongings, and as she does she finds a series of empty notebooks and is compelled to fill them with the story of a cat, intertwined with the story of her own life. The cat becomes a woman and has adventures the princess would have liked to have had. Harueme is a very present narrator, and you seldom get away from her life and the fact that this is a story she's telling. "

"So, here's what I know: The real secret to a great signing is . . . wait for it . . . to be Neil Gaiman.

Being famous, popular and having reputation can do quite a bit to attract a crowd. I know that sounds obvious and flip, but the fact that most authors are not famous, popular or have a reputation means that they need to help the bookstore make a signing successful."

"Breathed's earliest strips are arguably too reliant on throwaway pop-cultural references (you can safely skip Volume One's Charles-and-Di escapades), but the artist's satirical worldview quickly sharpened, his characters became less cartoonish, and his celeb references more off-the-wall (characters were punched out by Sean Penn, propositioned by Elvis, or fired by Donald Trump). Years before South Park, "Bloom County" existed in an oddball inter- dimension between the cartoon world and the real world. But what seems spectacularly fresh now is Breathed's complete absence of snark. His weird whimsy and lack of cruelty are positively quaint today. "

"My point, as you probably guessed, is that the odds of the New Yorker dipping into their archives and pulling out a Gladwell essay on the strength of its reporting or the depth of its intelligence decrease with every superficially clever, patently topical article they allow him to write and consent to publish. This isn't to say that Gladwell is incapable of strong reportage or intellectual depth--only that that people can't seem to convince him to slow down and write something with heft enough to be as relevant twenty years down the line as it is this week."

"In reality, lying is probably as old as humankind, and the elusive ability to tell when someone is lying has consumed a great deal of brainpower over the ages. Or, as David Thoreson Lykken phrases it in his classic book, A Tremor in the Blood: "If man learned to lie not long after he acquired language, we may assume that the first attempts at lie detection soon made their appearance....We are all human lie detectors; we must be to survive in our mendacious society."

So it's not surprising, then, that lie detection has a long and colorful history."

"There is a story about Richard Feynman that while he was at Princeton he had a hard time with dessert. Apparently they always served either chocolate or vanilla ice cream and Feynman would agonize over which he wanted that night. Then one day he decided that he was wasting his time making this decision and so he would solve this by only chosing vanilla and from that point on in life that is what he did. He no longer wasted time choosing, and, apparently, ate a lot of vanilla ice cream. Of course there is an equally valid and equally elegant solution to this problem which is in fact the exact opposite of Feynman's deterministic solution: choose randomly! Chocolate or vanilla? Choose randomly. Stop at the stop sign or not? Choose randomly (okay maybe not!) Of course there is the question of exactly how you choose randomly. For some, dice may suffice, but isn't there a better way than carrying around a bag of dice which makes you look like your heading out for a night of RPGing?"

"The story as told is mostly true, though a few details have been a little fudged by the winds of history. It goes like this: when the young Carl Gauss was a small child in school, his teacher wished to kill some time by making the students practice their addition by adding the integers from 1 to 100. Gauss worked for about 10 seconds and turned in the correct answer. His method was exceptionally clever. By doing the problem twice he made the calculation much easier."