3/31 Don Boudreaux on celebrating North Korea’s tiny carbon footprint.
3/30 On the economics of health care disparities, Richard Epstein proposes some good places to start. Peter Gordon puts in perspective automobile safety over the past century. And when disaster strikes: comparing the effectiveness of private and government sector responses to Hurricane Katrina. (PDF)
3/29 Developing Intelligence points out ten dissimilarities between brains and computers.
3/28 Several very sad anecdotes race and psychological poverty in America. (Thanks to Karen for the link.) A report on the stagnation of the European poor. (Via Erudito.) Exactly right, metaphysically: Nothing causes poverty. Meanwhile, Steven Horwitz champions Wal-Mart for the Nobel Peace Prize and wonders why the self-proclaimed friends-of-the-poor aren’t more enthusiastic.
3/27 A cautionary tale about the New York art market: are old masters or contemporary works better for your soul and investment portfolio? (Thanks to Michael for the link.)
3/26 A fine law review article by Timothy Sandefur rebutting creationism’s use of postmodernism. (Thanks to Bob H. for the link.)
3/25 A powerful TED talk by Cambridge physicist Neil Turok on entrepreneurship in African education. (Via Division of Labour.)
3/24 Fruits of the Enlightenment: IBM scientists have built a switch that “can control the flow of information on a chip using pulses of light instead of electrons.” A sixty-three year old mathematician solves the decades-old “Road Coloring Problem.” (Thanks to Virginia for the link.) And a TED video of Segway-inventor Ted Kamen’s latest: a high-tech prosthetic arm. (Thanks to Anja for the link.)
3/23 It’s the Spring Festival – celebrating life (flowers), fertility (rabbits), and pleasure (chocolate). Unless one is on the other side, in which case one is celebrating death and suffering. (Via Rebirth of Reason.) (I wonder if that report will prompt a movement lobbying the FDA and FTC to mandate warning labels on crosses as being dangerous to one’s health.) Update: John Enright links to this disgusting report, in the United States of all places, of another religious health threat.
3/22 Grant McCracken believes that there is new life for the independent bookstore: “Bookstores, independent bookstores, especially, create a value over and above the supply of printed materials and we must understand and act of this value, before it’s too late.” And Live Science explains how the Greek agora changed the world.
3/21 “Liberating the entrepreneurial spirit for good.” Here is the CEO of FLOW, Michael Strong, with the March edition of their FLOW Vision News.
3/18 Professor Allan Gotthelf of the University of Pittsburgh on Ayn Rand’s theory of concepts.
3/17 A set of high-resolution photographs from a space shuttle mission. (Thanks to Karen for the link.) And a well-illustrated survey of the early history of photography.
3/16 Two quotations about courage have crossed my horizon this week. Here is Terry Goodkind: “Sometimes, making the wrong choice is better than making no choice. You have the courage to go forward, that is rare. A person who stands at the fork, unable to pick, will never get anywhere.” (Wizard’s First Rule) And here is Henry Hazlitt: “Moral courage is the rarest of all the rare things of this earth. The war has shown that millions have physical courage. Millions were willing to face rifle and cannon, bombardment, poison gas, liquid fire, and the bayonet; to trust themselves to flying machines thousands of feet in air, under the fire of anti-aircraft guns of enemy planes; to go into submarines, perhaps to meet a horrible death. But how many had the courage merely to make themselves unpopular? The bitter truth must be told: the many enlisted or submitted to the draft on both sides of the conflict not because they were convinced that they were helping to save the world, not because they had any real hatred for the enemy, not to uphold the right, but simply that they hadn’t the moral courage to face the stigma of ‘slacker’ or ‘conscientious objector.’ … Fear of death? No; the soldiers faced death bravely. But they feared unpopularity. The dreaded the suspicion of their fellows. What was needed in war is needed no less urgently in peace. How many persons in public or even in private life have the courage to say the thing that people do not like to hear? … “What can it profit a man to be able to think if he does not dare to? One must have the courage to go where the mind leads, no matter how startling the conclusion, how shattering, how much it may hurt oneself or a particular class, no matter how unfashionable or how obnoxious it may at first seem. This may require the courage to stand against the whole world. Great is the man who has that courage, for he indeed has achieved will-power.” (The Way to Will Power, 1922) (Thanks to Bob H. for the Hazlitt quotation.)
3/15 At eSkeptic, Steve Salerno dissects media sensationalism and the decline of objectivity in journalism. (Thanks to James P. for the link.) 3/14 Ibn Warraq asks an important question: Which Koran? Here is a darkly-amusing commentary on the English-speaking world’s response to some of the more absurd radical Islamist claims. (Thanks to Bob H. and Barbara for the links.) And here is more Pat Condell.
3/13 A cool test of perceptual and conceptual focus. (Thanks to Joe for the link.)
3/11 A fun demonstration of how to create a new font.
3/9 Women and the achievement of excellence in science. “Norman Augustine, retired CEO of Lockheed Martin, and Burton Richter, Nobel laureate in physics, once pointed out that MIT alone-its faculty, alumni, and staff-started more than 5,000 companies in the past 50 years.” Meanwhile, “Representative Brian Baird, the Washington-state Democrat who chairs the Subcommittee on Research and Science Education, looked at the witnesses and the crowd of more than 100 highly appreciative activists from groups like the American Association of University Women and the National Women’s Law Center and asked, ‘What kind of hammer should we use?'” to enforce gender equity. Christina Hoff Sommers surveys the debate. (Via The InstaPundit.) An interesting historical point about when women got the vote in New Jersey. And the Toronto Star identifies the world’s ten worst countries for women.
3/8 Lots of wisdom in ten minutes: Randy Pausch’s last lecture. (Thanks to Karen for the link.)
3/7 Professor Lester Hunt announces a one-day conference the University of Wisconsin will be sponsoring on March 29: The Nature of the State.
3/6 Anti-human environmentalism: “Burn the rich”. (Thanks to Bob M. for the link.) And here are two reviews of Mine Your Own Business by Don Boudreaux and Ross Kaminsky.
3/4 Twenty-eight powerful photos from Life magazine.
3/3 
Sports, ethics, and political economy: Shawn Klein will be offering a new course on Sports Ethics in the fall semester. As the secondary ticket market goes online and grows hugely, Stephen K. Happel and Marianne M. Jennings argue against laws against ticket-“scalping”. And a trio of economists look at the data: do publicly-funded mega sports complexes make economic sense? Here is the abstract: “Professional sports leagues, franchises, and civic boosters, have used the promise of an all star game or league championship as an incentive for host cities to construct new stadiums or arenas at considerable public expense. Past league-sponsored studies have estimated that Super Bowls, All-Star games and other sports mega-events increase economic activity by hundreds of millions of dollars in host cities. Our analysis fails to support these claims. Our detailed regression analysis of taxable sales in Florida over the period 1980 to 2004 reveals that on, average, mega-events ranging from the World Cup to the World Series have been associated with reductions in taxable sales in host regions of $5 to $10 million per month. Likewise, strikes in Major League Baseball, the National Hockey League, and the National Basketball League, each of which has resulted in the cancellation of large parts of entire seasons, appear to have also had no demonstrable negative effect on taxable sales in host cities.” (Via Division of Labour.)