Who Were the Sea Peoples?

I've often admired the tales of the great ascetics who, for instance, lived for 37 years on top of a pole . However, I think going to their extremes would break me, so I have started down my own ascetic path with a small first step: I am only setting the timer on my microwave to integral powers of two, so that my food can only cook for, say, 32 or 64 seconds, but nothing in between. Your prayers are appreciated.

Find out here .

Folks, don't say 'methodology' when you mean 'method.' You had a method with which you conducted your recent study, not a methodology . 'Methodology' is what you do when you, say, study different ways of doing such a study and compare them. This may seem like nitpicking, but it is important because it is an exemplar of a general class of problems: the idea that using fancier language somehow makes our results 'deeper' or more 'scientific.' Such a notion is, of course, destructive of real insight, since the blizzard of high-falutin' words serves to obscure rather than to reveal the reality one seeks to explore. Try goggling 'methodology' and scanning the results: in almost every case on the first couple of pages, either the word 'method' or the word 'methods' could have replaced the word 'methodology' with an increase in clarity.

Here is an author who wants to "present... a summary of recent results obtained in game and social choice theories." The funny thing is that 17 out of the 27 papers cited are... by the author of this paper . I'm sure that's just a coincidence.

"Here’s how I think about jobs. First, what do we want? If those things can be provided with very few workers, don’t despair, ask what we want after we have gotten our first wish granted. And so on, until all the workers are employed." -- Here .

Whoever writes the error messages for Microsoft Exchange is very droll. Today, as the program crashed, I received the following: "Microsoft Echange has encountered an inconvenience and must exit." An inconvenience ? Well, maybe it was all my fault! Perhaps Exchange was busy chatting with Excel and Word over by the CPU cooler, and I disturbed it by asking it to send an e-mail. I should really be more considerate, and not bother Exchange when it's otherwise occupied.

Here : "And then confused as Beck prattled on about the etymology of 'gossip' and how King George sent spies into our land telling them to 'go sip' in the pubs with the Colonial rebels and thereby gather intelligence. That’s how 'gossip' came to mean what it does according to Glenn Beck." If you have any wits, the second you hear that story, you ought to recognize it as almost certainly made up. (I say "almost certainly" because once in a while, an etymology like this is real .) And it took me about five seconds to look up the actual etymology online. Sigh.

In my recent survey of television (after getting one for the first time in five years), absolutely the worst actor I've encountered in any major role is Jennifer Love Hewitt in The Ghost Whisperer . She basically has a single gesture that makes up the entirety of her "acting" repertoire: she scrunches her eyebrows together in a move that is supposed to show "caring." But Jennifer does not stop there: she is also the English Butcherer. She says, for instance, "Whenever a ghost comes to me in anyway, it's looking for help somehow." Now, remove the words "in anyway" and "somehow" from that sentence. We get "Whenever a ghost comes to me, it's looking for help." Simpler, stronger, more direct: so why did some writer put in those seemingly superfluous words? There was a strategy there, but what was it?

After following two posts on cooking french fries, I realized the take home lesson is: don't bother. As one commenter said, "The cold reality is that McDonalds has forgotten more about french fries than any of us will ever know." So just spend two dollars. (By the way, I was shocked at how inferior the fries were at a "French" "bistro" I went to for brunch the other day in Cobble Hill to Mickey D's. These things were a sodden, greasy mess, straight out of the fryer -- and at double the cost!)

So, here is the main quote I want to take up in this installment of commenting on Pete Leeson's book, The Invisible Hook , because it expresses something that underlies a lot of "While [government] is based on force, the [condo association] is purely voluntary" (p. 51). First of all, this ignores the distribution and rules of property that allow the founders of the association to set it up in the first place. I may agree to buy a condo from them, given that, somehow or other, I find them with lots of armed force behind them asserting they "own" that land . But no one alive today ever agreed to more than a tiny fraction of the tangled past of appropriation, theft, fraud, public domain seizures, etc., etc. that led to current property assignments. It's nice to dream of a world where all property titles are "clean," but that world never was and never will be. What's more, setting aside the questions of ownership, let us consider a young Pete L...

A while back , I mentioned that it wasn't clear to me why people were representing Pete Leeson's book The Invisible Hook as a story about "the economics of anarchy." Well, I'm reading it now, and I'm more puzzled than ever: it seems to me the correct description of the history Pete relates is that "even pirates, desperate scoundrels though they were, saw the need for government and were able to cooperate to establish such." For instance, Pete quotes a political speech advocating the election of a particular pirate as captain, where the speaker recommends electing a leader who can "ward us from the Dangers and Tempests of an instable Element, and the fatal consequences of Anarchy" (p. 23). You see, the speaker wanted this guy elected to avoid "the fatal consequences of Anarchy"... and he thought avoiding that would be a selling point to his listeners. A few pages later, Pete tells us that "each pirate ship required a lead...

Over at ThinkMarkets .

Bob Murphy suggests an interesting way for the US to return to a (sort of) gold standard: simply have the Fed target a gold price in dollars, rather than target an inflation level (or NGDP level, a-la Scott Sumner). I had not thought of that.

Laser made from bull semen ! (Hat tip Thoreau.)

So, I'm watching Criminal Minds , and the FBI agents are all atwitter because the "unsub" used the "antiquated" term "phobias": "Now," they tell us, "they're called 'anxiety disorders.'" Ah, how the field of psychiatry advances: re-label things! The Last Psychiatrist has a great post on this topic: "And so if you're thinking that the craziness is that psychiatry is the doing away with the concept of narcissism you have fully missed the point: the issue isn't whether narcissism exists or not, the issue is who gets to decide if narcissism exists or not... Never mind that the new terms have no more validity than the old terms, and are equally invented." By the way, I once spent a week programming the DSM-IV ailments into a web application -- the most depressing programming job I ever had.

but Paul Krugman has now cited Bob Murphy in his NY Times column. Soon, we will discover that Tycho Brahe was right about the solar system, and the ether really does exist.

plods round the statue of King Billy in quiet desperation. Emerson arrives and tells him to slip from his bridle and gallop out the door. The masters of the mill ridicule Emerson: "The circle," they say, "is the most reasonable geometric figure, and you have offered no empirical evidence for the worth of breaking out of it."

Of The Meanings of Michael Oakeshott's Conservatism . I wrote one of the chapters.

than that of Jerry Brown ?

Does anyone else find it ironic that the New York State Lotto is advertising with the theme song of Boston's 'More Than a Feeling,' given that it is a song about loss and bereavement? Yes, indeed, that is the likely result of playing the lottery... but they're boasting about it?

The other night one of my favorite bartenders, whom, for the purposes of this story, we will call Jonah, but whose real name is absolutely nothing like that, offered me a ride home. Now, this seemed like merely a nice gesture, at first. But things would soon take a darker turn. The first sign of trouble appeared when, after we got into the car, Jonah locked the doors . He looked over at me with a maniacal grin on his face. "Man, I ate a bunch of pot brownies tonight. I'm a little baked." Then he started off up the street. Good God, what had I gotten myself in to? I knew someone under the crazed influence of that evil herb was probably planning to do unspeakable things to me, such as making me listen to a CD by the band Kansas, or perhaps even worse. I had just begun to look for a chance to escape, when Jonah announced "We're stopping at the bakery for croissants!" What in his druggie world was that code for? I damned well knew there was no place in my...

When, for instance, he casts Kyra Sedgwick as a Georgian with a deep accent? She sounds like someone at the local bar doing a bad imitation of a southerner.

I'm reading Gregory Zuckerman's The Greatest Trade Ever -- not bad, if a bit "baby-talkish" at times -- and I just learned that Isaac Newton discovered gravity (p. 112)! You see, before Newton, no one realized that things fell to the earth. I also learned the the trader who made the "greatest trade ever," John Paulson, had a marketing director who told potential clients that paulson "might never match the home runs that some rivals were scoring in adventurous areas..." and that his "returns might be more unpredictable than those who carefully spread their money around..." Soooo... lower returns and higher volatility! Who could resist such a marketing pitch?

Roderick Long offers these definitions of conflationism: "Left-conflationism is the error of treating the evils of existing corporatist capitalism as though they constituted an objection to a freed market. Right-conflationism is the error of treating the virtues of a freed market as though they constituted a justification of the evils of existing corporatist capitalism. " Let us modify this to be more realistic: "Left-conflationism is the error of treating the reality of existing corporatist capitalism as though it had anything to do with the purely imaginary 'totally freed market' that anarcho-capitalists have in their minds. Right-conflationism is the error of acting as if the imagined virtues of the imaginary freed market constitute a justification for the reality of existing corporatist capitalism." Power long pre-existed the State. The State is, in fact, an attempt to control and channel power. It doesn't always work; sometimes it works very ...

(Hat tip to Jason Peters.)

and the Tea Party : interesting thoughts from the great historian Gordon Wood.

A good writer avoids clichés whenever possible. The more popular and trendy some phrase or construction fad is, the more it is to be avoided. But bad writers use clichés more the trendier they are. The reason is that the clichés offer a way to engage the non-discerning reader without doing any work. If you write "How cool is that?" you are instantly "in" with the mindless hordes who have been repeating that phrase themselves since it was first made popular on TV show X. For instance, Eamonn Brennan, discussing UConn's win over Texas, wrote : "After the win? Not so much." If you look back at the previous paragraph, "not so much" hardly even makes sense here. He was talking about UConn's performance at Maui being forgotten. Now, after beating Texas, it will be "not so much forgotten"? The mindlessness of clichés nicely illustrated: Brennan was so desperate to drop in the cliché that he couldn't even be bothered to see if...

Over in a heated discussion at Free Advice, I am happy to say that Tom Woods has joined in to support my view that "taxation is theft" is a terrible libertarian argument for convincing non-libertarians, because it already assumes a libertarian view of the State, and is therefore circular. Tom makes an analogy to slavery: Of course, he points out, arguing "slavery is kidnapping" to, say, Aristotle goes nowhere. Aristotle is simply going to respond, "No, kidnapping is taking someone who has the right to be free against their will. But, as I have shown in my writings, slaves do not have that right." To argue against the pro-slavery person, it does no good to keep saying "Slavery is kidnapping." No, what one must argue is, "These people you treat as slaves, in fact, ought to be treated as freemen." Then you won't even need to make the kidnapping argument; it will be obvious. And so it goes with "taxation is theft"; that...

Some group is running an ad claiming that "one-in-five children have been sexually solicited online." Well, a moment's thought convinced me that this figure must be nonsense. One-in-five children? First of all, just who qualifies as a "child"? Perhaps humans between 2 and 16? Now, you can't be solicited just looking up something on National Geographic Kids. You need an account of some sort. And how many kids under, say, 10 have such an account? So that knocks out half the sample right there. And that puts us at 40% between 11 and 16. Sounding pretty unlikely, huh? So, I looked it up, and guess what? The survey this statistic comes from does not support what the statistic apparently says at all. First of all, the survey was of 10 to 17 year-olds... and that leaves out an awful lot of children, hey? Secondly, they did not exclude solicitation of sex by other children. (Of course, the advertisement never says it means only by adults, but I think most peop...

Unfortunately, Daniel Kuehn gets this correct .

For anyone who has not read these documents, it is really worth checking out Steely Dan's wry correspondence with the Rock-and-Roll Hall of Fame (and sundry others) about their imminent induction. Amongst other things, citing the past squabbling over which band members of various groups ought to get in, Becker and Fagen demand that they have veto power not just over which members of Steely Dan are included, but which members of any band being inducted that night may be included.

My economics book has been out in Russian for four years now, and I just found out today! UPDATE: Ho-ho-ho. When I translate the page to English, one of the chapter titles comes out as "No bread and full of shoe polish"! UPDATE II: It turns out I wrote another chapter entitled: "And Sweden, and the reaper, and the dude igrets." You really have to translate the page to English and read them all.

Read all about him here .

Having a TV for the first time in many years, I've been watching it a lot. But we only have an antenna (no cable), so I only get a dozen or so channels. The one I watch the most is Ion Television, which shows re-runs of Criminal Minds for hours a night. (I'm typing this while between episodes!) Two interesting things about the show: 1) The tech person, "Garcia," pretty much does three or four illegal searches per show, and no one in the FBI does (and I guess no one in the audience is supposed to) bat an eye. 2) Periodically someone in the BAU (or a guest expert) decides to put forward some deterministic theory of what "caused" the serial killers they investigate to become murderers. But the agents still get all self-righteous with the killers when they catch them. May I note this makes no sense? If the lady is a murderer because her neurons were flooded with serotonin in the womb, that's certainly not her fault!

took a bath with my toaster.