Link Banana

A MetaFilter post — I don’t care about your “not credible source” nonsense — raises the interesting spector of Hawaii ceasing to be a member of the United States. The comments are also typically good.

In pure combustion terms, propane always wins. If you add enough other factors, you may be able to excuse your preference for the taste of charcoal.

…because the substance is made from trees, it can actually be carbon neutral in the end. They contend that the harvested trees, if taken from well-managed timberlands, are presumably replanted. So, while the felled trees are emitting carbon on barbecues nationwide, the new trees are sucking that carbon right back up. Gas, on the other hand, can’t be replenished—or at least not for the millions of years it takes for organic matter to break down into fossil fuels.

I’m personally torn about whether I’d find Peter Lovenheim a clever or annoying neighbor, but he’s got some interesting — right is another issue — things to say about the state of the American living.

The previous evening, as I’d left home, the last words I heard before I shut the door had been, “Dad, you’re crazy!” from my teenage daughter. Sure, the sight of your 50-year-old father leaving with an overnight bag to sleep at a neighbor’s house would embarrass any teenager, but “crazy”? I didn’t think so.

There’s talk today about how as a society we’ve become fragmented by ethnicity, income, city versus suburb, red state versus blue. But we also divide ourselves with invisible dotted lines. I’m talking about the property lines that isolate us from the people we are physically closest to: our neighbors.

Tyler Cowen’s been evaluating the environmental impact of flying (first here, second in title). Though he’s far from a conclusive answer, intriguing facts have emerged. For example:

Cargo has to come into play, too. Regardless of what you pay and what fare class you’re booking in, your travel on United between San Francisco and Nagoya, Japan is going to have almost no effect whatsoever on United’s decision-making. They’ve got a very large contract with Toyota and they fill up their 747 with cargo and the flight goes out with very low load factors yet is still profitable for them to operate.

I sometimes fancy myself rather spartan, but living with only 100 things — as Dave Bruno is trying for — sounds like a bridge too far.

“Stuff starts to overwhelm you,” says Dave Bruno, 37, an online entrepreneur who looked around his San Diego home one day last summer and realized how much his family’s belongings were weighing him down. Thus began what he calls the 100 Thing Challenge. (Apparently, Bruno is so averse to excess he can’t refer to 100 things in the plural.)

(via kottke)

Dan Koeppel raises the spector that American may have to stop counting Cavendish bananas as a staple food. In addition to a thorough history, he includes this astounding fact:

Americans eat as many bananas as apples and oranges combined,

Tyler Cowen points to some interesting research:

Immediately after one person performs a favor for another, the recipient of the favor places more value on the favor than does the favor-doer.  However, as time passes, the value of the favor decreases in the recipient’s eyes, whereas for the favor-doer, it actually increases.  Although there are several potential reasons for this discrepancy, one possibility is that, as time goes by, the memory of the favor-doing event gets distorted, and since people have the desire to see themselves in the best possible light, receivers may think they didn’t need all that much help at the time, while givers may think they really went out of their way for the receiver.

For The Atlantic, Gregg Easterbrook will try to scare you about how astroids will kill us. The title links to the video (because I have “reader’s block”), but the text of the story is also online.

Speaking of newspapers, Felix Salmon defends Alfonso Serrono interesting idea for ownership of the New York Times (or any paper):

Personally, I think this is a really good idea: give every print subscriber one Class B voting share of NYT stock, and then give them one more share every three months thereafter, assuming their subscription is still in good standing. The securities would automatically convert to Class A shares if they were sold or transferred, or if the subscriber let his subscription lapse.

(via Snarkmarket)

Jack Shafer dares thinking the unthinkable: Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal may actually be getting better.

Ronald Hutton’s summary of some recent book on the monument is rather good. I was rather struck by his beginning:

Why is Stonehenge the most famous prehistoric monument in the world? A large part of the answer lies in the domination of modernity by Western nations, and the supremacy of Britain among them, both in military and economic terms, as that modernity was being developed. In that sense Stonehenge was simply the top antiquity of the top nation at a critical moment in history.

Tyler Cowen points to a paper with an interesting contention: that criminal activity — especially financially motivated — is roughly synchronized with the timing of welfare payments.

This paper tests the hypothesis that the timing of welfare payments affects criminal activity. Analysis of daily reported incidents of major crimes in twelve U.S. cities reveals an increase in crime over the course of monthly welfare payment cycles. This increase reflects an increase in crimes that are likely to have a direct financial motivation like burglary, larceny-theft, motor vehicle theft, and robbery, as opposed to other kinds of crime like arson, assault, homicide, and rape. Temporal patterns in crime are observed in jurisdictions in which disbursements are focused at the beginning of monthly welfare payment cycles and not in jurisdictions in which disbursements are relatively more staggered.

The Economist’s Europe.view column considers the recently reinfused question of whether Lech Walesa, leader of the Solidarity movement that brought an end to Communism in Poland, had ever collaborated with the Communist government.

Some believe that Mr Walesa’s seemingly erratic behaviour and poor choice of advisers as president from 1990-95 was the result of blackmail (he strongly denies this too). That goes straight to the most divisive question in modern Polish politics.

For a large chunk of Polish opinion, the “PRL”, as the Polish People’s Republic is known, was fundamentally illegitimate. Everything that happened—including much so-called “dissident” activity—was a sham and a fraud, orchestrated by Polish or Soviet secret police. Others see the PRL as a pragmatic response to Poland’s impossible position after 1945. Surely it was better to live as best as one could than to die senselessly in the forests or rot in jail.

There are so many of them that we’re ignoring the road. So says John Staddon:

And I began to think that the American system of traffic control, with its many signs and stops, and with its specific rules tailored to every bend in the road, has had the unintended consequence of causing more accidents than it prevents. Paradoxically, almost every new sign put up in the U.S. probably makes drivers a little safer on the stretch of road it guards. But collectively, the forests of signs along American roadways, and the multitude of rules to look out for, are quite deadly.

Despite my ambivalence about that thesis, I do enjoy his railing against stop signs: “The four-way stop deserves special recognition as a masterpiece of counterproductive public-safety efforts.”

(via Slate)

Are we obligated to protect any life forms we find on Mars? One thought:

All of a sudden, it’s a judgement call. And that really hadn’t occurred to me until I heard Randolph talk of protecting extraterrestrial life — and though his arguments invoke religious parables, it doesn’t really require religious beliefs. He strikes the same vein as Methodist environmentalist Bill McKibben, who’s found a secular audience among more old-fashioned progressives.

“Fundamentally, the question is what it means to be a space-traveling species, and what counts as being an ethical space traveler. What sort of obligations if any do we owe to any extraterrestrial life that we encounter, whether it’s intelligent or not?” he asked.

This month, the libertarian Cato Unbound is discussing copyright. The first two (of four — the others haven’t been posted) essays are rather interesting reading. Rasmus Fliecher kicked off with a rather bleak vision of the future:

The real dispute, once again, is not between proponents and opponents of copyright as a whole. It is between believers and non-believers. Believers in copyright keep dreaming about building a digital simulation of a 20th-century copyright economy, based on scarcity and with distinct limits between broadcasting and unit sales. I don’t believe such a stabilization will ever occur, but I fear that this vision of copyright utopia is triggering an escalation of technology regulations running out of control and ruining civil liberties. Accepting a laissez-faire attitude regarding software development and communication infrastructure can prevent such an escalation.

More optimistically, Timothy Lee offers a (radical-sounding) new paradigm:

The starkness with which the copyright debate is often framed reflects a misunderstanding of the function copyright served in the 20th century. Copyright is commonly conceived as a system of restrictions on the copying of creative works. But until recently, it would have been more accurate to describe copyright as governing the commercial exploitation of creative works. From this perspective, the inevitable legalization of non-commercial file sharing looks less like a radical departure from copyright’s past, and more like an incremental adjustment to technological change. It will require the rejection of some misguided policy developments of the last decade, to be sure, but in a sense it will simply restore the common-sense principles of 20th-century copyright law.

(via Matt Yglesias)

Darshak Sanghavi makes an interesting point:

The greatest medical advances depend mostly on small but consistent improvements in the use of old drugs.

Psychology Today has a great article about the errors in reasoning that (vestigial) fear causes us to make. The ten:

• Risk and emotion are inseparable.
• Fear skews risk analysis in predictable ways.
• We underestimate threats that creep up on us.
• We prefer that which (we think) we can control.
• We substitute one risk for another.
• Using your cortex isn’t always smart.
• The “risk thermostat” varies widely.
• Risk arguments cannot be divorced from values.
• “Natural” risks are easier to accept.
• Worrying about risk is itself risky.

(via Lone Gunman)

Sounding a tad more conservative than usual, David Brooks laments America’s spending well beyond its means:

Over the past 30 years, much of that has been shredded. The social norms and institutions that encouraged frugality and spending what you earn have been undermined. The institutions that encourage debt and living for the moment have been strengthened. The country’s moral guardians are forever looking for decadence out of Hollywood and reality TV. But the most rampant decadence today is financial decadence, the trampling of decent norms about how to use and harness money.

This idea, like all great ones, seems like something a seven-year-old dreamed up:

Dietrich Stein, of the Ruhr-University of Bochum, wants to free up the roads by diverting the Ruhr’s freight underground. If his plan succeeds, the road network at the surface will be duplicated by a system of tubes below, inhabited by small vehicles that steer themselves automatically from factories to shops or even to individual homes.