Link Banana

Andrew Ferguson, of The Weekly Standard, does something I’ve always been curious to do — watch a party platform in progress — and comes to, among others, this conclusion:

“Republicans,” the platform says, “will attack wasteful Washington spending immediately,” even though they can’t. They can’t impose anything on anybody, either, but nevertheless “we will impose an immediate moratorium on the earmarking system.”

Powerlessness opens up a limitless future. It has the fierce urgency of not right now.

Roger Cohen made the interesting — if intellectually dubious — contention yesterday that the world isn’t actually flat, it’s inverted:

To understand it, invert your thinking. See the developed world as depending on the developing world, rather than the other way round. Understand that two-thirds of global economic growth last year came from emerging countries, whose economies will expand about 6.7 percent in 2008, against 1.3 percent for the United States, Japan and euro zone states.

Led to look into the topic by this column — which I never managed to finish — I just had to share this one. For lack of a better resource, I’m linking to the rather-good Wikipedia article. On the page, they explain the problem thusly:

Suppose you’re on a game show, and you’re given the choice of three doors: Behind one door is a car; behind the others, goats. You pick a door, say No. 1, and the host, who knows what’s behind the doors, opens another door, say No. 3, which has a goat. He then says to you, “Do you want to pick door No. 2?” Is it to your advantage to switch your choice?

Click through to read the counter-intuitive answer.

Also of note, John Teirney offers other similar problems.

The New York Times made the most interesting — and pretty — graph I’ve seen recently. It charts the box office receipts of major movies from 1986 to present.

(via kottke)