Link Banana

This Economist story’s a bit stale, but I feel a need to document such errata about obscure places.

This chart is impeccably executed.

The Economist — I need to start perusing that again — is only printed in English. But some enterprising Chinese crowd-source the translation of every issue and privately release it as a PDF.

Interestingly, after Andy Baio published the story on his site, the New York Times asked him to rework it and published it in the paper. The future of reporting, anyone?

That’s the theory being offered by Harvard’s Richard Wrangham.

And with Homo sapiens, what makes the species unique in Dr Wrangham’s opinion is that its food is so often cooked.

Cooking is a human universal. No society is without it. No one other than a few faddists tries to survive on raw food alone. And the consumption of a cooked meal in the evening, usually in the company of family and friends, is normal in every known society. Moreover, without cooking, the human brain (which consumes 20-25% of the body’s energy) could not keep running. Dr Wrangham thus believes that cooking and humanity are coeval.

(via The Meaningfulness of Little Things)

Chipping away at the “to read someday” pile, I found this bit from The Economist.

To be on the right-hand-side of an eye-level selection is often considered the very best place, because most people are right-handed and most people’s eyes drift rightwards. Some supermarkets reserve that for their own-label “premium” goods.

I’m definately going to be thinking about this next time I’m shopping.

If only to establish my present ignorance of current events, I was until today largely unaware of the widening problem of Gaza. One could trace the beginning to the complete Israeli blockade — as Sara Roy does — but the widely reported cause is an Israeli desire to lessen the rocket attacks.

Lloyd point to one of things I find so frustrating about gift exchanges:

The most conservative estimate put the average receiver’s valuation at 90% of the buying price. The missing 10% is what economists call a deadweight loss: a waste of resources that could be averted without making anyone worse off. In other words, if the giver gave the cash value of the purchase instead of the gift itself, the recipient could then buy what she really wants, and be better off for no extra cost.

I’m not sure what else there is to say about this chart.

The Economist provides a handy charts with the odd on where President Obama will visit first. Britain’s way ahead, if you’re too lazy to click.

I’m increasingly leery of news stories proclaiming that academics have proven or demonstrated something or other. That said, some Dutch researchers have experimental evidence showing that signals of low-level crime make people more likely to litter or steal.

(via Ideas)

An accurate predictor of the winner of the last seven presidential elections: Halloween mask sales.

In case you had doubts about the United State being one of the least equal “developed” countries, The Economist has a simple chart for you.

A very interesting daily chart from The Economist. The basic analysis:

Those [children of international parents] craving an unhealthy diet should make for America, where more than half of the expat parents said that their children had eaten more junk food since relocating. Keen gamers should consider China and Canada, whereas telly addicts should nag their parents to move to the United Arab Emirates or India.

If, like me, you had no idea what melamine is or why it was such a bad thing to find in Chinese milk, I suggest this Tech.view column (for that, and a whole lot more):

Melamine is used to make durable work-surfaces for kitchen cabinets and bathroom furniture, and is formed into heat-resistant jugs, bowls, dinnerware, and other household items. To be accurate, such products are made not from melamine, but from melamine resin—a thermosetting plastic produced by combining melamine with formaldehyde.

… Melamine itself is a different matter. In low doses, it is non-toxic; its so-called LD50 (median lethal dose) is on a par with table salt. But should it be combined with a closely related chemical called cyanuric acid, the resulting compound (melamine cyanurate) can cause fatal kidney disease. Melamine cyanurate is widely used as a fire retardant.

In a somewhat odd and thoroughly sweeping summary of comebacks — in a variety of fields — throughout history, The Economist says that Lance Armstrong should be careful not to end up like… Enron’s Ken Lay?

But Mr Armstrong must hope not to follow the example of a fellow American who reassumed the top job. Ken Lay retook the chief executive’s role at Enron in August 2001 after a break of six months and shortly before the firm made the biggest bankruptcy filing in American history.

UPDATE (20 minutes later): Perhaps the logic behind the awkward comparison is this: if Armstrong, like Lay, was crooked before the break, it’s possible that upon returning (still crooked) he’ll be caught.

While the world, and I, was paying attention to the situation in Harare, I predicted that Mugabe would effectively wait out the world’s short attention span and then keep power in the mess that remains of his country. He’s certainly outlasted the world’s attention span, but I would love to be wrong and see this power-sharing deal work out.

I wasn’t quite sure how to read a recent story in The Economist about demonstrations in Kashmir. Pankaj Mishra says that its clear evidence that if the Indian government doesn’t change its ways, it risks creating a new generation of motivated international terrorists.

A new generation of politicized Kashmiris has now risen; the world is again likely to ignore them — until some of them turn into terrorists with Qaeda links. It is up to the Indian government to reckon honestly with Kashmiri aspirations for a life without constant fear and humiliation. Some first steps are obvious: to severely cut the numbers of troops in Kashmir; to lift the economic blockade on the Kashmir Valley; and to allow Kashmiris to trade freely across the line of control with Pakistan.

When considering the under-noticed anniversary of Burma’s 1988 uprising, The Economist’s Asia.view column hits a sensible point I’d never considered:

No, the reason the revolution failed was simple: the army was prepared to kill as many people as it took to thwart it.

So long as a state apparatus is strong and remains cohesive, it’s hard to imagine how any citizen uprising can end authoritarianism.

I’ve documented before The Economist’s penchant for unusual economic indicators. The classic example, the Big Mac index — in which the price of the sandwich serves as a proxy for purchasing power parity (PPP), has been unveiled for 2008.

Perhaps more novelly, the magazine’s Africa correspondent, Jonathan Ledgard, offers the intriguing possibilty that sales of Coca-Cola are a signal of how peaceful and prosperous a given area of the continent is. (via Passport)

I’ve often heard people say that America’s maternity benefits are bad, but this chart really drives it home. Worst in the OECD isn’t the worst in the world, but it’s still a touch embarrassing.