You are currently browsing the monthly archive for July 2010.
1. Wine tasting note generator.
2. Postmodern essay generator.
- The art of 1-star Amazon reviews. I have been looking for a new hobby…
- Stanley Milgram, the TV show, starring William Shatner.
- History of the laugh track.
- Massaging your oppossum properly.
Suppose in a Department in a university there are two specializations, E and T. The Department has openings coming up over time and must hire to fill the slot when it appears or let it lapse, perhaps with some chance of getting it the following year.
The Department can hire on the “best athlete” criterion: just choose the best candidates, regardless of specialization. Or it could have a “Noah’s Ark” approach and let in one E specialist for each T specialist (perhaps this is done intertemporally if there are less than two slots/year). Both approaches are used in hiring in practice. How does the best approach depend on the environment?
To think this through, let’s suppose the Department uses the best athlete criterion. There are two problems. First, if specialty T has lower standards than specialty E, they will propose more candidates. They may exaggerate their quality if it is hard to assess. Or specialty T may simply want to increase in size – there will be more people to interact with, collaborate with etc. How should specialty E respond? They know that of they stick to their high standards, the Department will be swamped by Ts. So, they lower their bar for hiring, reasoning that their candidate has to be better than the marginal candidate brought in by the Ts, a weaker criterion. In other words, the best athlete hiring system leads to a “race to the bottom”.
Hiring by the Noah’s Ark system prevents this from happening. The two groups might have different standards or want to empire build. But the each group is not threatened by the other as their slots are safe. This comes at a cost – if the fraction of good candidates in each field differs from the slot allocation in the Department, it will miss out on the best possible combination of hires. So, if the corporate culture is good enough and everyone internalizes the social welfare function, it is better to have the best athlete criterion.
This is in fact an excellent introduction to game theory full stop. It covers strategic and extensive games, complete and incomplete information, sequential rationality, etc. Very nicely. And then on page 64 it gets really interesting, applying evolutionary game theory to pragmatics, a field in linguistics concerned with the contextual meaning of language.
After a disaster happens the post-mortem investigation invariably turns up evidence of early warning signs that weren’t acted upon. There is a natural tendency for an observer to “second-guess,” to project his knowledge of what happened ex post into the information of the decision-maker ex ante. The effects are studied in this paper by Kristof Madarasz.
To illustrate the consequences of such exaggeration, consider a medical example. A radiologist recommends a treatment based on a noisy radiograph. Suppose radiologists differ in ability; the best ones hardly ever miss a tumor when its visible on the X-ray, bad ones often do. After the treatment is adopted, an evaluator reviews the case to learn about the radiologist’s competence. By observing outcomes, evaluators naturally have access to information that was not available ex-ante; in that interim medical outcomes are realized and new X-rays might have been ordered. A biased evaluator thinks as if such ex-post information had also been available ex-ante. A small tumor is typically difficult to spot on an initial X-ray, but once the location of a major tumor is known, all radiologists have a much betterchance of finding the small one on the original X-ray. In this manner, by projecting information, the evaluator becomes too surprised observing a failure and interprets success too much to be the norm. It follows that she underestimates the radiologistís competence on average.
The paper studies how a decision-maker who anticipates this effect practices “defensive” information production ex ante, for example being too quick to carry out additional tests that substitute for the evaluator’s information (a biopsy in the medical example) and too reluctant to carry out tests that magnify it.
A tip of the boss of the plains to Nageeb Ali.
I thank Presh Talwalker for the pointer. Pretty soon I won’t have to do any teaching, I’ll just play YouTube clips for 90 minutes, pass out the chocolate and send them on their way.
A new study by many authors presented at the N.B.E.R. finds:
“Students who had learned much more in kindergarten were more likely to go to college than students with otherwise similar backgrounds. Students who learned more were also less likely to become single parents. As adults, they were more likely to be saving for retirement. Perhaps most striking, they were earning more.
All else equal, they were making about an extra $100 a year at age 27 for every percentile they had moved up the test-score distribution over the course of kindergarten. A student who went from average to the 60th percentile — a typical jump for a 5-year-old with a good teacher — could expect to make about $1,000 more a year at age 27 than a student who remained at the average. Over time, the effect seems to grow, too.”
Correlation is not causation but the study:
“offered a chance to answer these questions because it randomly assigned students to a kindergarten class. As a result, the classes had fairly similar socioeconomic mixes of students and could be expected to perform similarly on the tests given at the end of kindergarten.
Yet they didn’t. Some classes did far better than others. The differences were too big to be explained by randomness. (Similarly, when the researchers looked at entering and exiting test scores in first, second and third grades, they found that some classes made much more progress than others.)
Class size — which was the impetus of Project Star — evidently played some role. Classes with 13 to 17 students did better than classes with 22 to 25. Peers also seem to matter. In classes with a somewhat higher average socioeconomic status, all the students tended to do a little better.
But neither of these factors came close to explaining the variation in class performance. So another cause seemed to be the explanation: teachers.”
A new C.E.O. is appointed. What are the opinions of the employees and how are they going to react?
In England, where I grew up, the cliche is that people are looking for excuses to denigrate successful people and pull them down. Envy is the pertinent sin from the seven deadlies. My intuition for American norms is poor but my impression is that employees will rally around the C.E.O. Contradictory data is ignored and a big fan club develops spontaneously.
If employees diss or extol the boss whatever her true qualities, a rational observer cannot infer anything about the C.E.O. in cultural equilibrium. But if observers herd, there is an idolatry bubble. In an American bubble, the C.E.O. is a superstar. When the facts come out, the bubble bursts and the C.E.O.’s collapse is huge. In an English bubble, once the C.E.O. departs, employees will look back fondly on her tenure while complaining about the new C.E.O. (Tony Hayward straddles both cultures so it hard to classify him!)
Careful investors should short American firms and go long on English firms.
Did you know that the number 4, spoken in Chinese, sounds very similar to the Chinese word for death? For that reason the number 4 is considered unlucky. (You may also know that the number 8 sounds like money and so it is considered lucky.) Well it is unlucky. Indeed, the 4th of the month is the peak day for death by cardiac arrest among Asian Americans. That is according to this study which I found via my new favorite blog, which I found via my always favorite Twitterer, nambupini.
Suppose you are selling your house and 10 potential buyers are lined up. For whatever reason you cannot hold an auction (in fact sellers rarely do) but what you can do is make take-it-or-leave-it price demands. To be clear: this means that you can approach buyers in sequence proposing to each a price. If a buyer accepts you are committed to sell and if he rejects you are committed to refuse sale to this buyer. All buyers are ex ante identical, meaning that you while you don’t know their maximum willingness to pay, you have the same beliefs about each of them. How do you determine the profit-maximizing price?
It is somewhat surprising that despite the symmetry, in order to maximize profits you will discriminate and charge them different prices. What you will do is randomly order them and offer a descending sequence of prices. The buyer who was randomly put first in the order (unlucky?) will be charged the highest price and this is an essential part of your optimal pricing policy.
Although it sounds surprising at first the intuition is pretty simple, it’s an application of the idea of option value. When you have only one buyer left you will charge him some price 
Now the same tradeoff determines your price to the second-to-last buyer. Except now the cost of having your offer rejected is lower because you will have another chance to sell. So you are willing to take a larger chance of a rejected offer and therefore set a higher price. Now continuing up the list, at every step the option value associated with a rejected offer increases and therefore so does the price.
OK that was easy. Now consider a model where the seller posts prices and the buyers choose when to arrive. This should break the symmetry if higher value buyers arrive earlier or later than lower value buyers. And they will for two reasons. First, nobody with a willingness to pay that is below the opening price will want to be first. Second, even among buyers with a high willingness to pay, the higher it is the more you value the increased chance to buy relative to lower prices later. (There is a “single-crossing property.”) The seller adjusts to this by further steepening the price path, etc.
Thanks to Toomas Hinnosaar for conversations on the topic. Here is a paper by Liad Blumrosen and Thomas Holenstein on optimal posted prices.
Have you seen these? They mysteriously lurk at the top right of miscellaneous web pages on the Harvard Econ department web site. Like here, look Philippe Aghion’s page has brains. Mankiw? brains. And there is no caption or explanation given. I started to think that it was there as some kind of experiment like those guys in gorilla suits that run across the screen when you’re supposed to be counting basketballs? So I am here to say that I am not blind to these brains. And I see the word juice there. You can’t slip anything by me.
I went through a long showdown with tendonitis of the hamstring. At its worst it was a constant source of discomfort that occupied at least a fraction of my attention at all times. I knew that I had to heal before I would get back my to usual smiling happy self. So I worked hard, stretching, walking, running: rehabilitating.
My hamstring doesn’t bother me much anymore. But you know what? Now that it no longer dominates the focus of my attention, I am reminded that my back hurts, as it always has. But I had completely forgotten about that for the last year or so because during that time it didn’t hurt.
So I am not the content, distraction-free person I expected to be. Now that I have solved the hamstring problem my current distractions draw my attention to the next health-related job: keep my back strong, flexible, and pain-free.
This is a version of the focusing illusion. People are motivated by expected psychological rewards that never come. The classic story is moving to California. People in Michigan declare that they would be much happier if they lived in California, but as it turns out people in California just about as miserable as people who still live in Michigan.
Pain and pleasure make up the compensation package in Nature’s incentive scheme. Our attention is focused on what needs to be done using the lure of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. And if it feels like she is repeatedly moving the goal posts, that may be all part of the plan according to a new paper by Arthur Robson and Larry Samuelson.
They model the way evolution shapes our preferences based on two constraints: a) there’s a limit to how happy or unhappy we can be and b) emotional states are noisy. Emotions will evolve into an optimal mechanism for guiding us to the best decisions. Following the pioneering research of Luis Rayo and Gary Becker, they show that the most effective way to motivate us within these constraints is to use extreme rewards and penalties. If we meet the target, even by just a little, we are maximally happy. If we fall short, we are miserable.
This is the seed of a focussing illusion. Because after I heal my hamstring Nature again needs the full range of emotions to motivate me to take care of my back. So after the briefest period of relief, she quickly resets me back to zero, threatening once again misery if I don’t attend to the next item on the list. If I move to California, I enjoy a fleeting glimpse of my sought-after paradise before she re-calibrates my utility function, so that now I have to learn to surf before she’ll give me another taste.
That’s the subject of an article in Slate that leads with:
So, a Treasury secretary, a labor union leader, a hedge-fund billionaire, and an heiress walk into a conference call.
You will recall that the estate tax was temporarily repealed and it will come back in full force in 2011 unless some new legislation is passed. I have praised estate taxes before.
Salakot Slap: gappy3000.
I’m revisiting old haunts to try to get back into my Chicago equilibrium. Today, I ended up at Nazareth Sweets to pick up baklava for a party tonight. An assortment of 40-50 sets you back, wait for it……..$14! The pricing is the opposite of Pasticceria Natalina.
I am worried abut the calorific content but luckily it’s far enough from Evanston that I do not end up there too often. I love the walnut baklava and the bamya. The knaffeh is repulsive in my opinion. At the risk of causing an uproar, I somewhat concur with an earlier post of Jeff’s on Asian desserts as far as his point extends to knaffeh from the Middle East. Anyway, it is always good to buy some knaffeh – have some after one piece of walnut baklava so it grosses you out and you don’t eat any more dessert.
- Where’s Missy?
- The Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club For Scientists.
- Bruce Lee’s screen test. (If you click on only one sordid link this summer, this should be the one.)
- Try your hand at synaesthesia.
- Cross-subsidization.
- Using curry to fight global warming.
- Not a lot of living in these rooms.
Despite what you have read, theory holds up just fine.
The relationship between economic theory and experimental evidence is controversial. One could easily get the impression from reading the experimental literature that economic theory has little or no significance for explaining experimental results. The point of this essay is that this is a tremendously misleading impression. Economic theory makes strong predictions about many situations, and is generally quite accurate in predicting behavior in the laboratory. Most familiar situations where the theory is thought to fail, the failure is to properly apply the theory, and not in the theory failing to explain the evidence.
Which is not to say theory doesn’t have its problems.
That said, economic theory still needs to be strengthened to deal with experimental data: the problem is that in too many applications the theory is correct only in the sense that it has little to say about what will happen. Rather than speaking of whether the theory is correct or incorrect, the relevant question turns out to be whether it is useful or not useful. In many instances it is not useful. It may not be able to predict precisely how players will play in unfamiliar situations.4 It buries too much in individual preferences without attempting to understand how individual preferences are related to particular environments. This latter failing is especially true when it comes to preferences involving risk and time, and in preferences involving interpersonal comparisons – altruism, spite and fairness.
It’s actually a really great article, you should check it out. It has this:
The fashion modeling market also has a formal mechanism in place, known as the “option,” to ensure all tastemakers get in on the action. An option is an agreement between client and agent that enables the client to place a hold on the model’s future availability. Like options trading in finance markets, an option gives the buyer the right, but not the obligation, to make a purchase. In the modeling market, it enables clients to place a hold on the model’s time, but unlike finance options trading, model options come free of cost; they are a professional courtesy to clients, and also a way for agents to manage models’ hectic schedules.
And it even has this:
In behavioral economics, Coco Rocha’s success is a case of an information cascade. Faced with imperfect information, individuals make a binary choice to act (to choose or not to choose Coco) by observing the actions of their predecessors without regard to their own information. In such situations, a few early key individuals end up having a disproportionately large effect, such that small differences in initial conditions create large differences later in the cascade.
Sarcasm is a way of being nasty without leaving a paper trail.
If I say “No dear, of course I don’t mind waiting for you, in fact, sitting out here with the engine running is exactly how I planned to spend this whole afternoon” then the literal meaning of my words leaves me completely blameless despite their clearly understood venom.
This convention had to evolve. If it didn’t already exist it would be invented. A world without sarcasm would be out of equilibrium.
Because if sarcasm did not exist then I have the following arbitrage opportunity: I can have a private vindictive chuckle by giving my wife that nasty retort without her knowing I was being nasty. The dramatic irony of that is an added bonus.
That explains the invention of sarcasm. But it evolves from there. Once sarcasm comes into existence then the listener learns to recognize it. This blunts the effect but doesn’t remove it altogether. Because unless its someone who knows you very well, the listener may know that you are being sarcastic but it will not be common knowledge. She feels a little less embarrassment about the insult if there is a chance that you don’t know that she knows that you are insulting her, or if there was some higher-order uncertainty. If instead you had used plain language then the insult would be self-evident.
And even when its your spouse and she is very accustomed to your use of sarcasm, the convention still serves a purpose. Now you start to use the tone of your voice to add color to the sarcasm. You can say it in a way that actually softens the insult. ”Dinner was delicious.” A smile helps.
But you can make it even more nasty too. Because once it becomes common knowledge that you are being sarcastic, the effect is like a piledriver. She is lifted for the briefest of moments by the literal words and then it’s an even bigger drop from there when she detects the sarcasm and knows that you know that she knows …. that you intentionally set the piledriver in motion.
Sarcasm could be modeled using the tools of psychological game theory.
Regional data is available on civilian deaths from insurgent activity and counterinsurgent activity in Afghanistan. There is also data on the level of insurgent attacks. In principle, this might allow an analysis of the impact of civilian deaths on insurgent and insurgent support. If civilian deaths caused by insurgents cause an increase in support for counterinsurgents, perhaps the local population will give information about insurgent location to the opposite side. Then, insurgent attacks will decline. If civilian deaths caused by caused counterinsurgent activity increase support for insurgents, perhaps insurgents find more recruits leading to more attacks in the future etc etc.
A recent paper by Condra et al attempts to study these issues. One key finding:
“Counterinsurgent-generated civilian casualties from a typical incident are responsible for 6 additional violent incidents in an average sized district in the following 6 weeks.”
Are the causal statements water-tight? I wasn’t sure but certainly the questions are apt. This account summarizes many of the study’s findings.
I wrote previously about the equilibrium effects of avoiding spoilers. You might want to strategically generate spoilers to counteract these effects. I just discovered that a website exists for generating spoilers: shouldiwatch.com.
The premise is that you have recorded a sporting event on your DVR and you want to enjoy watching it. Enjoyment has something to do with the resolution of uncertainty. So you have preferences for the time path of uncertainty resolution. Maybe you want your good news in lumps and your bad news revealed gradually. Maybe you like suspense. A mechanism can fine tune and enhance these.
But it always cuts two ways. A spoiler creates a discrete jump in your beliefs at the beginning followed by another effect on your beliefs as the game unfolds. For example, ShouldIWatch.com allows me to set a program that will warn me when the Lakers beat the Celtics by more than 10 points. The idea is that I don’t want to watch a blowout. But there is an effect on my beliefs: knowing that it is not a blowout changes my expectations at the beginning of the game. Then there is a second effect during the game: if the Lakers take a 15 point lead, I am expecting a come-back by the Celtics. In return for the increased excitement at the beginning I pay with reduced excitement in the interim.
This trade-off could make for a cool model. An event will unfold over time. An observer cares about the outcome and cares about the path of his beliefs but will watch the event after it is over. A mechanism is a program which knows the full path of the event and reveals information to the observer before and while he watches the event. Design the mechanism which maximizes the observer’s overall expected value taking into account this tradeoff.
File this under psychological mechanism design.
If Indian capitalism has left you behind, your remaining options are begging or a scam to rip off tourists. A British journalist encountered this scam:
“I was emerging from an underpass in Connaught Place when a shoeshine man came up to me, and whispered into my ear the word “shit”. He then pointed at my right shoe on which sat, to my amazement, a small slug of brownish goo. He offered to wipe it off, in return for 100 rupees – but I suspected something was, well, afoot, and I cleaned it with a few leaves. Some months later it happened again and I had a minor altercation with the shoeshine man. One day, I decided I’d photograph the person who had squirted my shoe. But I was daydreaming as I wandered through the underpass – and was squirted again. This time, I’m embarrassed to say, I became incandescent with rage. To the consternation of passers by, and to my everlasting shame, I grabbed the man and rubbed the filth off my shoe on to his trousers.”
It seems more original than the “Come into my carpet shop – I give you good price” scam but it has a rich history:
“I also heard about older versions of the scam, in Cairo during the Second World War, and most unexpectedly in a book published in 1948, The Otterbury Incident by Cecil Day-Lewis. There is one scene in which boys hidden in a cellar use flit guns to spray the shoes of passers-by with muddy water. Two other boys are waiting a little way off, next to a sign reading “SHOE-SHINE – 3d”. Flit guns were a household device for spraying insecticide – and they’re still used in India.”
FYI: A Flit gun is a hand-pumped insecticide sprayer used to dispense Flit, a brand-name insecticide widely used against flies and mosquitoes between 1928 and the mid-1950s. Although named after the well-known brand, “Flit gun” became a generic name for this type of dispenser.
BP’s cap on the ruptured gulf coast oil well is a two-edged sword. On the one hand, there is a good chance it will hold and the problem will be solved. On the other hand, the cap makes it harder to verify whether this solution has failed.
The cap means that pressure is diverted elsewhere underground. Right now there is a camera in place pointing at the capped part of the well. When the cap was not in place this camera made it common knowledge whether oil was flowing into the gulf and it made quite clear how much. With the cap however, “seepage” in other locations can only be measured by noisy tests that can easily be disputed by both parties.
For example, BP will cite:
Some seepage from the ocean floor is normal in the Gulf of Mexico, according to University of Houston professor Don Van Nieuwenhuise.
“A lot of oil that’s formed naturally, by the Earth, ends up escaping or leaking to the surface in the form of natural seeps and yes, there are a lot of these all around the world,” he said.
and the government will argue:
“If the well remains fully shut in until the relief well is completed, we may never have a fully accurate determination of the flow rate from this well. If so, BP — which has consistently underestimated the flow rate — might evade billions of dollars of fines,” Markey, D-Massachusetts, said in a letter to Allen released Sunday.
The deadweight loss of negotiation and litigation means that even if the risk to the gulf is substantially reduced by having the cap in place, it may still be better to uncap the well and seek solutions (such as extraction of the flowing oil) that can be monitored directly by the camera that is already there.
A mathematician who was very important for economic theory, he died last week. Here are a number of thoughtful remembrances.
If I missed yours I am very sorry, please post a link in the comments.
At Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago. Bruce Norris is the playwright.
This guy I know is saying that a theater critic is always the bad guy. He’s like “the playwright is so special just because he wrote the play in the first place, but the critic never gets credit for his part. I mean the word ‘critic’ already carries such a negative connotation.”
Maybe its because reviews are so pointless. I mean what can a review actually accomplish? OK maybe you might convince some people to see the play or not to see the play, and maybe you might shed some light on some kind of deep meaning, but really what does that matter in the long run?
Hold on a sec, I don’t like the way that sounds. I don’t think I really believe that and I certainly don’t like the way it feels. Let’s do that again. Back up.
The female lead in the play takes off her shirt once. And the reality show Top Chef is featured in a crucial scene.
Now I am sure to have an impact. You don’t mind spoilers do you? Well, it doesn’t matter. It’s just a play and even if you do know what’s going to happen, there is nothing you can do about it because its already written and its going to unfold just that way no matter who is there watching. Do you smell smoke?
On the other hand, this review is being written right now and it can change at any moment. Did you hear that? She just said that this review is going to suck. You didn’t hear that? There, she said it again. You didn’t hear that?
_________
I’m not going to bother with this review any more. I know you just think I am making stuff up and you’re not going to listen to me anyway so what’s the point? So I’ll tell you about the dinner we had before the play. Even though I know that I will get bored of that by the end of this paragraph (yes, she told me that too.) But that’s kinda sad isn’t it? I mean it was a nice dinner. It made me happy. I had rhubard consomme, I should at least be able to write a nice review of that. But look, I am already bored of telling you about dinner.
OK, you wanna hear about the play again right? That’s why you are still with me through all this. OK good. It ends tragically. Everybody dies. Even I die. You don’t believe me, see I told you you wouldn’t. There I go, messing it up again. You gave me another chance and I blew it. I can’t let it end this way, let’s try again. Back up.
OK, you wanna hear about the play again right? That’s why you are still with me through all this. OK good. It’s beautiful and touching and it ends well and everybody goes home feeling warm and fuzzy.
Hey this is great. This is what a review is all about. Why am I always being such a downer? Nobody wants to read my ponderous reviews. From now on I am going to write nice, normal reviews and everyone is going to love them and everyone is going to love me.
Ick, it already feels wrong. I just can’t pretend like that. But I’ve already written all this stuff and its come out all wrong. I need to start over. Back to the beginning.
_____
This guy I know is always saying that a theater critic is always the bad guy…
You and a partner are employed on a joint project. The probability of success depends on your joint effort and, if the project succeeds, you both get a payoff of one. Effort is costly. This scenario is loosely based on Holmstom’s classic Moral Hazard in Teams model. In one version of this model there is a free-rider problem.
That’s the case where you and your partner agree that both your costly efforts contribute to the success of the project. The harder you work, the more likely success is for you but also the more likely is success for your partner. You do not take the positive externality into account in your effort choice and exert too little effort from the perspective of your partnership. This is the free-rider problem. If somehow either you or your partner could be inspirational and motivate both of you to work for the “common good”, the team would get closer to the joint surplus maximizing solution and everyone would be better off. The partners share a common “vision” but have to be motivated to work towards it.
But there is another scenario. In this one, you and your partner disagree about the direction in which the organization should be going. You think his costly effort reduces the probability of success. He thinks the same about your effort. Your effort exerts a negative externality on your partner and vice-versa. Each player does not take this into account and exerts too much effort from the perspective of the partnership. In fact if both players exerted no effort what so ever, they would both be better off according to each of their payoff functions. There is no jointly shared vision in this organization.
Actually, if you are in this latter situation, doing nothing is doing good. Your costly effort is bad for both of you and it is selfish of you to work. So, slack off and go to the beach. You will be taking one for the team.
Step 1: The 41-year-old should begin by having his first child when he is 32.
Step 2: when the child is 6 she should begin taking piano lessons.
Step 3: the 41-year-old’s mother should consistently beat him at golf.
Step 4: At age 39, notice that you can hit the ball twice as far as your mother and therefore there is no good reason she should always win. Notice that as long as your ball is always closer to the hole than your mother’s you will win.
Step 5: Use this strategy to actually beat your mother at golf for the first time.
Step 6: Notice that the same strategy applies to playing the piano vis a vis the now 7-year-old daughter.
Step 7: Begin attending daughter’s piano lessons and learning all of her pieces with the plan that you will always be a better pianist than her, even when she is a concert-playing professional.
Step 8: Around age 40 notice that this is going a little slowly and so its time to start learning some serious pieces.
Step 9: At age 41, learn to play Children’s Song #6 by Chick Corea.
It’s not very good. My hands get tired toward the end of the fast sections and you can see that I lose the rhythm a bit. Also I am rushing. (still ahead of my daughter though 
I have never taken piano lessons, but I think I might start.
We are reliving our Riesling dinner at Oleana wine by wine. I found the Leitz Magdalenenkreuz on sale for $18 at Binnys. The great thing about Riesling is that it goes with all types of food. We had it for dessert with nuts and fruits. The fruits kill the sweetness and leave a hint of lemon and acid. The nuts accentuate the taste apple, pear and lychee. This wine would go well with Asian food. I would have liked more minerality and acid. It has only 8% alcohol so you can drink away freely.
- This review of the new David Mitchell novel is pretty close. I would add this. Mitchell has total mastery of prose and microstructure, yes, but here he’s trying to be conventional and in many places I was just bored. I prefer Number9Dream with no attempt whatsoever at macrostructure. What should I read next?
- Somehow it’s more funny when phones do this than when my kids do.
- The Grateful Dead sing the star-spangled banner.
- Mother’s Day makes Mothers want to cheat on their husbands.
- Caffeine overdose calculator.
- Krakow prison tattoos preserved in formaldehyde.
The memory of watermelon and tomato soup still fresh in my mind, this recipe came across my google reader. Grilled watermelon and heirloom tomato salad.
I put 3/4-inch thick slices of watermelon on a charcoal grill for about 1 minute, then cut them into these circles using a stainless steel measuring cup (I don’t have cookie cutters.) This kind of salad you want to break out the fleur de sel. Drizzle with olive oil, the good stuff, and a squeeze of lemon juice. Basil from the garden. Fantastic. It’s going into my regular summer repetoire.
Oh, and this is the 1000th Cheap Talk post.
Chicago somewhat controversially privatized its parking meters. Now you have to walk over to a machine, put in money or a credit card, get the receipt and put in on your dashboard – the meters are defunct. It’s $1.25/hour so it’s still way cheaper than parking in a private lot. And now the machines work, unlike many that were installed earlier.
And here’s the cool thing: Suppose you’ve paid for two hours, only use up an hour and drive off and park somewhere else. As long as parking costs the same in new spot where your car ends up and the parking rate is the same, your receipt is still valid and you do not have to pay for more parking. There is less chance of wasting quarters like you do now when you leave the meter with time on it.
The fact that the receipt gives you option value means you might put in extra. The company makes more money potentially because of this. Also, with a meter, the next person to park might get lucky and get some time paid for by someone else. This is a classic positive externality – each individual parker does not take into account and skimps on how much they out into the meter. This cannot happen anymore because your receipt stays in your car (or goes into the trash) and not to someone else. So, they have to pay for their time themselves. Another round of extra money for the parking company.
But, all in all, it not as bad as people thought originally. And I love my durable receipt.
