Bluematter.

I finally got to visit my old friend Jeremy Bentham today. We had lunch together. He didn't talk much, but he was pleasant company nonetheless. Here, you can see both of us in this picture I took - he's the one behind the glass, and I'm the one in front of it.


If you ever visit UCL, I'm sure he'll be happy to see you too - and isn't happiness what it's all about? Here's more on where to find him and his busy schedule since his death 175 years ago:

At the end of the South Cloisters of the main building of UCL stands a wooden cabinet, which has been a source of curiosity and perplexity to visitors.

The cabinet contains Bentham's preserved skeleton, dressed in his own clothes, and surmounted by a wax head. Bentham requested that his body be preserved in this way in his will made shortly before his death on 6 June 1832.

Not surprisingly, this peculiar relic has given rise to numerous legends and anecdotes. One of the most commonly recounted is that the Auto-Icon regularly attends meetings of the College Council, and that it is solemnly wheeled into the Council Room to take its place among the present-day members. Its presence, it is claimed, is always recorded in the minutes with the words Jeremy Bentham - present but not voting. Another version of the story asserts that the Auto-Icon does vote, but only on occasions when the votes of the other Council members are equally split. In these cases the Auto-Icon invariably votes for the motion.

Bentham had originally intended that his head should be part of the Auto-Icon, and for ten years before his death (so runs another story) carried around in his pocket the glass eyes which were to adorn it. Unfortunately when the time came to preserve it for posterity, the process went disastrously wrong, robbing the head of most of its facial expression, and leaving it decidedly unattractive. The wax head was therefore substituted, and for some years the real head, with its glass eyes, reposed on the floor of the Auto-Icon, between Bentham's legs.

However, it proved an irresistible target for students, especially from King's College London, who stole the head in 1975 and demanded a ransome of £100 to be paid to the charity Shelter. UCL finally agreed to pay a ransome of £10 and the head was returned. On another occasion, according to legend, the head, again stolen by students, was eventually found in a luggage locker at a Scottish Station (possibly Aberdeen). The last straw (so runs yet another story) came when it was discovered in the front quadrangle being used for football practice, and the head was henceforth placed in secure storage.

Surfing video on a wave of similar magnitude

The Face of Tomorrow: the effects of globalization on identity

Desktopography exhibits various nature themed wallpapers

Beluga SkySails proves concept on its maiden voyage

Chinese smart phone runs 1 year in standby

Kurt Cobain About A Son

From Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis.

This is from the superb Persepolisby the Iranian Marjane Satrapi. If you read one thing this year, this should be it.

I will be posting a couple more excerpts from the book and commentary in the following days.

Dan Ariely, author of Predictably Irrationalsays that free! is not just another price.

Thanks to James for the pointer.

Impressive.

Start your daily all-in-one web experience simple with Symbaloo

Reported oil reserves and other interesting charts

Because adventure is a big part of life: Steep

Google office in Zurich, Switzerland

Assume house prices fall by 50%. Heck, assume stock prices also fall by 50%. As Tyler Cowen notes, no houses are dynamited. No factories are burned to the ground. No people are shot. In short, no resources are used up. We, as a society, have exactly as much material wealth as we did before.

At the end of the day, a massive fall in asset prices is nothing more than a transfer of resources from people that hold a lot of assets to people that hold few assets.

In fact, it is very difficult to argue that a fall in asset prices is not in fact a good thing. Asset-heavy individuals tend to be rich(er) than asset-light individuals. We, society, value redistribution. In fact, we value it so much that we impose highly distortionary taxes to achieve it. A massive fall in asset prices means that we now get a lot of redistribution with none of the distortionary effects.

One more thing: Tyler says 'Most of the costs of overinvestment in housing already have been borne in the form of lower living standards, namely we have fewer non-housing goods and services.' Of course, this implies that as P went up, Q supplied went up as well - but the housing market is a bit different to regular markets. In crowded European cities at least, Q is constained by the planning system, which responds to price changes very slowly and not necessarily in the direction a profit maximising supplier would. Given that the opportunity cost of utilising your land for housing is extremely low (how much do you think agricultural land is worth?) if you can get permission to build you do so as long as construction costs are less than the price the house will command (a near certainty for any development reasonably near to civilization).

In other words, high house prices are unlikely to have had a massive effect on building activity, thus driving a misallocation of resources on a grand scale. Strictly speaking, it is the land price bubble that burst; not the housing bubble.

How many billions are there in a billion? This is the top story on the BBC News website right now:

Ill health 'costs economy £1bn'

Ill health costs the British economy over £1bn a year - the same as the cost of running the NHS for a year, a report is set to say.

The calculation will appear in an analysis by Dame Carol Black, national director for health and work.

Dame Carol's report will say the total cost of ill-health to the British economy is around £103bn.

The bulk of that - £63bn - is made of the benefit costs and lost taxes for people who are not working due to illness or disability.

The rest of the bill is made up the cost of the care given by family and friends, the cost to an employer of having someone absent from work and other additional costs.

Next year I'll send them a check for £1.39. I'm sure they won't mind.

p.s. I would also comment on treating 'benefit costs and lost taxes' as a cost to the economy, but learning to count is a good starting point.

UPDATE: They have finally corrected the story. It took a while...

Yes, I live in London and you could claim I'm biased, but this is heartfelt advice. By the way, this is datacharmer hijacking stardom's Friday Special.

There's more eye-candy here, and don't miss this great spoof TV campaign. It offers all the reasons you need.

The master-economist must possess a rare combination of gifts. He must reach a high standard in several different directions and must combine talents not often found together. He must be mathematician, historian, statesman, philosopher - in some degree. He must understand symbols and speak in words. He must contemplate the particular in terms of the general, and touch abstract and concrete in the same flight of thought. He must study the present in light of the past for the purposes of the future. No part of man's nature or his institutions must lie entirely outside his regard. He must be purposeful and disinterested in a simultaneous mood; as aloof and incorruptible as an artist, yet sometimes as near the earth as a politician.

John Maynard Keynes, quoted by Timothy Taylor.

Addendum: Here is Keynes's 1946 obituary in Time magazine.

Geddit? As an economist talking to non-economists, this has been the single most difficult fact to explain.

This is from Timothy Taylor's 'Principles of Economics' lecture series on video. Click the link and check the list - he is a big success on the web, and - though his speaking style is a tad bit overstated - I really like this guy!

If you clicked on the link and are perplexed, this may help explain things.

From the winners of black and white photography

Spy satellite discovers lost Maya temples

You are on holiday in some strange land, and you bump into Sue, an old friend. What are the odds?

Well, the probability is 1. 100%. It's certain. It bloody happened.

OK, you say, fair point - but that's not what you meant. What you meant is what is the probability you would bump into Sue, assuming you hadn't just bumped into him. I reply that that's a silly assumption to make as you just did bump into him, but you insist.

Well then, the probability is whatever you want it to be - pick a number, and I'll explain to you why it's plausible. You look perplexed and ask what I mean.

I explain: first of all, you need to specify the probability of what you are interested in.
-Do you want to know the probability you'd bump into Sue at the time and place you did
-Do you want the probability you would bump into an old friend while on holiday in general
-Or do you want the probability that something 'remarkable' enough would happen to you at some point in your life that would make you start asking silly questions about 'what is the probability of that happening'?

You say the first, obviously, and that I should stop being clever. I wasn't done, I say, and proceed to ask what is the information set I should base my probability estimate at - quantum mechanics aside, randomness is in the eye of the beholder after all, and if I was all-knowing God the probability of whatever it is that happened would be 1 even before it happened.

You throw your pina colada on my head and vow never to speak to me again.

A few days later, you are kind of missing me but don't feel like talking to me yet, so you visit bluematter. as a first step in rebuilding the relationship. And the first thing you see is this delightful little story, via Andrew Gelman:

In the city of Syracuse, the strangest thing happened in Tuesday's Democratic presidential primary.

Sen. Hillary Clinton and Sen. Barack Obama received the exact same number of votes, according to unofficial Board of Election results.

Clinton: 6,001.

Obama: 6,001.

The odds of Clinton and Obama tying were less than one in 1 million, said Syracuse University mathematics Professor Hyune-Ju Kim.

Elaborating on Thursday, she [Professor Hyune-Ju Kim] noted: "The "almost impossible" odd is obtained when we assume the Syracuse voter distribution follows the New York state distribution. Since it is almost impossible to observe what we have observed, statistically we can conclude that Syracuse voter distribution is significantly different from the New York state distribution."

There would be less than one in 1 million chance of a tie occurring between Clinton and Obama in voting by a randomly selected group of 12,346 New York Democratic voters, she said.

To which Andrew replies:

Not to pick on some harried mathematics professor who'd probably rather be out proving theorems, but . . . of course Syracuse voters are not a randomly selected group of New Yorkers. You don't need a statistical test to see that. Regarding the probability of an exact tie: I don't think that's so low: a quick calculation might say that either Clinton or Obama could've received between, say, 5000 and 7000 votes, giving something like a 1/2000 chance of an exact tie. That's gotta be the right order of magnitude.

If there was one thing you were ever certain about, it is that you don't want to read what I have to say on this. A baseball bat happens to lie next to you (what are the odds!?). You grab it with both your shaky hands and smash the computer monitor to pieces.

Merv emails me this article:

Football clubs with red team strips are more successful than those with other colours, according to a study released Wednesday.

The fact that English clubs Manchester United, Liverpool and Arsenal regularly top league tables is not a coincidence, say the experts from Durham University and the University of Plymouth.

Red shirts give the team an advantage due to deep-rooted biological response to the colour. "In nature, red is often associated with male aggression and display," they said, giving the example of the red-breasted robin.

"It is a testosterone-driven signal of male quality, and its striking effect has even been harnessed by soldiers in the past," added the researchers, after analyzing data on English football league results since World War II.

The red-breasted robin? That's the most fearsome red beast they can think of?

I can't access the paper, but just reading the abstract is enough to convince me it's bonkers. The authors also have a 2005 paper - in Nature no less - entitled 'Red enhances human performance in contests'. If any reader has a access to Nature, would you be kind enough to email me the article so I can -ahem- review it?