Mash-Up

Well, hello, blog - long time no see.

Just thought I'd share this this fun track - this year's United States of Pop, a mash-up of the top 25 billboard hits of the year, created annually by DJ Earworm. I don't think this year's is quite as good as years previous, but it's damn catchy, and the video is great. Enjoy.

Sporcle is a lot cooler than it sounds.

My new favorite game website: Sporcle. The site features tons of quizzes along the lines of "Name all the countries in Europe" or "Name the book based on the antagonist." Be very careful about when you start playing, though, because it quickly sucks you in for long periods of time.

(We have really fallen off the blogging. This post is just under a month after the last post. I would love it if we could all start this up again.)

Awful Tattoos.

These are two of the worst tattoos I have ever seen, and they are both on the same person: White-supremacist MMA fighter Melvin Costa. [Amazingly there exists no Wikipedia page for this guy, so I just stuck in a link to a random blog post about his tattoos.]

The First Thanksgiving.

A hilarious reenactment of the first Thanksgiving that includes references to small-pox-covered blankets, the Pequot War, and King Philip's War:

A Talented Actress

Taking advantage of coincidence, porn star Lisa Ann has played both Sarah Palin and Tina Fey in pornographic parodies of, respectively, Sarah Palin's life and 30 Rock. Check out the hilarious trailers below .

Who's Nailin' Paylin? (This trailer is completely safe for work.)


30 Rock: A XXX Parody (This trailer is less safe for work due to a few women in skimpy clothing and some swearing.)

Who knew they could get weirder?

The Decemberists are turning The Hazards of Love, their most recent album, into a super-trippy animated film. This should be interesting:

The Wire

A video of someone's choices for the 100 greatest quotes from The Wire. Oh how I miss some of these characters.

"American Soldier"

Ian Fisher, a high-school senior who decided to enter the army after graduation, allowed a reporter and a photographer from The Denver Post to follow him from the time of his enlistment through his return from deployment. The multimedia series, which includes an in-depth article, photographs, and videos, can be found here. A nice selection of the photographs can be found here.

[NSFW!] Problems with the plumbing.

Two vagina-related points today:

1. Humans have apparently long had a fear of vaginas with teeth (vagina dentata). Someone recently decided to take that fear to the next level by making a horror movie entitled Teeth about a girl who regularly uses her vagina-teeth to bite off body parts.
2. The more horrifying story: "My vagina fell out." Apparently female genital prolapse "is characterized by a portion of the vaginal canal protruding from the opening of the vagina." In other words, an innie becomes an outie, as seen below. I would not wish this on anyone.
   

more cool nature photos...

Sperm Whale Eats a Giant Squid! (click through for more photos)

Insider trading.

Carly and I are currently dog-sitting in midtown for my aunt and uncle. They live next door to Raj Rajaratnam, a hedge-fund manager (he founded Galleon Group) and number 236 on Forbes' list of the richest Americans. Raj is also notable for his fantasy football league, which has a $100,000 entry fee and awards a total of $1,000,000 to the top three teams each year.

Early this morning his apartment was raided by the FBI and Raj was hauled in on insider trading charges alleging he earned over $20,000,000 illegally. Apparently the FBI is good at quiet raids, because Carly and I slept through the 6am arrest and apartment search.

**Correction: Raj was arrested Friday morning, not this morning. Carly and I still heard nothing.

1M Frames Per Second

The video is very long, and I recommend you skip to random points throughout it, as the type of bullet and the material being impacted are changed. The end features cutouts of animals being hit with barrages of bullets.

Pretty charts. Ugly news.

A few pretty and devastating graphs.

First: Percentage job loss from peak during post WWII recessions (Calculated Risk):

Second: year-over-year delinquency rate changes, where red indicates an increased rate and green indicates a decreased rate (New York Federal Reserve):

Third: the current delinquency rate as of the second quarter of 2009, where a darker color indicates a higher rate (ibid):

Obama wins Nobel Peace Price

All I am saying is this: do we really live in a world where the Arizona State commencement speech committee has more stringent standards than then Norwegian Nobel Committee?

Google Wave

Not nearly as cool as they think it is, but still one of those "finally!" moments for the internet.

http://wave.google.com/help/wave/closed.html

Owned!

Chicago eliminated in first round of Olympic 2016 voting. Obama's reputation as being unable to get things done will be solidified by the time you go to bed tonight. Happy 2010 elections! (Oh, and good luck on Iran!)

Mapping Sin

Useless but entertaining "sin map" from Wired:

"We're gluttons for infographics, and a team at Kansas State just served up a feast: maps of sin created by plotting per-capita stats on things like theft (envy) and STDs (lust). Christian clergy, likely noting the Bible Belt's status as Wrath Central, question the "science." Valid point—or maybe it's just the pride talking."

Internet Meme Timeline

The title is self-explanatory. Be careful: this site can waste all of your time if you let it.

"How to Write Well"

[Note: everything in the post except for this note, including the title, is taken directly from Greg Mankiw's Blog. Rather than linking to it I figure it is easier for me to just copy the text and cite the source. For those of you outside of the world of economics, Mankiw (sometimes referred to as variations on N. Gregory Mankiw) is a famous economist who headed the Council of Economic Advisers under Bush 43 from 2003 to 2005 and teaches at Harvard. The original post can be found here.]

When I was CEA chair, I sent the following guidelines to my staff as they started drafting the Economic Report of the President. A friend recently emailed me a copy, and I thought I would share them with blog readers. They are good rules of thumb, especially for economists writing for a general audience.

ERP Writing Guidelines

• Stay focused. Remember the take-away points you want the reader to remember. If some material is irrelevant to these points, it should probably be cut.
• Keep sentences short. Short words are better than long words. Monosyllabic words are best.
• The passive voice is avoided by good writers.
• Positive statements are more persuasive than normative statements.
• Use adverbs sparingly.
• Avoid jargon. Any word you don’t read regularly in a newspaper is suspect.
• Never make up your own acronyms.
• Avoid unnecessary words. For instance, in most cases, change
  o “in order to” to “to”
  o “whether or not” to “whether”
  o “is equal to” to “equals”
• Avoid “of course, “clearly,” and “obviously.” Clearly, if something is obvious, that fact will, of course, be obvious to the reader.
• The word “very” is very often very unnecessary.
• Keep your writing self-contained. Frequent references to other works, or to things that have come before or will come later, can be distracting.
• Put details and digressions in footnotes. Then delete the footnotes.
• To mere mortals, a graphic metaphor, a compelling anecdote, or a striking fact is worth a thousand articles in Econometrica.
• Keep your writing personal. Remind readers how economics affects their lives.
• Remember two basic rules of economic usage:
  o “Long run” (without a hyphen) is a noun. “Long-run” (with a hyphen) is an adjective. Same with “short(-)run.”
  o “Saving” (without a terminal s) is a flow. “Savings” (with a terminal s) is a stock.
• Buy a copy of Strunk and White’s Elements of Style. Also, William Zinsser’s On Writing Well. Read them—again and again and again.
• Keep it simple. Think of your reader as being your college roommate who majored in English literature. Assume he has never taken an economics course, or if he did, he used the wrong textbook.

Speech! Speech!

Assuming you saw the President's address to Congress last night. Apparently The Daily Beast has highlights from it. I thought it was a bit professorial, and painfully fast-and-loose with the facts, but overall a pretty decent speech (with quite a finish).

Ultimately, I don't see this changing much. And I believe Joe "You Lie" Wilson, for all his lack of manners, probably did an excellent job of undermining Obama. If you think about the subset of people who came into the speech against Obama's reform efforts but were warming up to it as the speech went on, that sort of outburst is exactly the sort of thing to snap one out of the increasing level of trust building between the speaker and viewer throughout the speech, reminding viewers that there was a reason they opposed this guy before, and his "sweet-talk" shouldn't necessarily win them over now.

As a side note, it is sort of terrifying how divisive this issue has been, given that there's so much everyone agrees on (like pre-ex's). I mean, even the school speech was a bitter partisan issue. And Drudge Report is reporting higher readership than at the same time a year ago, which is astounding given that a year ago we were in the height of the election season (and about two weeks into the Sarah Palin Era).