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M. Porcius Cato

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Blog Entries posted by M. Porcius Cato

  2. M. Porcius Cato
    Great review in the NY Times. I don't know what is more disheartening: (1) how violently totalitarian Communists--like the lackeys of Stalin--celebrate their resistance to local authoritarian fascists--like the thugs of Franco, or (2) how naively Western liberals buy into #1.
  3. M. Porcius Cato
    I admit to be a congenital contrarian. I choose Cato over Caesar, Macs over PCs, ancient history over modern, and so on. As John Tierney puts it, "Just because everybody believes something doesn't make it wrong, but that's a good working hypothesis."
     
    Given this penchant, it's probably no surprise that I've been highly skeptical about the CO2 theory of climate change since I first heard about it in 1990, a particularly hot summer in the US. Although I wrote my very first research paper on the topic (back in high school), I hadn't followed up on it since then. In the meantime, however, much has changed: initially, all a skeptic could say was, "the evidence is not convincing because it doesn't rule out alternative explanations for the same data"; now, skepticism is buttressed by an alternative theory of climate change--the solar energy theory of climate change--that does a much better job of explaining the data than the much-popularized CO2 theory.
     
    If you're interested in seeing the two different theories presented for a popular audience, I'd recommend Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" (for the CO2 theory) and BBC's "The Great Global Warming Swindle" (for the solar energy theory). You can watch the BBC special on Google Video for free.
  4. M. Porcius Cato
    First, Yahoo! cravenly handed over user records to Chinese auhoritarians authorities. Then, "Don't be Evil" Google promptly complied with Chinese demands to censor results from web searches. What next? The censorship of No-MSG recipes on Epicurious.com? Will the whole internet be forced to kowtow to the brownshirts in Beijing?
     
    Not on Jimbo Wales' watch! Wikipedia, the ultimate source of truthiness on the internet, will not yield to Chinese demands to censor their content. Read the whole story here.
  6. M. Porcius Cato
    American religious broadcaster and all-around wacko Pat Robertson was talking to God recently (or at least stopped taking his meds), when Robertson learned that Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon's stroke was caused by the Vengeance of God. Apparently God is none-too-pleased about the Likud-founder/bolting prime minister
    "dividing God's land" .  
    No word from Robertson yet about why God was OK with Saladin and his little capture of Jerusalem. Maybe God just likes turbans. Or maybe Pat Robertson isn't really the question-asking type.


     

  7. M. Porcius Cato
    Although Google has been rightly taken to task for capitulating to Chinese demands to assist in censoring dissidents on the internet, rival Yahoo has been doing vastly worse--actually assisting Chinese authorities in tracking down and imprisoning dissidents. More in today's New York Times. What a shame--now I'm going to have to abandon Yahoo entirely.
     
    Does anybody have a suggestion for a good MyYahoo alternative?
  8. M. Porcius Cato
    I mentioned in a thread on the Gracchan grain dole that the distribution of income is typically best described by a power function (sort of like an exponential/logarithmic curve). You probably have some inking of this distribution if you've ever heard a politician or professor complaining bitterly about the fact the top 1% owns 50% of the wealth (or whatever it is in your local area).
     
    However, economists have been pointing out for some time that this power law of income distribution really says nothing about corruption or anything like that: it's simply a consequence of there being a distribution of motivation/merit/opportunity/etc that is applied over the long term.
     
    To illustrate this prinicple, I thought I'd check whether the power function also describes the distribution of posts made to UNRV. As you can see in the chart below, the fit of the function is almost perfect!

    I thought this was a pretty cool example of economics applied to everyday life.
  10. M. Porcius Cato
    According to this Voice of America piece,
    The wife of a Chinese dissident jailed for publishing articles on the Internet says she plans to sue U.S.-based Internet company Yahoo for allegedly helping to put her husband in jail in China.
     
    I hope she wins her case against those unprincipled yahoos, who are resuscitating the old Stalinist claim that capitalists would sell the Soviets the rope with which to hang them. Good on VoA for covering this heroic woman.
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