7/30 Radley Balko has some good questions for candidates McCain and Obama.
7/25 New frontiers in mosaic art: check out Mosaika Art and Design’s portfolio.
7/24 Fascinating and fun to read: social psychologist Roy F. Baumeister wonders: Is There Anything Good About Men? (Thanks to Johann for the link.)
7/23 Neal McCluskey is appropriately Mad as Hell, And Not Taking Public-School Myths Anymore! Jerry Kirkpatrick encourages teachers to be peddlers of ideas. Perhaps someone can get through to this guy who clearly wasn’t paying attention in science class. (Thanks to Bob M. for the link.) On the other hand, this professional educator was paying attention – to her psychic. (Via ifeminists.)
7/21 Steven den Beste assesses, in somewhat curmudgeonly fashion, criteria for successful forms of alternative energy. New data suggests that male lust is blind. But since (hopefully) your surgeon is not blind, are green or blue the best colors for surgeons’ scrubs? And if you actually clicked on the above three links, you’ll probably want to learn your score on the Nerd Test. (Thanks to Jerry for the link.)
7/18 Gennady Stolyarov of the Heartland Institute has a trio of brief articles here, here, and here on individual rights and funding mechanisms for information technology, one of which quotes me.
7/16 In some countries, “There are fundamental public health problems, like hand washing with soap, that remain killers only because we can’t figure out how to change people’s habits.” So some non-profits are learning from the for-profit sector advertising techniques to change and improve people’s habits. (Thanks to Bob M. for the link.)
7/14 Astrophysicist and NOVA scienceNOW host Neil deGrasse Tyson enthusiastically presents “Manhattanhenge”, one of two days each year when the sun sets precisely in line with New York City’s grid layout. (Thanks to Eric for the link.) And it will be interesting to see how this plays out: BlackLight Power’s new energy source. Does it work or not? If so, is the theory behind it correct? If so, what explains the scientific establishment’s resistance? (Thanks to Brett for the link.)
7/12 In The Australian, Carl Mortished praises oil futures and speculation. (Via Rossputin.) Café Hayek has a brief history lesson that might just make your eyes tear up: regulating onion futures speculation. And Peter Cresswell explains how, in part, the recent sale of New York’s Chrysler Building to Abu Dhabi is an unintended consequence of Keynesian economics and environmentalist anti-development policies.
7/10 It’s the summer travel season for the northern hemisphere, which raises the question: which nation has the most obnoxious tourists? And speaking of obnoxiousness, here’s an eye-opening post on the dark side of compulsory volunteerism. (As if compulsory volunteerism weren’t dark enough on the face of it. Via Café Hayek.)
7/9 David Bernstein looks at the track records of liberal and conservative Supreme Court justices on individual rights. And the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education is on top of the disgustingly Orwellian treatment of a student employee at Indiana- University-Purdue-University-Indianapolis. Update: Here is a Wall Street Journal report on the IUPUI issue.
7/7 Is compassion a virtue? (Via Arts & Letters Daily.)
7/3 Richard Posner on why women get better grades in college. And Brandon Berg on feminism and female privilege, adding to earlier lists here and here.
7/2 Campaign finance reform as an opportunity for marketing principled liberty: “But it is the libertarians, and only the libertarians, who ask the precedent question of why we have so much corruption in politics. The answer is simple: Because government does so much that invites corruption, that caters to corruption and that perpetuates corruption. Things that have nothing to do with the core functions of government … If the politicians didn’t do so much that they were never meant to do, then no one would try to buy them. That would be the best ‘campaign finance reform’ of all.”