Specialization is for insects

The "Bachelor Party" Around the World

Wikipedia disappoints me.  It only (poorly) describes traditional bachelor parties in five countries.  The entry for Australia was interesting, though:

Just about every Bucks night\Bucks Turn features a stripper commonly referred to as the pouch.

Wouldn't it be called "Buck's night" instead of "Bucks night"?

Anyway, since this is an economics blog, I should point out that the creation of the "Stag Weekend Industry" in the UK is a nice example of the economic law that "Where there is demand, supply will follow."  That's kind of a vacuous economic law, I realize, but that's par for the economics course.  After all, according to economics lore, it took Paul Samuelson several years to come up with an example of an economic law that was both true and nontrivial.  No wonder it's so hard for me to come up with an economics thesis topic.  All my ideas are probably either trivial or false.  Or both.

Is the set of all possible temperatures unbounded?

Most of us learned about absolute zero in high school.  It is not possible to achieve a temperature below 0 K on the Kelvin scale, or roughly -460 degrees Fahrenheit.  Remarkably, scientists have reached 100 pK (pico-Kelvins) in the lab. 

NOVA asks "is there a corresponding maximum possible temperature?"   This is kind of like Free Trade and Economics; you'd think that physicists would speak with a more unified voice on this issue.  The laws of physics ought to be able to provide a definitive answer to this question.

What's in a name?

I am updating material for my "Programming for Economists" course that will be held next week (everyone is invited!).  The biggest update is the addition of a small section on Mata, which is a matrix language that is now built into Stata.  Mata is a nice name; no complaints there.  Even maybe some bonus points for the rhyming. 

My complaint is with the names of two particular procedures that operate on matrices in Mata:

diag(): create diagonal matrix from vector

diagonal(): extract diagonal of matrix into vector

Not very intuitive naming at all.  I don't like it.  Other than that, not many other things wrong with Mata.  It's also wicked fast.  And it supports complex numbers.  Economists probably won't have much use for that, though.  Our theories might be based on imaginary worlds, but our empirical work stays firmly on the real line of the complex plane.

UPDATE: Let me try to be more clear about why these names are lame.  It's almost impossible to remember which one extracts a diagonal vector and which one creates a diagonal matrix, since one name is just an abbreviation of the other.  I have mixed them up three times today already.  Method names should be more descriptive.

Tarantino @ Cannes

Tarantino is interviewed about his career:

Tarantino also said he had been told by "millions" of other directors that his opening scene in "Reservoir Dogs," a 10-minute sequence featuring eight black-suited men eating breakfast at a diner, had made it very difficult for them to do restaurant scenes.

I found the full scene here, thanks to youtube (warning: some adult language).

UPDATE: My long lost roommate Roshan alerted me to broken link above.  The scene can actually be found here.  The new typepad editor should share some of the blame for this mistake.

NBER in Boston Globe

Robert Gavin writesthat the "NBER keeps a low profile, occupying three floors above a furniture store outside of Harvard Square."  He also raves about all the different coffee machines; unfortunately, I don't like coffee, so I have to buy juice and vitamin water from the vending machine.

Airline pricing

I discovered this last night while buying a ticket to Chicago: many airlines are now going to charge you for checked baggage.  The NY Times interviews some outraged consumers:

American [Airlines] planned to impose a fee beginning June 15 for checking the first bag, a service that has long been free. ...

Earlier this month, American joined other airlines in adding a $25 fee to charge a second bag.

None of the other carriers rushed to join American in adding the first-bag charge, but several said they were studying the idea.

That did not sit well with Grace Pineda, 43, who was en route to Miami for the Memorial Day weekend with her children, Ramon, 10, and Claudia, 8.

“Are you kidding me?” Ms. Pineda said. “It just seems like if they are going to hit me with a fee they might as well add it to the ticket price. They’re trying to nickel and dime us.”

Ms. Pineda, who managed to pack the family’s belongings in one suitcase, said she would rather pay the additional $15 as part of the fare. “If it’s $160 to Miami and if they charged me $175, I’d pay it,” she said.

I don't see much difference, but, if anything, I would rather pay $160 and have the option of saving $15 when I travel light.  This just seems like standard price discrimination to me.

Cool music post-of-the-day

MF Doom and Talib Kweli, "Old School":

And, I might be buggin' but it seem to me
that cartoons be realer than reality TV
They inspire my decision to be open and listen
But folks got it all twisted, like a yoga position
Like, in order to spit it dope, you gotta have a criminal past
that's similar to the cast of Different Strokes
Me and my people break bread, sit and smoke
The conversation rich, but that depend on what you consider broke
I draw on anything for inspiration
A fond memory, a piece of paper, walls in a train station

It's just that I'm old school like that,
roll that rap over soul loops like that

It's just that I'm old school like that,
roll that rap over soul loops like that

Vote for Loyal Divide

Vote for my brother's band here.  Just take my word for it; they rock.  The fan voting is part of the "Last Band Standing" contest that is somehow related to Lollapalooza.  They need to make the Top 100 to make it to Round 2.  Currently they are in 10th place (out of 374 bands).  So I guess even without your help they should still make the Top 100.

On a (very loosely) related note, Steve Levitt explains why it's not rational to vote.  It's an old freakonomics blog post; but I never watched the FREAK-TV video until today.

UPDATE: Use this link to vote.

Does birth order matter?

Very fun and interesting segment on MSNBC on birth order that interviews two economists (Joe Price and Sandra Black) about the economic effects of birth order.  "Birth order shapes our personality," says the non-economist.  Younger kids get less quality time with parents, have lower IQs, less education, say the economics studies.  As the first-born child, I can't quibble with this at all :-)

I would be surprised if the birth-order effects were operating primarily through time-use.  But this is a young literature with an interesting future, so we will wait and see.

Silly sentences

Of course, there is no reason we have to follow an appealing principle off a cliff. We can have a bit of genetic justice without much risk of tumbling into Stalinism.

Really, you think?  We're talking about banning health insurance companies from discriminating on the basis of genetic tests, and the author invokes Stalin?  The article reads like it was written by a 7th grader.