Miscellany

A Sabbatical Note

Modern life is full of bustle and inattention, with too many activities and tasks and opportunities competing for our limited cognitive bandwidth. Even in the relatively staid academic life this is true; my regular teaching requirements and other campus commitments have meant that my mind is stretched, particularly over the past few years as some …

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Poor Market Design Causing High Prices in Diablo Iii Auction House?

Michael Giberson  I don’t play Diablo III, but I do follow price gouging discussions online, which led me to this post on the Diablo III discussion forum: “Auction House and Price Gouging.” The initial complaint comes from a player trying to equip a new character through purchases in the Auction House, an in-game player-to-player trading mechanism, and …

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Do You Want to Be Intellectually Honest?

Michael Giberson Some techniques for checking the tendency toward extreme partisanship, which can be a ready source of intellectual errors (source): •Take opposing points of view at face value. It is more comfortable to treat opposing points of view reductively. That is, rather than deal with a different viewpoint, we prefer to explain it away. …

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The Matt Ridley Prize for Environmental Heresy

Michael Giberson The Spectator magazine in the U.K. announces the Matt Ridley Prize for Environmental Heresy: Matt Ridley has long deplored the wind farm delusion, and was appalled when a family trust was paid by a wind farm company in compensation for mineral rights on land on which it wanted to build a turbine. The …

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The Beautiful Transmission Tower, the Glamorous Wind Turbine

Michael Giberson We talk a bit about the economics of electric power transmission and wind power here, but there is more to understanding the world than economics. Previously we have noted Virginia Postrel writing on the techno-glamour of, among other things, wind turbines. Now we take note of the Pylon Design Competition and its recently …

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