Cardiff de Alejo Garcia

Links -- 25 Feb 2010

No sooner had I promised to average five posts of original content per week and to never skip my daily links than had I broken that promise.  Apologies, I'll do better, and to make amends here is an extra-long, extra-sweet set of links today.

-- We start with a freelance book review I did for amNY, where a friend is the sports editor.  I felt badly for disliking this book so much, but I had to be honest  am New York

-- We are all predictable because our movements follow a pattern, a finding that " shouldn't be cause for alarm so much as existential distress."  AolNews.

-- In praise of intellectual travelers, who are normally treated with suspicion  Overcoming Bias

-- A study finds that narcissists, when they first meet someone, are liked more than regular people, but gradually they get found out and are shunned, so they find new people to impress and the cycle repeats.  One possible reason they don't recognize the pattern and change their behavior is that "friends and partners never hang around long enough to tell them in such a way that they actually believe it and want to do something about it."  PsyBlog

-- Why we return to bad habits (short version: we overestimate our self-discipline)  SciAm

-- Zoolander 2 is coming!  Maybe  Geekosystem

-- Elsewhere in movie news:

A Nightmare on Elm Street Trailer 2 in HD

Trailer Park Movies | MySpace Video

-- This dude, well, it's in the title (via kottke):

--How to live to be 100 (go straight to 15:39 if you just want the conclusion):

-- Why you can't work at work:

Links -- 21 Feb 2010

A defense of night owls against the tyranny of morning larks

The 100 best web sites of 1999

Dating study: women prefer men who are kind

Conor Friedersdorf's roundup of the best journalism of 2009

A brief history of pretty much everything:

Links -- 19 Feb 2010

-- The single worst date in America.  MyVeryWorstDate

-- Does keeping a romance secret make it more exciting?  Nope.  Badadesuyo

-- "Relatively few among the public see internet blogs as an important addition to the American scene." Pew Research

-- La Vie D'Ennui: "Like melancholy and its darker cousin sadness, boredom is related to emptiness and meaninglessness, but in a perfectly enjoyable way."  Philosophy Now

-- The top 10 unreliable narrators in fiction.  Guardian via Brainiac

-- This can't possibly be real, can it?  (HT Radley Balko):

Links

First a quick note to say that I'll try to average about five or six original items per week, though posting will be sporadic and there may be long stretches without any.  But I'll try never to skip any days for these linkfests, so you'll be at least somewhat rewarded each time you look here.  That's all...

-- "There should be a special circle in hell reserved for 'friends' who from a love of 'honesty' report the mean words of others back to us."  The recommended Twitter feed of Alain de Botton

-- A paragraph and a picture for each story of The One Who Got Away (via kottke).  Pictorymag

-- In movies, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl is "wish-fulfillment for all those nice guys out there who just want someone conventionally beautiful to see their inner beauty and appreciate their mix tapes...Lazy writers think that if they make the girl a little daft, they can skip the part where they explain what she sees in him. She's whimsical, that's why!"  3QuarksDaily

-- Too Big to Fail Underpants: "Show off your own Bailout Package in these exclusive embroidered men’s underwear."  Deal Journal

-- Two videos of Ricky Gervais talking, first about growing up poor, second about the principles of comedy:

Links

-- How to get the most out of your caffeine consumption.  Bakadesuyo

-- Carnival, in big pictures.  The Big Picture

-- The world's oldest death row inmate died last week at age 94, of natural causes.  He killed a man in 1983 after escaping prison, but was never executed because of concern that he was mentally incompetent.  Some think he fooled everybody.  In the news

-- Heartbreaking, and beautifully expressed.  eject

-- "But just as many on the Right succumbed to a fantastical foreign policy that makes the world much more dangerous than it needs to be, some have also accepted the myth that Hispanic immigrants and their children have high crime rates."  The American Conservative (Yep, I was shocked too.)

-- I'm a big softy for these these stories of NYC subway heroes.  NYP

-- Awesome (ht Make):

Lush Life

 Lush Life is about the aftermath of a fatal shooting on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, and specifically about the psychological fallout on the people affected by it: the cops, the killer, the family of the victim, and two survivors.

Richard Price, the author, is a co-writer of The Wire, and fans of the show will recognize the rich colloquial dialogue.  As viewers of The Wire are expected to follow what is being said without much help beyond the context, much the same is expected from readers of Lush Life. 

And just like in The Wire, the events of Lush Life unfold chaotically, meant to approximate the daily frustrations, mistakes, and bureaucratic hassles of real life.  There isn't a clear narrative arc, because whose life has one of those?

Anyways, I liked the book, and I especially think that fellow New York media types will identify with the character of Eric Cash, the 35-year-old manager of an LES bar whose youthful dreams of artistic stardom have faded.  As the book opens, he is struggling to accept his failures.  This is how Price introduces the character:

But what really drew him to the area wasn't its full-circle irony but its nowness, its right here and nowness, which spoke to the true engine of his being, a craving for making it made many times worse by a complete ignorance as to how this "it" would manifest itself.

He had no particular skill or talent, or what was worse, he had a little talent, some skill: playing the lead in a basement-theater production of The Dybbuk sponsored by 88 Forsyth House two years ago, his third small role since college, having a short story published in a now-defunct Alphabet City literary rag last year, his fourth in a decade, neither accomplishment leading to anything; and this unsatisfied yearning for validation was starting to make it near impossible for him to sit through a movie or read a book or even case out a new restaurant, all pulled off increasingly by those his age or younger, without wanting to run face-first into a wall.

Later in the story, Cash says the following about a former lover, but it's obvious he is also describing himself:

"She's got to be in her thirties by now, mid-thirties.  I think at first she was some kind of performance-artist-barmaid.  Now she's just a barmaid.  It's like..people say they're one thing or another?  Then at some point, they just are what they are."

And still later:

"I'm so much better than anything I've ever done."

Links

--- The Case For An Older Woman: a persuasive use of data, charts, graphs, and common sense explaining why men should consider dating older women.  oktrends

--- "I was perfectly content before I was born, and I think of death as the same state."  A profile of Roger Ebert.  Esquire

--- "The culmination of my four-year obsession with happiness research is that I think people need to choose between an interesting life or happy life."  Penelope Trunk

--- A history of people freaking out over new technology.  Bottom line: "To date, studies suggest there is no consistent evidence that the Internet causes mental problems."  Slate

--- Wired goes digital (HT Sorgatz):

Hard work

Eric Falkenstein writes:

The social sciences are much harder than the physical sciences or math, in that our progress has been much slower here than in these areas. An educated man knows a lot more math or physics than a child or hunter-gatherer; he does not know much more about what causes business cycles. Figuring out why Haiti is so poor, or how interest rates affect investment, is really difficult. However, it is easy for someone to articulate an answer to hard social issues that is not obviously wrong, which makes it easy to think one knows the answer. A wrong math or physics answer, is clearly wrong, and if you have worked with people who knows something quantitative you learn quite quickly how ignorant you are in that area.

I can appreciate what Falkenstein is driving at here and agree with a lot of what he says, but I find the basic issue of whether the social sciences are "harder" than the physical sciences to be unanswerable. 

Is it really true that we've progressed more in the physical sciences?  What measurements can we use for such a comparison to make any sense?  I ask honestly, not to be a smartass.  If an educated man knows how to factor a polynomial but not what the price elasticity of demand means, does that mean he knows more about math than economics? 

I minored in mathematics in college, primarily because I had a splendid instructor (this guy) for freshman year calculus, and afterward I just took whatever class he happened to be teaching each semester.  As I remember it, one day he explained to our class that some of his advanced students, during office hours, had offhandedly remarked that they thought geometry was easy, based on their high school experiences.

"Really?" he asked them.  He then wrote a geometry problem on the board and asked the students to solve it.  They couldn't, and gave up after a while.  "That's okay," he told them, "nobody else has ever solved this problem either.  And there are many more like it.  Still think geometry is easy?"

The point is that it doesn't make much sense to say a subject is hard or easy, and it makes even less sense to compare the ease or difficulty of one subject to another.  It all depends, really, on the problems you're talking about.  Problems that push against the boundaries of one's knowledge are hard.  Those well within the boundaries are easy, and of course there's a spectrum between the two.

So it's easy to do a simple Econ 101 comparative advantage problem, but, yes, hard to know why Haiti is poor.  Just like it's easy to find the hypotenuse of a right triangle, but not to solve whatever problem my professor put on the board, or understand string theory.

***

To be honest, I'm not completely sold on these thoughts, so comments welcome.  And I'll add that Falkenstein is one of my favorite bloggers and remains oddly underrated in the finance and economics blogosphere.  Check out his excellent recent posts on "sexonomics" and the necessity of emotions.

About this blog

I use this space mostly to write about personal interests, and I claim no expertise in the topics discussed here (or in anything at all, really).  These are likely to include economics and finance, media, politics, psychology and neuroscience, Cuba, mixed martial arts, and anything else I come across that knocks me on my ass. 

I'm a reporter for FT Alphaville, a group blog hosted by the Financial Times.  Click here if you'd like to see the archive of my posts there.

I'm also at LinkedIn and Twitter, and you can email me at cardiffgarcia [at] gmail [dot] com.  Don't be shy: I'm nice!