New Scientist: Europe’s worst ever floods linked to poor land management:

Engineers have channelled all the major rivers that flooded this month – draining wetlands, straightening meanders and cutting them off from their flood plains with high banks.

The aim was to protect surrounding land from floods and send the water down to the sea as fast as possible. But instead it has tended to create massive and comparatively sudden surges of water down the rivers, where in the past the water would have been delayed for days or even weeks as it meandered across the river’s natural flood plain.

Oh dear, a genuine public goods problem. I suppose cities downstream could contract with owners of land in the floodplains upstream, but that just transfers the free rider problem.

James Lileks says several right things about the WTC.

It’s not cowardice to suggest that there might be difficulty renting the upper floors of two 110 story towers; I can imagine myself as someone looking for office space, standing in the exact same spot in the sky the walls of the WTC enclosed before, feeling naked, and wondering whether this just wasn’t proving some point that didn’t need proving.

. . .

It’s not that people hated Modernism – they hated seeing good old buildings fall to the reaper’s scythe, replaced by ugly tall graceless slabs, again, and again, and again. Modernism wore out its welcome long ago. Modernism had no time for people. People returned the favor.

Steven den Beste, in “An act of faith”, puts words in the mouth of an anonymous blogger:

. . . I, myself, do not admit to holding those opinions to those around me because I’m afraid of the consequences. But I believe that American voters should do what I say, not what I do, and they should publicly embrace the opinions that I myself fear to admit to in my own name.
They should be courageous and take chances based on my writings, even though I’m not willing to. They should risk social censure, even though I do not.

I haven’t read the blog in question, so I won’t comment on it in specific; but —you knew a ‘but’ was coming, didn’t you?— but it seems to me not unreasonable to say: “Here are some things I wish someone would do, and I hope to persuade you that they are good ideas. I am unwilling or unable to do them myself; but maybe my constraints do not apply to you. Maybe you can see a way to do whatever-it-is without the same risk that holds me back.”

Maybe only an underachiever would think of that.

Larry Niven wrote, somewhere or other, that if you live long enough you’re bound to get rich at least once. It occurs to me just now that, if you live long enough under an immortal dictatorship, sooner or later you’re bound to be dragged away by the secret police; whereas if life is short anyway you’re likely to die in bed if you keep your head down. Perhaps that is part of what Kim Stanley Robinson meant when he wrote in Icehenge that longevity raises the political stakes.

Saw a union picket today with a sign saying Catbert Corporation is Enron II. If you thought your employer was a house of cards, would you spend your time agitating to increase its labor costs, or look for a new job?

Tuesday 7/30: I’m tempted to join in with a sign saying “Honk if you love noise pollution”. (And my best earplugs.)

New Book Uses Statistical Methods to Analyze Avant-Garde Art

The patterns emerging from Mr. Galenson’s crunched numbers suggested that the careers of avant-garde artists tended to fall into two categories, embodying distinct kinds of innovation.

Some painters developed new techniques over a long period of experimentation, often through painstaking trial and error. Prime examples are Paul Cézanne and Mark Rothko. By contrast, Mr. Galenson found that other artists tended to have one or more creative breakthroughs that he calls “conceptual”: a sudden, radical retooling of what or how they paint. The most dramatic example would be Pablo Picasso, who ran through a series of radically distinct and original visual idioms – each of which seemed to emerge full-blown, as though the idea had taken shape in his head and simply needed to be executed. . . .

With experimentalists, says Mr. Galenson, the later canvases tend to be the most valuable, both on the art market and in the judgment of artists and historians. In contrast, conceptual breakthroughs usually came early in artists’ careers. The reputation of their later work tends to fall off drastically over time. . . .

(Link from John Hull on the Armchair Economists mailing list.)

Steven E. Landsburg writes in Slate of all places:

Either a) the justices – having concluded that paying compensation would transform routine government activity into “a luxury few governments could afford” – are prepared to draw the logical conclusion that routine government activity is not worth the cost, and therefore local governments should for the most part be out of business; or b) the justices are incapable of employing enough elementary logic and economic analysis to understand the implications of their own opinion.