Gary Becker and Richard Posner have a blog (any day now)

Mike Linksvayer attended a lecture on “Changes in the Disparities in Chronic Diseases During the Course of the Twentieth Century”.

Perry Metzger shares a report (pdf) on infrastructure in Somalia. (Later: Michael Tennant comments on it at Strike The Root.)

Mike also has a map showing the potential partition of Ukraine. He wraps up:

It’s time to stop thinking of nation states as sacred and inviolable entities that must be held together with violence in opposition to the wishes of inhabitants, [rather than] as service providers that must peacefully change and differentiate to best meet the needs of inhabitants.
. . . .
So long as freedom to live and work in all parts of the formerly unified state is maintained for all citizens of the smaller states, there need be no negatives for individual citizens, apart from a loss of irrational nationalistic feeling for the unified state, which will eventually transfer to the smaller states in those with the need for such feelings. I’d be happy to see the U.S. split into fifty separate countries under such terms.

(afterthought 2009) I would hope that most citizens keep an attachment to the wider region’s culture, rather than to the successor state.

Say, is the number of telephone lines dedicated to modems declining, as traffic moves to broadband? NANPA might know: it affects how soon more areas will need to be split or overlain.

The Campaign for Dark Skies collects evidence that brighter lights do not deter crime. (Cited by Bruce Schneier; link updated 2006.)

quoth Paul Graham:

But VCs are mistaken to look for the next Microsoft, because no startup can be the next Microsoft unless some other company is prepared to bend over at just the right moment and be the next IBM.

Tehee. In the same essay:

Because you can’t tell a great hacker except by working with him, hackers themselves can’t tell how good they are. This is true to a degree in most fields. I’ve found that people who are great at something are not so much convinced of their own greatness as mystified at why everyone else seems so incompetent. The people I’ve met who do great work rarely think that they’re doing great work. They generally feel that they’re stupid and lazy, that their brain only works properly one day out of ten, and that it’s only a matter of time until they’re found out.

Why, that’s just how I feel! Do you suppose . . . ?

(Perry Metzger pointed me to Graham’s essays.)

Jim Henley on Spider-Man 2:

We are fortunate that genuine equality is impossible because it would be the social analog of entropy [ . . . ] ‘heat death’ of the social universe.

Educated Guesswork relays graphs – purporting to be from the ONDCP, no less – showing that the retail prices of heroin, cocaïne and methamphetamine (as adjusted for purity as well as currency inflation) declined fairly steadily between 1981 and 2001, while THC (marijuana) peaked in 1991 and has since returned to near its 1981 price.

Remind me again, is the objective of the DEA to make drugs more or less available?