On a private mailing list someone wrote:
having just seen the 1951 Britisher version of the Dickens Christmas Carol, it struck me that free marketeers should really live in Dickensian England and try work their way out from the bottom.
I thought of writing a rant about Dickens’s sins, but a better approach presented itself:
FYI
1838: Oliver Twist
1843: A Christmas Carol
1846: repeal of the Corn Laws — commonly cited as the first triumph of the free trade movement
Tyler Cowen (cited by Travis) quotes a NYT article:
. . . participants [at a retreat for autistics] . . . can wear color-coded badges that indicate whether they are willing to be approached for conversation.
and remarks:
I will be very happy if this ever becomes socially acceptable practice for non-autistics . . .
When I had a cubicle to call my own, I would sometimes put up a little sign:
CAUTION
TEMPORARY ACUTE SURLINESS ZONE
No one ever gave me grief about it, and I can’t recall that anyone even asked what it meant; I guess they assumed I was busy.
Doctor Matrix’s little helpers
Ed Pegg writes:
I’d like to do a “behind the scenes” look at Mathematical Games for an article. Martin [Gardner] did lots, but he avidly used a lot of help from hundreds of people. I’d like to write an article about the background help. If you ever assisted in one of Martin’s columns, I’d like to hear from you — a note about what you did. I’ll use these notes in my article.
A link from Pegg leads indirectly to a collection of weird and wonderful algorithmic paintings.
How did the medical marijuana case now before the Supreme Court come to be called Ashcroft v Raich? I gather that it began life as a criminal case, which would normally be titled US v Raich. Or it could be a civil suit seeking an injunction against certain practices of the DoJ, in which case it might be titled Raich v Ashcroft.
Are appeals often renamed? Is there a rule?
Dec.23: Todd Larason comes through, citing the Raich camp’s website:
It began as Raich et al. vs Ashcroft et al. — Raich is suing Ashcroft, seeking an injuction preventing Ashcroft & others from doing certain things; it isn’t an appeal of a criminal case as US v. Lopez was.
Ashcroft filed the petition for certiorari, so at the supreme court level he’s the petitioner, and it turned from Raich v. Ashcroft to Ashcroft v. Raich.
[Upton] Sinclair wrote The Jungle [1906] to ignite a socialist movement on behalf of America’s workers. He did not even pretend to have actually witnessed or verified the horrendous conditions he ascribed to Chicago packing houses. Instead, he relied heavily on both his own imagination and hearsay. Indeed, a congressional investigation at the time found little substance in Sinclair’s allegations.
Ernest C. Pasour: We Can Do Better than Government Inspection of Meat (The Freeman, May 1998)