Dean Baker is one of the most interesting public intellectuals working in DC. His blog Beat the Press does a great job correcting misconceptions about economics generated by the MSM. He has a number of interesting insights on the relative competence of government and business. I just noticed that the PAER has [...]

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(with apologies to Susanna Hoffs and The Bangles)
Both the IPKat and William Patry reported recently that the Egyptian government is moving to enact legislation that would impose a royalty obligation on those who reproduce ancient Egyptian monuments.  In effect, the Eygptians want to copyright the pyramids.

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Three news notes have more in common than meets the eye:
Back in November, the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture drew attention (and criticism) for banning “hormone free” labels on milk sold in the Commonwealth.  The theory is that suppressing information prevents consumer confusion; Rebecca Tushnet has a good critique, and some good links, here.  Today brings related [...]

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Ah lists. We all know that the end of the year brings a flood of top 10, 50, 100 lists. And although many of them are vapid forays into what one person thinks matters right now as opposed to being a sign of what will endure, the advantage of the lists is that one can [...]

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Popular Mechanics has a fun piece about a car company called Aptera. It looks cool and is made here in the U.S.A. In fact it is made up the road from me in Carlsbad, CA. The hybrd prototype will cost $30K according to the company. It can get a claimed 300 mpg. The available all [...]

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While scientists are pioneering exciting new modes of cooperation, humanities scholars are increasingly tripped up by an archaic copyright system. Great schools of the recent past may be doomed to an ownership pattern fractionated enough to frustrate even the most persistent assembler. Mark Bauerlein describes one editor’s struggle to put together an [...]

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The Chron reports on the “International Genetically Engineered Machine Competition, known as iGEM[, which features teams of college students trying to] figure out whether biological organisms and devices can be built from a collection of standard, off-the-shelf parts, just as someone might build a kit plane or car.” One team made “BactoBlood,” which is [...]

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Cory Doctorow brings word of this fascinating result in an Antiguan trade case:
Antigua has won the right to pirate $21 million worth of US copyrights in the World Trade Court, because the US violated the World Trade Organization agreement when it banned Antiguan Internet casinos.
There will be some fascinating valuation and choice of law [...]

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The Times today reports on the latest version of an old theme: 
Silicon Valley, the wellspring of the digital technologies fueling globalization, is itself a collection of remarkably local clusters based on industry niches, skills, school ties, traffic patterns, ethnic groups and even weekend sports teams.
“Here, we have microclimates for wines and microclimates for companies,” said [...]

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Every four years, the national media re-discover the Iowa caucus.  The countdown to the current version has begun in earnest (the caucus will take place on January 3), and it’s happening again.
It’s not only the media, of course.  At roughly caucus-minus-3o days, as they do every four years since Carter/Kennedy in 1980, college students and well-intentioned [...]

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Three recent MSM stories about Facebook caught my eye recently:
“About Facebook! Forward March!” in the Washington Post, a not particularly serious look at how an academic discipline is emerging around the study of online social networks. 
“On Facebook, Scholars Link Up With Data” in the New York Times, a much better look at the emerging study [...]

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George Mitchell’s recent report on performance enhancing drugs in baseball identified many players as users of various substances, including steroids and human growth hormone. Of those identified, Yankee ace Andy Pettitte is perhaps the most prominent to confirm his use of such substances and give his side of the story. In a nutshell, [...]

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Scott Greenfield and Jeff Harrison offer a critical take on the 72,000 law review articles generated over the past 10 years. Greenfield says that “it’s a shame to waste all these fine minds on writing articles that no one will read, [especially] the ‘irreducibly, immitigably, irrelevant’ articles.”
I’m open to critiques of information overload, but [...]

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I was recently reading Prof. Annemarie Bridy’s article on apotemnophilia–a “desperate[] desire[] [of able-bodied individuals] to live as amputees” because they are “unable, despite considerable efforts, to reconcile themselves psychologically to living with the bodies with which they were born.” (Bridy, Confounding Extremities, 32 J. Law, Med., and Ethics 148 (2004). The condition [...]

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Like several other folks who blog, I went up to Yale’s Reputation Economies conference last weekend. Plenty of others have offered thoughts about the conference (including Frank here). Eric Goldman has his own thoughts and a good list of links to other blogs and Rebecca Tushnet very helpfully posted panel-by-panel summaries.
It was an [...]

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The Amazon reviews of Tuscan Whole Milk are almost uniformly frivolous, and fun. Here’s a sample:
On the nose this milk is exceptionally elegant. Dominant floral notes (mint and white flowers) mingle with hints of fresh fruit (citrus fruits, fresh almonds). As it undergoes aeration, riper notes of vanilla and nougat come to the fore, [...]

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Al Gore and Rajendra Pachauri, the head of and representing the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, accepted the Nobel Peace Prize for their work on climate change. Yes, it is an important issue. Here are Gore’s speech and Pauchari’s speech on behalf of the IPCC. Gore pulled out the stops and invoked Churchill and Hitler. [...]

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Silicon Valley entrepreneur Auren Hoffman gave an engaging presentation at the Yale Conference on reputation in cyberspace this morning. Here are some points from his position paper:
1. You should know more about yourself than anyone else knows about you.
Consumers should have the right to find out what data is being collected about them. [...]

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Many have noted that cable networks produce some of the better if not the best shows on television of late. The Sopranos arguably started this trend but other shows such as The Larry Sanders Show and Dream On opened the way for more creative shows. Recently Battlestar Galactica and The Wire (possibly the best show [...]

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I’ll be trying to comment on a conference I’m attending today on “reputation economies in cyberspace.” Here’s an overview from the conference website:
Reputation, which plays a key role in almost any economic or social system, is a fundamental, but not well understood, aspect of online business transactions, peer production of information and knowledge, [...]

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