Something's amiss in Nascar Nation

IQ is a hard thing to measure, but I think the people who made this ad used a test based on the recitation of Harry Gant sponsors, or took an especially bad sample. The only explanation I see is that they happened to survey a group of Dartmouth students when they were at Loudon, Berkeley and Stanford students at Sears Point, Northwestern and Chicago at Chicagoland, and the rest were Elliott Sadler fans like myself.

Markets fail when there are information and access asymmetries

If you give your nice clothes to a needy person, you are wasting money. Logically, you are almost guaranteed to reach a suboptimal net benefit. Poor people need other stuff first. I'm sure there is something snarky to be said about the "free market" candidate not knowing any better, but I'm feeling more beaten than witty right now. OK, I'll try: As a real American, Sarah Palin should know that the logical process is to auction the clothes the public at least in part bought for her, then use the proceeds to fund abstinence only education. Silly.

I wish I could write prettier

Popular society's pretty good at picking up on tragic brilliance a bit late, and I'm not well equipped to find these people ahead of time. The only artists I can think of that I was aware of before their tragic ends are Kurt Cobain (because of my older sister) and Hunter Thompson (because of Johnny Depp, again because of my older sister) -- and they were both on a flatter part of their coolness trajectories when I latched on.

David Foster Wallace is now dead as well, and that is a shame because he wrote the one the best things I've ever read. I read it because slate told me to. Here is my favorite passage:

As I see it, it probably really is good for the soul to be a tourist, even if it’s only once in a while. Not good for the soul in a refreshing or enlivening way, though, but rather in a grim, steely-eyed, let’s-look-honestly-at-the-facts-and-find-some-way-to-deal-with-them way. My personal experience has not been that traveling around the country is broadening or relaxing, or that radical changes in place and context have a salutary effect, but rather that intranational tourism is radically constricting, and humbling in the hardest way—hostile to my fantasy of being a real individual, of living somehow outside and above it all. (Coming up is the part that my companions find especially unhappy and repellent, a sure way to spoil the fun of vacation travel:) To be a mass tourist, for me, is to become a pure late-date American: alien, ignorant, greedy for something you cannot ever have, disappointed in a way you can never admit. It is to spoil, by way of sheer ontology, the very unspoiledness you are there to experience. It is to impose yourself on places that in all noneconomic ways would be better, realer, without you. It is, in lines and gridlock and transaction after transaction, to confront a dimension of yourself that is as inescapable as it is painful:

As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing.

I like that the "insect on a dead thing" line comes in the final line of the sixth footnote to the article. It seems to me like my favorite authors, like Thompson and Hemingway, built chapters, if not compounds in Aspen, around lines like that. I would probably have a t-shirt made explicitly quoting myself if I could muster such a classy bit of text.

Now that he's dead, reading his shorter pieces brings about the same type of enjoyment I found listening to music there would be no more of like Queen and Zeppelin... oh wait.

Sarah Palin uses many words to say few things

Sarah Palin was interviewed by Charlie Gibson, and it aired tonight:

• A nucyooler Iran is a real threat to the security of this country's people.

Supposedly many former southern politicians pronounced nuclear as nucyooler and it is included in Merriam-Webster. It is a signal though, and I'm still scared.

• You can see Russia from Alaska

You can see Bel Air from UCLA, but that hasn't made me an expert in exorbitant wealth... yet.

• McCain/Palin is for reformation of federal government
• A person with decades of Washington experience is part of the old machine

This summer I read a really cool article by Peter Atkins in this book about how time might seem to occur much faster in greater gravity, so it might be that the McCain-Palin campaign is indeed in its own spacetime. If this is the case, it could explain how such a notion differentiates McCain from Biden. It would also explain why McCain is so squat.

• She quoted Abe Lincoln's statement that war may be carrying out God's will without attribution

I see a couple problems there. First, It is a very solid and graceful thought that the defeat of slavery was a clear correction of an ungodly practice. The same argument is harder to buy about the eradication of "Islamic extremists" from Iraq when it might be that our military presence there brought more of them than there were to begin with. If the statement was specifically about Afghanistan, I'd buy it. Second, the softish interrogative technique used by Charlie Gibson only led Palin to point out that Lincoln, and she herself (maybe after thinking through her previous statement), didn't presume to know God's will (but could seemingly act based on a principled understanding of it) -- not that it isn't clear that the President of a country hosting a bunch of different definitions of God(s) can say things like that to begin with. She certainly didn't use such nuance when she said referenced the war as God's will (she also saw the Alaska pipeline as God's will). So, I presume that she believed that God's will was being carried out in Iraq -- but wasn't sure after introspection. That seems like some progress from the outgoing bullheadedness, but, generally, I hope that the leader of our country will leave the hyperbolic missions from God to people who have a clearly defined enemy.

The audacity of mope

Washington is a great place to spend the summer. There is more history in the offices I get to walk through each day than can fit into one person's mind, and the city is full of smart and interesting people. An outgoing person could cull a lifetime of stories from the museums and monuments, or sitting in on hearings and briefings, and maybe randomly opening meeting room doors here and there. I, myself, started the summer on a hot streak. I am now up to date on Krakauer and Roth, but since the majority of my work responsibilities here involve reading silly politician language, my desire to finish the last 1300 or so pages of the two Neal Stephenson books I've started has died off. I'm trying to write these posts as a way of memorializing the next few months of my life before I start working toward buying a large SUV. I get really annoyed at myself when I read what I've written though, so this is almost certainly going to die pretty quickly. So now I spend my idle time wandering the spectacular and non-scary parts of the city, and even that has become kind of tedious.
Midway into my 11th week, I'm used to the novelty of being an intern in DC. My time with people who are either very politically inclined or all too wary of the politically inclined has also weakened my ability to buy into the moment's powerful political rhetoric, so at least I don't feel that I'm suffering without access to the DNC.
I have enjoyed the work here, and feel smarter for having been here, but the place I've rented in DC has no television, and the open wifi connections I can typically poach from my couch lack the strength to consistently stream video. Beyond that, I somehow erased my computer trying to install Ubuntu (my fault, not Linux's), so I lost all of the movies and itunes music I'd built up over the three week periods following the quarterly disbursement of my grad school financial aid. That leaves me with few options for entertainment after work, so I walk around. I also buy gallon jugs of water from the 7-11 a few blocks away a couple times a week.

Definition

The union of sets Gregory and Megalodon defines the subset Y, and can be expressed as:

Y = Gregory ∪ Megalodon

When considering the moment at which blog titles switch sources in hybridizing words, this set can contain multiple values, and thus remains a set. A unique entity, i, is then a single location in this subset, ie. this blog, which can similarly be expressed as:

Yi = {this blog}

Without the benefit of subscripts, this may be interpreted as the professional basketball player and Olympic pushover who will certainly steal time from a UConn Husky. This is not intended. When you read this, you should think of an observant shark with enormous teeth and nothing else.

The most baller bicycle possible?

Cadillac is trying to push Escalades for $5k under sticker while the world waits on pins and needles for the hybrid version with big goofy "this is how i save the world rolling on 22s" stickers across the sides of the truck.

People are probably holding off on buying another big SUV because they're waiting for versions with 50% better fuel mileage, right? GM commits one of my favorite math frauds by playing up a percentage gain from a small denominator... well I'm going to exercise 100% more than I did last week in honor of GM's feat. That's right, I'm soiling two pairs of running shorts by next Saturday.

Rather than only mocking progress, I hope this blog will also enlighten discussions of economic and environmental sustainability. In this vein, I offer an alternative with infinitely better gas mileage, also from Cadillac: $1500 worth of bike on sale for $3100. The 'sclade hybrid can't touch a Caddy that rocks 27s straight from the dealer.