Adventures in Onionism

Multiple Hearst papers are reporting on the Boy Scouts selling their land (often donated to them, often strictly deeded for conservation and recreation) to be logged and developed. The first article in the series, about logging. One of today's articles from the Chron, about development (both with links on the left side to many of the stories from the series). Map of reported abuses. BSA response.

Given my research idea (and my film snobbery), this article about the box office success of Paul Blart: Mall Cop is pretty interesting. This poll is the best poll ever. If I were a big nerd, I'd tell you that if you assume there's exactly a 50% chance that international voters choose heads, then the odds of 1857 of the 3439 international voters choosing heads are exactly 3439!/(1857!1582!)*.5^1857*.5^1582. If were an even bigger nerd I'd simplify that expression for you using Matlab, because it seems it would take me more than 30 seconds to figure out how to get google, Excel, or Stata to crunch numbers that large/small for me. Oh well.

I'm thinking that performance doesn't fall off after an award in baseball. Comparing MVP's and Rookies of the Year to their runners up (and multiple runners up) the winners are still better after a few years. In fact, I think I'm seeing that they get more better. So I had a thought. Perhaps I'm looking at the wrong type of award, and perhaps I need to look at getting awarded a new free-agent contract, although I'd be surprised if this hasn't been done before. There's lots of examples of people sucking after landing a big contract (Zito). I think this would help me answer the question "how is this economics?" a lot better. I'm looking at performance after awards in general, and perhaps in "award" means something different in different contexts. As for movies (why are there so many R-rated movies when they're less profitable?), I haven't made much progress here (I got some revenue data, but I'm not to the point whe...

Facebook is killing personal blogging, but just for (six months ago) old time's sake, here are some links. In honor of my not liking U2's new single very much, here's a belated link to a review of Chinese Democracy by the person most qualified to write such a review, Chuck Klosterman, my hipster idol. The true story of a lobotomy performed on a 12-year old at the insistence of his (evil?) step-mom. I learned about this from the NPR show To the Best of Our Knowledge , which usually isn't so depressing. My buddy Schnapp turned me on to a great blog about transit and smart land use in the Washington DC area called Greater Greater Washington . I really like this post about the capability of transit as exemplified by inauguration day. I guess transbayblog.com is sort of the equivalent for the bay area, but posts there don't seem to be quite as frequent. Speaking of transit, it is getting the shaft in the proposed stimulus package. TPM says so, and GGW says so,...

As is my wont, I went to Truckee for the weekend. First, this might have been a one-time glitch, but using the Amtrak MasterCard to get Amtrak Rewards points resulted in a rate of return much higher than the typical 1% from other cards. Just an FYI. More importantly, I went snowshoeing. Scratching my head in Coldcreek Canyon On the way up towards the ridge between Anderson Peak and Mt. Lincoln Just underneath the ridge The Benson Hut Looking west towards Royal Gorge, the American River, and even the coastal range Sure, this is a windswept ridge, but there really is a large drought. The only tree I saw all day that hadn't phlumfed yet Heading down Mt. Judah towards the train tracks and Donner Lake. Sproul Plaza during the inauguration. The cheers for "data and statistics," "science," "universities," and "non-believers" were amazing. Finally, I nabbed this Getty image from WaPo, just because it's awesome how Blofeldian/Strangeloveian ...

How many other econ grad students had the thought "reg enlistment recession gibill combat_deaths afqt_requirements, robust" after reading this NYT article? OK, maybe some of the terms should be in logs. Either way, very interesting, and probably of more importance than my other sports/movie ideas. (For non-Stata geeks, this is the code to run a regression, i.e., fit a line through points, but in multiple dimensions, to find the correlation between all those things and enlistment.)

Friends from ALDHA-West alerted me to the existence of a bill currently before the floor of the Senate, S22, the Omnibus Public Land Management Act of 2009, which would designate a bunch of new areas as wilderness, designate several trails as National Historic/Scenic Trails, and generally be totally awesome. According to Congress Matters it passed a cloture vote a few hours ago so should be up for a real vote soon. Read the full text on Thomas . Follow the bill's status on OpenCongress . Use the American Hiking Society's link to tell your Senatorial peeps to vote for it. Do any hiker friends know anything about the New England National Scenic Trail ? I'd never heard of it before just now.