Adventures in Onionism

I will be volunteering at the C&O Canal 100 April 27-28, and I'll be running the Bear Mountain 50 -miler May 4. It feels weird to have signed up for a trail run with not just one but two corporate names in the title. Instead of being organized by a husband and wife team, or an ultra-runner who's a bartender at a ski resort, or a crazy junior high school basketball coach, my money's going to a publicly owned corporation. I've never run their race in the Headlands, but I've heard things both good (brings out strong competition) and bad (littering, a big zoo, not as pleasant a vibe as the usual trail race). I guess we'll see. Also, registration for Steamtown marathon opens tomorrow. Any takers?

More research on how research is a crock. Star Wars: The Empirics Strike Back , a working paper from the IZA website. Basically, they show the distribution of published p-values is funny-shaped, and what you'd expect if people were specification-shopping to get a barely significant p-value. You know, publication bias. [h/t WB Impact Blog]

Barkley was in the NYT . I'm bummed I didn't get in this year, but that's fine. It's just silly of me to have forgotten to mention my PhD in my application essay since that would have gotten me extra weighting and a greater probability, and the race is only getting more popular as the years go by. Oh well.

Brendan Leonard is a way better blogger than I am. You should be reading Semi-Rad if you don't already.

An empiricist making policy decisions instead of an ideologue? I know, I'm as surprised as you are, but that's apparently what Washington state got in the guy they picked to advise them on their experiment with legal weed . Economist Hulk on Twitter . Most of the expenses from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are yet to come. Let me say that again: Yet to Come .

I didn't even run enough last week to merit mentioning. A hiker buddy applying to grad school in econ visited, so we did some hiking, but I was pretty worn out with travel and lecture prep, so I only ran 20 miles, plus maybe 15-20 walking. Hopefully this week I'll get back on track. From my students' perspective, I'm clearly trying to cover too much in class, so maybe if I ease up on them I'll get a minute of spare time as a byproduct. Here's a not-horrible USA Today article on the dirtbag lifestyle, specifically retiring early. I certainly contemplate stuff like this, but I'd really like to talk to somebody who is, you know, old , who's done this. Billy Goat's the oldest hiker I know, and I think he's got some sort of pension to fall back on. Does anybody know an adventurer who lived the life who's now old and wishes they'd actually worked a little more so they could afford their meds? The platitude says that no one on their deathbed ...

I was an Emory University employee last year. My name doesn't have a suffix, so I left the box blank. I assume that whoever coded H&R Block's submissions to the state of Georgia linked middle initial output to suffix input. I dropped my middle and I'll see if that works. UPDATE: No, that did not work. H&R Block is going to refund it, however, and since they already let me calculate everything (and print it), I guess I win, assuming that Georgia can recognize a blank suffix when they see it.