Like honeydew or a fine mist

[Via Dropular]

Why? at the Loft

I saw Why? at the Loft last night. Alopecia was one of my favorite albums from 2008 – one of those that seems okay at first, you know, a couple of catchy songs but nothing special. Then you listen to it a few more times and there’s more and more there, with lyrics that won’t leave your head. It was kind of a strange concert in that it started about 11:30 PM and had no opening band. Who’s ever heard of a rock concert with no opening band? The concert had more than the normal share of drunken assholes, which kind of killed some of the mood for me. Other than that it was a pretty decent concert.

Anyway, Ezra Furman and the Harpoons are playing tonight, but I’m too worn out by the week to go see them. The one song I have by them is catchy and amusing. Listen away…

Why? – The Vowels Pt. 2 [mediafire]
Why? – The Hollows [mediafire]
Ezra Furman and the Harpoons – Take Off Your Sunglasses (live) [mediafire]

Academia, the standard by which very little is set

Ezster Hargittai of Crooked Timber has a new “advice” column for those looking to eventually get tenure. A lot of it is fairly obvious – try to network, be prepared, etc etc – but it’s also good to remember. One of the benefits of writing things down is that it standardizes and helps reinforce learning. So remember this advice, thou that wishes to become a tenured professor!

Too often I have had people ask me for advice on how to approach a situation too late in the process. For example, the year you are on the job market is not the right time to start wondering about how to make yourself a competitive candidate. Similarly, the year you are coming up for tenure is too late for plans that will help maximize your chances of a successful tenure and promotion review. The relevant strategies often take years of investment and work…

(Image from williac)

The perfect egg

I just got back from Chicago, so I have a lot to catch up on. I didn’t realize the dining scene in Chicago was so great – might I recommend The Gage or Lao Szechuan/Shanghai for anyone who’s there?

On the topic of food, here’s an article with the best type of cooking advice one can get. It goes step-by-step experimenting and explaining how temperature, time, etc affect boiling an egg. Learn how to make the perfect boiled egg here.

Like Banksy, only totally different

This is BLU. I’ve seen people compare him to Banksy, but the only similarity is that they’re both graffiti-ish artists. Banksy is political, BLU is a better artist. See tons more photos here.

Fifty years of space exploration, and still no Lunar City!

This is a pretty sweet graphic of every space mission from the last fifty years. It’s both unexciting and impressive. Unexciting because, really, where are the martian cities? And the space colonies orbiting Jupiter? But impressive because, well, look at it! We’ve gone to Jupiter and Saturn! We’ve gone to Mars and Venus tons of times! Compared to anything we do on Earth, the scale is mind-boggling.

Dance, sifaka, dance!

I learned today that there is a lemur, the Sifaka, that dances, only to then learn that that’s not true. Apparently they just can’t walk on the ground very well, so they hop around sideways in what looks like a ‘dance’. What a sad day. Watch some videos of Sifaka Dancing, or just be informed by the video above.

Metronomy + Fool’s Gold

I went and saw Metronomy last Thursday at the Loft. The Loft is a pretty cool venue; it’s part of the newly built extension to the UCSD student union. It’s cozy and intimate, especially because UCSD undergrads are pretty lame about going to see musicians (Colin Meloy played a free outdoor show last spring that must’ve attracted maybe a hundred people max…on a campus of 25,000). The Loft has the added benefit of having shows that are $5 (or pay what you can). Cheap!

Anyway, Metronomy was pretty good live. I’d say they come across much better live than they do on headphones – their music is pretty danceable, and bits that are boring on headphones are a lot of fun live. Their opener was Fool’s Gold which was kind of the opposite: aside from one song, they’re the type of band that I’d love to sit at a bar and listen to, but not really what I want to see before a band like Metronomy. They’re too chill.

Now, here’s a good track from each band to enjoy.

Metronomy – Not Made For Love [mediafire]
Fool’s Gold – Surprise Hotel [mediafire]

Modest Mouse are on a roll…literally.

Modest Mouse are on a roll, visually speaking. Really great music videos. Not the world’s biggest fan of their latest CD, but I like that they’re kind of getting back to their old pre-Good News sound.

Do you read from the heavenly book?

In English we say, “It’s all greek to me” when we don’t understand what someone is saying. Apparently, tons of other languages have that saying but for different languages. In Yiddish, it’s all Aramaic. The Korean equivalent is Hebrew. Tons of languages point to the Chinese as the epitomy of undecipherability. Here’s a flow-chart describing how they’re all connected. I like that everyone flows to the Chinese – who flow to the Heavenly script (our Chinese postdoc said the equivalent is “reading from the Heavenly book”).

New technology is boring, let’s go retro

(luisaguirre)

I’ve been noticing that a lot of the ‘hip’ photography in the past couple years has been retro film style. Now that digital SLRs are ubiquitous, they’re boring (to the arterati, or, er, whatever you call them). I guess it’s similar to the vinyl vs. CD divide. I think you get a lot of interesting colors out of the analog process. Here’s a flickr photo pool which has some pretty cool film photos, along with a lot of bad ones. Watch out for the hipster-favorite polaroids!

We have fun and megapixels bore the shit out of us

These things are all the same

A cool visualization of how far one is from McDonalds that’s been making the rounds lately. Of course, everywhere this is posted, people bemoan how terrible America is, how sad it is that McDonalds is everywhere, etc etc. But really, isn’t this just an example of urbanization? Below are some other maps that do not show geological or political phenomena (ie, ocean borders, lakes, etc) but still give the same map of the US. I’m sure there are others of the US/world out there…but I couldn’t find them.

A new birthday will cost you $10.28

Freakonomics has really popularized the idea of ‘natural experiments’ that economists can use to examine social questions. By using fancy econometric methods, they can give simple answers to complicated questions. I’ve always been dubious of this; it’s really a lot of correlational work, and as we always say, correlation is not causation! Case in point, one of the underlying assumptions of some of this work – that your month of birth is independent of income – is in fact wrong. Of course, that doesn’t mean the results are wrong (though the p value certainly is). It just means that one needs to be very careful when evaluating these things. But can I say what a cool finding this is?

Justin Nelson

Justin Nelson is an artist out of Tampa. His drawings are pretty amazing and not at all strange.

Macroeconomists, again

Unsurprisingly, a lot of people are interested in rebutting Paul Krugman’s essay in the NYT magazine, which I discussed earlier. There are two rebuttals in particular which I think are of note: David Levine’s and Narayana Kocherlakota’s.

Kocherlakota’s is more intellectually interesting, or at least useful. He lists all the young tenured faculty at the top fifteen economics departments in the US, and then gives ten conclusions about them. They are:

1. Macroneconomists don’t ignore heterogeneity
2. Macroeconomists don’t ignore frictions
3. Macroeconomic modeling doesn’t ignore bounded rationality
4. Macroeconomic models do incorporate a role for government interventions
5. Macroeconomists use both calibration and econometrics
6. There is no freshwater/saltwater divide – now
7. These researchers have been much more interested in the consequences of shocks than their sources
8. The modeling of financial markets and banks in macroeconomic models is stark
9. Macroeconomics is mostly math and little talk
10. The macro-principles textbooks don’t represent our field well

I would say that most of these are not the impression one would get from the Krugman’s article. Indeed, I can’t believe this whole freshwater/saltwater divide thing is being brought up as so important. Chicago is where some of the most important behavioral research is being done – not a very “freshwater” thing to do.

Levine’s article, on the other hand, is illuminating for what I think is being gotten wrong about the whole argument. Yes, he was wrong or misleading about a lot of things that macroeconomics is doing wrong. But the important point of the article is the institutional biases against that kind of economics being brought into policy debates. Now I have no idea whether that is true or not: but I don’t see any articles arguing against that point. It’s great to say that you have much better models than Krugman suggests – but why aren’t they being used in policy discussions? (Answer: probably because they’re harder to talk about.) I think this goes to point number 7 above, too. I also think there’s a difference in how academic economists see themselves and how the rest of the world sees them – which Levine alludes to – in that academic economists are interested in how the economy functions while the public wants them to be predicting rare events (major recessions).

On a slightly different topic, Matt Yglesias has a strange post against micro foundations in macroeconomics, and I gather he gets the idea from here. He first brings up the ‘metaphysical issue about whether or not it’s the case that macroeconomic propositions are ultimately reducible to microeconomic phenomena’, which is valid but beside the point. Obviously it would be nice to know but I fail to see how one can conclude that without doing the research in the first place. Further, if one cannot predict macro phenomena from micro phenomena, it says one or the other theory is wrong. But that’s great information to know, so I don’t see why there would be hostility to studying it.

He then asks the ‘methodological question about whether it really makes sense to demand that macroeconomists produce microfoundations for their theories’ which is ill-informed. Not every macroeconomist produces microfoundations. Instead, those searching for a rigorous basis to macroeconomics try to do this while those content with modeling qualitative macro phenomena do that! And that’s what they do in plenty of other fields too, and it’s very successful. The rest of his post is fairly misinformed, too, so I won’t say anything more about it. To get a decent rebuttal, one should read this article by Dasgupta from 1996 from page 13 on (“critiques of modern economics”). [Note to self: interesting note about herd behavior in citation 36).

[Update: A list.]