Economics

Here’s The Inevitable Article

…on “price gouging” (otherwise known as the law of supply and demand) in the wake of Hurricane Charley. The Mises Institute preemptively responded to this, but it never slows down the economic ignoramuses at the New York Times:

Janet Snyder, a pharmacy technician in Cape Coral, said several men in two pickup trucks spotted her roof damage and offered to lay down a temporary covering of plastic sheeting. They wanted $600, about four times what she figured was the right price, based on 15 rolls of plastic that usually sell for $10 each.

OK, so Janet is clearly no business major, but how dumb is the reporter to pass this on without comment? She seems to think that the men’s labor should be free, and that she should only have to pay for materials. In the real world, even with no hurricane, she wouldn’t get free labor. She certainly can’t expect it when there is so much to be done.

Economics

Here’s The Inevitable Article

…on “price gouging” (otherwise known as the law of supply and demand) in the wake of Hurricane Charley. The Mises Institute preemptively responded to this, but it never slows down the economic ignoramuses at the New York Times:

Janet Snyder, a pharmacy technician in Cape Coral, said several men in two pickup trucks spotted her roof damage and offered to lay down a temporary covering of plastic sheeting. They wanted $600, about four times what she figured was the right price, based on 15 rolls of plastic that usually sell for $10 each.

OK, so Janet is clearly no business major, but how dumb is the reporter to pass this on without comment? She seems to think that the men’s labor should be free, and that she should only have to pay for materials. In the real world, even with no hurricane, she wouldn’t get free labor. She certainly can’t expect it when there is so much to be done.

General Science

Dynamic lab notebook

I’ve been mulling the idea of keeping my lab notes on my Mac for a while, and I’ve started moving in that direction. The problem with keeping notes on a computer rather than on paper is that the computer is far less flexible. It’s much more powerful, but it’s quite constrained by the need for exactly the right software. The major advantage of a computer over a lab notebook is that you can put in a whole lot more data, and interlink the data in ways that you just can’t with paper.

The ideal lab notebook software would combine some of the functionality of a blog with some of the functionality of a wiki. The blog function would be to simply keep a log of all entries, with timestamps. The entries would consist of text, images, and tables of data. The wiki function would integrate the linear collection of entries from the blog to build up a coherent time-independent picture of the object under study. The wiki would include both information about the current state of the experiment and a set of tentative conclusions about the phenomenon under study, along with things like lists of references with comments.

Continue reading Dynamic lab notebook →

Political Commentary

Well, Now We Know

We now know why the Paper Formerly Known As The Paper of Record has waited so long to report on Senator Kerry’s Excellent Southeast Asia Adventure. They had to gather enough chaff to thoroughly obfuscate the issue. Reading this piece, it’s clear that the primary motive is not to report all the available facts, but to put up a solid phalanx against anyone standing in the way of John Effing Kerry becoming the next president. I’m sure that bloggers with much more time than I will dissect it line by disingenuous-and-one-sided line.

And so the media suck up to the Democrats, and associated decline in its credibility, continues.

[Update on Friday morn, and ignoring the brouhaha in the comments section]

The dissection begins. And Patterico lays off the LA Times momentarily to go after the Gray Lady as well:

The article accomplishes something that I would have thought impossible just two days ago. It makes the L.A. Times’s coverage of the Swift Boat Vets look (almost) like responsible journalism.

That’s gotta hurt.

Space

Flawed Premises

Thomas James mildly fisks a clueless space policy op ed.

By the way, I just got a complaint in the previous post that I’m doing too much politics, and not enough space stuff.

Maybe. I just don’t see that much going on in space right now worth commenting on, and if you browse through some of the space related blogs to the left, you’ll see that there’s not much activity there either (other than at the always-prolific Clark Lindsey’s site).

Maybe it’s just the dog days of August (and my continuing travails in getting the California house rented and finally getting to Florida), but I’m also getting a little burned out on space commentary. After almost three years of this, and a couple years of Fox News columns, I start to feel like I’m repeating myself. In addition, I just finished up a several-thousand word essay for The New Atlantis (in the mail to current subscribers, probably on line about the beginning of September, at which point I’ll put up a link to it), and I’m expanding it into a book, so I don’t have a lot of space energy remaining to blog about it unless something really topical pops up.

And I find the story of how the press is AWOL on Mr. Kerry’s tall tales, and clearly desperate to prop up his candidacy, the most fascinating thing going on right now.

Maybe Andrew can pick up the slack, but I suspect he’s busy as well.

[Evening Update, with thanks to Glenn for the link]

Per Bill Maron’s comment, I don’t think that space is an unimportant issue for this election. I think that, at least for those interested in space, it’s a very important one and an important election, and that Kerry would be a return to the stagnation of the nineties. But there are still over two months to the election, and most people aren’t really paying attention yet. To the degree that I’m going to invest much energy, mental or otherwise, in the subject, I think that it would be a better investment to do so in October rather than August.

Political Commentary

Another Kerry “Mistaken Recollection”?

Apparently, his journal isn’t consistent with the official story of one of his Purple Hearts. No biggie. He can just say he lied to his diary. After all, the press bought it during the Clinton administration (see Steiner, Josh).

No doubt this will be their strategy, since Drudge is reporting that, in desperation at what horrible (as in “incompetent”) liars both the candidate and his spokesmen to date are, the campaign wants to bring back the smooth Mike McCurry, whom the press all loved and were always willing–no, strike that–eager to believe.

I’m starting to think that “Unfit for Command” is likely to be viewed in the future as a much more reliable history of Kerry’s Vietnam activities than Brinkley’s hagiography.

[Thursday morning update]

Hugh Hewitt notes that Brinkley is AWOL:

As for historian Brinkley, he too is unavailable, even though the media wants him and such appearances could sell a lot of his books. His publisher must be wondering why Professor Brinkley is not accepting invitations to appear on cable or nationally-syndicated radio shows, which are the big wins for anyone peddling a book. (Believe me, I know about how books are sold these days, and Brinkley isn’t acting like any other author I have ever seen.) Going to the mattresses hasn’t worked for the past two weeks, and I don’t think it will work for the next two weeks. The story has legs until we get the run down on John Kerry, secret agent man in Cambodia.

Hugh also has some questions for the historian.

Political Commentary

Another Kerry “Mistaken Recollection”?

Apparently, his journal isn’t consistent with the official story of one of his Purple Hearts. No biggie. He can just say he lied to his diary. After all, the press bought it during the Clinton administration (see Steiner, Josh).

No doubt this will be their strategy, since Drudge is reporting that, in desperation at what horrible (as in “incompetent”) liars both the candidate and his spokesmen to date are, the campaign wants to bring back the smooth Mike McCurry, whom the press all loved and were always willing–no, strike that–eager to believe.

I’m starting to think that “Unfit for Command” is likely to be viewed in the future as a much more reliable history of Kerry’s Vietnam activities than Brinkley’s hagiography.

[Thursday morning update]

Hugh Hewitt notes that Brinkley is AWOL:

As for historian Brinkley, he too is unavailable, even though the media wants him and such appearances could sell a lot of his books. His publisher must be wondering why Professor Brinkley is not accepting invitations to appear on cable or nationally-syndicated radio shows, which are the big wins for anyone peddling a book. (Believe me, I know about how books are sold these days, and Brinkley isn’t acting like any other author I have ever seen.) Going to the mattresses hasn’t worked for the past two weeks, and I don’t think it will work for the next two weeks. The story has legs until we get the run down on John Kerry, secret agent man in Cambodia.

Hugh also has some questions for the historian.

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!