Here are links to two very different, very good graphical presentations of information:
1) Personal Democracy Forum, net number of Meetup supporters forming offline groups and communities in support of the Democrats and Republicans.
2) History of Religious Geography in 90 seconds. No theology nor social history — just a nice set of spreading blobs showing the geographical spread of five major world religions.
Worth reading, Media Matters on its deliciously old-fashioned approach to news criticism.
At Media Matters, we go the extra mile and
actually read and watch the news reports we critique. It isn't quite as fast or easy as simply making things up, but we think it's worth it.
Via Lifehacker, a link to Verify Email Address.
If, for whatever reason, you need to verify someone's email address, try Verify-Email.org, a free email address verifier. Just enter in the email addy, click “verify”,and go. The format, domain, and user are all checked by actually connecting to the mail server to see if everything is kopasetic. Somewhat disconcerting, but sure to come in handy in some way.
Seems the like email equivalent of pinging a web site to see if it's there. I guess we need this now that so many sites block finger.
Lifehacker is a funny site. So much of what they say strikes me as obvious or irrelevant to my life; but then there's that very useful 5-10%. Then again, maybe I should aspire to that signal-to-noise ratio…
Strange item by one Shankar Vedantam in the Washington Post today, which apparently ran on page A03: When Immigration Goes Up, Prices Go Down.
Seeing that headline, I expected to read about the labor market. All other things being equal, more immigration means more workers, means more competition for jobs, means lower wages, which in turn may mean lower prices too.
But no. Not at all. Here's how it starts:
Last week, a gallon of gas at an Exxon station in the tony suburb of Bethesda cost $2.99.
At an Exxon station in the less affluent suburb of Wheaton, a gallon cost $2.63 — 36 cents less.
Both Exxon stations are located near a subway line that goes to downtown Washington. Both are in the same county: Montgomery.
Why would the same company charge you 14 percent more for an identical product in one location?
Because it can.
The article goes on to suggest that concentrations of immigrants lower prices. Yes, it's presented as cause and effect:
Immigration, economist Saul Lach recently found, plays a powerful role in holding down prices. For every 1 percent increase in the ratio of immigrants to natives, prices go down by about 0.5 percent, according to Lach's new study about the effects of 200,000 Jews immigrating to Israel from the former Soviet Union in 1990.
It may be that recent immigrants are poorer, and thus are cannier shoppers, and that this causes a downward pressure on prices. But note that the article itself gives as its major example the willingness of immigrants to drive out of their way for cheaper gas (which would suggest the effect might not in fact be localized).
Whatever the circumstances were in Israel, it seems passing strange to assume that direction of causality in Maryland when there's so much reason to suspect it works the other way: low prices attract immigrants more than immigrants cause low prices.
I would have thought that poor people tend to live in neighborhoods where property prices are lower because they can't afford the homes in expensive neighborhoods. And I would have thought that commodity prices like gasoline are lower in poor neighborhoods in part because fixed costs, like rent or property taxes, are lower.
A correlation, even a strong one, is not causation.
(And let's not even start on all the evidence that food prices are higher in very poor neighborhoods because low-cost chain stores won't open there.)
Erc Muller's new book “American Inquisition”: A New Study of the Inner Workings of the Japanese American Internment is being published today, and he'll be blogging about it all week at Is that Legal? and Prawfsblawg.
Here's a bit from the first post:
I'm happy to announce that Monday, October 15 is the official publication date of my new book “American Inquisition: The Hunt for Japanese American Disloyalty in World War II.” It's an account of the secret inner mechanisms of racism within the episode we call the Japanese American internment of World War II.
I ground the book in extensive new archival research in the records of the civilian and military agencies that passed judgment on the loyalties of American citizens of Japanese ancestry. As historian Roger Daniels says, the book presents a new story of “bad news from the good war.”
I'll be blogging about the book's claims here over the next several days. Today, I'll start things off by offering a very brief account of how the federal government ended up in the business of passing judgment on the loyalty of more than 40,000 U.S. citizens of Japanese ancestry between 1943 and 1945.
Anyone familiar with Eric's work or his blogging will know that this will be a painstakingly careful book — and a good read. I'm looking forward to it.
WSJ Law Blog, Law-School Dropout Wins Nobel Peace Prize.
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