Archive | April, 2004

Responding to my “how contagious am I?” post, reader Bob Woolley writes that what I hoped for — a home test that would “somehow objectively measure just how contagious one is likely to be — perhaps some sort of quickie home saliva test or some such” is unlikely to be available soon. But here’s what […]

Jeff Jacoby has a good column on this.

My review essay of Brian Barry’s Culture and Equality, “Liberal Jacobinism,” Ethics 114 (January 2004): 318-336, is now online. (That link is html; the pdf is here.) Links are probably only open to those whose institutions subscribe to Ethics, though that will cover most people accessing the web via universities.

The tables I mention below are fascinating, and I suspect generally highly reliable. Still, check out this table, and explain to me how anyone could possibly make remotely plausible projections about future rates of death. The projections about changing rates of death due to violence are particularly laughable — though we can probably predict that […]

Mary Campbell also points to some cool tables available from the Social Security Administration. Check out the data here and here, for instance, to observe how infant mortality has plummeted. UPDATE: Some helpful details, again from Mary Campbell: In the blog item linking the SSA tables, you might want to indicate which column to look […]

Reader Mary Campbell, an actuarial assistant in New York writes, based on Social Security Administration tables: There are two types of mortality tables available — cohort and calendar year. Using the 1900 cohort tables, I find the following probabilities (and life expectancies) (my table does not include mortality before age 5, as early childhood mortality […]

CalBlog reports: Ted Franks has filed a petition in Montreal, Quebec, seeking the identity of various commenters on the Infotel thread. I was served by registered mail. I got the slip last night and picked it up this morning. The hearing is Friday. Did I mention in Montreal, Quebec? The full petition is attached. I […]

With the governor, Senate, and House in Virginia fighting each other over who can take credit for raising taxes, the latest proposal is to do away with former Gov. Gilmore’s plan to completely eliminate the “car tax.” The rationale for this, as well as much of the rest of the tax-raising, is that local governments […]

Those who think that it is only in recent years that people have started giving their children unfortunate names (such as Latrina) — and those who have complained that their own names are unpleasant — should check out this record from the 1880 Census. If you search here for the same first name, you’ll find […]

Via Dan: The not-terribly-surprising but still most unpleasant news that Hoover’s Larry Diamond– the democratization scholar and optimist, editor of the Journal of Democracy, and sometime advisor to the Coalition Provisional Authority– has decided not to go back to Iraq. “We just bungled this so badly,” said Diamond, a 52-year-old senior fellow at Stanford University’s […]

Yasser Arafat deserves to be embraced — but the invasion of Iraq is a “crime against humanity,” and “murder.” The one thing that finally gave the Iraqi people the opportunity (we’ll see if they can take advantage of it, but at least they have a chance) to have some semblance of democracy, human rights, rule […]

Jeff Jarvis (BuzzMachine) writes: Among all the absurd, meddling, and stupid rulings from the FCC lately, this one really takes the Twinkie: The FCC fined a station for making a phony phone call to the real Fidel Castro — and getting him on the line — but not following commission rules about getting permission to […]

Clayton Cramer has the details: Since 1983, with the formation of Eco-Justice Working Group, the National Council of Churches has been providing an opportunity for the national bodies of member Protestant and Orthodox denominations to work together to protect and restore God’s Creation. A major task of our environmental ministry is to provide program ideas […]

The Chronicle of Higher Education has a good piece on the late Invisible Adjunct blog, its anonymous author, blogging, the academy, adjuncts, and more. Thanks to Ralph Luker for the pointer. (I’m told that the Chronicle piece should be available for free for five days.)

As I mention in the post immediately below this one, I much liked Radley Balko’s TechCentralStation piece. I do think, though, that this line falls into a common error: But I doubt that Easterbrook longs for the early 20th century, when 45% of American laborers toiled in the fields — and most of them could […]