prior probability

Hurricanes can be destructive and dangerous, so why not name these storms after unpopular or disgraced or failed politicians like the ones pictured below? Alas, that wouldn’t be fair to the hurricanes! (The MWO is the body that assigns names to tropical storms and hurricanes.)

On this day (September 28) in 1850, President Millard Filmore signed the 1851 naval appropriations bill, which abolished flogging as a form of punishment in the US Navy. Here, however, is a defense of flogging. See also this short essay on “flogging at sea“.

That is the title of this City Journal obituary of the North American philosopher and logician Saul A. Kripke, who died earlier this month at the age of 81 and whose most influential work were his 1970 lectures on “Naming and Necessity” (published in 1980 and available here). Among other things, I learned that the great Kripke (like H. L. A. Hart, another intellectual giant of the 20th century) never earned a doctorate.

Alternative title: love in outer space

I am following the development a new tropical storm in the Caribbean very closely. (This storm is expected to make landfall somewhere on the Florida peninsula next week.) What if, instead of taking the average of all the weather models to predict the trajectory of a tropical storm, the National Weather Service assigned a probability value to each of the possible trajectories based on the past performance of each model?

I nominate John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme.” (P.S.: Here is the full album.)

Although neither Tyler Cowen nor I have ever been to the island of Martha’s Vineyard (or what I prefer to call “NIMBY Island“), I found his take on “The Martha’s Vineyard saga” to be well worth reading.

That is the day the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C. will be hosting a conference on “New Challenges to the Free Economy”–challenges from both the Progressive Left and the Populist Right. This all-day conference will bring together leading economists such as Hal Varian and policymakers like my colleague and friend Joshua Wright. You can attend in person or watch the livestream. Details are available here. (I will be there in person!)

That is the conclusion of this new research paper by Eric Martinez (MIT), Frances Mollica (Edinburgh), and Edward Gibson (MIT). Their fancy paper is awkwardly titled “Poor writing, not specialized concepts, drives processing difficulty in legal language,” so I am guessing that most academic researchers and “social scientists” are shitty wordsmiths too! (A more interesting paper would try to explain the reasons why most legal–and social science–writings are so terrible in the first place.) File under: true but trivial?