prior probability

Via Tumblr (circa 2014, emphasis added): “Last Man … is a game of deliberate media/knowledge avoidance, invented by … Kyle Whelliston. Its full name is ‘Last Man in America to Know Who Won the Super Bowl‘.” The official rules of this crazy game are below the fold:

To commemorate Saint Valentine’s Day, I am reposting my Adam Smith’s Lost Loves blog post (via AdamSmithWorks) as well as my full-length paper on Adam Smith in Love (via Econ Journal Watch). As an aside, according to this history of Valentine’s Day, it was Chaucer who was the first to record this occasion as a day of romantic celebration, writing in his 1375 poem Parliament of Foules: “For this was sent on Seynt Valentyne’s day/Whan every foul cometh ther to choose his mate.” So, perhaps it is not too far-fetched to imagine Adam Smith — who, alas, never married — asking someone, perhaps the Lady of Fife or Lady Francis or Madame Nicol, Will you be my Valentine?

With Saint Valentine’s Day around the corner — and Black History Month in full swing — today I want to take us back to 1978 to share this music video of “Is this love“. FYI: Bob Marley was born in Saint Ann Parish, Jamaica in the month of February — Feb. 6, 1945, to be precise!

Via Kottke, the video below shows how the “warp jump” special effect in the Star Trek universe has changed over the years, beginning with Star Trek: The Movie in 1979. (In case you’re wondering, there were no warp-speed special effects in the original Star Trek series.) You’re welcome!

Also, via Reddit, see here for maps of British, German, Japanese, and North American sportswear brands. File under: Big, Bad Nike versus the World.

I have blogged about Rosa Parks before (see here and here, for example), but I did not know that the actual city bus in which she was arrested on December 1, 1955 for refusing to give up her seat to a white man–a brave act of defiance that ended up changing the entire world–still exists. It was restored and brought back to life by the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan, going from a discarded relic in a lonesome Alabama field (see below) to one of the most popular artifacts in that museum’s collection. Via The Henry Ford (THF), more details are available here.

During the past 12 years, I have authored or co-authored a number of scholarly works exploring various aspects of markets and property rights using a “Coasean” lens. In addition to my 2011 paper on “Coase and the Constitution“, for example, which I blogged about recently, I have also explored or applied the logic of markets and property rights in the following contexts:

1. Science fiction. Another 2011 paper of mine, Clones and the Coase theorem (co-authored with my colleague and friend Orlando Martínez-García), explores Ridley Scott’s 1982 film Blade Runner from a Coasean perspective.
2. Blackmail. Why not a market in secrets? Yet another 2011 paper, this one titled The problem of blackmail: a critique of Coase, “out-Coases” Coase (so to speak) and explains why blackmail is a reciprocal problem.
3. The prisoner’s dilemma. My 2014 essay on the famous “prisoner’s dilemma” (also co-authored with Martínez-García) asks, What would happen if the prisoners in this dilemma were allowed to talk and bargain with each other? Would they strike a Coasean bargain?
4. Vampires. Another 2014 essay of mine, Buy or bite?, which found its way into The Economics of the Undead, discusses the possibility of contracts between humans and vampires for the purchase and sale of blood.
5. The trolley problem. Yet another 2014 paper, Trolley Problems, proposes a market solution to both versions of the famous “trolley problem” in moral philosophy: why not conduct an auction from behind a veil of ignorance?
6. Literary fan art. My 2019 NYU paper Of Coase and copyrights explains why copyright infringement — and, more generally, disputes between “creators” and mere “copiers” — is a reciprocal problem and defends literary fan art as fair use.
7. Lockdowns. My work-in-progress Lockdowns as takings, which I began writing in 2020 and significantly revised in 2021, explains why workers have a property right to their labor and why stay-at-home orders constitute a government taking of such labor rights.
8. Illegal and immoral promises. My most recent work, Breaking bad promises (forthcoming), explores the problem of illegal and immoral agreements.
9. Conspiracy theories. My other forthcoming work, The Leibniz Conspiracy, proposes a retrodiction market to allow people to bet on their favorite conspiracy theories.

Academic trolling, or flashes of insight? Either way, I will leave it up to my loyal readers to decide which of these scholarly works are totally loony and which are perfectly lucid.

Check out this short paper on “Variables and parameters” by Douglas Altman and J. Martin Bland, who identify at least three different meanings of the statistical term “parameter” and attempt to distinguish parameters from variables as follows (note: the introductory labels in bold are mine):

1. Parameters as statistical quantities: “… parameters [unlike variables] do not relate to actual measurements or attributes but to quantities defining a theoretical model,” such as the mean and standard deviation of the data pictured in the figure pictured below.
2. Parameters as slope-intercepts: “Another use of the word parameter relates to its original mathematical meaning as the value(s) defining one of a family of curves,” i.e. the slope and intercept of a line or curve.
3. Parameters as variables(!): “In some contexts parameters are values that can be altered to see what happens to the performance of some system.” (Wait, isn’t this what a “variable” is?)

So, which is it? In the alternative, is the definition of the term parameter provided by Wikipedia (see here) even less helpful?

Following up on my Garrincha post, another Cuban artist whose work was featured during the Thirteenth Conference on Cuban and Cuban-American Studies last week was Manuel Almenares Estrada, a photographer who lives and works in Havana. (Here is a short bio.) Via Instagram, pictured below are some of his “street scenes” of daily life in Centro Habana — note too the spatial arrangement of the street scenes on his Instagram page: