prior probability

Is the op-ed a hoax, or is there really a presidential nanny in the White House? According to one prediction market (see screenshot below), the top three suspects are VP Mike Pence, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. You can place your bets on this website (mybookie.ag). But hurry, you have until 9 September to place a bet!

Read the full story here, via our friend and colleague Brian Frye, a law professor at the University of Kentucky. Below is one tantalizing excerpt:

The Zapruder film is not only the most important home movie ever made, but also the most thoroughly analyzed 26 seconds of film in existence. Shortly after noon on Friday, November 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas. At least 32 people filmed or photographed some aspect of the event, but Abraham Zapruder captured the assassination itself more clearly and completely than anyone else…. [But copyright law] made it largely unavailable to the public until 1998.

Socialism for me but not for thee? Following up on this post by our friend and colleague “LawProfBlawg” (@lawprofblawg), we wish to pose the following simple question: why aren’t any law school faculties willing to implement true egalitarian principles or willing to operate along socialist lines by treating all faculty equal? Given the pervasiveness of “liberal” (i.e. leftist) faculty at most U.S. law schools (see chart below), the feudal hierarchy dividing full professors, associate professors, assistant professors (not to mention the divide between legal writing instructors and doctrinal instructors) is a moral scandal. Are these arcane hierarchies the product of path dependence, or are they the end result of something more sinister, like hypocrisy?

Via Cliff Pickover (@pickover): “Titan is the largest moon of Saturn. Imagine sailing, with someone you love, on its methane sea. (The sea, pictured here [below], is about the size of Lake Superior, the largest of the Great Lakes of North America.)” More details here.

Last year the first reports came to light that American and Canadian diplomats in Cuba had suffered severe brain injuries due to mysterious causes. (See press release below.) We were then told in March of this year that a “sonic weapon” may have been to blame. Now, we are being told (via this report by William J. Broad in the N.Y. Times) the culprit could be “microwave signals.” Whatever the cause, why hasn’t the U.S. broken off diplomatic relations with Cuba until this incident has been cleared up and those responsible, including the leaders of the Cuban military, brought to justice?

Is there an enclave in heaven reserved for economists? Along with the errant economist Thomas Schelling (1921-2016) and the non-mathematical economist Ronald Coase (1910-2013), the self-described “micro-microeconomist” Martin Shubik (pictured below) was one of our intellectual heroes. (One of our recent papers explores a game called “So Long Suckers” that Professor Shubik helped to develop.) So we are saddened to report Professor Shubik died at the age of 92 on August 22 of this year. Here is an excerpt from his obituary, via Sam Roberts of the N.Y. Times:

With Lloyd S. Shapley, a Nobel-winning economist, Professor Shubik developed an index to measure the power wielded by coalitions within groups ranging from shareholders to legislatures.

At Princeton, they, John Nash and another mathematician were among the creators of an economic strategy game, “So Long Sucker,” in which four players can make, and renege on, agreements with one another.

Professor Shubik also invented the mathematical model for “Dollar Auction,” a game that illustrates “escalation of commitment” because while the winner collects the bill, the second-highest bidder loses whatever he bid.”

Which letters (or keys on your keyboard) do you use the most? Via Robert Allison: “For a simple first-test, I copy-n-pasted the text from my most recent blog post (the one about monitoring the number of M&Ms in our break room) into a text file, and wrote some code to import the text into SAS and count how many times each character (or number) was used. I then plotted that data on a simulated keyboard, and shaded each key based on the number of times that letter appeared in the text. Now you can easily see which letters I used most frequently.”

Hat tip: u/graphguy (via reddit)

The United States Air Force Space Command was founded on this day in 1982.

1. Which do you prefer: 140 or 280?

2. When do you know when to stop scrolling?