Gawker’s Ashley Feinberg did some digging and was able to trace the origins of Donald’s Trump’s meticulous hairdo. It’s a toupee! According to Ms Feinberg, Trump’s toupee is based on “a little-known, patented hair restoration treatment [pictured below] called a ‘microcylinder intervention.'” Read her full report here.
It’s alive!
Hat tip: Belle Beth Cooper, via Lifehacker.
In our previous post, we mentioned that a small number of scholars (about 150 intellectuals at last count) have openly declared their support for Donald Trump. According to their public statement, the 150 are voting for Trump for the following reasons: (1) K-12 education, (2) religion, (3) economics, (4) corruption, and (5) the Supreme Court. Below the fold is our reasoned reply to their five arguments: Continue reading
Some 150 North American scholars and writers have openly declared their support for Donald J. Trump. (You can access the complete list here.) Below the fold are the five main reasons they give for supporting Trump: Continue reading
Why aren’t any of the postseason games at Wrigley Field day games? Because the suits at Major League Baseball and the TV networks are greedy bastards. In the words of sportswriter Ryan Fagan:
… it’s known start times are heavily influenced (OK, controlled) by TV networks, and TV networks love prime-time contests. But they’re missing a wonderful opportunity to give a nod toward nostalgia, and how great of a hook would this be? They could sell this, folks.
Saturday’s Game 4 would have been the perfect fit. It’s a weekend, which means the typical 9-to-5 routines of the work week don’t apply to most would-be viewers. And the way the primary competition for sports eyeballs — college football on Saturday — is set up, with flexible start times, most of the best games are in the evening anyway.
As Fagan notes, the Cubs didn’t play their first night game at the Friendly Confines until August 6, 1988. By way of comparison, the White Sox, the other baseball team in Chicago, installed lights at the original Comiskey Park in 1939.
Welcome to the Friendly Confines.
1. Will the results of this year’s presidential election confirm or disprove the median voter theorem?
2. Further questions:
(a) How do we determine who the “median voter” is in the real world, and along which policy dimension do we measure his or her political preferences?
(b) How does the act of not voting (i.e. “none of the above”) relate to the median voter model? Specifically, do median voters abstain more frequently than voters closer to the extremes?
(c) Are presidential politics to complex to be amenable to formal mathematical models?
Gregory Mankiw, an economics professor at Harvard, wrote this ringing economic defense of ticket scalping and price-gouging generally. In his essay, Prof Mankiw revisits the laws of supply and demand from his Econ 101 course to explain why he was more than happy to pay $5,000 (or maybe even $7,500) for two (or three) tickets to see the hit Broadway musical “Hamilton.” (Although the original title of his essay in print is “$2,500: a fair price for ‘Hamilton’,” Prof. Mankiw himself clarifies in the seventh paragraph of his piece that he paid “$2,500 a ticket,” so we assume that he also bought a ticket for his wife and maybe even for his teenage son, who were with him during his recent Columbus Day weekend visit to NYC.) In reply, Michael Hiltzik, a columnist for the L.A. Times, wrote this moralizing rebuttal to Prof Mankiw, arguing that price-gouging of non-luxury, essential products (like bottled water after a storm has hit) is immoral. (But who decides what is “essential”?) For our part, we agree with the likes of Mankiw that the price of something is just the product of supply and demand forces, but we agree with Hiltzik that $7,500 for three tickets for a Broadway musical is an obscene and offensive price. Prof Mankiw must have other significant sources of income (from private consulting work or textbook royalties, for example), in addition to his university professor salary.
Supply and demand.
More math art here, by Bronna A. Butler. (Hat tip: Cliff Pickover.)
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