Did she go "mad"? Or did she just go FRENCH?

One an Angus' favorite (and rightly so) Chris Rock's routines is the one about the tiger.

As in, the tiger ain't go crazy.  That tiger went TIGER.

This woman...just went French?  As the label says...

The Left Gets A Pass....Again

So we hear a lot about the "anti-science" views of the conservative Right.  The folks who deny evolution to the point of claiming that Neanderthals and dinosaurs roamed the same earth, at the same time.

Fair enough.  That's pretty bad.

But why don't we hear about the anti-science views of the Left?  I don't mean just the market-deniers who believe in magic and think that a benevolent Lord called "DeState" will take care of them, either.

What about the Truthers?

The GMO-nuts?

The vaccine-deniers?

On the last of these, there is quite a funny video.  Dr. House (of Cards):

Paying For College?

To paraphrase the dad of one of the YYM's classmates, Jessica.

"It's a debt trap, it's a suicide rap, we've got to stay debt-free until tomorrow, 'cause baby we're too young to borrow!"

A solution?

A statement of the problem.  I'm not sure that "college is expensive, so I was forced to film porn" is a tight argument, but the article is quite persuasive.

On the other hand, as Peter Lange has pointed out, tuition does not really cover all the "costs," either.

Full Contact Skydiving

It doesn't look that fun to me.  I wouldn't enjoy either the skydiving or the MMA parts.  Combining them would not be an improvement.  (Nod to Radley Balko, @radleybalko )

Signs

Tommy the Tenured Brit sent in this sign (click for a larger image):

Questions:

1.  Would this be Allen Iversen's favorite golf course, or Michael Jackson's?  Or both?

2.  Why no apostrophe for possesive?  Is "childrens" just the plural of "children" in England?  I think "churrins" would be the correct form of that.

3.  The dog poop sign:  clearly an afterthought.  Perhaps they should allow practise after all.  And maybe learn how to spell "practice."  Allen Iversen could help with that.

Surfing Alone? The Internet and Social Capital: Evidence from an Unforeseeable Technological Mistake 

Stefan Bauernschuster, Oliver Falck & Ludger Woessmann Journal of Public Economics, forthcoming

Abstract: Does the Internet undermine social capital, such as real-world inter-personal relations and civic engagement? Merging unique telecommunication data with geo-coded German individual-level data, we investigate how broadband Internet affects social capital. A first identification strategy uses first-differencing to account for unobserved time-invariant individual heterogeneity. A second identification strategy exploits a quasi-experiment in East Germany created by a mistaken technology choice of the state-owned telecommunication provider in the 1990s that hindered broadband Internet roll-out for many households. We find no evidence of negative effects of the Internet on several aspects of social capital. In fact, the effect on a composite social capital index is significantly positive.

Nod to Kevin Lewis

Monday's Child

1.  Detroit snapshots.

2.  VA doesn't allow "boyz in the hood."

3.  The fabulous Ms. C is a "private citizen" now.  Right.

4.  Black gold.  Texas UT.  A funding gusher.

5.  Maybe we are just going about this all wrong.  Maybe we should declare a "War on Education," and the result will be lots MORE education.  It has certainly worked that way for the "War on Poverty."

(moremoremore!)