Freakonomics

I picked up a copy of Freakonomics. It's fun. Basically, you have a really smart professor rambling about stuff. Stuff like whether there is any cheating in sumo wrestling. (There is.) If real estate agents are corrupt. (They are.) It's all backed by data he's analyzed, and some of it is very unique data. Like the profits of a drug ring, carefully recorded in a notebook, that a drug runner gave to the author's friend. Before the runner was killed.

It's very non-PC; he claims that abortion has lowered the crime rate. But he also analyzes discrimination on The Weakest Link. Remember, that show with the uppity British Lady who said, "John, you are ... ... ... ... TheWeakestLink!!!" Maybe that's not very PC either, but it's a good read. Read the book.

Who am I kidding; you won't read it. (Sorry, Dave, but I haven't watched Primer yet.) Instead, read this long article that got it all started. It was published in 2003, and the response was good enough that they expanded it into a book.

Phil missed his true calling

So the space shuttle launched today, and my buddy Phil Sandlin was there to take some pictures. (See the post below.) He took some pretty good ones, like this one:



and this one:



But I think that, secretly, Phil really was hoping that the launch would be delayed a bit longer, just so he could file pictures like this one:

A dragonfly sits on a weed near the Space Shuttle Discovery at the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Fla., Thursday, July 14. NASA officials are trying to determine when they attempt a launch of the STS-114 mission. The launch was scrubbed on Wednesday after a fuel gauge read full when it should have read empty.

AP Photo/Phil Sandlin

Yes, I think Phil is just waiting for the call from National Geographic.

I like Phil.

So you're a photographer. You're down in Florida, waiting for the space shuttle to take off so you can take some really cool but (hopefully) pretty standard pictures of the launch. Meanwhile, you're bored. And the Associated Press takes care of film costs. What do you do?

Well, you take pictures of anything you can. Maybe the beach. Or some tourists. Or a boat. Or a porpoise.

You end up with a really cool picture of a porpoise with a fish in its mouth. So what do you do? You publish it ... as a space shuttle story!

Very odd.

As scientist and engineers anxiously follow the countdown for the launch of Space Shuttle Mission STS114 Monday, July 25, 2005 a porpoise leaps out of the water as he holds on to his catch of fish as he feeds in the Indian River in Titusville, Fla. The Space Shuttle is scheduled to launch Tuesday after a delay caused by a faulty fuel sensor. (AP Photo/Phil Sandlin)

Oh, and I used this image without permission. Sorry, Phil. If the AP asks me to take it down, well, that'd just be funny.

The moon is made of ...

I like Google. They seem to let their employees have fun. I'm guessing they'll turn into a big boring company in about 5 years, but for now they give us fun stuff like Pigeon ranking and Google Gulp.

The also seemed to be obsessed with jokes about the moon being made of some kind of cheese. First, there was the Google Copernicus Hosting Environment and Experiment in Search Engineering (G.C.H.E.E.S.E.), and you could apply for a job on the moon. And yesterday, they launched Google Moon, which is actually not a joke at all, but rather a way to see where the Apollo moon landing took place.

The joke is that, if you zoom in as much as you can (using the slider on the left) you can see what the moon is really made of. You guessed it:

Yes, we have no bananas

I don't think about bananas much. They're cheap, healthy, and my kids like them. But in this month's Popular Science, there is an article about bananas.

Here's what I've added to my banana knowledge:

- There really is only one kind of banana that anyone eats. Sure, people try the funky kind in the supermarket once in a while, but a banana is a banana is a banana. Not true with most other fruits (apples especially).

- The kind of banana we eat now is not the same kind people ate up until the early 1960's. That kind of banana is gone. Wiped out by a fungus.

- The kind of banana we have now is called a Cavendish. And it might be on its way out also. In 10 years. Or less.

So, if you like the Cavendish, better freeze some now.

Off to the beach.

When free is worse than full price

I've always wondered about people on game shows. They win nice things, like cars and vacations. They jump around and scream. But what they don't realize is that they have to pay taxes on those prizes.

In the case of cars or other tangible items, you can just sell it, pay the taxes, and pocket the difference. That's what some people did when Oprah gave away a bunch of cars last year. It's a little bit of work, but you end up pocketing $15,000 or so after taxes, so it's all good.

So poor Jack McCall, who thought he won lots of free American Airlines tickets, ends up having to pay $792. In taxes. Per ticket. I'm guessing he wouldn't find many takers to buy a ticket for more than $792. Especially since they would also need to be named Jack McCall. Needless to say, he declined the prize. (Here's another link ... I don't know if the Wall Street Journal leaves these links out there.

It sounds like a nice prize, but it's really quite awful. A nice deceptive marketing ploy by American.