Tuesday, December 28, 2010

ShareThis button causes my Ubuntu laptop to crash!

I tried to install the very likable and useful ShareThis button as an add-on for Firefox on my Ubuntu 10.04 laptop. It crashed the machine. Anyone have similar experiences?

Saturday, December 18, 2010

A delightful version of From the Beginning

A pop hit from ELP: "From the Beginning."


R.I.P. Captain Beefheart

Endlessly weird, provocative (enough to catch Frank Zappa's eye) but an original talent, Don Van Vliet, Captain Beefheart, extended the boundaries of music. May he rest in peace.

Friday, December 10, 2010

An interview with the great Deirdre McCloskey

She is one of the most innovative scholars to be found. A veritable public intellectual, if only people in charge would listen.
My alarm comes from the economist’s tendency to reduce humans to Maximum Utility machines. We need a humanomics, of the sort that Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill and John Maynard Keynes and Friedrich Hayek and Gunnar Myrdal and Kenneth Boulding and Albert Hirschman practiced. Some current practitioners are Nancy Folbre, Arjo Klamer, and Richard Bronk. It’s an economics for grownups.
A must-read interview.