Saturday, March 22, 2008

Erratic Blogging

My regular readers may have noted that my blogging has become a bit more erratic over the last few days. I've been trying to maintain a rate of one post a day, but there have been many days this month that I haven't posted at all; and a few days where I've posted a lot.

Expect this pattern to continue. For one thing, those books we ordered from Amazon.com finally showed up, so I have been at least partially immersed in Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism for the last couple of days now. For another, my wife and I recently started watching this video series, entitled "The Story of Human Language"--part of Tonya's birthday present from last summer, which we'd never gotten around to watching until now. We think it's fascinating.

But both of these activities really have to be done in the evenings after the kids have gone to bed--which is also, coincidentally, the only time of day that I can do blogging. Something's going to give, and I'm afraid, it's all of you.

Blogging may be light and/or erratic the next few weeks. Or not. Who knows?

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

My regular readers may have noted that my blogging has become a bit more erratic over the last few days.

Don't worry, both of us are quite patient. ;-)

By the way, you might be interested in Predictably Irrational by David Ariely. I think the book is right up your alley. (His work on people cheating is rather interesting.)

Here's an excerpt:

Excerpted from Chapter 2 – The Fallacy of Supply and Demand
http://www.predictablyirrational.com/?page_id=130

Consider this: if I asked you for the last two digits of your social security number (mine are 79), then asked you whether you would pay this number in dollars (for me this would be $79) for a particular bottle of Côtes du Rhône 1998, would the mere suggestion of that number influence how much you would be willing to spend on wine? Sounds preposterous, doesn’t it? Well, wait until you see what happened to a group of MBA students at MIT a few years ago.

[... details of experiment deleted, see link for full info...]

When I got back to my office, I analyzed the data. Did the digits from the social security numbers serve as anchors? Remarkably, they did: the students with the highest-ending social security digits (from 80 to 99) bid highest, while those with the lowest- ending numbers (1 to 20) bid lowest. The top 20 percent, for instance, bid an average of $56 for the cordless keyboard; the bottom 20 percent bid an average of $16. In the end, we could see that students with social security numbers ending in the upper 20 percent placed bids that were 216 to 346 percent higher than those of the students with social security numbers ending in the lowest 20 percent.

Timothy Power said...

Don't worry, both of us are quite patient. ;-)

Judging from the fact that my hit counter is above twelve thousand, it would appear that both of you are pretty obsessive, too.

Anna said...

Both, HA!
Here's another link to Predictably Irrational.
http://www.thesimpledollar.com/2008/03/23/review-predictably-irrational/

Anonymous said...

Oooh, John McWhorter is so cool! I loved that course ... and he's taping another one right now -- don't know that title or topic, but I plan to get it asap. Enjoy! :-)

Anonymous said...

Judging from the fact that my hit counter is above twelve thousand, it would appear that both of you are pretty obsessive, too.

Scary, huh? ;-)