Eric Rasmusen’s Weblog

I thought of titling this post “Mel Gibson’s Drunk Driving”, but it actually his arrest that has gotten the attention. He was arrested going double the speed limit with a bottle of tequila in his car, after which he insulted and threatened the policeman arresting him and continued to be grossly rude in the police station. Somehow the police report was leaked to someone and posted on the web.

One would think, from the public comment, that Gibson spent an hour ranting against Jews after his arrest. Somewhere I read about a “four-page police report” of his anti-Jewish rantings. I wondered about that– why would Gibson choose such an occasion for an extended lecture on the evils of Jews? It turns out, though that
Gibson’s anti-Jewish comments are mentioned in 5 lines of the three and a half page handwritten police report, with very little detail. He said lots of other foul things too, and those have gone without remark. He has been unduly criticized for the few anti-Jewish statements, and unduly spared criticism for everything else. The other bad behavior, moreover, shows us that much more is wrong with Gibson than mere anti-Semitism, which, in fact, seems just like a way to be obnoxious to a policeman. I hope he pulls out of his self-destructive state, for he does make unusually good movies.

The old National Gallery building in Washington DC is dramatically better than the new one by I. M. Pei. I wonder when we’ll have the guts to tear the new one down and replace it with one in the style of the old building?

“Every Breath You Take” Dean Glenn Hubbard, Columbia School.

Fascinating.

I’ve just been googling trying in vain to find a telephone with two features:

1. It is cordless and has push buttons instead of rotary dial.

2. It has the buttons on the fixed part and the portable part is the classic curved shape that you talk into rather than towards.

It is truly remarkable how uniform in design cordless phones are. They are all little boxes. I must remember this when I think about how smart engineers are relative to other people— they may be able to do calculus after a fashion, but they so often fail to think “out of the box”. Anyway, I found that Wikipedia has good articles on telephone exterior design, including “Model 500″ (illustrated here) and “Western Electric”.

Western Electric issued the first telephone with a single handset, having both the transmitter and receiver placed thereon (previous telephones had been of the “candlestick” type). This telephone was known as the “102″ phone, and had a round base; it was succeeded in 1930 by the “202″ phone, which was identical except for the shape of the base, which was oval.

The next significant upgrade came in 1937 with the introduction of the “302″ phone. Designed by the noted industrial designer Henry Dreyfuss, this telephone included the ringer within its rectangular housing; previous models (including the candlestick) had required a separate “bell box.” The 302 was followed by the “500″ phone; initially released in 1949 and modified in 1954, the Western Electric Model 500 Phone would become the most extensively-produced telephone model in the industry’s history.

Later innovations included the Princess telephones of the 1950s and Trimline telephones of the 1960s, and the development of touch-tone dialing as a replacement for rotary dialing.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance–another view, from Professor Smith:

The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer held that life was nothing but the meaningless chasing after of things, which, if we ever do attain, we just get bored with anyway. This certainly seems to be the case in my neighborhood, where people appear to chase after things constantly, usually on dirt bikes. A dirt bike, for those of you not familiar with the term, is a particularly noisy kind of motorcycle used to kill desert flora. You chase and chase with a dirt bike, but why and where is not so clear. Perhaps it is happiness they seek. If so, they do not seem to find it, because they keep coming back. One suspects they have not discovered that what tranquility there is to be found in life comes from aesthetic experience, not racing around on small but loud motorcycles. Or perhaps this is just a small example of what Schopenhauer means when he avers that life is just suffering.

From Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution.

I like this smile immensely. This lady is someone easy to love.