Grasping Reality on TypePad, by Brad DeLong

The “SuperFreaks” claimed that Ken Caldeira’s “research tells him that carbon dioxide is not the right villain in this fight."... Caldeira has responded on his professional website: “Carbon dioxide is the right villain, insofar as inanimate objects can be villains”:

Huffington Post Passes WashingtonPost.com In Unique Visitors In September: Nielsen. More data at Editor & Publisher I had no idea Dan was that popular….

The interesting question to me is why is it that "pissing off liberals" is delightfully transgressive and oh-so-fun, whereas "pissing off conservatives" is boring and earnest? Based on their writings in Freakonomics 1 and their blog, Levitt and Dubner strike me as open-minded political pragmatists, so it's not that I think they have a big political agenda. It's possible to write things that piss off conservatives while still retaining an edgy, transgressive feeling--take a look at Nate Silver (or, to take a less analytical example, Michael Moore)--but I think it's a little harder to do. Flouting liberal conventional wisdom is funner somehow. As I said, I think there's something more general going on here but I don't feel I have a full picture of this phenomenon. Freakonomics 1 was based on Levitt's previous research, which was all over the map, whereas in Freakonomics 2 the authors got to choose ahead of time what to be counterintuitive about. When it comes to writing, too much freedom

I hadn't realized I was buying myself a handheld gaming thing - I found Civilization in the App Store, and have been playing the stupid thing until my eyes cross. I've always had a bad (in the addictive sense) relationship with computer games, and having an appealing one in my pocket is not great for my chances of paying attention to anything else when I have a free moment. Newt's already chastised me for playing games instead of watching his soccer team get massacred. Also, when I crank up the difficulty, I find that it produces absurd situations like allowing the computer to defeat my tanks with its mounted knights. (A) This is poor design -- no matter how hard the game's supposed to be, that's just silly, and (B) it causes me to behave in a childish and unseemly fashion in public. I shoulda just bought myself a phone.