Isegoria

Tim Harford (The Undercover Economist) uses “tournament theory” to explain Why Your Boss Is Overpaid:

Lazear and Rozen’s tournament theory has stood the test of time and been supported by many subsequent pieces of empirical research. It also passes the smell test: The more grotesque your boss’s pay and the less he has to do to earn it, the bigger the motivation for you to work for a promotion. As Lazear wrote in his book, Personnel Economics for Managers, “The salary of the vice president acts not so much as motivation for the vice president as it does as motivation for the assistant vice presidents.”

Economists don’t even pretend that your boss deserves his salary. Suddenly, everything is clear.

This Aardvark Mother and Baby just brightened my day:

One of the newest additions to the Brookfield Zoo, a female aardvark named Paatsy, right, sticks close to her mother, Gracie, during mealtime Thursday, May 25, 2006, at the zoo in Brookfield, Ill. It will still be several more weeks before Paatsy, born March 30, makes her debut before zoo visitors. Zookeepers and researchers were able to accurately predict Paatsy’s date of birth by analyzing hormone levels in her mother’s fecal samples, giving them time to prepare the birthing area for her arrival.

From Dracula’s castle returned to Van Hapsburg:

More than 60 years after it was seized by communists, the Romanian government is to hand back one of the country’s most popular tourist sites, the fabled Dracula Castle, to its former owner, the culture minister said Tuesday.

The castle, worth an estimated $25 million, was owned by the late Queen Marie and bequeathed to her daughter Princess Ileana in 1938. It was confiscated by communists in 1948 and fell into disrepair. It will be transferred on Friday to Dominic van Hapsburg, a New York architect who inherited the castle from Princess Ileana decades after the communists seized it, minister Adrian Iorgulescu told a news conference.

Van Hapsburg is a descendant of the Hapsburg dynasty which ruled Romania for a period starting in the late 17th century.

Dr. Henry I. Miller describes the Biopharm Thrilla in Manila:

The early-stage R&D I saw during my travels was astonishing. University of the Philippines, Manila, Professor Nina Barzaga — “The Illustrious Nina,” as she is known locally — has introduced into banana plants the genes that express potential vaccine proteins for typhoid fever, rabies and the HIV virus. She and her collaborators intend to process the bananas sufficiently to be able to standardize the dose — by converting them to dried banana chips, for example — and then to carry out clinical testing.

I’ve mentioned the Mosquito before. Now it’s been hijacked. From Pupils perform ‘alarming’ feat:

A high-pitched alarm which cannot be heard by adults has been hijacked by schoolchildren to create ringtones so they can get away with using phones in class.

Techno-savvy pupils have adapted the Mosquito alarm, used to drive teenage gangs away from shopping centres.

The alarm, which has been praised by police, is highly effective because its ultra-high sound can be heard only by youths but not by most people over 20.

Schoolchildren have recorded the sound, which they named Teen Buzz, and spread it from phone to phone via text messages and Bluetooth technology.

Now they can receive calls and texts during lessons without teachers having the faintest idea what is going on.

Pilot Bob Hoover demonstrates a number of aerobatic feats, including A Barrel Roll while Pouring Iced Tea. Watch the video and listen to him describe what the difficult part is.

In A Liberal Teaches Republicans About Free Markets, Andrew Roth cites a speech by Congressman Barney Frank (D-MA) that should shame hypocritical Republicans:

Mr. Chairman, I am here to confess my reading incomprehension. I have listened to many of my conservative friends talk about the wonders of the free market, of the importance of letting the consumers make their best choices, of keeping government out of economic activity, of the virtues of free trade, but then I look at various agricultural programs like this one. Now, it violates every principle of free market economics known to man and two or three not yet discovered.

So I have been forced to conclude that in all of those great free market texts by Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek and all the others that there is a footnote that says, by the way, none of this applies to agriculture. Now, it may be written in high German, and that may be why I have not been able to discern it, but there is no greater contrast in America today than between the free enterprise rhetoric of so many conservatives and the statist, subsidized, inflationary, protectionist, anti-consumer agricultural policies, and this is one of them.

In particular, I have listened to people, and some of us have said let us protect workers and the environment in trade; let us not have unrestricted free trade; but let us have trade that respects worker rights and environmental rights. And we have been excoriated for our lack of concern for poor countries.

There is no greater obstacle, as it is now clear in the Doha round, to the completion of a comprehensive trade policy than the American agricultural policy, with one exception, European agricultural policy, which is much worse and just as phony.

Sugar is an example. This program is an interference with the legitimate efforts at economic self-help in many foreign nations. So I appreciate the leadership of the gentleman from Arizona [Jeff Flake] and the gentleman from Oregon [Roy Blumenauer]. Here is a chance for some of my free-enterprise-professing friends to get honest with themselves, and now maybe we will see some born-again free enterprisers in the agricultural field.

The architecture of Mysterious Tibet retains a unique Tibetan-ness despite its obvious foreign influences:

Tibetan architecture contains Chinese and Indian influences, and reflects a deeply Buddhist approach. The Buddhist wheel, along with two dragons, can be seen on nearly every Gompa in Tibet. The design of the Tibetan Chortens can vary, from roundish walls in Kham to squarish, four-sided walls in Ladakh.

The most unusual feature of Tibetan architecture is that many of the houses and monasteries are built on elevated, sunny sites facing the south, and are often made out a mixture of rocks, wood, cement and earth. Little fuel is available for heat or lighting, so flat roofs are built to conserve heat, and multiple windows are constructed to let in sunlight. Walls are usually sloped inwards at 10 degrees as a precaution against frequent earthquakes in the mountainous area.

Study: No marijuana link to lung cancer — despite the fact that “smoking a marijuana joint deposits four times more tar in the lungs than smoking an equivalent amount of tobacco”:

Marijuana smoking does not increase a person’s risk of developing lung cancer, according to the findings of a new study at the University of California Los Angeles that surprised even the researchers.

They had expected to find that a history of heavy marijuana use, like cigarette smoking, would increase the risk of cancer.

Instead, the study, which compared the lifestyles of 611 Los Angeles County lung cancer patients and 601 patients with head and neck cancers with those of 1,040 people without cancer, found no elevated cancer risk for even the heaviest pot smokers. It did find a 20-fold increased risk of lung cancer in people who smoked two or more packs of cigarettes a day.