Go here and search for “ESPN First Take’s Best Guest Ever: Dr. Aaron Perlut” as he discusses mustaches in professional sports.

I hate Microsoft for tooling computer users around for decades with their profit-garnering machinations of evil. I recently happened upon a Microsoft original farce called port25. This sort of disingenuous marketing dreck is really maddening to me and so I wrote the following anti-M$ comment and posted it on Port 25’s “About” page.

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There has been some evidence that teams wearing red have an advantage simply because they wear the color red. Would the police be better off apprehending individuals if they wore red?

Here is the audio from my first stand-up comedy experience. Enjoy!

I had my first experience doing stand-up comedy the other day. I don’t have it video recorded, but I did tape record it. When I figure out how to get it uploaded to the internet, I’ll post it.

This comes from Marginal Revolution.

“In More Sex is Safer Sex Steven Landsburg famously argued (based on work by Michael Kremer) that if more people, especially more sexually conservative people, had sex the AIDS epidemic could be reduced.  Landsburg wrote:

Imagine a country where almost all women are monogamous, while all men demand two female partners per year. Under those circumstances, a few prostitutes end up servicing all the men. Before long, the prostitutes are infected; they pass the disease on to the men; the men bring it home to their monogamous wives. But if each of those monogamous wives were willing to take on one extramarital partner, the market for prostitution would die out, and the virus, unable to spread fast enough to maintain itself, might well die out along with it.

In The Wisdom of Whores (see also my earlier post) Elizabeth Pisani says that such a country exists, it’s Thailand, and the results of more sex were safer sex - exactly as Landsburg argued. Here’s Pisani’s story: more »

This comes from Predictably Irrational.

“I recently came across this article in the New York Times that describes a new movement among doctors and hospitals to admit their mistakes rather than continue with the more traditional approach of denying and defending them. As a result, the article suggests, these hospitals are seeing a decline in lawsuits and legal costs. I suspect that this has something to do with the fact that in these hospitals the patients are being treated with an approach that is usually reserved for meaningful, social relationships. more »

This comes from Seth’s Blog.

“I asked this question in a recent post. If you look at people sitting in an audience, about one-third of them will be touching their mouth. more »

This comes from the Freakonomics Blog.

“After writing my last Freakonomics post, I received a phone call from a police officer who began his career in Chicago.

Carl, the 54-year-old cop, started working in Chicago’s inner cities at the height of the crack epidemic. He transferred to the suburbs of Seattle for a lifestyle change — “I was tired of getting shot at,” he said matter-of-factly. more »

This comes from New Scientist.

“NICE guys knew it, now two studies have confirmed it: bad boys get the most girls. The finding may help explain why a nasty suite of antisocial personality traits known as the “dark triad” persists in the human population, despite their potentially grave cultural costs.

The traits are the self-obsession of narcissism; the impulsive, thrill-seeking and callous behaviour of psychopaths; and the deceitful and exploitative nature of Machiavellianism. At their extreme, these traits would be highly detrimental for life in traditional human societies. People with these personalities risk being shunned by others and shut out of relationships, leaving them without a mate, hungry and vulnerable to predators. more »