We may not have mutated beavers (jokes on this topic to the beaver thread, please!), but life in Australia is still interesting. I’ve never had a roo in the house, but I once had to remove a green tree snake which had come in through the window. And that reminds me of my favourite Australian t...

I realize that beaver management jokes are so a fortnight ago. Nevertheless, my wife – because she loves me – bought me a book on the subject. (To be fair, she bought a whole bunch of other old paperbacks in the same lot.) I read it. (Just so you know I have an excuse for not posting or ...

Via My Baseball Bias, Joe Girardi's projected rotation should put Joba Chamberlain on the mound for the first regular season game at the new Yankee Stadium: Girardi said he had lined up the pitchers all the way through the 162-game......

I have acquired a copy of R. Wilmott’s English Sacred Poetry of The Seventeenth, Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (1861) for the Dalziel brothers engravings. Which I am moderately pleased with. The book itself is fantastic looking. Comically heavy-bound and smoky-dark object. Zoë (age ...

Just a quick follow-up to my Toy Story post, which got some good comments. The CPSIA is now law, the CPSC granted a stay and issued some guidelines (PDF) but things seem pretty screwed up. Etsy folks are hopping mad. Fashion incubator, who did a lot of work on the issue, is seriously depressed. Over...

Pitchers and catchers are reporting this week. That makes this the perfect time to start working on the rankings for starting pitchers. Today, let’s look at the top ten: Tim Lincecum | San Francisco Giants - The real question at the top of the starting pitcher rankings is who to rank #1 betwee...

We aren’t up to Part II of Cohen’s Rescuing Justice and Equality, but I’m going to jump the gun. There’s this bit about something from Amartya Sen – ‘his celebrated Prude/Lewd example’ – which I had never heard tell of. I’ll quote Cohen’s n...

On the surface, Rich Hill looks like a good high risk, high reward pick to make in the late rounds of fantasy baseball drafts in 2009. But once you look a little deeper, it becomes apparent that this isn't the case. At his best, Hill offers strikeouts. Lots of them. The problem is, that's about all ...

There’s been a serious debate at the other place where I blog over whether academia in general, and political science in particular is a sexy profession. I’m glad to say that we actually have Real Social Scientific Data1 that we can bring to bear on this topic. In 2006, James Felton, Pet...

I had a really tough time naming this particular post. The point that I am trying to convey isn’t that the three players on this list are bad baseball players or that you shouldn’t draft them. I’m not trying to tell you that they’ll flop like the fish from that Faith No More ...