God Plays Dice

Tim Gowers wrote in The Importance of Mathematics : If you were to work out what mathematical research has cost the world in the last 100 ye...

From "you suck at craigslist:" 2+2 = 5 . People selling things on craigslist who want $x for one of some item and more than $2x f...

The third derivative of the number of people employed in the United States is positive . (From 538 .) Nate Silver puts it as "the seco...

The New York Times reports on bad housing news : The median price of a home plunged 13 percent from October to November, to $181,300 from $2...

Greg Mankiw calculates the probability that McCain will raise taxes , using data from the Intrade prediction markets, which have contracts f...

One thing people complain about in regards to slower speed limits, which I wrote about earlier today , is that when speed limits are lower i...

"Every five miles an hour faster costs you an extra 30 cents a gallon." From yesterday's New York Times , among others. This...

Greg Mankiw provides a graph of the salaries of newly minted lawyers , originally from Empirical Legal Studies . There are two peaks, one ce...

Have we underestimated total oil reserves? , from New Scientist (and, it appears, every other source in the British-speaking world). Richar...

Malthus, the false prophet , from The Economist , and Costs of Living , a review of Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet by Jeffre...

Suze Orman , "internationally acclaimed personal finance expert" (actually the title of her web page!),, said yesterday on myphl17...

As of right now, intrade.com reports a 7.4 percent probability that Hillary Clinton will get the Democratic nomination for President -- and...

An interesting informational graphic: All of Inflation's Little Parts , from Saturday's New York Times. This is a graphic that brea...

Do you tip less in a tough economy? , from Queercents.com, which is apparently a queer personal finance site. It seems that at some restaura...

Last week I wrote about confusing coffee pricing : Wawa, a Philadelphia-area convenience store chain, charges $1.25 for 32 ounces of coffee ...

Here in the Philadelphia area, we have an oddly-named chain of convenience stores named Wawa . At Wawa, you can buy coffee for the following...

Greg at The Everything Seminar posts about "hyperbolic discounting". Roughly speaking, theoretically one should value a payoff ...

Many of you are probably familiar with the St. Petersburg paradox. This is the following paradox. I offer to play the following game with ...

As has been documented by a lot of people, it seems that a lot of psychological traits have the following properties: men and women have app...

An interesting question from Marginal Revolution : how much cash should you carry? Greg Mankiw has also commented on this; apparently there...