Links for you. Science:
How many for-profit publishers are repackaging CC-BY articles into books?
What if Diet Soda Wasn’t Diet?
Cottonmouths in the Ocean: Fact or Fiction?
Endangering the Herd: The case for suing parents who don’t vaccinate their kids—or criminally charging them.
Listening to what cancer genome sequencing is really telling us
Other:
Opting for Free Time: Something’s missing from the work/life balance debate. (excellent, though I think there are a lot of little time sinks, such as increased commuting that also play a role)
Generation X gets really old: How do slackers have a midlife crisis? Gutted by the economy, shipwrecked by nostalgia, Gen X stares down a midlife crisis. Winona Ryder can’t save it
Jennifer Hoelzer’s Insider’s View Of The Administration’s Response To NSA Surveillance Leaks
Do you understand health insurance? Most people don’t.
Elites’ deplorable double-standard on corruption
Information overload, the early years: Five centuries years ago, a new technology swamped the world with data. What we can learn from the aftermath.
Porn Professor Hugo Schwyzer Comes Clean About His Twitter Meltdown and Life as a Fraud
Your mortgage documents are fake!
The Angry Moderate Reformer, Part I: The Rise and Fall of Tony Bennett, and The One Lesson We’ll Almost Certainly Ignore
The cruel trick played by history on Milton Friedman
Signs & portents
Air Travel Is Worse Than a Hummer With Wings
Smithsonian acquires Parliament-Funkadelic Mothership
Can Good Graphic Design Help The Homeless? A new project replaces the handwritten signs of homeless people with eye-catching recreations, but maybe the graphic design isn’t the point
The Door Revolves Again: the Former White House Health Reform Czar Goes to Private Equity Firm Looking for Investments Created by Health Reform
mikethemadbiologist
McArdle manages to take yet another lame swipe at “intellectuals”. It’s been known for years that air travel was a fuel hog — see, for example, this interview with Mayer Hillman 11 years ago: http://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2002/nov/02/weekend7.weekend2 .
At the same time, someone who allegedly understands economics should understand that people will make tradeoffs — if we find ourselves more able to give up a giant SUV than overnight delivery, then that is exactly the tradeoff we will make. Presumably a carbon tax would make it obvious to use just what the costs were, and would also make it clear to companies like Amazon that they would need to find ways to save money (and thus CO2 emissions) by change how they warehouse their goods.