Miscellany

A single casket creates a more moving image than dozens, or thousands. This was somebody’s son or daughter, brother or sister, perhaps father or mother.

Things to gawk at on the internets:

• Remember the String Kings? Then you’ll love the Director’s Cut, brought to you by Steven Miller.
• Remember that the cell is like Tron? There’s a Director’s Cut of the Inner Life of a Cell video as well, with commentary and all that. (Thanks to many people for letting me know.)
• Construct a Heptadecagon with nought but compass and straightedge! That’s a seventeen-sided polygon, for those of you keeping score at home. Wikipedia shows you how.

Downtown Los Angeles is in the midst of a renaissance. (Partly because I live there, but I can’t claim all the credit.) Amidst the high-rises and cultural institutions, residential building is booming, bringing restaurants and nightlife along with it. But the vibrant core of Downtown is just a few blocks from the epicenter of homelessness in LA: Skid Row. This compact area (official six square blocks) is a magnet for poverty and dispossession, and intentionally so: the city has concentrated services for the homeless near Skid Row, in an attempt to provide relatively easy access for the city’s itinerant population. But the neighborhood is by no means a pretty sight: the vision of small tents and ratty cardboard boxes stretching along the streets is an indelible one. And reports continue of local hospitals and mental-health clinics simply giving up on their worst cases and dumping them on Skid Row to fend for themselves.

Ideally, you don’t want to contain homelessness in a tiny area, you want to eradicate it completely. (The condition, not the people who suffer from it.) One step toward that goal is a better understanding of actual conditions in the region: who the homeless are, how many of them are on the streets, how they live and move through the city. Eric Richardson, who writes the excellent blogdowntown covering everything about Downtown LA, as part of his day job at Cartifact has been working to map Skid Row’s homeless population. (Cartifact is also responsible for an interesting interactive map of Downtown.)

It’s an impressive project, described here, and the most recent update has just come out. The data come from regular counts undertaken by the LAPD; systematic uncertainties will, of course, be as much of an issue here as in any data-collecting process. By clicking on the lower left corner, you can see the maps change as a function of time, or run through an animation of all the maps for the last several months. The good news is that the most recent count is the lowest yet; this is much more likely to represent a seasonal fluctuation than a long-term trend, but it’s still heartening to see.

Archaeologists from Valdaro, Italy, have unearthed a pair of skeletons — a couple who died young, and have been hugging for the last five thousand years. Take that, Andrew Marvell!

Commentators were unsure of many of the basic facts about the Neolithic couple — whether they died simultaneously or one followed the other, whether it was a sudden accident or a ritual sacrifice, or even whether they are man and woman or a same-sex couple.

Opinion is unanimous, however, that they are awfully cute.

Happy Quasi-Religious but Mostly-Secular Holiday with Pagan Origins, everybody! We’ll be back with our regularly scheduled hardnosed blogging — and a numerological milestone! — come Boxing Day.

Study by Robert Whaples, summarized by Greg Mankiw:

• 90.1 percent disagree with the position that “the U.S. should restrict employers from outsourcing work to foreign countries.”
• 87.5 percent agree that “the U.S. should eliminate remaining tariffs and other barriers to trade.”
• 85.2 percent agree that “the U.S. should eliminate agricultural subsidies.”
• 85.3 percent agree that “the gap between Social Security funds and expenditures will become unsustainably large within the next fifty years if current policies remain unchanged.”
• 77.2 percent agree that “the best way to deal with Social Security’s long-term funding gap is to increase the normal retirement age.”
• 67.1 percent agree that “parents should be given educational vouchers which can be used at government-run or privately-run schools.”
• 65.0 percent agree that “the U.S. should increase energy taxes.”

They like the free market, don’t they? Well, so do I. I basically agree with all of them except the bit about school vouchers — I even willing to be convinced about that, but the data so far seem to speak strongly against the success of vouchers (as I vaguely recall). The incentive structures don’t really point in the right direction. From the table, note that the above answers lump together “agree” and “strongly agree”; in fact, when it comes to vouchers, the agreement is not strong.

If you disagree with the economists, here’s why. All via Marginal Revolution.