Hopefully Interesting

I've been having some thoughts about how the economy is regulated and the design of the institutions doing it that I've been meaning to put down in a blog post.  So here goes. I haven't read Ben Bernanke's memoirs myself and maybe I should but I've been reading various economic bloggers reactions to them.   Here is an example.  One thing that stands out to many people is that during the financial crisis the Fed was so preoccupied with the banking system that they essentially forgot that they were also the agency in charge of steering the macro economy at large, trading off between inflation and unemployment and so forth. "Nothing is as important as you think it is while you're thinking about it." It's easy to see how this could happen.  In addition to trying to steer the macro-economy the Fed is in charge of bank regulation and that was generating an enormous amount of work in 2007 to 2008.  As the subprime crisis hit bank after bank went to...

I should have put this up a few days ago but I was somewhat distracted starting my new job at  RightHand Robotics .  There are some pretty cool videos on our front page.  But on to a curated list of nifty things I found on the internet in the last month! Nature has a good list of some interesting unsolved mysteries in physics and cosmology. There are a lot of nifty things that can only be made in microgravity like foamed metal and antibiotic crystals.  Now we can add metal glasses to this as well. A lot of the time we think of conservatives as being in favor of "original interpretations" of the Constitution and liberals as being more supportive of the "living constitution" approach.  There are good reasons for that but it's worth remembering that many of the things that the Black Lives Matter protesters and others criticize about how our criminal justice system handles police immunity were "judge created law" as conservatives usually put it.  T...