Hopefully Interesting

For an author it's important to get things that the reader might find hard to swallow out there and dealt with as soon as possible.  I didn't really enjoy Neal Stephenson's last book, REAMDE , past the halfway point because too many improbably occurrences had piled up and my suspension of disbelief didn't recover.  By contrast his newest novel, Seveneves , seems to be doing an excellent job of getting the improbable stuff dealt with quickly and I've been enjoying the book without any hangups.  I've only gotten through chapter 7, acknowledged, but I've got a feeling I'll continue to enjoy this one. But of course the second improbable of the two things gives me a chance to talk about some physics I find interesting so I'm going to dissect what I think Stephenson gets wrong.  Not because I think the author is a bad person or wrote a bad book but just because I think the physics is nifty and reading this prompted me to share it. The basic setup of th...

Recently I read The Myth of the Rational Voter by Bryan Caplan and I feel like I got a lot out of it, but from a very surprising direction. Like many people who are interested in economics, I'd long been aware of the idea of rational ignorance, that because it takes time and effort to become informed many people won't in situations where there is no direct benefit to them. Because the effect any given person has on national elections is utterly tiny it doesn't make much sense for individuals to invest much time and effort on learning about political issues since any good they do is further spread out among 300 million of their fellow citizens. This was my explanation for what problems there are in the US political system before reading the book and though it came strongly recommended (1) I figured it would just be an elaboration on this theme. I was very wrong, because Caplan spends a few pages near the start of the book utterly demolishing this argument as a sufficie...