Month: May 2011

Don Gomez, a veteran of the Iraq War,  writes that "Memorial Day is no longer an abstract holiday honoring a faceless mass of heroes from a history textbook":

When once I may have thought of Memorial Day veterans as old men in wheelchairs, I now think of the young blonde soldier at Walter Reed, painfully fixing her prosthetic leg to her knee for her morning physical training session. I think of my friends who struggle daily with their wartime experience and the challenges they face in transitioning from combat to civilian life. I'm reminded of those who died by their own hands long after they returned from the Middle East, victims of a war that would not leave them.

Wilkinson watched Romney give a speech in Iowa:

This solid speech, taken on the road and refined, won't hurt his cause. Mr Romney sounds assured and smart, and he certainly looks the part. But there is a hint of almost manic desperation in his relentlessly full-throated patriotism, as if he were trying to banish by sheer force of will a small dark doubt that an extravagant outpouring of furious love for America can make America even like him back.

“I love that smell of the emissions,” – Sarah Palin at yesterday’s Rolling Thunder rally.

Taryn Davis, shown above with her late husband, remembers her fallen soldier:

Michael was a gorgeous man inside and out. He was a geek that loved Star Trek and PBS. He loved his soldiers, dog, and family. A perfect night would consist of a good foreign film and greasy Chinese food. He always saw the best in people and made me want to nothing other than to make him proud. After getting out of the Army, Michael had aspirations of finishing his engineering degree and having children. Michael was a simple man who could eat steak and peas for the rest of his life, who had a gap in his smile that added a warm quirkiness to his spirit. He loved with all of his heart and gave it out to all who knew him.

There are many (nearly 6,000) like him and it is their memory, it is the one thing that didn't die with them that day; it is their legacy and what we want the world to remember them by. That is what Memorial Day is for military widows.

We don't want you to remember them just by the uniform they wore or the number of casualties you see on the five o'clock news…But the men and women like you; following their passions, loving the people in their life, enjoying a cold beer on a hot summer day.

Davis urges readers to visit www.americanwidowproject.org to hear more stories from the widows of soliders.

A new study finds that ads are good at creating false memories. Jonah Lehrer explains the cognitive mechanism at play:

Our memories are a “Save As”: They are files that get rewritten every time we remember them, which is why the more we remember something, the less accurate the memory becomes. And so that pretty picture of popcorn becomes a taste we definitely remember, and that alluring soda commercial becomes a scene from my own life. We steal our stories from everywhere. Marketers, it turns out, are just really good at giving us stories we want to steal.

After calculating how much the average American has to work to pay for their car (about 2 hours a day), James Schwartz tallied that cost for the bicycle commuter:

Based on an annual average cost of $350 to own a sturdy, quality bicycle, the average American will work 15.98 hours a year to pay for their bicycle, which works out to be 0.063927 hours per day – or 3.84 minutes a day.

Lloyd Alter corrects Schwartz's math because Schwartz doesn't take fuel into account:  

Revenue Canada has determined that for bicycle couriers, food is fuel and worth $17  dollars per day. … Add that to James's calculation of $ 350 for owning and operating a bike, and one gets a total annual cost of $ 821.25, or 9.01 minutes per day of work to pay for the bike and its fuel. Sorry, James.

Pawlenty gets the Huntsman treatment:

In related commentary, Larison suspects Pawlenty wouldn't have benefited from being McCain's number two:

McCain supported a cap-and-trade position during the campaign, and Pawlenty would have had no difficulty agreeing with that. He would have been introduced to the country as a proud supporter of cap-and-trade instead of an embarrassed former supporter. Instead of being able to dodge the bailout issue by claiming to be a merely “reluctant” supporter, he would have been forced to defend McCain’s support of it.

Daveed Gartenstein-Ross reminds us that if al Qaeda attacked the Saudi oil supply they could still seriously damage the US economy:

The kingdom relies on its Abqaiq facility to process two-thirds of its crude oil, and on two primary terminals (Ras Tanura and Ras al-Ju'aymah) to export its oil to the world. The economic impact of a successful attack on one of these targets would be tremendous: Gal Luft and Anne Korin of the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security estimate that, if a terrorist cell hijacked a plane and crashed it into either the Abqaiq or Ras Tanura facilities in a 9/11-style attack, it could "take up to 50% of Saudi oil off the market for at least six months and with it most of the world's spare capacity, sending oil prices through the ceiling."

Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has an interactive chart that allows you to input which quality of life inputs matter most (such as safety or work-life balance), and orders 34 countries accordingly. Nathan Yau swoons:

[E]ach country is represented with a flower, and each petal on a flower represents a metric. The higher the index, the higher the flower appears on the vertical axis, and if the flower metaphor is too abstract for you, roll over each flower to see the breakdown by bar graph.

… [Y]ou can focus on specific topics such as housing to see how countries rank in each area and information on what indicators were used to compute each sub-index. The environment index, for example, is based solely on air pollution levels, whereas the education index takes educational attainment and reading skills into account. So whether you're interested in a specific country, topic, or a group of topics, the interactive tools lets you see world data from plenty of angles.

Alex Tabarrok advises:

If you don’t like the OECDs better life ranking, here is Oprah’s best life series.

James Surowiecki wants a better the Consumer Price Index:

The government continues to track inflation, for instance, by gathering price data much as it did in the nineteen-fifties: it surveys consumers by phone to see where they buy, surveys businesses to see how much they charge, checks out shopping malls to price goods. This leaves out consumers who have only cell phones, and it probably overstates inflation by not fully accounting for things like the impact of big-box stores. The larger problem, though, is the time it takes: the Consumer Price Index’s figures don’t come out until a month after the fact. In turbulent times, that’s too slow.

He compares it with a new operation, the Billion Prices Project, which could act as the "first real-time inflation index":

The B.P.P., which was designed by the M.I.T. economists Alberto Cavallo and Roberto Rigobon, gathers price data not via survey but, rather, by continuously scouring the Web for prices of online goods around the world. (In the U.S., it collects more than half a million prices daily—five times the number that the government looks at.)