Daily Archives: January 14, 2004


So You Want to be Secretrary of the Treasury

Brad Delong details, and I mean in great detail, what O’neill or any future candidate for this position should do to establish their role and notes that with regard to O’neill:

O’Neill did none of the things that he needed to do in order to get Robert Rubin’s job. Why not is unclear. He did suffer from CEO disease–that is, after a decade of everyone who works for ALCOA telling him that he is a genius and that every one of his words is pure gold, he did believe it and could not readjust. He sent his deputy to ask if O’Neill could attend the 7:30 White House senior staff meeting, but apparently thought it beneath his dignity to ask himself (or to just show up).

Pretty good stuff.
NB: I note, though, that given the reality of the bush administration O’neill could have followed Brad’s guidelines to the T and it likely would not have made an iota of difference.


Skipping Stones

Want to break the world record:

Jerdone Coleman McGhee of Wimberley, Texas, holds the current Guinness Book of World Records title for a 1992 toss that yielded an impressive 38 bounces across the Blanco River in central Texas.

Then here is what you need to do: toss the stone at greater then 25 miles per hour with a spin of 14 rotations a second and assure that it enters the water at an angle of 20 degrees.
The article does not talk about the impact of wind and water conditions.


Quicksilver Companion

Those of you who have read or are reading Stephenson’s Quicksilver might also want to read Carl Zimmer’s Soul Made Flesh. PZ Myers reviews the Soul Made Flesh here:

The book is a fascinating combination of history, philosophy, biography, and science. And by “science”, I don’t mean the plain recital of observations and inferences, but the process of grappling with the evidence, testing hypotheses, and deriving new and better explanations. I’ll be assigning Soul Made Flesh as required reading next time I offer my neuroscience course.

and provides a comparison of the two here:

After all, both describe the same period of intellectual ferment, and both make it clear that it was not a good thing to be a dog in England in the last half of the 1600s.

Oh, and Myers has also posted the most titillating picture of the week. Read the caption here.
NB (1/18): Corrected Zimmer’s first name.