Fire and Knowledge

This is amazing, bizarre, creative, and must have taken a lot of time and paint:

(via KK)

It ends up Sherlock Holmes never actually said “Elementary, my dear Watson.” Here’s what Chip & Dan Heath say about it in Made to Stick:

One of the most famous misquotations of all time is attributed to the fictional detective Sherlock Holmes. Holmes never said, “Elementary, my dear Watson.” This seems hard to believe—the quote is perfectly suited to our schema of Holmes. In fact, if you asked someone to name one Sherlock Holmes quote, this would be it. His most famous quote is the one he never said.

Why did this nonexistent quote stick? It’s not hard to imagine what must of happened. Holmes frequently said, “My dear Watson,” and he often said, “Elementary.” A natural mistake, for someone inclined to quote from a Holmes mystery, would be to combine the two. And, like an adaptive biological mutation, the newly combined quote was such an improvement that it couldn’t help but spread. This four-word quotation, after all, contains the essence of Holmes: the brilliant detective never too busy to condescend to his faithful sidekick. (p. 239)

(Wikipedia has some other famous misquotations.)

By any rational measure, this world belongs to microbes. They were mastering the subtleties of evolution three billion years before the first multicellular organism appeared. They continue to evolve and adapt in a tiny fraction of the time it takes us to reproduce once. They flourish in polar ice caps, in boiling water, and amid radioactive waste. We exist only because some of them find us useful. Ninety percent of the cells in our bodies are bacteria. The entirety of human evolution has taken place in an environment saturated with microbes, and humans are so firmly adapted to the routine of sheltering allies and rebuffing enemies that the removal of either can devastate our defense systems.

—Nathanael Johnson, “The Revolution Will Not Be Pasteurized“

According to the Energy Information Administration, in 1922, gasoline cost the current-day equivalent of $3.11. Today, according to the EIA, gasoline is selling for about $3.77 per gallon, only about 20 percent more than 86 years ago….

American gasoline is also dirt-cheap compared with gas in other countries. British motorists are currently paying about $8.38 per gallon for gasoline. In Norway, a major oil exporter, drivers are paying $8.73.

—Robert Bryce, “Gasoline Is Cheap“

The other day I typed “why” on Google Suggest, and the first auto-suggestion was “why did i get married.”

At first I was surprised that the term was so popular and had over a million results. It seemed odd that humans, though admittedly a very strange mammal, could think Google could answer the question of why they got married.

But then I saw there was a movie by that name. A reasonable explanation after all!

As they say, correlation is not causation. But I wonder if there’s something to this.

Unemployment among 16 and 17-year-old black males was no higher than among white males of the same age in 1948. It was only after a series of minimum wage escalations began that black male teenage unemployment not only skyrocketed itself but became more than double the unemployment rates among white male teenagers. In the early twenty-first century, the unemployment rate for black teenagers exceeded 30 percent.

—Thomas Sowell, Basic Economics (3rd Edition, Basic Books, 2007), p. 221.

I learned recently that in 1951 – 1963, the top tax bracket was 91% (and 92% for two years)! That means every $1.00 over $400,000 was reduced to $.09!

So an additional $200,000 of income over $400,000 would be reduced to a measly $18,000.

It seems like that would be a very big incentive not to make money.

Update: As Les points out in the comments, this was a marginal tax bracket, so only the income over a certain level was taxed at that rate. I’ve changed the post to reflect this.

If you ask an economist what’s driven economic growth, it’s been major advances in things that mattered—the mechanization of farming, mass manufacturing, and things like that. The problem is, our society is not organized around doing that. People are not working on things that could have that kind of influence…. How many people are working on things that can move the needle on the economy or on people’s quality of life? Look, [for example,] 40,000 people a year are killed in the US in auto accidents. Who’s going to make that number zero or very, very small?

—Larry Page, Google co-founder