G as in Good H as in Happy

Free Sample: Price Discrimination

An excerpt from Tim Harford's new book.

In the supermarkets, we see the same trick: products that seem to be packaged for the express purpose of conveying awful quality. Supermarkets will often produce an own-brand “value” range, displaying crude designs that don’t vary whether the product is lemonade or bread or baked beans. It wouldn’t cost much to hire a good designer and print more attractive logos. But that would defeat the object: the packaging is carefully designed to put off customers who are willing to pay more. Even customers who would be willing to pay five times as much for a bottle of lemonade will buy the bargain product unless the supermarket makes some effort to discourage them. So, like the lack of tables in standard-class railway carriages and the uncomfortable seats in airport lounges, the ugly packaging of “value” products is designed to make sure that snooty customers self-target price increases on themselves.

As in other contexts, it's hard to cheat an honest, unpretentious person. On the other hand, we like those artistic sketched-fruit labels, on the cunningly-shaped jam jars. And they're only a dollar more.

Via The Fly Bottle.

Following Him Anywhere, Credit Card in Hand

Tim Harford's book, via Marginal Revolution.

The Complete Calvin and Hobbes

"What do you think is the meaning of true happiness?" Calvin asks Hobbes. "Is it money, cars and women? Or is it just money and cars?"

Personal MBA

Josh Kaufman is improvising "The Personal MBA," a promising and substantial reading list, and more.

Don't Forget...

...the riches available through the free e-books from Project Gutenberg. Here's the listing for Anthony Trollope...

Happiness and Books

August 26, 2005

We ditto Michael Blowhard's praise of happiness from books. We took on vacation every book of Donald E. Westlake we could find, and bought another one on the road.

He leaned forward...to switch on the radio. Soon, nasal laments of untrustworthy lovers met in bars filled the car with the sorrows of trying to get through life while unutterably stupid.

--From a page chosen at random (67) from a volume chosen at random (Put a Lid on It, paperback, 2002.)

Via Marginal Revolution

Secrets of the Vaulted Sky

We'll read anything by David Berlinski. Quirky, profound, literate and learned.

...the science that replaced astrology—Newton's science of mechanics—and astrology itself, although differing very considerably in intellectual power, nonetheless share a strong family resemblance—the same strong bones, wide-set eyes, and slightly goofy expression. What I found most interesting about astrology as a failed science is that in some sense it lives on despite its official and widely-noted death rattle. Astrological forms of thought are present in biology, a most astrological endeavor, and even in contemporary mathematical physics itself. Astrology has always been a magical discipline inasmuch as it has always been committed to some form of action at a distance, the very mark of magical thinking. Magical thinking has not disappeared from modern science: It has simply been disguised by a brilliantly effective mathematical screen. Where the screen is thinnest, as in molecular biology, the magic is still very notable.

Beyond this, the problems that the astrologers faced had the quality of great depth—action at a distance, free will, causes that incline but do not compel; and the men and women struggling to meet these problems evoke a sense of shared sympathy...

His new book, researched with his Berkeley-classicist son, is based on primary sources in Greek, Latin, French, German, and English. They had a little help with the Arabic.                  

Books in a Bottle

August 8, 2005

We'll be heard from only intermittently through the 20th or so of August. [Update: Or as Betsy's Page has it: "go cold turkey on the internet and live as our ancestors lived in the olden days."]  Big Family Party, the first anniversary of a small academic wedding last summer, thus functionally, The Wedding Reception.

New camera with memory card, pressed linen duds, hair fluffed, nails manicured, drinks ordered. Mature and deliberate festivity in the 21st century, to which we're still surprised to wake up.

Tidewater Virginia, followed by the Delaware Shore. [We notice UD is on her way to Rehobeth, the playground of those poor souls living D.C.-and-environs rather than Austin. We've been based there too, and frankly...] Can't beat the East Coast for Old House-Big Ocean Good Times, though.

And just-in-time... 

Papyrus Plus

St. Paul's Letter to the Romans, a fragment dating from when the Good News was still regarded as news. From the handsome Chester Beatty Library image collection.

Courtesy mirabilis

Latitude, in Shades of Purple

It would not be surprising in most modern contexts, but it's our impression, prowling recently on the fringes of those precincts, that the predominant, at least the non-Romanian, thrust of the Eastern Orthodox Church is far from the happy-slappy syncretic / "it's all good" / "all paths lead up the mountain" adopted by much contemporary spirituality. Therefore to find a book on the Tao and the Logos connected with Fr. Seraphim Rose, and a positive review of it by an Orthodox Deacon in New York state, is a breadth [sic] of fresh air that we did not expect.

Can't yet say whether it's a good book, but we are still reeling that it is, at all. Good-faith effort to cross-reference the deepest possible concepts while maintaining theological precision is a worthwhile and challenging enterprise, a royal science. Less academic comparative religion than following the thread, tracking the spoor of the Hound Who perseveringly lopes along and watches after souls on their wild tear through fields of Johnson grass matted beneath the hells, toward light vectors around and over unimaginable constellations.

Via Cruciform Axis