Dan is right, J. Bradford DeLong is funny:

“My feet hurt. These marble floors are hard. I want to go sit down.”

“But here comes David Laibson, the master of hyperbolic discounting. If we stay here, we can talk to him.”

“But then our feet will hurt worse later on in the afternoon.”

“Ah, but right now we don’t care: you see, we are hyperbolic discounters, and so underweight future pain relative to present pleasure. It’s true that later on we’ll regret the fact that we spent so much time standing around and did not sit down. However, right now the benefits of discussing hyperbolic discounting with David Laibson are irresistible!”

“But if we stay here, we’ll be doing the wrong thing…”

More niche humour from James, yesterday:

“Two atoms were walking down the street. One turns to the other and says, “Oh, no! I lost an electron!”

The other responds, “Are you sure?!?”

“Yes, I’m positive!”

» J. Bradford DeLong: The Non-Work Side of the American Economic Association’s Annual Meeting

» Pretty Punny Physics Jokes

This is a great chewy chunk of stuff from another aspect-of-the-Matt-cloud: “Adaptive design for weblog software”.

“The spectrum of software development has two ends. On one end is the push model (yes, I’m going to lapse into the push/pull dichotomy again), which is the model where you set your sights on a goal, and build a tower to get there (like Windows). On the other end is the pull model, which is more like an ecology. Tiny steps, filling niches, each new piece of development just taking advantage of what’s already there, and creating new capabilities — like, life creates conditions conducive to life, in everything that it does . But it’s undirected, not goal oriented, and slow. It can’t be forced. “

Welcome to the New Cambrian.

» Interconnected: Adaptive design for weblog software

From what might be my new favourite place, Lightcycle.org:

“Love in a petri dish”.

Awww.

Phil has come up with some pretty clear explanations of terms commonly used in the blogging world.

» Gyford.com: An introduction to weblog terms for weblog readers

Lazyweb.org is live, and already thriving. Kudos to Ben and Pete Birkenshaw!

Phil Gyford has shown exactly what you can do with new media if you have a viable public domain to play with: Samuel Pepy’s Diary in ‘weblog’ format, with collaborative annotation, in real-time…

Absolutely awesome.

» paranoidfish.org/notes: LazyWeb corollary

While finding links for the last entry I found this place. Awesome! [CTRL-D!!!]
Also it has links to “Second-Life”

» UrbanSimulation.com

Matt Webb is on holiday, but his outboard brain is not. There he’s sneak-previewing what he thinks is going to be his next big topic of enquiry: the sufficiently-broad “what’s next”

On which note, this piece from a recent New Scientist on who might be next at the top of the food chain caught my eye:

“As smart colonies of super-insects evolve rapidly, the once mighty mammals are driven by competitive onslaught to near extinction. Within a few million years these super-coordinated colonies achieve a tactile and chemical language with a syntax and grammar. Their computational networks discover mathematical complexities far beyond the point reached by humans. Space travel is for amateurs; quantum computing opens the portals to galactic exploration. Think about that next time you swat a wasp.”

» NewScientist.com: An alien intelligence [may require registration?]