Check out this must-read long post on heritability and IQ:

One of the sound tenets of a lot of conservative social and political thought is an insistence on the importance of tradition and tacit knowledge, its transmission through families and communities, and the difficulty of making up for the absence of early immersion in a tradition with later explicit instruction. The fact is, however, that if I studied anything which is transmitted via tradition in the way people estimate IQ's heritability, I'd conclude that it had a genetic component. If, in particular, there are traditions which affect IQ, the estimated genetic component of the variance is going to actually include at least some of the variance in traditions.

This post is fantastic so definitely read the whole thing.

Can New Urbanism be imposed?

New Urbanism refers to a recent architectural fad that includes mixed-use developments (retail and housing in the same complex), high-density housing (either multi-family or single-family on tiny lots), and pedestrian-friendly design (limited parking and storefronts on sidewalks instead of facing large parking lots). There is a demand for this type of development and no one objects to developers meeting that demand.

Portland, however, has decided to go far beyond market demand by imposing this type of development on many people. An urban-growth boundary has driven up the cost of single-family housing and the city uses subsidies, including tax-increment financing and below-market land sales, to promote high-density housing. A member of the Portland city council (and leading candidate for mayor) has even said that no new housing should be built in Portland that does not meet New Urban densities and designs.

A podcast with Don Boudreaux on EconTalk where he talks about the failures of antitrust legislation.

Crabs take their food to-go because it lowers the chances that it will be stolen:

Experiments revealed that shore crabs always first attempt to catch their prey at the richest food spot. However, the shore crabs do not consume their prey there. Instead, they take these with them to a nearby food poor spot where there are fewer competitors who want to share the meal.

With this take-out meal strategy shore crabs are ensured of their dinner and they avoid greedy comrades. Field observations in the Wadden Sea suggest that shore crabs take both factors into account in their final choice of food spot when the alternatives are far away from each other.

Unexpected consequences are expected. Example: a glut of ethanol for fuel has caused a collapse in the price:

Only last year, farmers here spoke of a biofuel gold rush, and they rejoiced as prices for ethanol and the corn used to produce it set records.

But companies and farm cooperatives have built so many distilleries so quickly that the ethanol market is suddenly plagued by a glut, in part because the means to distribute it have not kept pace. The average national ethanol price on the spot market has plunged 30 percent since May, with the decline escalating sharply in the last few weeks.

"The end of the ethanol boom is possibly in sight and may already be here," said Neil E. Harl, an economics professor emeritus at Iowa State University who lectures on ethanol and is a consultant for producers. "This is a dangerous time for people who are making investments."

While generous government support is expected to keep the output of ethanol fuel growing, the poorly planned overexpansion of the industry raises questions about its ability to fulfill the hopes of President Bush and other policy makers to serve as a serious antidote to the nation's heavy reliance on foreign oil.