links for 2009-01-06

"The middle fifth of the income distribution begins at a yearly income of $34,738 per household. Assume they pay 20 percent in total taxes (it's probably a bit higher), and they're left with $27,798 to live on. That's fairly rough if you're raising a family. The top 0.01 percent, by contrast, begins at a yearly income of $20,471,271. Assume they pay, including state and local taxes, 35 percent of their income (they probably pay less), and they're living on a mere $15,353,453 a year. It's hard to imagine the electorate taking much pity on that sort of suffering."

A scaling argument for why traffice is worse in bigger cities.

"The case for privatisation had two main elements. First, there was the fiscal argument for privatisation, namely, that governments could improve their financial position by selling government business enterprises. This argument assumed that privately owned firms would have higher levels of operating efficiency, and therefore that the value of those firms would be increased by privatisation. The second argument was a dynamic one, that the allocation of capital between alternative investments would be improved if governments were not involved in the process. Both of these arguments have been fatally undermined by the collapse of the efficient markets hypothesis."

"Leon Lederman, a Nobel prize winner and a champion of "Physics First," gave a talk at the Minnesota AAPT section meeting this fall, and there he remarked that perhaps we should require all students to take three years of science in high school with an emphasis on the connections between all science disciplines, perhaps even naming the classes Science I, Science II, and Science III."

What could be simpler than one giant button?