Links for 2011-11-30

How to Demonstrate Surface Tension This easy and fun experiment will be sure to captivate absolutely no one. Equipment Glass of water Needle A piece of toilet paper One or more kids who will be unimpressed by your experiment

"Edward Gorey doing The Fantastic Mr. Fox" was the first description that entered my head when I saw these, but that's not quite right. Maybe if The Fantastic Mr. Fox had been the book written by HP Lovecraft instead of The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath.

Cool digital art with a kind of Shaun Tan thing going on.

When you're in the Uticas or Rockfords of the world, it's easy to regard statewide policies as stalking horses for the agendas of, say, the Manhattans or Chicagos. (I'd guess that many of my non-Northeastern readers would have an easier time identifying the mayor of New York City than the governor of New York State.) That gets even more true as the major metros experience significant in-migration, and the outlying cities don't. Over time, it's easy for policymakers -- both offficial and unofficial -- to conflate the large cities with the state as a whole. But what makes sense for Seattle may not make sense for Richland. That can have real consequences for the overshadowed regions. Just because insurance is huge in Omaha doesn't mean that it can be duplicated in Hastings, which presumably has needs of its own. Whatever efficiencies centralization might promise could easily be overwhelmed by deadweight losses caused by blindness to local conditions.