Chris Dillow instructs us in his post 'Come Dine With Me: The Economics' that social preferences, or preferences that involve regard for the person with whom one interacts, are pervasive in the British Television show 'Come Dine With Me'. It's a fun hypothesis, and an even more fun forum in which to 'test' it, where a 'test' is a simply discussion of the incentives and the evidence of what people seem to do in several episodes of the show. The structure of the game...

The Historian - Elizabeth Kostova 1/2Based on the the history of Vlad Ţepeş and his fictional counterpart, Count Dracula, The Historian details the routes taken by three related people in their search for Dracula. We have the story of the narrator, an unnamed 16 year old girl; the narrator's father, Paul; and her father's doctoral supervisor, Bartholomew Rossi. Other characters feature: Helen Rossi, the illegitimate child of Batholemew; Professor Turgut Bora, a Turkish...

Understanding Society is a blog I recently began to read. I have been impressed with the author, Daniel Little, and his command of a several subjects within the social sciences. Little touches on topics that relate predominantly to philosophy (political, philosophy of science), and to sociology, anthropology, and economics. Little blogs the ideas he plans to discuss in a new book that he is writing, which I assume will be called Understanding Society.  I thought...

Matthew B. Crawford - Shop Class as Soulcraft Matthew B. Crawford's appeal for a society that engages more with its material world caught my attention some time back in a recommendation that I saw.  My father retired from electrical engineering some time ago, and now does all kinds of DIY jobs for people.  Because I spend most of my time uninvolved with such work, but intrigued by the idea of finding what so fascinates my father, I picked up Shop Class as...

I thoroughly enjoyed this Financial Times article on about Jerry Morris, one of the first scientists to pick up a positive correlation between health and exercise.  Apart from the enjoyable reportage, the short biography, etc, what struck me was the simplicity in the setup for which Morris was able to detect a pattern.  I will describe it slightly differently, just to show how ideally it is suited to a quasi-experimental approach. Take a group of a few thousand...

Moxyland by Lauren Beukes Moxyland, from young SA author Lauren Beukes, takes the near future sci-fi of authors like Philip K. Dick, Neal Stephenson, and others and locates it in Cape Town, rather than the more traditional locales of such fiction - NYC, LA, London, Tokyo, etc. But this is a post-superdemic, corporatist, freedoms-limited-by-crazy SAPS Cape Town, not the liberal-outpost, 'Shwaa man', sea and sun, more-laid-back-than-thou Cape Town we know and love. In...

My sister recently announced that she is pregnant.  Our family is overjoyed for her, and interested to see all developments.  Anyway, when she told me she went on to say, 'So no sushi for me.' This immediately got my sceptical brain humming, so I compiled what I could of the research I found on the internet and emailed her.  The content of the email is below, slightly edited to be a blog post. After our conversation about pregnancy I did some research...

Love, etc by Julian Barnes Some time ago I read Julian Barnes's Talking It Over. Published in the early 90s it made a fair dent on contemporary literature by simultaneously maintaining entertainment and fun, with the interesting and semi-postmodern gimmick of switching between narrators. I reviewed (in the earlier days of my reviews - it was brief indeed) Talking It Over in December of 2008 - take a look if you want to get the gist. Anyway, on my recent flight to...

I'm going to try a new format with book reviews for a while. A friend of mine recommended some time ago that I try to dedicate individual posts to individual books, rather than doing the summary posts that I've done for the past while. Consequently, I've decided to try that for a while to see how it goes. I have a bit of a backlog of books so you'll see a number of posts on books for the next while, but following that I'll try to review books immediately after I've...