Newmark's Door

Scott Adams, author of Dilbert, owns some restaurants and he's been posting a little about the restaurant business. I don't read his blog regularly, so I don't know whether we're supposed to take it 100% seriously or not. But in this post he claims that a big key to restaurant success is lighting:

When asked about the most important factor for a restaurant’s success, experts often pick lighting. Your first inclination is to laugh that off as absurd, because you’ve probably never made a restaurant decision based on lighting. But if you look at the restaurants that are doing well without being Italian or Mexican or tax cheats or a chain, they generally have excellent lighting. Everything, including your date, looks better with the right lighting. And that can be enough to make you remember the food and service as being better than they were. I pay attention to restaurant lighting, and find it a far better predictor of success than food or service. (I’m working on my restaurant’s lighting too.)

I usually yield to experience but not in this case. If he's serious, I disagree completely.

"Top 20 Temporary and Disposable E-Mail Services".

"The 100 Best Web 2.0 Sites and Services".

Robin Williams does his thing on the Letterman show.

I don't know which presidential candidate I'll vote for next year, but Fred Thompson's column praising federalism impresses me. Federalism is a vastly underrated asset of our system. (Link via Greg Mankiw.)

Those who would become brave should first celebrate bravery. Four teenaged girls in Kansas show how it's done.

I've had enough global warming for a while, but I can't resist linking to "They Call This a Consensus?"

UPDATE: Sorry, but the National Post has now put the link behind its pay firewall.

UPDATE 2: Thanks to reader Tony K. here's an alternate link to the piece. Here's a link to the entire 26-part series, "The Deniers". Recommended reading and thanks again to Tony.

53-year-old Gary Kamiya looks in the mirror and asks, "When did I get so damn old?'"

I almost stopped reading at that point. I've found similar pieces to either be trite or pointless. But Kamiya surprised me; while flirting with trite, he manages to provide something a little different.

But resisting old age makes you old. It makes your losses serious. When you accept those losses, on the other hand, they become comic. You defeat old age by making friends with it. By letting it win. And you might as well, because it's going to anyway. . . .

But gratitude doesn't mean forgetting, or not sometimes mourning the loss of what you had, or were. . . .

I had my day, and I'll have other ones. We all have our losses -- and a lot of people's are infinitely bigger than mine. Yes, it's hard to look down from the top of the hill at the rest of your life -- no more illusions, this is it -- and realize how many things you aren't ever going to do. But there would be no possibility without impossibility. Besides, the view from up here is beautiful. It's like you can see forever.

Brief sketches of how twenty New York City businesses make their money. Very interesting.

The staff of the Straight Dope takes a crack at the disappearing bee story.

I received Robert H. Frank's The Economic Naturalist: In Search of Explanations for Everyday Enigmas as a gift. Tyler Cowen liked it. Steven Pearlstein of the Washington Post gave it a mixed review:

The result is often repetitious and too often simplistic and unsatisfying. . . . It is pleasant enough to read, but it breaks little new ground and winds up being more clever at asking questions than at answering them.

While I, too, spent a pleasant couple of hours with the book, I have, like Pearlstein, some complaints.

However, I completely support what Professor Frank is trying to do. He wants students taking introductory economics to begin applying economics as soon as possible. He assigns his students to write short essays that are "to use a principle, or principles, discussed in the course to pose and answer an interesting question about some pattern of events or behavior that you personally have observed." About 90 such questions-and-answers that his students proposed are the core of the book. (Another couple dozen or so derive from Professor Frank's research and the research of other professional economists.)

This is a very worthwhile objective. And Professor Frank states, ". . . their answers to the questions should be viewed as intelligent hypotheses suitable for further refinement and testing. They are not meant to be the final word." So, the questions-and-answers also have benefit of stimulating further discussion and further hypothesizing.

But a problem with teaching through these assignments is that finding good questions and answers is quite difficult. Many of the students' questions or answers, or both, won't be very good. Given that the 90 in the book probably represent the best responses of several Cornell classes' worth of assignments, four problems with using these assignments in the classroom are apparent.