Yappa Ding Ding wrote a lively post about automating intellectual jobs in response to my gripes about lawyerbots. Yappa is more optimistic than I was being about the impact of this automation. As she says:

Wouldn’t it be cool if we all had our own lawyerbot to protect our
interests and automatically communicate with other lawyerbots. Just put
my libel case winnings in my bank account, please!

…Similarly, we can and probably will automate vast chunks of what is
done by lawyers, doctors, politicians, bureaucrats, engineers, computer
scientists, and so on. This could lead to a reduction in prices, just
as manufactured goods are much cheaper than they used to be. That could
be important. For example, now, if you are charged with a crime and
have enough money that you are ineligible for government-paid legal
assistance, you will likely go broke defending yourself. Ditto if you
get involved in a contested divorce settlement. Even handling a real
estate transaction costs hundreds or thousands of dollars in legal
fees, when most of the work is rote. It would be a social revolution if
the cost of … Continue reading

Kieran Healy, Last Best Gifts, University of Chicago Press, 2006.

Gary Becker and Julio Elias, Introducing Incentives in the Market for Live and Cadaveric Organ Donation, (working paper).

The
distinguished theoretical chemist John Murrell wrote that physicists like to solve simple models exactly, while
chemists like to solve detailed models approximately. There are
benefits to both approaches. Take the study of solid state electronic
and magnetic properties, where the early work of physicists was to
compute, using very sophisticated techniques, the properties of highly
simplified models such as a free-electron gas with a uniform background
of positive charge. Chemists, on the other hand, were busy studying
complex materials with intricate structures, but didn’t have the theory
to do more than classify the kind of observations they made. As a
result, physicists gave theories for superconductivity and other exotic
phenomena, but because their theories had so little information about
the specifics of molecular structure they couldn’t predict the kind of
material where superconductivity would be found. The discovery of
… Continue reading

john_d at This Magazine writes about Canadian wines, and what makes them (or fails to make them) Canadian. The story is similar to that of British beer.

Link: BLOG.THISMAGAZINE.CA.

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Went into Toronto today, and took a look at the Andy Warhol exhibition   at the Art Gallery of Ontario, "guest curated" by David Cronenberg.

Talking to AK beforehand, she said that the show is as much about
Cronenberg as it is about Warhol, and I see what she means. The theme
is "Stars, Deaths and Disasters, 1962–1964", and it’s
the Deaths part that is most obvious, and which Cronenberg has most to
say about on the commentary. Given that Warhol produced so much stuff
the focus on death, particularly grisly death (as in the electric chair
series and the Car Crash series) and disaster does seem to have more to
do with Cronenberg’s interests than with Warhol’s.

I went not knowing much about Warhol beyond Campbell Soup, Velvet
Underground, and the odd profile of him I’d seen. I wasn’t sure whether
I would be impressed or not – I don’t have knee jerk reactions for or
against modern art. On the plus side, I like being challenged by art –
anything that makes you take a different look at a piece of the world
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Scott Piatkowski highlights a paragraph from the local paper that reminds us how market-driven and developer-driven much of Southern Ontario’s recent city growth has been.

"Historically, in the early 90s, (the idea) was to strip away bureaucracy to make it easy for business to come down and open up without all the red tape," city planner Cory Bluhm said yesterday. "What we’ve learned from this is the opposite is now the way to go. Residents now expect the city to play a role in shaping the downtown."

About time, I’d say. The only thing worse than city hall is no city hall. Here is the full report that he is talking about.

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I routinely use three different computers, and so any web-based tool is a natural for me. I don’t want to move stuff around from place to place, and I don’t really want to store home things on a work computer. So I find myself – although not without misgivings – keeping more stuff on the web all the time.

I’ve used Gmail as e-mail interface for some time, and I keep photos on Flickr, and now I keep appointments on Google Calendar.  I’ve just discovered LibraryThing (hi piefuchs) and am working out what to do with it, but I expect I’ll keep some kind of catalogue of my books there. There’s no doubt these new applications are changing how useful the web is. I recently started using Zoho Writer to write longer weblog posts, and the thing is, I could imagine using it as my main word processing program. It’s nowhere near as feature-rich as MS Word, of course – but being free, web-based, and reasonably usable, are three big things in its favour, and that’s something I didn’t expect a year ago. Zoho Sheet is pretty cool too.

One big question is … Continue reading