Bookslut points to an article in The Times by Libby Purves on how bookstores (in the UK) have publishers caught in a prisoner’s dilemma when it comes to promoting books, and as a result readers are stuck in a market for lemons. Here is an excerpt:

Reports have “revealed” the so-called secret fees paid by publishers to
booksellers in order to get books stocked, “chosen” and recommended by
the big book chains.

That W H Smith’s “book of the week” title, which attracts you as
if it had won a prize, has been bought and paid for. The publisher
handed over £50,000. Waterstone’s Book of the Week accolade is £10,000,
less for ecstatic mini-reviews. Borders charges for “fiction buyer’s
favourite”. Smaller sums buy other levels of prominence; only some
local staff “picks” are related to actual content. It is not uncommon
for a catalogue to recommend a title warmly before the compiler has
even seen it. A pre-Christmas push costs £200,000 and a big campaign
double that. One publisher told a newspaper: “We’ve got to play by the
rules because we need them.” It is considered … Continue reading

I was out in the front yard just now, trimming some miniature pine trees we have (to keep them miniature) when, all of a sudden, one of the branches moved.

Then it moved again.

What had looked like a slightly darker area of the tree was, in fact, a mass of caterpillars. And yes, they were throbbing, rhythmically.

You want proof? I’ve got proof. Here. Look at this. I put a video up on You Tube (my first posting there).

Watch the Caterpillars

Each caterpillar is about 2 cm (3/4 in) long. I’ve no idea what they are or whether I should be killing them. They’ve been doing the synchronized throbbing thing for about an hour at least now.

Two questions:

Q1 – Will use of the phrase "throbbing caterpillars" lead to a spike in traffic to this site?
Q2 – Is Great Throbbing Caterpillars a great name for a band. A. Yes.

Continue reading

From today’s Sunday Star, how trucks slow everyone down but actually speed up  traffice through bottlenecks. It sounds fine in principle — like making sure everyone walks when there is a fire alarm clears a building quicker, the key thing is to keep traffic smooth, not to permit high speeds. Does it happen in practice? I don’t do enough highway driving to know.

Link: TheStar.com – Revenge of the elephant racers.

Revenge of the elephant racers Why truckers on the 401 team up to control traffic, and help everyone else in the process May 28, 2006. 01:00 AM ANDREW CHUNG TORONTO STAR

Has
the thought ever occurred to you on the rig-riddled Highway 401 that
truck drivers were deliberately conspiring to prevent you, humming
along in your sleek little Celica, from getting around them?

Some
drivers thought so last weekend as they approached a bridge
construction zone near Belleville, where the highway lanes narrowed
from two to one. Giant tractor trailers seemed to line up side-by-side,
blocking both lanes, and slow to a speed that left a half-kilometre gap
between them and vehicles … Continue reading

Steven Landsburg in Forbes Magazine misinterprets what a union is (or could be) — seeing it as a source of coercive rules rather than as a mechanism for coordinating actions, but does have some interesting things to say about how many hours people work in different countries, and why there is a pressure to work a similar amount to everyone else.

Compared
to Europeans, Americans are more likely to be employed and more likely
to work longer hours–employed Americans put in about three hours more
per week than employed Frenchmen. Most importantly, Americans take
fewer (and shorter) vacations. The average American takes off less than
six weeks a year; the average Frenchman almost twelve. The world
champion vacationers are the Swedes, at 16 and a half weeks per year.

This raises more than one interesting question. First,
why do Americans choose to work so much? (Or, if you prefer, why do
Europeans choose to work so little?) Second, who’s happier?

… One
trio of economists (Ed Glaeser of Harvard, Bruce Sacerdote of Dartmouth
and Jose Scheinkman of Princeton) offers this explanation: When your
wages are cut 20%, … Continue reading

Stumbling and Mumbling often points me to things I didn’t know. A few days ago he pointed to this:

if you treat everyone as if they were motivated by money alone, you might drive out these higher motives and worsen management-labour relations. There’s some evidence that this happens in blood donations; if you pay people to give blood, some stop giving.

And links to a paper by some Kiwi researchers that shows it can happen. People donate blood for a variety of reasons, but part of it is because we want to be the kind of person who does their civic duty. If you pay people to donate blood, they no longer get this kind of boost. As a result, some people who previously gave blood no longer do. It makes sense, but the idea that paying people to do something makes them stop doing it takes some getting used to.

The original suggestion was made by RIchard Titmuss in 1970, but it was met by what some Swedish researchers refer to (presumably overly-generously) as "skepticism", including rebuttals by two Nobel prize winners (Arrow, Solow).

And yet … Continue reading

Guess what? One of the people on my blogroll is Lordi, who just won the much-derided Eurovision Song Contest!

Well, nearly. See the always-interesting FinnSense for more.

Continue reading

I got my author copies of the book today.

Pretty exciting!

It looks good – the cover is the tipped over shopping cart/trolley that I posted a couple of posts down. The colour (turquoise with a touch of grey, if that makes any sense) works, and I like the image a lot.

The book is a trade paperback size (6" by 10") and its 240 pages are in a well-spaced, good sized, easy to read font (Stone). There’s a continuity between the cover and the inside – the fonts for the headings are repeated on the cover, and the star that is used as a separator between sections is used again on the cover (a reference to Wal*Mart). There’s even a shade of grey inside, used for the chapter numbers, which gives a slightly classier feel.

I hadn’t seen the index (done by yours truly) in final form before, and it looks fine. I didn’t end up putting any of those Easter Eggs in that you see in some indexes (eg, No Logo has an index entry for "index, puzzling self reference to" on page 437 (or something) which is, of course, the page the index entry appears on). … Continue reading