This from Kieren Healy at Crooked Timber:

It just struck me that if all your information about America came from political blogs, you’d think the country was composed mainly of libertarians together with a bloc of right-wing populist-imperialists and a few liberals here and there. But if all your information about California came from political blogs, you’d think the state’s politics must be a model of thoughtful right- and left-leaning commentary, marked by a care for civility, a tendency to moderation and a close attention to detail.

See? California does do more than provide entertainment for the rest of the nation.

If you find yourself over here in Cambridge during the next year and you read the blog, just drop me a line (or give me a call at 0779 followed by 2978927), and I'm sure I'd be happy to meet you.

Well, I've been blogging a lot about Chicago lately, but seeing as how I'm now on the other side of the Atlantic I thought maybe a random post on Britain would be in order. So via The Right Coast I found this speech by Tony Blair. Most of it isn't terribly interesting for people not interested in Blair's particular arguments for why he's been a wonderful guy, but I did find one quote particularly nice, especially since it can serve a sort of rejoinder (or at least a warning) to those who support the California Recall effort (like me):

Government's tough. Fulfilling but tough. Opposition was easy. All our MPs had to do was to go back to their constituencies and blame it on the Government. Some of them still do.

Well, the Chemistry and Economics Prizes are out, and none of them went to anybody with any U of C affiliation. So unless the Nobel Committee does something really strange like give a peace prize to Ashcroft or Wolfowitz or Chalabi, the U of C will end this Nobel season with a mere two more prizes under its belt.

The Peace Prize should be announced on Friday, and I'll be sure to have some thoughts then, as well as a call for a celebration if somehow the prize goes to some tangential brainchild of the U of C that I've forgotten.

(Via Julian Sanchez): Andrew Chamberlain has a long and slightly frightening post about the game theoretic considerations of having one's blinds opened or closed (the basic dilemma being that you want your blinds open, but you want everybody else to keep theirs closed so they can't see you).

Here's the situation: my building is "u" shaped, and inside the "u", apartments face each other maybe 30 feet apart. If our blinds are pulled, we can all clearly see each other.

The problem is that in general people prefer to leave their blinds open, for the natural sunlight and increased sense of space. But open blinds also means no privacy -- and the creepy prospect of catching the eye of the half-naked guy across from you.

So, I want my blinds open, and everyone else's closed. But everyone else wants that too. We can't all have it. It's a classic case of strategic interaction. And that means we can model it using some game theory, and maybe learn something in the process.

So here we go.

I do applaud Mr. Chamberlain's thoroughness. But even though he did five different models including a mixed strategy equilibrium, he failed to list three obvious failures of his models, and the real reason that they fail to capture the reality of his dilemma.

Firstly, this isn't just a one-on-one game as he models it. In reality, I suspect, his window can be viewed by probably 4-12 people on the opposite side of his "U". That means that the cost of keeping your blinds open is higher than Chamberlain accounts for, because the chance that one out of 12 people will randomly open their blinds that day is higher than the chance that just one person will.

Secondly, the decision to open or close one's blinds isn't actually made only once a day. Many people, for example, close their blinds long enough to change clothes, have sex, or do naked aerobics, but then open them again once they don't mind being on view to the world as much.

Thirdly, whether you like to have your blinds open or closed is probably asymmetric. Exhibitionists won't mind so much if people can see them changing clothes. Voyeurs want to be able to see people. These functions can also be affected by the gender and attractiveness of your neighbors. A voyeuristic heterosexual gentleman who lives across the way from an exhibitionist and attractive female will leave his blinds open, and so will she. Similarly, a single exhibitionist or extremely hideous-looking person can probably get away with leaving his or her blinds open all the time-- he or she either doesn't care if anybody sees, or knows that everybody will shut their blinds to get away.

So this little exercise in game theory (if you've made it this far, make sure you go read Chamberlain's whole post) actually does have applicability to the real world. One thing it does is predict the equilibrium we generally see-- people close their blinds when they're doing private things, but then open them again once they're doing public things. Another thing it does is suggest that certain types of players (I have no idea about Mr. Chamberlain) can take advantage of the asymmetries of the game. If Mr. Chamberlain is particularly unattractive to those who live across from him, if they have a particular revulsion for peeping, or if he suspects he'd be happier about peeping in on them than they would be on him, he can open his blinds with impunity, or take them off if he prefers. But taking his blinds down is probably a losing proposition, without some sort of asymmetry in his favor, because otherwise the odds are too great that one of those people across the way will be a voyeur or the like.

Yes, Chicago may have been slighted by Atlantic Monthly, but at least the Nobel prize board knows what's what. One of the three Nobel Laureates in Physics is Mr. Alexei Abrikosov, who The University of Chicago can claim as one of their own. (In bragging about the number of Nobel Laureates we've had, we don't always make clear that we count a Nobelist as "ours" if they've ever had anything at all to do with us. Abrikosov taught at Chicago in 1996.

With J.M. Coetzee last week, that makes two Nobels for the University of Chicago this year, which is impressive. And even more impressively, that's two other Nobels for current faculty members at The University of Illinois-Urbana. So let's recap:

In three categories, the Nobel Committee has awarded six nobel prizes. Four of those six have gone to the state of Illinois, and two of them to the University of Chicago. Who cares what the Atlantic Monthly thinks? If we're going to depend on external validation, let's get ours from the top.

For those of us who know we went to best college in the country, it's not clear whether the insult occasioned by Atlantic Monthly ranking us 39th on their list of top colleges is palliated by the New York Times' acknowledgement that this is indeed an insult.

Yet what is most disturbing about the Atlantic Monthly's list is its blatent attempt to tap college admission anxiety without really providing any new information to parents or students.

"Atlantic readers are people too, and they have the same natural instincts," Mr. Sullivan said. "They like lists. And we're appealing to them with a list."

Mr. Sullivan said that the magazine, which has been losing millions of dollars annually, printed 20,000 extra copies of its November issue, for a total of about 150,000. It hopes that the list, as well as the articles, will draw more teenage readers, as well as their parents.

"As we try to build circulation and readership," Mr. Sullivan said, "those are two very important categories for us."

So in a way, I'm actually rather glad to see Atlantic Monthly underrate us so much, as a high score from them could only serve to increase the number of gullible, status-conscious drones present in next year's incoming class.