This week, I have been mostly reading:

• Food in the Bowl — The Oatmeal by Matthew Inman:
  
• Microeconomic success, macroeconomic failure — Dr Cameron K. Murray: When I teach macroeconomics, I use a dog and bone analogy to demonstrate that the macro-economy is not equivalent to just “adding up” the micro. Let’s see the analogy in action. In the dog and bone economy, ten dogs repeatedly try to find nine bones buried in the yard. Each round, at least one dog misses out. We think that this outcome is undesirable— we can’t have an economy with over 10% dog “bone poverty” and perpetual “dog unemployment”! Some astute dog economists notice that dogs that miss out on a bone are usually a little slower, or have some other traits that make them relatively poor performers. They reason that there is a “skills mismatch” that, if corrected, could solve the macro-economic problems in the dog economy.
• Devin Nunes and the Power of Keyword Signaling — Francesca Tripodi in Wired: When there is limited or no content available on a topic, it’s possible to game search engines to guarantee that certain keywords will be directed to content that includes these terms or is tagged accordingly. This is why conspiracy theorists were able to capitalize on the concept of a “crisis actor.” By producing a plethora of insidious content rife with the term and maximizing SEO, conspiracy theorists filled what Microsoft’s Michael Golebiewski and danah boyd referred to as a “data void.” Searches for “crisis actor” got conspiratorial results until other sources filled the void with more legitimate content debunking the theory.
• Alcohol really is no excuse for bad behaviour – research reveals you’re still the same person after a drink — Kathryn Francis, who writes about it in the Conversation, gave some people the trolley problem and some vodka. Because science!: While alcohol might have impaired the empathy of our participants, it didn’t have an effect on how they judged these moral situations or how they acted in them. If someone chose to push the person off the footbridge in order to save more lives while sober, they did the same thing when drunk. If people refused to sacrifice the person’s life in the same situation because they believed that killing was wrong regardless of the consequences, they also did the same when drunk. It turns out that while we might believe that alcohol changes our personalities, it doesn’t. You’re still the same person after a drink – your existing sense of morality left intact. So while alcohol might affect how we interpret and understand the emotions of other people, we can’t blame our immoral behaviours on alcohol.
• Bloom County 2019 — by Berkeley Breathed: