The dept of Economic History in Lund is hiring a new Senior Lecturer! Ad is here, deadline 17 May: lu.varbi.com/en/what:job/...

lunatic

Starting to think that if the founding fathers were any good at founding fathering, they would have given the power to declare war to Congress rather than one man in the White House.

Looking to use Claude Code as an applied economist? This excellent series by @paulgp.com covers how to set it up, data analysis and web scraping. Amazing work! Looking forward to the next episodes

Bilingual joke? French Wikipedia says the Poisson distribution is "not to be confused with Fisher's distribution" (the F-distribution) fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loi_de_...

looking for an economic historian of the Soviet Union and successor states at the University of Toronto!

We are hiring! Applications are now open for a Lecturer in Economics and Public Policy! We are looking for someone doing policy-relevant microeconomics. Come to beautiful Scotland and help us build the UK's quantitatively-focused MPP! Apply here: www.vacancies.st-andrews.ac.uk/Vacancies/W/...

Just so you understand, this is as if you prepared for argument in front of a panel that included Cookie Monster, and Cookie Monster asked you a question about cookies, and you had not thought about cookies in advance.

While social media shows you extreme content, AI is more likely to show people more moderate content This means the technology, on average, could have very different effects on polarization. www.ft.com/content/3880...

I’m pleased to report that, apparently, in the eyes of my 10 year old my most outstanding characteristics are being a Brazilian jiu jitsu blue belt and having a very hyper-extended right elbow. The two are likely related.

Is there a word for a scientific model that works absurdly well, nobody really knows why, everyone is a little embarrassed about that, and we use it all the time anyway? #LLMs #QuantumMechanics #LoggingTheDependantVariable

my favorite application of zipf… premodeconhist.wordpress.com/2009/04/02/d...

Zipf’s law drives anyone who thinks too much about it into gibbering madness

This is incorrect.

One thing I haven’t been able to get Claude to do is clip a figure or table from a paper to include in a beamer slide deck. Is this impossible or is it just me?

It’s almost like they’re incapable of thinking about the consequences of their actions before they act.

In the future when we look back, it will be clear that Musk and Trump were the two people most responsible for transition to EVs

Environmentalists that are anti-density and pro-parking are like public health advocates that are pro nuclear waste bathing.

Phew. Glad the disruption will last long enough for wise American voters to punish a future Democratic administration for it

not wrong…

This is wild: Over a third of genetics papers published in top journals in 2014-20 (including Nature, Cell, and PNAS) have errors whereby genes with names like SEPT8, DEC1, or MARCH3, were turned into dates by Excel automatically! The issue was first noted in 2004.

pull quote

Interested in opinions on this… I’m scheduled to teach phd gis/spatial techniques in the fall. I usually split it half coding and half discussing causal methods in papers. Should I tear it down, teach how to use Claude agents, and expand the scope of the class to cover research Methods in general?

Dog is asking some very pointed questions right now about why it was 80 degrees yesterday but snowing today.

Actually, this is not false.

The 2026 National Science Foundation budget is $8.75 Billion.

🔭 The Cranium Nebula from the Webb Telescope Image Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI; Processing: J. DePasquale (STScI) ap260309

Spurs are SO bad they're making me feel bad for a Spurs player

Cool opportunity to work at the intersections of climate/environmental history and history of medicine! History and Medicine – Associate Professor or Professor with Tenure – McMaster University Apply by March 31st niche-canada.org/2026/03/05/h... #envhist #histmed #climhist #cdnhist

Useful thread! COVID-19 led to the largest decline in life expectancy since WWII. Recovery is incomplete altho countries differ a lot. US had the largest life expectancy deficit of any studied. Deficits in countries that delayed widespread infection ( eg Norway Japan) had lower cumulative mortality

Two weeks until Trump claims the Iran war would never have happened if he’d been president.

This entire post is a very good read. And also depressing/disorienting. Unrelatedly, I also just ate an entire container of supermarket boneless buffalo wings. causalinf.substack.com/p/claude-cod...

🔭 Shapley 1: An Annular Planetary Nebula Image Credit & Copyright: Peter Bresseler; Text: Keighley Rockcliffe (NASA GSFC, UMBC CSST, CRESST II) apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap26030...

📽️ "Seven points clear - WHAT A NIGHT!" - Brighton 0-1 Arsenal | On the Whistle youtu.be/9DRB36bqMPE

I love that the first guy Googled him and then the second guy asked his mom for advice and SHE Googled him.

Believe in your work. Stop ending papers with “More research is needed” and start concluding with “No more research on this topic is needed.”

Delightful. www.youtube.com/watch?v=FACq...

Wow.

New vocabulary word just dropped. From the Washington post—“The storm will undergo a rapid intensification process called bombogenesis on Sunday night…”.

So, walking around my house and this sticky note was stuck on the bottom of my shoe. I think good things are happening here…

NJ lawmakers introduce the FUCK ICE Act. The bill "permits civil action for violations of US Constitution related to immigration enforcement."

This means that Trump is giving himself as the Head of the Board of Corruption, $10 billion to spend however he wants, with no oversight from the US government and without congressional approval. It’s outright thievery.

“Humans across multiple languages spontaneously associate the nonwords kiki & bouba with spiky & round shapes, respectively...We tested the bouba-kiki effect in baby chickens. Similar to humans, they spontaneously chose a spiky shape when hearing a kiki sound & a round shape when hearing a bouba.”😲🧪

the only place this should happen is academic conferences

New data paper out!

Oh Editorial Manager... thank you for keeping me honest with my login credentials. Also, does anybody want to do some referee reports for username noeldjohnson? DM me for the password.

Something new: A short video responding to the Trump administration saying that economists whose studies aren’t what they want to hear should be “disciplined” www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzZd...

How about if instead of onerous ID requirements on voters we institute constitutional literacy tests for members of Congress?

This is the opposite of what is about as close as you get to an objective fact in economics.