Daily Archives: June 19, 2015

Tab Sweep – June 19

The most diverse place in America:

Remember Sarah Palin’s much-parodied 2008 interview with Katie Couric? One segment ended with this line: “Believe me, Alaska is like a microcosm of America.”

Five Thirty-Eight: Which Flight Will Get You There Fastest?

Compared with the OECD, America is a Violent Country. Is it getting worse?

Indie publishing tips: Get a Spine and Get a Blurb (for your book’s cover), and The Economics of Indie Publishing.

John C. Wright explains why he doesn’t worry about an author’s politics.

There are other authors (Milton among them) who were visited nightly by the muse and dictated to him. … But her voice is there, or the story is merely words without spirit. … I do not care that Leigh Brackett was a lady or Lord Dunsany a lord. I also care very little what the author thinks in his private life when he is speaking for himself. This is why I prefer the juveniles of Robert Heinlein over his seniles. His later books were too much Bob and not enough Bob’s muse.

Lifehack: John Brandon’s 7-minute routine to change your work life and a follow-up article about implementing it. (I hate the auto-scrolling at that site, by the way.)

Acton Institute: Why the Price System is One of God’s Artworks. (Which reminds me: I need to read Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments.)

Dieting doesn’t shrink your stomach, quite:

The latest science suggests that chronic food restriction can actually affect how much you need to eat to feel full—with caveats. … Numerous imaging studies have shown that the stomachs of obese people are really not that different from those of the rest of the population, indicating that there is little relationship between body size and baseline stomach size….

Thoughts about effective logo design.

Kurt Schlichter says it’s not cool when a high school graduating class has 72 valedictorians.

Shut down the TSA. Really.

This deserves more than a mention in a tab sweep: The Founders’ Model of Welfare Actually Reduced Poverty. I don’t know how well things worked before the modern social welfare system (since Roosevelt’s New Deal, say) but today it’s hard to spend almost any effort trying to alleviate poverty without giving in to despair.