links for 2009-11-18

• Martin Wolf: Grim truths Obama should have told Hu
• Nancy Birdsall and Arvind Subramanian: Forget emissions, focus on research
• Malcolm Gladwell: Steven Pinker on "What the Dog Saw"
  [Pinker] had three source.... The first was Steve Sailer. Sailer, for the uninitiated, is a California blogger with a marketing background who is best known for his belief that black people are intellectually inferior to white people. Sailer’s “proof”... is... crude: his key variable is how many times a player has been named to the Pro Bowl. Pinker’s second source was a blog post... who also failed to appreciate... the distinction between aggregate and per-play performance. Pinker’s third source was an article in the Columbia Journalism Review... that made an argument partly based on a link to a blog called “Niners Nation” which in turn makes reference to a “study” of quarterbacks conducted by a fantasy football website...
• Clay Shirky: Ontology is Overrated -- Categories, Links, and Tags
• Sean Carroll: Why Does the Universe Look the Way It Does?
• Reed Magazine (2005): News of the College: Buhler, Carr, Kapsch retire