Mini-Digest: Potpourri

A number of articles caught my attention in the last day or so but didn't seem to merit their own individual posts.

538.com's Nate Silver [pretty impressive Wikipedia entry there, sir] offered, as usual, the following off-the-beat perspective:

I know it isn't in vogue to say this, but I think the manifest excesses of Wall Street have made them perhaps too easy a target in assigning blame for the economic collapse. A more appropriate focal point is probably the Federal Reserve, which many economists believe kept interest rates far lower than they ought to have been, contributing to the climate of cheap credit that triggered the housing boom (and bust). The mortgage companies themselves, of course, also exercised exceptionally poor judgment -- as did the media, with its Flip-This-House fetishism, which perpetuated the fiction that one of the biggest asset price bubbles in American history was in fact business as usual. Whether to assign any blame to the homebuyer himself is probably not important. It's tempting to say: if Joe the Homeowner had only read Schiller, none of this would have happened! But it's difficult to expect the consumer to behave rationally when they were getting such bad information from their televisions and their elected (and appointed) officials.

You can read the complete post here.
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Curt Schilling retired from Major Leage Baseball after 23 seasons. I'm sure pundits in the States (on PTI and the Dan Patrick Show, and in Phoenix, Philadelphia, and Boston sports talk radio, if nowhere else) are already debating Schilling's Hall of Fame credentials, as well they should be.

Schilling was a machine on four amazingly successful teams, the '93 Phillies, '01 Diamondbacks, and '04 and '07 Red Sox, and anchored many others. You could argue that he and Randy Johnson double-handedly ended the Yankees momentum post 9/11 and coming off four World Series wins in five years. He will undoubtedly go down as one of the great Yankee haters ever to play the game.

Schilling's record (216-146) will serve, perhaps, as something of a standard for Hall of Fame pitchers from the hitters' era of 1990 ff. He is the greatest postseason starting pitcher I have ever seen and for that should go to Cooperstown to join his blood-stained sock. I hope he goes in as a Philly or a Diamondback; that red sock stands as testament to its friends who are less adept at pluralizing English nouns.
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The journal Archives of Internal Medicine published a study indicating quite clearly the heightened risk of death associated with daily consumption of red meat. What CNN, at least, failed to do (as usual) was properly contextualize the study, whose limited conclusions (as they were reported by CNN) said a variety of things I'm pretty sure we already knew: the equivalent of a quarter-pound hamburger or "small" steak a day is not good for you; neither is eating significant amounts of processed meat (cold cuts; ham; bacon; sausage). If CNN wanted to publish this as part of a general trend indicating that red meat consumption might contribute to death (or might be linked to other factors like cancer and cardiovascular disease which do), then that would have been responsible. Drawing absurdly bombastic conclusions, like their title "Want to live longer? Cut back on red meat," is not the way to go. Shame on non-Surgeon General Sanjay Gupta and the whole CNN health team.
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Amid all the bad news surrounding the descent into debauchery of today's teenagers, Jack Shafer on Slate forcefully debunks (for the fifth time!) the notion of "pharm parties" where teenagers allegedly dump a variety of mom and dad's pills into a bowl and begin gobbling them as if they were a trail mix of M&Ms, Reese's pieces, and Skittles.
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Joe Posnanski does his usual magic by bringing Bill James's mathematical model for how NCAA tournament teams should fare over time and then analyzing why the most common upsets happen (12s over 5s and 9s over 8s) and then looking at this year's Sweet 16 bracket through James's system. I love Posnanski (and the asterisk-as-footnote move).
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On a lighter note, Mental Floss brings us both kooky periodic tables and a lunch quiz on G.I. Joe characters. (I got an impressive 0/15 on G.I. Joe. And I loved them.)