That is my conclusion after seeing this Google Book Search Page for a book called How to Build Your Own Furniture. The page lists three “Related Books,” including How to Make Your Own Recreation and Hobby Rooms, How to Build Your Cabin or Modern Vacation Home, and … Freakonomics.
Huh?
I am trying to think of what [...]

Here’s a new website, from the Dept. of Health & Human Services, that lets you see how your hospital compares to others.
Here’s another new site, from the Project for Excellence in Journalism, that lets you see how a particular news story is covered in various media outlets.
And if you just need to complain about something, [...]

Even though Americans may be less concerned with global warming than people in many other countries, it is amazing how the subject has recently become so omnipresent. The media is brimming with global warming stories every day, from a variety of angles: environmental, economic, political, etc.
How did this happen? How has such a sweeping, complex, [...]

When Mark Duggan and I wrote our statistical analysis of match rigging in sumo wrestling (which also was featured in Freakonomics), I spent a lot of time digging through translations of Japanese media reports of suspected past match rigging incidents. Almost every prior accusation of match rigging had a common theme: it was always a [...]

There’s a new John Tierney column out today, a good one, on doomsday predictions (mostly concerning biological weapons), and who’s backing up their predictions with cash (including Tierney) on LongBets.org. There’s more information on Tierney’s blog, including a link to this interesting essay by Steven Pinker about the overall decline of violence in modern times.

Al Roth, a Harvard economics professor who has been a leader in getting kidney exchanges established, forwarded this press release to me:
NEWS RELEASE
U.S. Representative Charlie Norwood, Tenth District, Georgia
For immediate release: January 29, 2007
Norwood/Inslee Introduce Paired Kidney Donation Bill in House
(Washington, DC) - Patients waiting for a life-saving kidney transplant [...]

At least if you live in Chicago or California.
If you are interested, there is a memorial service at the University of Chicago today at 2 pm central time that will be broadcast over the web.
And there is a documentary on PBS tonight.

The other day, I posted here about a reader’s complaint that the San Francisco Chronicle turned into a podcast. It was a voicemail message from a man who objected, very strenuously, to some redundant language in a Chronicle article.
It was the first installment of a new audio feature the Chronicle is calling “Correct Me if [...]

It’s one thing to see a flame war break out on a Web site. But it can’t compare to actually hearing the flamer at work. That was the realization of the S.F. Chronicle, which just had the insanely entertaining idea of turning irate readers’ phone messages into podcasts. Here’s the first one.
I will give a [...]

Nice post here at Complete that breaks down Web traffic not by unique visitors or even page views, but by time spent at a particular site. The winner, by a gigantic landslide: MySpace.
Most of the rest of the top 20 aren’t that surprising (Yahoo!, Amazon.com, Facebook, eBay, etc .). It’s interesting to me that only [...]

Jon Tester, the new senator from Montana, posts his daily appointment schedule on his website for all the world to see. According to this A.P. article by Mary Clare Jalonick, such transparency is “fulfilling a promise the Democrat made in his campaign against Republican Sen. Conrad Burns last year. Burns attracted heat for his relationship [...]

David Shenk, author of a bunch of really interesting non-fiction books including this one on chess, and this one on Alzheimer’s disease, has begun working on a book about talent. In one key regard, Shenk is following in footsteps of, inter alia, Chris Anderson, who used a blog to help develop the content of his [...]

Levitt posted a quiz here, and then gave one hint, and then another.
Nobody has come up with exactly the right answer yet, however. I’m not all that surprised: what the conference organizer did was indeed pretty tricky. A lot of you were close, or had different elements of the answer right, but not quite.
Now Levitt [...]

Pardon this brief interruption of contest fever (see three previous entries) but …
Here’s a nice observation written by Nicole Tourtelot, who toils away here in the Freakonomics office (maintaining this Web site, fulfilling bookplate requests, etc.):
Dubner posted recently about intentionally misspelled domain names, such as Stockpickr.com, that aim to grab clumsy typists and/or poor spellers. [...]

Tif177 was on the right trail when he/she offered the following guess:
the speaker was actually a recorded speech/tape that the organizer played at a faster RPM than originally intended.
I am getting on an airplane and will be out of action for the day, so if someone gets the right answer Dubner said he would [...]