It’s Not Happening

This post by Matt Yglesias, while not especially noteworthy in terms of content, offers an example of something that’s been bugging me for a while now. Check out this snippet:

For quite a long time now people have been urging Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal to run for hire office[...]

Note the homophone. I’ve seen these pop up quite a lot lately in blog posts, and while I haven’t been tracking carefully, I think Yglesias and Ezra Klein are the worst (maybe only) offenders. I don’t recall seeing homophone typos much, if ever, before, except when people forget their/they’re/there or other similar rules. Are they using voice transcription? Is it just a stupid spell-check error? Signifiers of unedited authenticity? None of those seem right to me for various reasons – I can’t imagine why they’d want to use transcription and I think I would have noticed spell-check errors long ago. Ideas?

(Via Damn, Gina, a mst excllnt tumblr blg)

I loved reading Stanislaw Lem‘s short stories when I was in high school, and this collection makes it easy to see why, as it’s full of big ideas with just enough plot and character to keep the pages turning. What Borges was to philosophy, what Dick was to psychedelia, what Lovecraft was to fear, Lem was to science. Though his novels and some of his stories (Fiasco, Solaris) did deal directly with human and/or alien psychology, much of the work I loved was little more than gleefully nerdy extrapolations from the grab bag of Curiosities of 20th Century Science. Time paradoxes, life transcending matter through information, and robots indistinguishable from living humans have all been grist for the sci-fi mill since day one, but few matched Lem for sheer geeky enthusiasm.

His satire is a little hard to understand, though – he was writing behind the Iron Curtain, but some of his dystopian worlds seem like unmistakable digs at Soviet-style totalitarianism. I’m curious to hear if anyone has any insight into this.

I don’t think I’d recommend this to anyone but the most hardcore fans or near-Asperger’s teens, but his other work is well worth pursuing.

“Money Only Makes You Happy If It Makes You Richer Than Your Neighbors”

While it’s tempting to just laugh this off as another awesome Science Daily headline, this has important policy and political implications. Redistribution of wealth shouldn’t lead to increased happiness on its own, so those of us who think eroding income inequality is important need to make sure we improve lives beyond simply shifting money around – if we want our changes to be sustainable, that is. Improving healthcare access, and thus health outcomes, seems like a good, smart step (though it’s also technically a redistribution of income). What else? Better access to leisure time? Education? Drug legalization?