Websurdity asks the tough questions (via Radosh).

Good article on Borough Market in London, where Eric and I spent a pleasant Saturday morning a couple of years ago. [LA Times]

Wikipedia is terrible for, say, political controversies, but it's just plain awesome for fanboy stuff like old computer games.

The Prisoner was perhaps the best computer adventure game ever, making up for its primitive 1980 graphics and limited universe by subverting the very nature of computer game-playing, even tricking the player with fake error messages into revealing a secret code that would cause the player to lose the game. It's disappointing that no one has ported it to modern PCs. Even the programmer's web page fails to give any useful links to where the game itself can be purchased, instead linking to various pages about the tv series (from which the Wikipedia page says it never received a license).

Ostensible predictions for 2000 made a hundred years earlier in 1900, via Cowen. This list is tripping up my hoax-meter, but if it's real, it's quite enjoyable, ranging from wild underestimates (New York to London in two days!) to wild overestimates (a strange obsession with large produce) to a few that are almost but not quite right (a strange obsession with networks of pneumatic tubes) and a couple that are frighteningly spot on. On which side will today's prediction of the singularity be?

Update: Not a hoax. A reader generously sends me a pdf, which I'd post but for the extensive (but perhaps incorrect) copyright notice. The sequence is different from the web-page, but the text (including the word "suburbs") is accurate every place I've double-checked.

According to Mumbai police: 3,404 people, or about 13 each weekday, were killed in 2006 scrambling across the tracks, tumbling off packed trains, slipping off platforms, or sticking their heads out open doors and windows for air. ... Accidents are so common that stations stock sheets to cover corpses. [WSJ]

The trains are so crowded that passengers have started riding trains against their commute to get seats at the beginning of the line.

Contrary to John Derbyshire's remarks, some VT people apparently did confront the shooter: Kevin Granata left his third-floor office after securing students there, and was killed on the second floor.

Cho shot 45 or so people, killing 32. Many press accounts mention that many victims had multiple gunshot wounds. There are several accounts of Cho firing into closed doors unsuccessfully, and an account of Cho firing at a janitor several times and missing. Cho presumably had several other shots that missed. So why are so many press accounts saying that Cho was armed with two guns and "fifty rounds of ammunition"? [E.g., LA Times] He clearly had more than that; at Roanoke alone, he bought two magazines and fifty rounds for just one of the guns.

I only got 250 words on the Virginia Tech tragedy, which, judging by the quality of the comments, is just as well. Wally has a round-up of other op-eds and blogs that made a similar point with more space to do it in.

Elsewhere:

• I'm quoted in the March 27 Madison County Record and in Legal News Line April 13.


• I have a piece on American.com and in the latest issue of Class Action Watch.


• New Liability Outlook at AEI.

I wonder if I should worry that I'm making I'm making the same argument as Amanda Marcotte. Funny how my version prompts a knee-jerk response. Who says the Left is closed-minded?

The gun-shop owner who sold the shooter the gun allegedly posted Cho's name on a gun forum a day before the press reported it.

With a tax refund winging its way to me (I was able to find a capital loss in December to avoid paying capital gains taxes, but I would've been better off financially holding on to the stock as it rebounded), I went and calculated my net worth. If one believes the sales price the neighbor of mine with an identically-sized condo (but one fewer parking space) just listed his unit for, some time between September and today I became a millionaire, albeit one with illiquid assets that would expose me to expenses and tax liabilities that would take me well below the million-dollar line if I were to try to translate them into fungible cash. Not bad, considering my net worth was negative when I was thirty.

I'm skeptical that my condo value has really increased 10% in six months, however. On the other hand, smaller (if newer) units further away from the Metro, also with only one parking space, are ostensibly selling for more. The market is what the market is.

I don't feel like a millionaire. Maybe it's because I have days when I have only $23 in my checking account and it's a pleasant surprise when Slim buys a book for me that I thought I'd have to wait for in paperback. Or because Slim always leaves the bread heels for me.

Redoing someone's dorm room isn't just for MIT students any more.