Quick reversal of fortune: NBA (also file under small sample size)

A couple weeks ago, the Wolves were the feel good story of the NBA.  They had huge injury problems (Love and Rubio both out) but were still winning games, leading to a flurry of speculation that they might be a playoff team and even that Adelman was making a case that the Lakers shouldve hired him instead of Mike Brown.  Here we are a few injuries later (Barea, Budinger, etc) and with KLove back in the lineup, and now a few losses have people questioning everything from KLove's offense to Adelman's subsitution decisions.  On some level I really enjoy the daily analysis of the NBA, but sometimes it's just ridiculous.  Depending on what day you checked last week, D'Antoni was either saving or screwing the Lakers, the Knicks were the best or more overrated team in the league, the Bobcats were en fuego or the same garbage as usual, etc.  Instant analysis is fun, but everything in moderation, guys!  Not every game is a sign of a permanent trend.

Don't pick up pennies

A fun post at xkcd on the economics of picking up pennies.  Some other issues they might've considered:  germs (bad), keeping the ground clean (good), likelihood that you will use the penny before you use it...

Knicks are going to continue getting Tech'd

An interesting article on Why Refs Hate the Knicks from the WSJ.  The main points:

1) older players get more technicals
2) high draft picks get more technicals
3) the Knicks are old and have the most top 5 draft picks in the league
4) the Knicks are going to continue wracking up the T's

Government Reform (FDA edition)

Via MR, I see that Rand Paul inserted language into FDA legislation recently passed by the Senate which would force the FDA to accept data from clinical investigations conducted outside the United States, including the European Union.  As Paul's press release claims, this would speed the process of getting drugs to market in the U.S., a process that has become increasingly burdensome, and unmatched to the task of reviewing the most advanced treatments.  Alex Taborrak has long advocated for automatic FDA approval of any drug or medical device that gains approval in the EU, Japan, Canada or Australia (I assume he would expand this list if offered the power to write the rules).  I'd be interested to see arguments against.  Is there a reason we shouldn't outsource this decision making, lessening the burden on U.S. govt resources and decreasing the time it takes for important medical treatments to come to market?

Driverless Cars - liability, technology, and a test drive

Continuing its very successful practice of giving test drives to journalists and politicians, Google recently took Randal O'Toole of Cato for a ride.  Some highlights:

He said the car and hardware cost about $100,000, but Google has just a handful of them. When they go into mass production, he estimated an ordinary car could be retrofitted for a couple of thousand dollars. Some cars already have many of the sensors the Google car uses, so the cost of retrofitting such cars would be much lower.

This is fantastic to hear, and something I hadnt given much thought to. If they can retrofit cars rather than having to build them from scratch, that could dramatically accelerate adoption of the driverless technology.

As we threaded through downtown DC traffic, he noted that the car relies on GPS for only the most general purposes. Mainly it relies on the information it senses and its built-in knowledge of the area. For example, Google programs the location and height of every traffic signal the car might encounter so it knows where to look for the signals.

This is also good news, as use of GPS has been a big concern for a variety of reasons.  The article does mention that the cars currently have information only about local areas - the car can drive around DC but not from DC to CA - but software updates should be able to make up for that in time.

And finally, this is encouraging in the short term, as Google leads the push for driverless cars, but does little to settle concerns that liability laws will remain a significant hurdle to widespread adoption:

Automakers probably won’t bring self-driving cars to market under current laws, he speculated–but those laws won’t stop Google. He promised that Google would stand by its software: If a self-driving car is involved in an accident, the car will have a record of what other vehicles involved were doing up to the accident. If the other vehicle is at fault, the record will prove it, and if Google’s car is at fault, Google would pay the cost and fix the problem so it won’t happen again.

Google is awesome.

End Prohibition (Organ markets edition)

Matt Welch makes the case for ending the prohibition on selling of kidneys:

Every day, eighteen people die in the United States while waiting in vain for a kidney transplant according to the National Kidney Foundation. The Department of Health & Human Services reports that nearly 92,000 patients were on the kidney waiting list as of April 6 (up from 66,000 six years ago), but that only 16,812 transplants were made in 2011. That deadly math is part of the reason that, according to the National Institutes of Health, more than 380,000 Americans are on dialysis, a punitively expensive and physically grueling death-postponement procedure. The imbalance cannot be meaningfully addressed via cadaver-harvesting alone. As the writer (and kidney donor) Virginia Postrel observed in 2009:

If every single person who died the right way became an organ donor, an optimistic estimate would be that 7,000 more kidneys a year would be available for transplant. Since the [waiting] list is now increasing by 6,000 a year, that would be enough to end it—in 80 years.

So we know that maintaining prohibition—letting the law be guided by our moral revulsion toward placing price tags on human organs—will certainly increase the body count. We know that boosting the number of kidney donations from the living is the only real way to whittle the waiting list down. And we also know, from such procedures as egg donation, that legalizing monetary rewards is a guaranteed method for expanding the pool of living donors. Your morality may vary, but mine says that sentencing more than 6,000 people a year to an avoidable death falls well short of the Golden Rule.

I agree.

In Case You Missed It

Caballo Blanco

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/21/sports/caballo-blancos-last-run-the-micah-true-story.html?src=me&ref=general