Off-topic

• Google street view: Pompeii. (via Brad Delong)
• Great firefox plug-in to organize trips.
• Bollywood goes to China. Weird, but fun. Torrent file here. This week I am going to watch Dhoom 2, a Brazilian-Bollywood adventure.

The Decline of Empires in 3 minutes and 30 seconds

Amazing.

Visualizing empires decline from Pedro M Cruz on Vimeo.

Via BoingBoing.

All the flights of the world

24 hours in 72 seconds. (I can not even guess the size of the W matrix!)
Ideas that I am not going to carry out: do the same thing with Eltis data on slave trade.

Berlin's Wall as a natural experiment

Aqui.

Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking

The Economist's New Clothes

This BBC 4 radio show about the 2009 crisis has interviews with Quah, Scholes e Thaler. (The presenter is quite simplistic, but it is a nice show anyway)

Mainstream Plurocracy

I came across the expression "mainstream plurodoxy" while reading this paper by David Colander (hat tip Shikida). I think it quite a neat way to describe modern economics:

By plurodoxy, I mean a mainstream that has no orthodoxy, neoclassical or other. It is a mainstream composed of many different competing beliefs and research programs...
Today, the problem facing all heterodox groups, Austrians included, is that much of what they were fighting against no longer exists, if it ever did exist. Any orthodoxy that may have existed back in the 1970s has been replaced by a mainstream plurocracy.

I think that the concept is a "sequel" of his paper 2000 paper "The Death of Neoclassical Economics"

World Economic History Conference 2012- África do Sul

Here. (HT Irineu de Carvalho Filho)

The great cities in history

From Ur to Los Angeles. It has received an enthusiastic review.

I love XKCD

Maybe I've been working to much with R, but I love this XKCD tribute:

"Economic History Matters!"

Samuelson says! (HT Brad Delong!)

The role of rats and beer in Economic History

Economic History Blog is an excellent blog and also entertaining. Recently the author came across rat furs (!?!?!?!!?) exports from Manhattan to the Netherlands. In another post, he argues that beer may have caused the Industrial Revolution.

G R Elton - The Practice of History

It is an great book on the theory and practice of History. Geoffrey Elton is such an amazing writer, it almost reads like poetry. The first paragraph:

"The future is dark, the present burdensome; only the past, dead and finished, bears contemplation. Those who look upon it have survived it: they are its product and its victors. No wonder, therefore, that men concern themselves with history.

"

Netlogo

My friend Bernardo Furtado convinced me that Netlogo is pretty cool. He showed me a bunch of impressive simulations, but one really got me: Von Thünen model.

Links

Video: Robert Allen:Why was the Industrial Revolution British?. (via Brad Delong)
Gapminder now holds data on food production and regional inequality. (via Marginal Revolution)
Anti-capitalist soviet posters were amazing! (via BoingBoing)
Art ?? (via BoingBoing)

2010 Cliometrics Conference

Here.

Kindle international version

Amazon says it will ship the new Kindle worldwide!

Another interesting abstract

Wordy but it does the job.

Another reason for using R

It is Hal Varian's choice at Google!

Tax on innumeracy is well spent

Britain's National Lotery will help Bletchley Park. Cory Doctorow points the irony : innumerates fund the preservation of the memory of the geniuses of the past.