Daniel Okrent (NYT Public Editor) takes a pop at Paul Krugman

For a man who makes his living offering strong opinions, Paul Krugman seems peculiarly reluctant to grant the same privilege to others. And for a man who leads with his chin twice a week, he acts awfully surprised when someone takes a pop at it. Because only a fool or a supply-sider would eagerly engage in a debate on economics with Prof. Krugman, I’ll try to eschew argument and stick to facts – or, at least, the sort of statements that he himself represents as purely factual:

1. I offered him only three examples of “shaping, slicing and selectively citing” (for some reason, he’s left one out of his rebuttal) because I was at home when he began bombarding me with outraged demands for retraction and apology; I’d completed my tenure as public editor the preceding week, and did not have any files with me. When I had the chance to consult some of my reader mail later in the week, some of his greatest mis-hits immediately came to the fore. I’ll get to a few of those in point No. 5, below.

Mark Gerstein blog

Synthetic diamonds better than authentic

Real diamonds may go the way of natural pearls.

WSJ.com - The Snoop Next Door

Bad manners are severely punished: your neighbors will post pictures and descriptions on "bad manners" blogs. Is this the end of road rage?

Dark matter mapping

The universe gives up its deepest secret
It is the invisible material that makes up most of the cosmos. Now, scientists have created the first image of dark matter

By Steve Connor, Science Editor, The Independent (UK)
Published: 08 January 2007
One of the greatest mysteries of the universe is about to be unravelled with the first detailed, three-dimensional map of dark matter - the invisible material that makes up most of the cosmos.

Astronomers announced yesterday that they have achieved the apparently impossible task of creating a picture of something that has defied every attempt to detect it since its existence was first postulated in 1933.

Scientists have known for many years that there is more to the universe than can be seen or detected through their telescopes but it is only now that they have been able to capture the first significant 3D-image of this otherwise invisible material.

Unlike the ordinary matter of the planets, stars and galaxies, which can be seen through telescopes or detected by scientific instruments, nobody has seen dark matter or knows what it is made of, though calculations suggest that it is at least six times bigger than the rest of the visible universe combined.

A team of 70 astronomers from Europe, America and Japan used the Hubble space telescope to build up a picture of dark matter in a vast region of space where some of the galaxies date back to half the age of the universe - nearly 7 billion years.

They used a phenomenon known as gravitational lensing, first predicted by Albert Einstein, to investigate an area of the sky nine times the size of a full moon. Gravitational lensing occurs when light from distant galaxies is bent by the gravitational influence of any matter that it passes on its journey through space.

The scientists were able to exploit the technique by collecting the distorted light from half a million faraway galaxies to reconstruct some of the missing mass of the universe which is otherwise invisible to conventional telescopes.

"We have, for the first time, mapped the large-scale distribution of dark matter in the universe," said Richard Massey of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, one of the lead scientists in the team. "Dark matter is a mysterious and invisible form of matter, about which we know very little, yet it dominates the mass of the universe."

One of the most important discoveries to emerge from the study is that dark matter appears to form an invisible scaffold or skeleton around which the visible universe has formed.

Although cosmologists have theorised that this would be the case, the findings are dramatic proof that their calculations are correct and that, without dark matter, the known universe that we can see would not be able to exist.

"A filamentary web of dark matter is threaded through the entire universe, and acts as scaffolding within which the ordinary matter - including stars, galaxies and planets - can later be built," Dr Massey said. "The most surprising aspect of our map is how unsurprising it is. Overall, we seem to understand really well what happens during the formation of structure and the evolution of the universe," he said.

The three-dimensional map of dark matter was built up by taking slices through different regions of space much like a medical CT scanner build a 3-D image of the body by taking different X-ray "slices" in two dimensions.

Data from the Hubble telescope was supplemented by measurements from telescopes on the ground, such as the Very Large Telescope of the European Southern Observatory in Chile and the Japanese Subaru telescope in Hawaii.

Details of the dark matter map were released yesterday at the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle and published online by the journal Nature. The map stretches half way back to the beginning of the universe and shows that dark matter has formed into "clumps" as it collapsed under gravity. Other matter then grouped around these clumps to form the visible stars, galaxies and planets.

"The 3-D information is vital to studying the evolution of the structures over cosmic time," said Jason Rhodes of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.

Astronomers have compared the task of detecting dark matter to the difficulty of photographing a city at night from the air when only street lights are visible.

Scientists said the new images were equivalent to seeing a city, its suburbs and country roads in daylight for the first time. Major arteries and intersections become evident and a variety of neighbourhoods are revealed.

"Now that we have begun to map out where dark matter is, the next challenge is to determine what it is, and specifically its relationship to normal matter," Dr Massey said. "We have answered the first question about where the dark matter it, but the ultimate goal will be to determine what it is."

Various experiments on Earth are under way to try to find out what dark matter is made of. One theory is that it is composed of mysterious sub-atomic particles that are difficult to detect because they do not interact with ordinary matter and so cannot be picked up and identified by conventional scientific instruments. Comparing the maps of visible matter and dark matter have already pointed to anomalies that could prove critical to the understanding of what constitutes dark matter.

The Sharpest Sports Handicapper

LAS VEGAS -- Veteran sports bettors and bookmakers are not prone to fantastic notions. They like to think that everything new is just something old in a fashionable suit. But this fall, the stereotype no longer fit. Years of studied cynicism gave way to breathless talk. Las Vegas had a mystery on its hands. Hot streaks rarely last. One handicapper says, "He needs to enjoy this while it's going on right now." Each Thursday morning at precisely 10 a.m. Nevada time, every major casino sports betting operation in the world from here to Costa Rica was being simultaneously pounded by thousands of bettors wagering millions of dollars on the same few college football games. Odder still, most of these lock step bets were turning out to be winners, costing the casinos a fortune.

To protect themselves, bookmakers broke with protocol and began making unusually large and sudden corrections to their betting lines, or "point spreads." At least one offshore casino disabled its Web site for maintenance and restored it only after adjusting the odds. "The whole thing was unreal and unbelievable," says Robert Walker, the race and sports book director for MGM Mirage in Las Vegas. "In 20 years I've never seen anything like it." There were rumors. Some thought terrorists were involved, or hackers, or maybe a shadowy international gambling syndicate known as the Asian Group. But as the month wore on, the truth began to bubble up through the Las Vegas whisper pool.

Turns out there was no grand conspiracy. The global business of sports betting was being jolted every week by one person: an obscure 41-year-old statistician from San Francisco named Dr. Bob.

Dan Rather memogate memo image

Little Green Footballs opened Microsoft Word, set the font to Microsoft’s Times New Roman, tabbed over to the default tab stop to enter the date “18 August 1973,” then typed the rest of the document purportedly from the personal records of the late Lieutenant Colonel Jerry B. Killian. All of the settings were on default; nothing was changed. The Microsoft Word version, typed in 2004, is an exact match for the documents trumpeted by CBS News as “authentic.” Anyone can open MS Word and retype the text -- using default settings -- and achieve the same result. Review the actual document superimposed over the MS Word document and make your own decision as to whether this forgery is so obvious as to compel the conclusion that Rather knew it.

Tripping the Rift animation

Bunnyburgers: Spy Magazine (RIP) hilarious prank

To test our suspicion that certain high-brow marketing companies would agree to market anything for a price, SPY decided to dream up a doomed company with a terrible name, then invent a couple of bogus deep- pockets Japanese investors who'd be bankrolling the idiotic venture, then contact PR firms of various sizes and whether they'd be interested in representing us, and then take our stupid company with its ridiculous name out into the consumer marketplace.

We needed to come up with a venture that would have the look and feel of a big, well-financed, image-driven, Madison Avenue- created powerhouse yet somehow lack fundamental common sense. The bad idea we settled upon was simple and all-American: a fast food chain called Bunny Burgers Inc., which would be selling ground rabbit, as well as salads and french fried carrots, at dozens of outlets in the eastern United States and Canada. The company could follow the Red Lobster model - diners would have the opportunity to pick their own bunnies (Tuesday is P.Y.O.B. Night!) for broiling. The whole idea appealed to us because it simultaneously evoked sweetness and made the skin crawl.

We invited nine PR firms to bid on the account and assist us in determining whether the concept was feasible, public-relations-wise, and if so, what measures could be take to mitigate public hostility toward the consumption of bunny meat at a time of burgeoning sensitivity toward the animals with whom we share this fragile planet. At the outset, we feared that PR firms would hang up on us when we phoned to describe our fictitious enterprise and ask for help.

None of the firms hung up on us.

Cheap wine reviews (very funny)

Robert Moses' response to "The Power Broker"

Patrick Moynihan tribute by George Will

The New York Times is left biased: By its own Public Editor

I don't trust the NYT to leave the link active, so I have copied the entire text below.

THE PUBLIC EDITOR; Is The New York Times a Liberal Newspaper?

The New York Times
By DANIEL OKRENT
Published: July 25, 2004

OF course it is.

The fattest file on my hard drive is jammed with letters from the disappointed, the dismayed and the irate who find in this newspaper a liberal bias that infects not just political coverage but a range of issues from abortion to zoology to the appointment of an admitted Democrat to be its watchdog. (That would be me.) By contrast, readers who attack The Times from the left -- and there are plenty -- generally confine their complaints to the paper's coverage of electoral politics and foreign policy.

I'll get to the politics-and-policy issues this fall (I want to watch the campaign coverage before I conclude anything), but for now my concern is the flammable stuff that ignites the right. These are the social issues: gay rights, gun control, abortion and environmental regulation, among others. And if you think The Times plays it down the middle on any of them, you've been reading the paper with your eyes closed.

But if you're examining the paper's coverage of these subjects from a perspective that is neither urban nor Northeastern nor culturally seen-it-all; if you are among the groups The Times treats as strange objects to be examined on a laboratory slide (devout Catholics, gun owners, Orthodox Jews, Texans); if your value system wouldn't wear well on a composite New York Times journalist, then a walk through this paper can make you feel you're traveling in a strange and forbidding world.

Start with the editorial page, so thoroughly saturated in liberal theology that when it occasionally strays from that point of view the shocked yelps from the left overwhelm even the ceaseless rumble of disapproval from the right.

Across the gutter, the Op-Ed page editors do an evenhanded job of representing a range of views in the essays from outsiders they publish -- but you need an awfully heavy counterweight to balance a page that also bears the work of seven opinionated columnists, only two of whom could be classified as conservative (and, even then, of the conservative subspecies that supports legalization of gay unions and, in the case of William Safire, opposes some central provisions of the Patriot Act).

But opinion pages are opinion pages, and ''balanced opinion page'' is an oxymoron. So let's move elsewhere. In the Sunday magazine, the culture-wars applause-o-meter chronically points left. On the Arts & Leisure front page every week, columnist Frank Rich slices up President Bush, Mel Gibson, John Ashcroft and other paladins of the right in prose as uncompromising as Paul Krugman's or Maureen Dowd's. The culture pages often feature forms of art, dance or theater that may pass for normal (or at least tolerable) in New York but might be pretty shocking in other places.

Same goes for fashion coverage, particularly in the Sunday magazine, where I've encountered models who look like they're preparing to murder (or be murdered), and others arrayed in a mode you could call dominatrix chic. If you're like Jim Chapman, one of my correspondents who has given up on The Times, you're lost in space. Wrote Chapman, ''Whatever happened to poetry that required rhyme and meter, to songs that required lyrics and tunes, to clothing ads that stressed the costume rather than the barely clothed females and slovenly dressed, slack-jawed, unshaven men?''

In the Sunday Styles section, there are gay wedding announcements, of course, but also downtown sex clubs and T-shirts bearing the slogan, ''I'm afraid of Americans.'' The findings of racial-equity reformer Richard Lapchick have been appearing in the sports pages for decades (''Since when is diversity a sport?'' one e-mail complainant grumbled). The front page of the Metro section has featured a long piece best described by its subhead, ''Cross-Dressers Gladly Pay to Get in Touch with Their Feminine Side.'' And a creationist will find no comfort in Science Times.

Not that creationists should expect to find comfort in Science Times. Newspapers have the right to decide what's important and what's not. But their editors must also expect that some readers will think: ''This does not represent me or my interests. In fact, it represents my enemy.'' So is it any wonder that the offended or befuddled reader might consider everything else in the paper -- including, say, campaign coverage -- suspicious as well?

TIMES publisher Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr. doesn't think this walk through The Times is a tour of liberalism. He prefers to call the paper's viewpoint ''urban.'' He says that the tumultuous, polyglot metropolitan environment The Times occupies means ''We're less easily shocked,'' and that the paper reflects ''a value system that recognizes the power of flexibility.''

He's right; living in New York makes a lot of people think that way, and a lot of people who think that way find their way to New York (me, for one). The Times has chosen to be an unashamed product of the city whose name it bears, a condition magnified by the been-there-done-that irony afflicting too many journalists. Articles containing the word ''postmodern'' have appeared in The Times an average of four times a week this year -- true fact! -- and if that doesn't reflect a Manhattan sensibility, I'm Noam Chomsky.

But it's one thing to make the paper's pages a congenial home for editorial polemicists, conceptual artists, the fashion-forward or other like-minded souls (European papers, aligned with specific political parties, have been doing it for centuries), and quite another to tell only the side of the story your co-religionists wish to hear. I don't think it's intentional when The Times does this. But negligence doesn't have to be intentional.

The gay marriage issue provides a perfect example. Set aside the editorial page, the columnists or the lengthy article in the magazine (''Toward a More Perfect Union,'' by David J. Garrow, May 9) that compared the lawyers who won the Massachusetts same-sex marriage lawsuit to Thurgood Marshall and Martin Luther King. That's all fine, especially for those of us who believe that homosexual couples should have precisely the same civil rights as heterosexuals.

But for those who also believe the news pages cannot retain their credibility unless all aspects of an issue are subject to robust examination, it's disappointing to see The Times present the social and cultural aspects of same-sex marriage in a tone that approaches cheerleading. So far this year, front-page headlines have told me that ''For Children of Gays, Marriage Brings Joy'' (March 19); that the family of ''Two Fathers, With One Happy to Stay at Home'' (Jan. 12) is a new archetype; and that ''Gay Couples Seek Unions in God's Eyes'' (Jan. 30). I've learned where gay couples go to celebrate their marriages; I've met gay couples picking out bridal dresses; I've been introduced to couples who have been together for decades and have now sanctified their vows in Canada, couples who have successfully integrated the world of competitive ballroom dancing, couples whose lives are the platonic model of suburban stability.

Every one of these articles was perfectly legitimate. Cumulatively, though, they would make a very effective ad campaign for the gay marriage cause. You wouldn't even need the articles: run the headlines over the invariably sunny pictures of invariably happy people that ran with most of these pieces, and you'd have the makings of a life insurance commercial.

This implicit advocacy is underscored by what hasn't appeared. Apart from one excursion into the legal ramifications of custody battles (''Split Gay Couples Face Custody Hurdles,'' by Adam Liptak and Pam Belluck, March 24), potentially nettlesome effects of gay marriage have been virtually absent from The Times since the issue exploded last winter.

The San Francisco Chronicle runs an uninflected article about Congressional testimony from a Stanford scholar making the case that gay marriage in the Netherlands has had a deleterious effect on heterosexual marriage. The Boston Globe explores the potential impact of same-sex marriage on tax revenues, and the paucity of reliable research on child-rearing in gay families. But in The Times, I have learned next to nothing about these issues, nor about partner abuse in the gay community, about any social difficulties that might be encountered by children of gay couples or about divorce rates (or causes, or consequences) among the 7,000 couples legally joined in Vermont since civil union was established there four years ago.

On a topic that has produced one of the defining debates of our time, Times editors have failed to provide the three-dimensional perspective balanced journalism requires. This has not occurred because of management fiat, but because getting outside one's own value system takes a great deal of self-questioning. Six years ago, the ownership of this sophisticated New York institution decided to make it a truly national paper. Today, only 50 percent of The Times's readership resides in metropolitan New York, but the paper's heart, mind and habits remain embedded here. You can take the paper out of the city, but without an effort to take the city and all its attendant provocations, experiments and attitudes out of the paper, readers with a different worldview will find The Times an alien beast.

Taking the New York out of The New York Times would be a really bad idea. But a determination by the editors to be mindful of the weight of its hometown's presence would not.

With that, I'm leaving town. Next week, letters from readers; after that, this space will be occupied by my polymathic pal Jack Rosenthal, a former Times writer and editor whose name appeared on the masthead for 25 years. I'm going to spend August in a deck chair and see if I can once again read The Times like a civilian. See you after Labor Day.

The public editor serves as the readers' representative. His opinions and conclusions are his own. His address is Public Editor, The New York Times, 229 West 43rd Street, New York 10036-3959; or e-mail: public@nytimes.com. Telephone messages: (212) 556-7652. The public editor's column appears at least twice monthly in this section, and his Web journal can be found at nytimes.com/danielokrent.

Gates and Rockefeller: Remarkable similarities