Rotundus.com

• Cost of book Dave wanted to read on Amazon.ca: $13
• Interlibrary loan's (direct) cost to me: $0
• Charge of the remote library to my library: $15
• Add in cross-Canada shipping of the book in question: ???. I'll guess $5

In such cases wouldn't it make a whole lot more sense for the library to say: "Dave, we'll just buy you the book. It's cheaper that way". But no, that would make too much sense.

Or perhaps the remote-library charges are somewhat artificial, getting cancelled out by reciprocal loans? (In this case I kind of doubt it; the book was obscure enough that the closest location that it could be small was in a relatively obscure Ontario library).

One of the things that I've been working on over the course of the last year or so is eating better food. That's meant less sugar, less restaurant food, and more instances of I've-never-eaten-this-before-so-why-not-buy-one in the grocery store. I've been gradually adopting one of Mark Pollan's suggestions:

Avoid food products containing ingredients that are (a) unfamiliar, (b) unpronounceable, (c) more than five in number, or that include (d) high-fructose corn syrup. (p. 150)

This past weekend's experiment brought me back to something that I've done before: make my own bread. I'm not talking the slacker/let's-use-a-bread-machine way. One of the problems with bachelorhood is that it's a bit hard to the right amount of bread, unless of course you happen to like frozen bread, dry, moldy bread, tastes-like-sawdust bread, or going on a bread eating binge for several days. Thus I decided to try freezing dough to make myself some 60% whole wheat bread. All in all working from frozen dough wasn't too bad. Tasted roughly the same after baked, although I wasn't the biggest fan of the taste of the original bread.

Cathy Ortiz, a secretary in Fairhaven whose husband is out of work, was ordered in 2007 to make alimony payments from her own paycheck to his ex-wife - who has a full-time job with benefits. The husband, Ernest Ortiz, is suing the state, arguing that these laws are unconstitutional. Oral arguments were heard yesterday in Appeals Court.

- In the Boston Globe

The courts not adjusting child support or alimony based on chang in employment status is nothing new. It is rather ironic that new-wife(-with-unemployed-husband) is now forced to pay old-(and-employed)-wife alimony) though.

As the article notes, laws on the book like these do make people more likely to avoid marriage.

Do you think that they're trying to stretch things a little bit too far? Try this example:

It is a truth universally acknowledged that the available, sociable, and genuinely attractive man is a character highly in demand in social settings. Dinner hosts are always looking for the man who fits all the criteria. When they don't find him (often), they throw up their hands and settle for the sociable but unattractive, the attractive but unsociable, and, as a last resort, for the merely available.

Luckily I can rely on my personality to keep me out of such situations :)

... The problem of the eligible bachelor is one of the great riddles of social life. Shouldn't there be about as many highly eligible and appealing men as there are attractive, eligible women?

Actually, no—and here's why. ... The structure of the proposal is not, "I choose you." It is, "Will you choose me?" ...

... You can think of this traditional concept of the search for marriage partners as a kind of an auction. In this auction, some women will be more confident of their prospects, others less so. In game-theory terms, you would call the first group "strong bidders" and the second "weak bidders." Your first thought might be that the "strong bidders"—women who (whether because of looks, social ability, or any other reason) are conventionally deemed more of a catch—would consistently win this kind of auction.

But this is not true. In fact, game theory predicts, and empirical studies of auctions bear out, that auctions will often be won by "weak" bidders, who know that they can be outbid and so bid more aggressively, while the "strong" bidders will hold out for a really great deal. You can find a technical discussion of this here. (Be warned: "Bidding Behavior in Asymmetric Auctions" is not for everyone, and I certainly won't claim to have a handle on all the math.)

Is that the limit of this sort of research?

Nope. Consider, for example, a game theory paper entitled On the likelihood of finding the right partner in an arranged marriage or Decision making in arranged marriages with a stochastic reservation quality level.