Exasperated Calculator

Exasperated Calculator: Star Trek & Economics

  • Profit maximisation

    Ticket scalping has always puzzled me – why can’t they just get the price right in the first place? [Now TicketMaster has an auction service that might just fix that](http://www.ticketmaster.com.au/ticketauctions).

  • Harry Potter and the Book to Film Adaptation

    Adapting a book to film is not easy. There are not many succesful examples around, and what few there are (Blade Runner, for instance) drift a very long way from their source material. The five books of the Harry Potter film series so far have been a distinctly mixed bag. Why? In my opinion, because…

  • More Wikipedia bias

    A nice summary of [the pro-nerd bias of Wikipedia](http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/06/07/wikipedias-huge-nerd-bias/).

  • What explains terrorism?

    Bruce Schneir explores [the incompetence of most recent attempted terrorists](http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/06/portrait_of_the.html).

  • Today’s pretty picture

    Pictures made from [the patterns of air traffic movements in the US](http://users.design.ucla.edu/~akoblin/work/faa/index.html).

  • Behind the Regan’s Berlin Wall speech

    [The behind-the-scenes story of Reagan’s most famous speech](http://powerlineblog.com/archives/017914.php).

  • From communism to Capitalism

    A 65-year-old man in Poland [has just awoken after 19 years unconscious](http://www.reason.com/blog/show/120556.html).

  • Harry Potter and the Invasion of the Fan-Fic

    Another feaure of Harry Potter is the tuly amazing volume of fan fiction (fanfic for short) that have been written.[^1] It’s getting close to overtaking Star Trek… [One site alone](http://www.harrypotterfanfiction.com/) has over 42,000 stories, written by over 20,000 different authors. Some of it is very, very good. But that’s not any fun… A few highlights…

  • More uses for a credit card

    [Credit card shaped cutlery](http://www.makezine.com/blog/archive/2007/06/credit_card_cutlery.html?CMP=OTC-0D6B48984890).

  • Ten states for Australia?

    [One proposal that never quite made it](http://strangemaps.wordpress.com/2007/06/03/130-a-ten-state-australia/).