Friday Nights Linksorama

  • Nice work, if you can get it. Wish I could get paid half a billion dollars for shuffling papers.
  • An Islamic cleric explains how to beat your wife. I was actually expecting something much worse. He regards women as children, which is an improvement, I guess, over regarding them as animals. The scary thing is, he’s a liberal by Middle Eastern standards.
  • Ah, cat butter. The salad days are over for Mac users.
  • At last they find a way to honor John Jordan O’Neill. Fantastic.
  • Megan McCardle on the importance of failure. As a scientist, I can tell you that an experiment that works precisely as planned tells you nothing.

    Failure, to put it bluntly, works. Failure is nature’s way of telling you “Hey, that doesn’t work!” The American economy is vastly strengthened by the fact that companies are allowed to fail–and also by the fact that our crazy culture encourages us to try things that don’t work.

    In the first few iterations, this often looks inferior to a centralized system. Look, the critics say, they sat down and planned it all! Compare that to our messy, fragmented market where half the stuff doesn’t work!

    It can take a decade or more before the cracks in the planning appear. The planners, it turns out, didn’t foresee that the world would change, and now the giant, planned system can’t cope.

    Speak it, sister.