Good Entropy

Marginal Revolution: Murakami’s *1Q84*

That’s the new Haruki Murakami book, due out in the U.S. in late October. It’s over one thousand pages and it was published originally in three parts. My view of Murakami is that his later works are good but not special, and that his masterpieces are the early novels and also his non-fiction chronicle of the Tokyo gas attacks, Underground. My favorite is Hard Boiled Wonderland the End of the World, which also should appeal to science fiction fans.

IQ84 has been a smash hit in Japan and the never-easy-to-please Germans very much like it too. Here are other foreign reviews. I have read the first 130 pages and believe it may well be his masterpiece. It starts off with two dual stories, with what are recognizably Murakami-esque characters, but I won’t say more than that.

No Substitute For Saving – Megan McArdle – Business – The Atlantic

At this point, I think that most people who are likely to be reading this blog should be targeting a savings rate in the range of 20-25% of income, more if they can manage it.

Science-Based Medicine » Why haven’t we cured cancer yet?

Cancer is not a single disease, and cancers are different

What Does Bias Look Like? – Megan McArdle – National – The Atlantic

So my post on the liberal slant in academia has garnered what I believe to be a record number of comments, many, even most of them, pretty angry. And as I predicted, the positions are very much reversed from the normal take on such things. Conservatives are explaining how bias can be subtle and yet insidious; and liberal, many of them academics are saying that you can’t simply infer bias from statistical underrepresentation, and sarcastically demanding to know whether I really think that people are asking candidates for physics professorships who they voted for in the last election.