We’ve finally reached the end of 2020, a year that many people are happy to forget. In the history books, 2020 will be known for little besides the Covid pandemic. Fortunately, the end of this disaster is in sight. With multiple vaccines starting to roll out, it looks like 2021 will be a better year. Speaking of vaccines, I’ve been racking my brain to find things to be thankful for this holiday season. It’s not easy.

As a scientist, I spend much of my time writing. Over the years I’ve experimented with a panoply of writing tools. This week I thought I’d share what I’ve learned. While you can ultimately write on any device that records your words, a good tool makes writing less painful. For a lot of people, the writing tool is Microsoft Word (or some similar word processor). If it works for you, great.

It was a bet heard around the world. Okay, that’s an exaggeration. It was a bet heard mostly by academics and sustainability buffs. But still, it was a bet … and it was important. The year was 1980. The players were biologist Paul Ehrlich and business professor Julian Simon. The two had conflicting ideas about where humanity was headed.

Do you remember peak oil? It was all the rage a decade ago. Now, almost no one is talking about it. The funny thing is, the problem never went away. If anything, it’s gotten worse. In this post, I take a deep dive into peak oil. I show you that the peak in the production of conventional crude oil isn’t some distant prospect.

I’m a fan of hands-on science. My philosophy is that you don’t really understand something until you play with the data yourself. With that in mind, I’ve made an app that lets you explore the data from my last post, Deconstructing Econospeak. A brief refresher. In that post, I used a word-counting bot to analyze the language found in undergraduate economics textbooks.

I rarely write about partisan politics on this blog. Today, though, I’ll make an exception. As the spectre of a second Trump term remains possible, here are some thoughts on the US election. Avoiding democracy A second Trump term is possible largely because the US electoral system is designed to avoid democracy. To be fair to the US, though, many of the world’s democracies have similar features.

It’s been 20 years, but I still remember the feeling. It was a mix of curiosity and unease. I was curious because I was learning something new. But I was uneasy because something didn’t sit right. The place was Edmonton, Alberta, circa the year 2000. The situation? My first encounter with economics: Econ 101 . Interestingly, I can’t remember much of the course content.

Nothing says 1990s like an ‘internet forum’. Nothing says 2000s like a ‘blog’. And nothing says 2010s like ‘social media’. As we contemplate how social media is ruining our society, let’s hearken back to a simpler day. Yes, I’m writing this on a blog. But today I want to talk about internet forums — specifically the Capital as Power Forum, which has recently relaunched.

This post begins with a sigh. For the last month, I’ve been working on a project that analyzes word frequency in economics textbooks. I’d hoped to have the final write up done by now. But I don’t … for reasons explained here. I’m calling this post ‘Working with Google Ngrams’. But even if you’re not interested in ngrams (i.e. word frequency), there’s useful information here.

A few weeks ago I got an email from Wikipedia with the subject ‘ This is a little awkward ’. I knew from the header that they were going to ask for money. But I was happy to oblige. Wikipedia is one of the triumphs of the internet — a vast repository of knowledge that’s free for everyone. I use Wikipedia daily. So I was happy to support their work.

It was a Thursday in August when all hell broke loose. The place was Logan County, West Virginia. The year was 1921. Over the next week, one million rounds of ammunition would be fired. Up to a hundred people were killed. All told, it was the largest armed uprising since the American Civil War. Yet you’ve probably never heard of it. That’s because the battle was a labor dispute . It was called the Battle of Blair Mountain.