This article states what seems obvious to me: readers really do judge a book by its cover:

“BOOK LOVERS MAY NOT BE the most heroic members of the romantic world, but at least, we tell ourselves, we are deep, we are discerning. Well, I have news for you from publishing’s bottom line: we bespectacled creatures of the late-night night light are, frankly, a bit slutty.
All the research shows that consumers are very, very influenced by the covers, not necessarily to buy a book, but to pick it up,” Joanna Prior, publicity and marketing director at Penguin, says.
Studies show that a book on a three-for-two table has about one and a half seconds to catch a reader’s eye. If it is picked up, it is on average glanced at for only three to four seconds.

Matt Haughey writes that he bought a house this year without the help of a realtor and feels confident that he could also sell a house without a realtor:

We sold our first house and bought a new one this year and in the process learned that we really could do without a realtor, just as the authors described. We staged our old house ourselves, and pushed our realtor to get us on the weekly home tour. I took photos for our listing and helped write it, keeping in mind the lessons from the book and removed every empty phrase like “fabulous” and “wonderful” and replaced them with descriptive terms like “open” and “large”. We did all of our new home shopping online and by canvassing the city and calling builders with works in progress. We found and bought our new house without any realtors involved at all. It was surprisingly easy — whenever I was wondering what we were supposed to do at a stage in the financing/offer/escrow process, I could just punch up google and get all the info I needed. Google searches lead me to offer letter templates, legal ramifications for each document we signed, and how to find the best financing. While I like my realtor and consider her a personal friend, if we ever sell our new home, we’ll do it ourselves and save a few grand next time around.

If Matt feels comfortable handling a real estate transaction himself, good for him, but I think that finding a buyer for your home-for-sale and/or finding a home for you to buy are the least important tasks that a realtor does (or should do). Monitoring the legal aspects of the transactions is the most important role. I would feel very uncomfortable not having an experienced expert monitoring the process and advising me in the legal transactions.
When we sold and bought houses three years ago, we ended up finding the new house ourselves–which is pretty easy these days with everything online. But we needed to close on both houses on the same day, so we were super sensitive to a delay in either deal. Our realtor was in constant contact with the seller’s and buyer’s realtors for each deal, both title companies, and our mortgage lender to make sure everything went smoothly. He knew exactly what should be happening with each transaction at every point and he was hard-assed when necessary with the other parties to make sure they did their tasks competently and in a timely fashion. His diligence and expertise were well worth the fees we paid him (since we used him for both transactions, he waived one of our fees to him, which reduced our total realtor costs a bit).

Over at BoingBoing, Dale Dougherty traces the genesis of a news story, in this case, retail sales numbers for ‘Black Friday’. He shows how this story, which is communicated on every news media every year after Thanksgiving, starts with a press release based on very questionable market research methods from an industry trade group, and then gets repeated as fact by news media.

I’m a self-identifying English language usage curmudgeon. But I tell you, misuse of apostrophes has become so rampant, it hardly even gets a rise out of me any longer. In just a few minutes of news scanning this morning, I ran across two incidents:

Google envisions a world in which all content is free; and of course, it controls the portal through which Internet user’s access that content.

Web store fails to monitor it’s own reviews board.

I just can’t get outraged any longer. It just makes me sad and tired.

Over at Marginal Revolution, Tyler Cowen posted titled “How to walk through a museum“. In addition to a number of specific suggestions to enhance your art viewing trip, he writes:

A key general principle is to stop self-deceiving and admit to yourself that you don’t just love “art for art’s sake.” You also like art for the role it plays in your life, for its signaling value, and for how it complements other things you value, such as relationships and your self-image. It then becomes possible for you to turn this fact to your advantage, rather than having it work against you. Keeping up the full pretense means that you must impose a high implicit tax on your museum-going. This leads you to restrict your number of visits and ultimately to resent the art and find it boring.

I used to go with Katie to the opera occasionally, but several years ago I put my foot down and refused to go with her. Reading the quote above makes me realize that I thought I was supposed to like it ‘for art’s sake’ and I finally admitted that I didn’t like it, and that I didn’t care whether anyone else thought whether I should like it.
But it also makes me realize that maybe others enjoy something else about opera bedies the ‘art for art’s sake’ angle. I’ll have to re-think whether there’s some other reason why I might find opera interesting.

As soon as the levees were breached and New Orleans started flooding after hurricane Katrina, I tried to impress on people that this tragedy affected all types of New Orleanians, not just the ones we saw on TV who were did not get out ahead of time: white and black; poor, middle-class, and wealthy (though some were obviously more seriously affected than others. That’s a discussion for another post).
As I’ve thought about this, I’ve concluded that standing water flooding is its own type of hell because it leaves your house and it contents in place for the most part, but also pretty much completely ruined. If your house is blown away by hurricane winds or washed away by torrents of water, it’s certainly tragic, but you pretty much know that you start over from scratch. But with standing water flooding, you eventually have to return to figure out what to do with everything–what stays, what goes, do you repair the house or rebuild, etc. This Flickr photo set shows what one New Orleans family returned to.

Over at Making Light, Jim Macdonald wrote an interesting post about the history of telling time.

Seen in a comment here:

We bought a new lawnmower a while back. After describing our needs to the Home Depot salesman, Katie and I asked him what it would cost us. He replied, “Well, it depends on how much you want to invest.” Katie and I were both taken aback by that answer. One of us stammered something like, “Well, I don’t want to think of it as an investment at all. We just need the cheapest lawnmower that meets the needs we described.”
Today, I read this Ask Metafilter comment. Now I realize that the salesman was probably just misusing ‘invest’ to mean ‘spend.’ I had never heard that before.

This show’s thesis:

In the programme, which looks at the causes and treatment of poor reading, at least three academics call into question the value of separating those with difficulty in reading into dyslexics and “ordinary poor readers”, when the treatment is the same for both groups.
Experts say many children are being diagnosed with the condition to save embarrassment over their reading skills and in order to get extra help at school.

This show interests me, not because I believe that dyslexia is a myth–I have no opinion in the matter–but because I have little doubt that the diagnosis is sometimes used for exactly the reason given above.
Too bad this show is airing in Great Britian, not in the US.