WATCHING BASEBALL SMARTER.

SOME HOUSING HORROR STORIES, from James Lileks.

SO THE DOW FINISHED THE WEEK slightly up, as were the other indexes. Good news? Or just a brief reprieve? Beats me.

THE BLOG WAR BEGINS.

A FLIP-FLOP ON TERRORISM PREDICTIONS, at the New York Times?

MORE ANIMAL-RIGHTS TERRORISM: Violent radicals aim to kill Jules Stein Eye Institute researchers who test on animals. There’s already been a car-bomb attempt.

SACRED BANDS AND SPARTA: A HISTORY LESSON FOR MIKE GRAVEL, from Victor Davis Hanson.

A NEW BEAUCHAMP STATEMENT from TNR, though still not terribly informative.

UPDATE: Dave Price is unimpressed. “Well, that’s a neat, lawyerly trick: insist that the Army do something they know the Army cannot do, and claim they are helpless to admit the story is fake otherwise. Slick.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: Jules Crittenden is unpersuaded.

SAVING GAS WITH A digital tire gauge? Not a bad idea, I guess, and keeping your tires inflated properly is a good idea anyway, but don’t expect anything really dramatic.

UPDATE: Some readers recommend filling tires with nitrogen. I’m pretty skeptical of this — air is nearly 80% nitrogen anyway, and upping the percentage to something likely to be still well below 100% (because of residual air in tires, etc.) doesn’t seem at all likely to make a difference.

ACE WONDERS WHY NOBODY’S TALKING ABOUT the NASA climate data revision.

UPDATE: Well, here’s a bit of notice.

ANOTHER UPDATE: More here: “Will the mainstream media report the corrected story with as much gusto as they initially reported the claim that 1998 was the warmest on record? Doubtful. But they should. Good public policy can not be made on bad data.”

MORE: This comment at Ecotality distinguishes hottest years in America from hottest years globally, but I always understood this to be about American, not global, records. And I think I was right. As I noted in my earlier post, it indicates problems with the data sets. More here:

The GISS today makes it clear that these adjustments only affect US data and do not change any of their conclusions about worldwide data. But consider this: For all of its faults, the US has the most robust historical climate network in the world. If we have these problems, what would we find in the data from, say, China? And the US and parts of Europe are the only major parts of the world that actually have 100 years of data at rural locations. No one was measuring temperature reliably in rural China or Paraguay or the Congo in 1900. That means much of the world is relying on urban temperature measurement points that have substantial biases from urban heat.

Much more information at the link.

Plus, reports of Denial-of-Service attacks.

IS IT “PAY FOR PLAY” in Spitzer’s New York?

IT’S THE Tennessee Pork Patrol! Rope ’em and brand ’em.

LINDA GREENHOUSE IN A TIFF WITH C-SPAN: Why are journalists so often unhappy about being recorded? “What we’re hearing is that Linda Greenhouse wanted to be as free as possible to criticize the Supreme Court’s recent turn to the right — without having to worry about such pesky things as, you know, ‘impartiality’ (which we bloggers don’t have to worry about, thankfully).”

BRYAN PRESTON gives John Murtha a call.

LOTS OF PEOPLE ARE BUSTING ON STEVE LEVITT for trying to think like the enemy. I understand the point, but there’s lots of this kind of brainstorming going on at jihadist sites anyway. Plus, presumably the NYT will harvest IP addresses and turn them over to the FBI, thus ensuring America’s safety.

UPDATE: Robert Mayer emails:

It is exactly because of the firestorm surrounding Steve Levitt’s comments that the blogosphere is becoming increasingly unreadable at the general level. Not only is it simply impossible to find something to become offended by and infuriated at on a daily basis, but it is even harder to do so about such stupid things.

In just about every terrorism class at any university in the country, students must think like terrorists in order to judge what they might do. In my own class, our final project was to plot our own terrorist attack and present it to the class. (We hacked and brought down the electricity grid, followed by an attack in a blacked out city).

Don’t intelligence analysts do this every day when they’re tracking down foreign jihadis? Don’t Homeland Security officials do this every day when thinking about the most vulnerable parts of our country?

I hope they are, because if they aren’t, I’m more worried about that than some smart comments that Steve Levitt made.

Yeah, people need to calm down a bit.

DESMOND LACHMAN: The housing bust is a big deal. The markets seem to agree, pretty much.

THOUGHTS ON earmarks, corruption, and rational ignorance.

WHAT NOT TO NAME YOUR BLOG: At least “InstaPundit” doesn’t come up . . . .

OUCH: “The top-quality fact-checking that can only be achieved by large media corporations is on fine display today, as Reuters is caught by a 13-year old Finnish schoolboy representing still photos from the movie ‘Titanic’ as pictures from the Russian North Pole expedition.”

A JOHN EDWARDS / ZAC EFRON nexus?

A LOOK AT NANOTECHNOLOGY AND THE FUTURE OF WARFARE, from the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology.

CARRY PERMIT CORRUPTION in California.

And more on the Boston Globe firearms straw purchase scandal. No explanations from Steve Bailey, just attacks on his critics.

Lots of background on the Bailey case at SayUncle.

BILL ARDOLINO is going back to Iraq.

MERRY CHRISTMAS! Now go vote! “With the states on a race to set primaries and caucuses earlier than everywhere else, both major candidates will be probably known by the end of January, nine full months before the election — or as much time as it takes to make a baby. It’s a major change in the way the US has been electing presidents, and something that the Founders probably didn’t have in mind.”

SINCE I MENTIONED IT YESTERDAY, people want to know what I think of William Gibson’s new novel, Spook Country. Alas, I haven’t started it yet. I’m currently reading the new Harry Turtledove book, the conclusion to his alt-history series in which the South won the Civil War, producing a series of follow-on conflicts making America look more like 20th Century Europe. It should be required reading for all those neo-confederate types who wish things had gone the other way in 1865. Meanwhile, if you follow the link there are some very positive reader reviews of Gibson’s book, and an interview, too.