This is old news: Opening up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling wont help gas prices much. But I didn't know how little it will help: 75 cents per barrel! Not per gallon, but per barrel! Each barrel has 42 gallons. This means 1.8 cents per gallon. That's how little opening up ANWR for oil driling will help.

This is not some report coming from an environmentalist organization. This is from the Department of Energy.

Two news bits about gay couples. First comes the New York Times article reporting that gay couples are more satisfied with their relationships than straight couples:

After Vermont legalized same-sex civil unions in 2000, researchers surveyed nearly 1,000 couples, including same-sex couples and their heterosexual married siblings. The focus was on how the relationships were affected by common causes of marital strife like housework, sex and money.

Notably, same-sex relationships, whether between men or women, were far more egalitarian than heterosexual ones. In heterosexual couples, women did far more of the housework; men were more likely to have the financial responsibility; and men were more likely to initiate sex, while women were more likely to refuse it or to start a conversation about problems in the relationship. With same-sex couples, of course, none of these dichotomies were possible, and the partners tended to share the burdens far more equally.

While the gay and lesbian couples had about the same rate of conflict as the heterosexual ones, they appeared to have more relationship satisfaction, suggesting that the inequality of opposite-sex relationships can take a toll.

The second one is in "Bonk", Mary Roach's book about sex. In it, she wrote about a Master & Johnson study suggesting that gay couples have better sex. The study is a bit dated, as she explains:

First, that study is over 30 years old. Second, the most important thing in improving sex is to talk about it. Heteros have made a good deal of progress in talking about sex, but as a group, homosexuals were more at ease with everything about sex.

That was in the 70s. It would be interesting to find out if this is still the case. My personal opinion is that the younger gays are more up-tight about sex than the older ones from earlier years, but still more open about it than straight people.

And I wonder if there is one of the reasons the gay relationships are more satisfying is that the sex is better...

New York Times has an article about the three physicists serving in the Congress, Rush Holt (Dem), Bill Foster (Dem), and Vernon J. Ehlers (Rep). I love the part where the physicists have to do emergency education on science:

Several times [Ehlers] has found himself “rushing to the floor” to head off colleagues ready to eliminate financing for endeavors whose importance they did not understand.

Once it was game theory. The person seeking the cut did not seem to realize that game theory had to do with interactions in economics, behavior and other social sciences, not sports, Mr. Ehlers recounted.

Then there was the time he rose to defend A.T.M. research against a colleague who thought it should be left to the banking industry. In this case the initials stood for asynchronous transfer mode, a protocol for fiber-optic data transfer.

This reminds me of a student who showed up at the group theory class I was taking. He was there for two sessions, and then did no return again. I later found out that he was a sociology student who thought "group theory" was about groups of people... =)

But in all seriouseness, the Congress needs more technical minds, specially since Newt Gingrich eliminated the Office of Technology Assessment in 1995.

When I think of recession, I think of less jobs and lower economic growth. These two used to go hand-in-hand, so that when there is an economic slow down, there are also less jobs, and when the economy recovers, so does the job market. But that's no longer the case. It is now possible for the economy to be "out of the recession", but at the same time, for the job market to be in decline. Here's Paul Krugman comparing the pre-1990 and post-1990 recessions:

Official recession definitions used to correspond closely with labor market outcomes, because we had “V-shaped” recessions: when they were over, everything sprang up quickly. Here’s the employment-population ratio and recession periods from 1973 to 1990:

The way it was

Back then, when a recession was over, it was really over.

But here’s the same variable since 1990:

The way it is

As far as the job market was concerned, the last two recessions lasted literally for years after they were officially declared over.

Now we have what looks and feels like a recession that, from the point of view of the labor market, started before it officially began.

The point, I think, is that the traditional definition of recession only worked well in the face of a jagged business cycle; if we now have smoother, longer curves — maybe due to better inventory management, or whatever caused the Great Moderation — the question, “Is this a recession?”, no longer means much.

FYI: The recession years are colored in gray. The graph is that of the Civilian Employement to Population Ratio.

Here's the 411:

This work was done in Bocchignano, Italy, a village close to Rome, as part of the group project "20 Eventi". The group of artists developed projects for 4 villages of the Sabina region and decided to create a compilation of drawings, for collectors to purchase, and to support this project.