Thomas Cooley and Lee Ohanian on “Lessons from the Depression.”

Tim Carney on the real Republican divide.

— Andy Kessler, May 8, 2010

China is nowhere near closing for business as it did five centuries ago. One doubts, however, that the Ming emperor knew he was dooming his people for the next couple hundred years, depriving them of the goods and ideas of the coming Industrial Revolution. China’s present day leaders know this history. They know technology. They know turning away from global trade and communication would doom them far more surely than would an open Internet.

In addition to reaching a milestone for peak traffic served this past Friday, the Akamai network also hit a new peak during the same day for video streaming, as well as a near high for total requests served.

• With online interest in major sporting events – including professional golf and baseball – helping to drive the surge in demand, Akamai delivered its largest ever traffic for high definition video streaming.
• Over the course of the day, Akamai logged over 500 billion requests for content, a sum equal to serving content to every human once every 20 minutes
• At peak, Akamai supported over 12 million requests per second – a rate roughly equivalent to serving content to the entire population of the United States every 30 seconds.

The November 2009 email “hack” of Britain’s Climatic Research Unit that has generated so much recent news is only a brief epilogue. The real story happened day by day over the last decade as McIntyre, a retired mining engineer, and a his fellow Canadian Ross McKitrick, an economist, searched for, and then through, shabbily constructed data sets and magical algorithms, with surprising finds on almost every page.

As my friend George Gilder wrote:

The reader should know that the supposed email “scandal,” as described in the book, is in fact a rather trivial and even defensible part of the story. Few people are at their best in emails. What is shocking — and I use the word advisedly as a confirmed sceptic not easily shocked — is the so called science. I never imagined that it was quite this bad. It is shoddy beyond easy belief.

The hockey stick chart mostly reflects a defective algorithm that extends and inflates a few deceptive signals from as few as 20 cherry-picked trees in Colorado and Russia into a hockey stick chart that is replicated repeatedly through reshuffles of the same or similar defective and factitious data to capture and define two thousand years of climate history. These people simply had no plausible case and were pressed by their political sponsors to contrive a series of Potemkin charts.

Almost, but not quite, as surprising, was Montford’s narrative itself. Somehow he turned an esoteric battle over statistical methodology into a captivating “what happens next” mystery. British science writer Matt Ridley agreed:

Montford’s book is written with grace and flair. Like all the best science writers, he knows that the secret is not to leave out the details (because this just results in platitudes and leaps of faith), but rather to make the details delicious, even to the most unmathematical reader. I never thought I would find myself unable to put a book down because — sad, but true — I wanted to know what happened next in an r-squared calculation. This book deserves to win prizes.

Engrossing. Astonishing. Devastating.

(hat tip: David Warsh)

— Ben Bernanke, Feb. 24, 2009, finally, if tamely, acknowledging the crucial role of mark-to-market accounting in the financial death spiral.

(via Brian Wesbury)

Holman Jenkins today also picks up the theme of mark-to-market’s central role in the panic.