Daily Data Dump - October 19th, 2010

Use Cash, Not Cards, To Buy Better Food? Another of the upsides of the "pain of paying." I wonder if the effect will be transferred to debit cards as we move away from cash? Or, perhaps the effect is tied to the concreteness of a currency, and cash is just more concrete than debit cards. If you had gold ingots would there be more pain? And barter? Intelligence Makes People Think Like Economists. The preprint has been around forever, I had forgotten that Bryan Caplan was going to publish it somewhere. Whether is redounds to the reputation of the intelligent or not is your call. Climbing Obesity Rates Threaten U.S. National Security by Hampering Military Recruitment. This is getting ludicrous: "Compared with white females, black and Hispanic females are less likely to meet the weight standards, for instance, making it difficult for the military to achieve its diversity goals." Later they moot the possibility of changing standards for non-combatant roles. If you let overweight black and Hispanic women into these support positions wouldn't you just be reinforcing stereotypes? And that's bad too, right? So perhaps you should just put these overweight individuals in a room with water for a few weeks. Problem solved, diversity maintained. Chronology of the Grotte du Renne (France) and implications for the context of ornaments and human remains within the Châtelperronian. The Châtelperronian has been the case of Neandertals selectively adopting aspects of anatomically modern human culture. These results indicate that the synthesis may be an artifact of mixing between stratigraphic layers. Atheism nontroversies. Atheists agree on the fundamentals. That being said, so? I'm sure most atheists have much more in common politically with a liberal Christian than they do with me.