Philip Gomes

The smartest guys in the room

New media is a wonderful thing. Apply the filters and follow the links and you have a 'newspaper' worthy of the name. While social media filters are now an important part of how I select what I read, RSS feeds remain the foundation of my personal news.

I was going to blog a quickie about Malcolm Colless' bizarre argument against taking action on global warming but Deltoid did it for me.

You'd have to be a journalist working for The Australian to bring up a case where a international treaty is successfully solving an environmental problem and try to use it as an argument for inaction.

And I'm highly interested in the nitty gritty of Usain Bolt's new world record in the men's 100m at the World Athletics Championships, The Science of Sport had the goods.

Translating those times into speeds is a simple but interesting exercise (shown in the graph below), because you then perceive just how fast the top end speed is. For Bolt, the fastest interval (60m to 80m) was run at an average speed of 44.72km/hour. If you're wondering how that compares to last year in Beijing, read on...

And then via Twitter Richard Masoner of Cyclelicious threw up this interesting Freakonomics piece in the NY Times on second hand bicycle prices.

Still, whether it’s over/underpricing or just selective selling, what struck me about this informal little analysis was that not one city fell out of line in the inverse order. Where cars were selling for the most, bikes were selling for the least; where cars were selling for the least, bikes were selling for the most; and so on, inversely, in between.

Thanks to them, I feel smarter now.