The greatest Wondermark ever, if not the greatest thing, ever:

Slightly switching gears, David Leonhardt on Obamonics in the Times.

And, in case you missed it, we released version 0.9 of the Android SDK. Its dreamy.

Via Google's Open Source Blog, this Google-sponsored project to study Linux I/O scheduler behavior is quite interesting, yielding unexpected results—for example, deadline is actually best for some workloads and CFS, while ideal for others, has awful worst-case performance.

Curious about I/O schedulers? Check out chapter 13 in my favorite kernel book. Want to optimize your code's file I/O and understand scheduling from the perspective of user-space? Read chapter 4 in my favorite system programming book.

Hat tip to loyal reader for making me a billionaire:

Expires six months after issue

Somewhat unrelated, Amazon is running a special this month wherein you can try Amazon Prime Free for One Month—in other words, get a month of gratis two-day shipping. US only, unfortunately.

Zimbabwe introduces $100 billion banknotes, each valued at one US dollar.

In all seriousness, for posterity, I would love to get one or two of these new bills. If anyone can help, I will pay handsomely.

The line of 3G-hopefuls outside of Boston's Apple Store:

The fervor Apple instills in their customers, particularly compared to their competitor, is impressive.

Incidentally, down the street, the line outside of the decidedly-less cool AT&T Store was only ten or so folks deep.

To date, clearly poised to surpass $1 billion before the cycle is over, the campaigns have spent a whopping $900 million. The New York Times, again proving that their core competency is in producing remarkably-informative graphics, has this rad little interactive visualization:

$4.3m to Verizon for cell phones!

See also the related article, Cashing In on Obama and McCain .

Collected by the Boston Globe, these photos of Martian skies are without peer. There is a romance to exploring the unexplored, about going somewhere new simply because that's what's next.

It reminds me of President Reagan's speech, quoting from the poem High Flight, later cribbed by The West Wing, on the night of the "Challenger" disaster. Scheduled to give his state of the union, he spoke in lieu from the West Wing:

For the families of the seven, we cannot bear, as you do, the full impact of this tragedy. But we feel the loss, and we're thinking about you so very much. Your loved ones were daring and brave, and they had that special grace, that special spirit that says, "Give me a challenge and I'll meet it with joy." They had a hunger to explore the universe and discover its truths. They wished to serve, and they did. They served all of us.

And I want to say something to the school children of America who were watching the live coverage of the shuttle's takeoff. I know it is hard to understand, but sometimes painful things like this happen. It's all part of the process of exploration and discovery. It's all part of taking a chance and expanding man's horizons. The future doesn't belong to the fainthearted; it belongs to the brave. The Challenger crew was pulling us into the future, and we'll continue to follow them.

The crew of the space shuttle Challenger honored us by the manner in which they lived their lives. We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved good-bye and "slipped the surly bonds of earth" to "touch the face of God."

Slipped the surly bonds of earth to touch the face of God.

Anyhow, beautiful pictures.

I am keeping a food blog, Food Tastes Good. It is mostly recipes, such as,

• Curried Split Pea Soup
• Gnocchi with Butternut Squash, Sage, and Browned Butter
• Strawberry Rhubarb Sauce
• Red Wine Sangria

Do check it out, if that sort of thing interests you.

Mankiw on the corporate income tax:

The ultimate payers of the corporate tax are those individuals who have some stake in the company on which the tax is levied. If you own corporate equities, if you work for a corporation or if you buy goods and services from a corporation, you pay part of the corporate income tax. The corporate tax leads to lower returns on capital, lower wages or higher prices—and, most likely, a combination of all three.

Krugman on embedded versus non-embedded inflation:

Imagine that there are two entrepreneurs, Harry and Louise, both of whom change prices only at fairly long intervals—say, once a year. Other things equal, Harry want his average price over the next year to be about the same as Louise's; Louise wants her average price to be about the same as Harry's. But their price setting takes place on different dates. (This is a metaphor for the real economy, in which people setting prices have to think about the prices of many competitors and suppliers that will prevail until they revise the price again.) In this situation, inflation can feed on itself: Harry raises his price above Louise's, because he expects her to raise her price in the future, and she does the same thing when it's her turn.

Love on the 2008 US Presidential election:

Clinton, citing Puerto Rican victory, soldiers on ... PR cannot vote in general ... Obama 48 delegates shy of lock

Biz Stone on why the above is so damn slow:

We currently use one database for writes with multiple [sources say two] slaves for read queries. As many know, replication of MySQL is no easy task, so we've brought in MySQL experts to help us with that immediately. We've also ordered new machines and failover infrastructure to handle emergencies.

Spring arrives in Boston (cf. winter)

In yesterday's Financial Times, Larry Summers on tax competition and cooperation:

First, the US should take the lead in promoting global cooperation in the international tax arena. There has been a race to the bottom in the taxation of corporate income. Closely related is the problem of tax havens that seek to lure wealthy citizens with promises that they can avoid paying taxes altogether on large parts of their fortunes. It might be inevitable that globalization leads to some increases in inequality; it is not necessary that it also compromise the possibility of progressive taxation.

Agreeing or disagreeing with Secretary Summers' point is largely a question of the role of government as much as it is one of international economics. I generally view tax competition as a healthy restraint on the tax burden and thus a bridle on the size of the state. Here, Larry is taking the view that without cooperation, you will have nanny states without nannies and thus nothing to transfer.

From the make-Edward-Tufte-proud department, another stellar graphic in today's Sunday Times, this one visualizing both relative size within an average American's consumption bundle and year-on-year (March 2007 to 2008) inflation of the basket of goods making up the CPI:

All of Inflation's Little Parts

You always glean points from a good visualization that you don't from the tabular data. For example, consumers spend the same amount (about 1% of total spending) on cable service as on doctor visits. The portion of consumer spending allotted to "computers" has declined 12% year-on-year. Rising import prices, particularly oil (which, although denominated in dollars, experiences the same exchange rate pressure as other imports), and growing food costs account for the bulk of the inflationary pressures. I am happy to note if you rent your home, don't own a car, and spend most of your money on clothes and bacon, your purchasing power has actually increased year-over-year.

A page earlier, Alan Blinder argues for greater regulation of the financial industry. Unfortunately, Prof Blinder notes:

It will, for example, substantially reduce the profitability of investment houses and, therefore, reduce their scale. But that?s the price you pay for access to a publicly financed safety net.

No doubt increased regulation, particularly in the area of margin requirements curbing excess leverage, will lower short-term profits. But I don't see why the goal of any changes in regulation shouldn't include maintaining or even improving longer term profits. After all, you'd have to take substantial bites out of Goldman's earnings to equal the loss in a single implosion such as Bear's.

Linux Journal unleashed their annual Readers' Choice Awards the other day, and I am proud to note that Linux System Programming—my recent work on system-level Linux hacking—received an honorable mention in the category of "Favorite Linux Book." Whether you live strictly at the lowest levels or only occasionally reach outside your cozy virtual machine; whether you code in C++ or Python; whether you are wolf or neophyte, the text is both an excellent guide to systems programming and a handy reference to Linux's sparsely-documented system call API.

Also, congratulations to GNOME for winning "Favorite Desktop Environment" and—natch—vi for winning "Favorite Text Editor."

Disclaimer: I am Contributing Editor at LJ, but I was wholly uninvolved in the Readers' Choice Awards. Hat tip to "loyal reader" for the link.

Today's Post tackles yesterday's topic:

A growing chorus—including a top congressional Democrat—labeled Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's proposal for suspending the federal gasoline tax ineffective and shortsighted yesterday, even as she continued to paint Sen. Barack Obama as insensitive to drivers' woes for not endorsing the plan.

The initimble Prof Mankiw chimes in:

Harvard professor N. Gregory Mankiw, who has written a best-selling textbook on economics, said what he teaches is different from what Clinton and McCain are saying about gas taxes. "What you learn in Economics 101 is that if producers can't produce much more, when you cut the tax on that good the tax is kept by the suppliers and is not passed on to consumers," he said.

Over the short-run—and particularly over the summer, with refineries already at maximum capacity—the quantity supplied is fixed. Cutting the tax will cause consumers to simply bid the price back up to its original value, allowing demand to meet the fixed supply.

Here is a policy proposal: Ditch the gas tax, replacing it with a broader tax on all carbon. Offset the carbon tax with a revenue-neutral reduction in marginal tax rates.

Although neither are in office, Senators Clinton and McCain have both endorsed a gas tax holiday this summer, temporarily eliminating the 18¢ per gallon Federal excise tax. To his credit, Senator Obama has denounced the holiday as not "an idea designed to get you through the summer" but one "designed to get through an election." It is also bad economics.

The price of fuel during the "holiday" will depend on gas's elasticities of supply and demand. As the short-run supply and demand of gas is fairly constant—in the short-term, supply is fixed as factories (at least over the summer) already run at full capacity and demand is inelastic as consumers cannot significantly change their driving behavior overnight—the holiday price of gas will rise to meet the pre-holiday price.

Put another way, given the fixed supply, the price of gas will rise until the quantity demanded drops to meet the quantity supplied. Since the supply is invariant with respect to the tax, the price will not change.

Gas taxes, in the short-term anyhow, do not modify behavior—they just transfer payments from the supplier to the state. Thus, Clinton's version of the holiday, which replaces the gas tax with an offsetting tax on gas producers, asininely accomplishes nothing, but at least her plan is funded.

Let's assume fuel is elastic in the short-run. Then its price will drop, although likely not by the full 18¢. Over the course of the summer, this will save the average driver the cost of about a tank of gas (Obama says half a tank, but my calculation comes out a little higher). Now, if the price drops due to an elastic demand, the quantity demanded will increase (this is why the price will not fall by the full 18¢) and thus consumption increases. What happened to yesterday's policy of the day, global warming? And what happened to last year's headliner, crumbling infrastructure, which the gas tax funds?

The proposal is just pandering, but if we really care about stimulating the economy by putting money in consumer's hands, there are better methods than targeted tax credits—for example, cutting marginal income tax rates.