rapid fire march 1

Some items worth a second look, but not a whole entry:

• parking roundup: "the cost of 'free' parking, up to $35,000 per space, is almost never passed along to the parking users."(related)
• libertarians aren't "really the Nietzschean little sociopaths their arguments are always trapping them into claiming to be." If they weren't so busy being indignant, they might notice that "one of the nice things about being a liberal is that you never need to pretend that you're actually a barbaric hoodlum who only behaves civilly due to fear of punishment from the 101st Airborne."
• Benjamin Cohen has a multi-part series about Objectivity, by Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison. I'll have a few things to say about it myself one day.
• Speaking of Galison, he's compiled a very nice history of physics reading list for PhD general exams. It's worth a look.
• boggle your mind with these color illusions.
• John Wilkins says the recent revelation that "physical features of [Lapita Complex Polynesian] canoes that affected their reliability and efficiency were slower to evolve than the cultural features such as decorations" is unsurprising if we take cultural evolution to be analogous to sexual selection.