New links

• For those of you that doodle, Wired thinks it might actually help you to pay attention by giving you an easy secondary activity to keep you from being too bored in your primary activity. This may explain why I sometimes turn on the TV, play video games, or sit in noisy cafes in order to be able to read through the piles of econ lit I have.
• "Clean coal", despite the media frenzy around it, is an insane environmental idea, since there is no such thing as a coal that is clean (for instance, see the Tennessee coal ash spill as proof of this). I'm disappointed to hear the World Bank funds coal plants in developing countries through its Clean Technology Fund (CTF).
• Freakonomics has a good list of resources for explaining the recent financial crisis.