This and that ...

Just a quick collection of links that I found interesting. In a way, this is my own little blog mela, except that some of the links are not to blog posts.

Here we go:

• Barry Schwartz, the author of The paradox of choice: Why more is less, gives excellent advice to the 2004 graduates of Swarthmore College in a commencement address: use your judgement about when to really go for the best, and when to settle for 'the good enough'. The advice is reality- and science-based. Just a word of caution, though: reading it might change your life!
• Via Yazad: An interesting piece on flat taxes in the Economist.
• Crooked Timber's Daniel Davies, a.k.a. dsquared, warns you: Don't look up. It's about the Welsh struggle for nationhood.
• Over at the ZooStation, Vinay Nair, who is an assistant professor of finance at Wharton is moved to post something about -- you can start moaning now! -- pornography! In the comments, Prashant Kothari asks him about the evolutionary significance of visual stimuli represented by porn. Vinay's co-blogger Anand provides an answer that fits their blog's title rather well... I have to admit that it is all nice and academic.
• Finally, an old newsgroup post by my good friend Ramesh Mahadevan titled This and That -- now you all know where I got the title of this post from. Ramesh's site is a great resource that has pretty much everything written by him, including those riotously funny stories whose hero is an IIT-M graduate called Ajay Palvayanteeswaran. Yours truly managed to find a mention in one of Ramesh's posts, and that makes yours truly mighty proud! So proud, in fact, that it is a permanent part of the blogger profile that you find on the sidebar.

That's all folks!