Quentin went to the FiRE conference in San Diego (where he gave a presentation about the Ndiyo Project). He ordered an ‘economy/compact’ rental car from Avis. This is what he got!

.

According to John Sutherland,

The American economist R Preston McAfee, for example, suggests that hip book buyers should “try logging into Amazon with your own identity and asking for a price on something. Then clear your cookies (so Amazon cannot access your personal information and purchasing history) and search again anonymously for the same item. Sometimes you will be quoted a different price, because when Amazon looks at your past spending pattern, and sees that you have not always gone for the lowest price, they will treat you as a poor searcher – a more inelastic customer – and make you a less attractive price offer.”

Hmmm…. Wonder if this is true or just another urban legend. At least it’s an empirical question. Must have a go…

The prolific Professor Sutherland, incidentally, resembles the Chicago meat-processing industry — which, famously, “used every part of the hog except the grunt” — in that he allows nothing to go to waste and extracts maximum value from every snippet he finds. Thus, the McAfee quotation is used again in Sutherland’s entertaining ‘Diary’ piece in the current issue of the London Review of Books.

The Million Dollar Space Pen Myth is just that, a myth. The pens never cost a lot of money and were not developed by wasteful bureaucrats or overactive NASA engineers. The real story of the Space Pen is less interesting than the myth, but in many ways more inspiring. It is not a story of NASA bureaucrats versus simplistic Russians, but a story of a clever capitalist who built a superior product and conducted some innovative marketing. That story, however, is a little harder to sell to a public that believes what it wants to believe.

That’s the gist. For detail, see here. Another urban legend bites the dust. Sigh.

One of my boys had a Space Pen for school work. Once he wrote a poem about it for an English assignment. It went like this:

This is the pen
That I did my homework with.
This is the pen
That earned me merits.
This is the pen
That got me through tests
And classwork,
Took me through my education,
Always at the bottom of my pencil case,
Waiting…
This is the pen.