Assorted Links

1. Great story on Chris Moneymaker's win at the 2003 World Series of Poker.  I started playing around the time he won that tournament, and poker was a big part of my life (and income) until 2011.  I even played in the World Series of Poker in 2005, 2006, 2008, 2010, and 2011.  I have also read a lot about poker (I have 40+ poker books) and can safely say that this article is one of the best poker articles ever written.

2.  Via Greg Mankiw.  Reinhart responds to Paul Krugman.  Krugman has been extremely obnoxious about an error in their paper.  An excerpt:

We admire your past scholarly work, which influences us to this day.  So it has been with deep disappointment that we have experienced your spectacularly uncivil behavior the past few weeks.  You have attacked us in very personal terms, virtually non-stop, in your New York Times column and blog posts.  Now you have doubled down in the New York Review of Books, adding the accusation we didn't share our data.  Your characterization of our work and of our policy impact is selective and shallow.  It is deeply misleading about where we stand on the issues.  And we would respectfully submit, your logic and evidence on the policy substance is not nearly as compelling as you imply.

3.  The March against Monsanto.  Of all the things in the world that cause problems, tough to believe people have free time to protest this.  Bad use of a limited resource (time).  Further, GM foods are crucial to agricultural productivity and decreasing food prices (which translates to decreasing world hunger).  Yet these protesters spend time and energy fighting against them.  It would be sad enough if the protesters were just expending their energy on something useless, instead of trying to solve actual problems in our world.  The fact that what the protesters want is counterproductive makes it worse.  It is just sad.