Sunday Papers

Taking a page from the playbook of my favorite video games blog, Sundays are for kicking back, drinking tea, and linking to some interesting reading that's popped up on the internets over the last week. Ideally, I'll be doing this every week, but we'll see...

• The moderate think tank Third Way had an interesting idea: what if taxpayers were better informed about where their money goes? They propose to do this by issuing a tax receipt to every taxpayer. Lots of people have been talking about this idea, but I found Megan McArdle, Andrew Gelman and Peter Suderman to have the most interesting takes.
• Aaron Carroll at the Incidental Economist has a ridiculously good series on why American healthcare is so expensive. It's really refreshing to see something written about this that is simultaneously deeply grounded in actual numbers and really easy to read and understand. Probably best to read the whole series, but if you read nothing else, check out the part on Red Herrings.
• Tim Burke (my former professor and all around nice guy) has one of the better reactions to that study showing that most religious people know less than you'd expect about their own religions.
• Today marks the end of World War I reparations payments for Germany. Took a while...
• Google's new WebP image compression. Yet another example of how Google continues to be better at the internet than others... If none of that makes sense to you, this is pretty close to an explanation in normal language...
• An important scientific finding? Martin Robbins does a pretty spot-on satire of the poor nature of science coverage in most newspapers.