They are all speakers at the TED conference which is being held this week in Monterey, California.

As I have written before, TED is perhaps the single most interesting way that a smart and curious person could spend a week.

This is the first time Emily Oster, who is a Becker Fellow here at U of C, will be on the big stage. Let’s hope she blows them away. She certainly has the ideas to do so.

The executives at American Airlines must be crazy. I heard a rumor — and I believe it is true — that they have made the decision to replace plastic knives with honest-to-God metal table knives in the first class cabin.

Are they crazy? Metal table knives were banned after 9-11 for good reason! Those things are dangerous. They could poke an eye out. There is no way the government, or whoever got rid of metal table knives after 9-11, would have banned them unless it was absolutely necessary to fight terrorism. This horrible decision to allow metal on the plane is simply an invitation to terrorists that they can come right on the plane unarmed, gather up these knives, and poke people at will. No honest citizen in his or her right mind would take the risk of flying on American in this new regime.

The next thing you know, TSA is going to allow me to fly with my 4.1 oz deodorant instead of throwing it in the garbage and rightly demanding that next time I limit myself to 3 oz. From what I hear, that extra 1.1 oz of deodorant is just the extra amount that terrorists need to turn deodorant into nuclear weapons from scratch on the plane. Apparently, though we have completely lost our will to fight terrorism in the sky.

(As an aside, I’m happy to say that my iPod listening during takeoff and landing continues not to cause the plane to crash.

I believe that my daughter Anya, who just turned five, may turn out to be a philosopher. (I know, there isn’t much money in philosophy, but the thought does warm my heart.) I base this suspicion on something she said the other night while she, I, and her six-year-old brother Solomon were setting up for a massive Playmobil battle. She was building a castle out of blocks and Solomon was arranging the Playmobil knights and pirates. The three of us were deciding who was going to play “the bad guys” and who would play “the good guys.”

That’s when Anya asked her excellent question: “Do ‘bad guys’ call ‘good guys’ ‘bad guys?’”

Doesn’t this look like the face of a philosopher?

A reader named Kevin Cornwell, who has his own blog here, wrote us the other day about the forthcoming book The Baseball Economist. It’s by J.C. Bradbury, an economist at Kennesaw State University who writes the baseball blog Sabernomics. (I love that a baseball economist teaches at a university named for the same Georgia mountain for whom the first baseball commissioner, Judge Kenesaw  Mountain Landis, was also named; FWIW, the commissioner post was created after the Chicago Black Sox scandal.)

Here’s what Cornwell had to say:

I think it [the book] looks interesting, but doesn’t the title feel a bit, oh, I don’t know, familiar? [I think he’s confusing the title of the book with the title of Bradbury’s blog.] Can you copyright the use of adding “onomics” to the end of something for a book title? Pretty soon someone is going to publish a book called “Tweakonomics,” the economics of modifying someone else’s idea just enough to hop on the bandwagon without infringement.

I appreciate Cornwell’s looking out for us. We got some similar e-mails about the recently published book Wikinomics. But, as I told Cornwell, it’s not like we were the first ones — or even the tenth ones — to stick a new beginning on the front of “-onomics.” Anyone remember “Reaganomics”? William Safire certainly does — and he personally helped coin the phrase “Nixonomics.” On this very website, there’s an article about “Blackonomics.”

But even if I disagree with Cornwell’s concern, I do think he’s a pretty good title guy: Tweakonomics, IMHO, isn’t half-bad.