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Ecuador, attempting to prove that it's indistinguishable from Costa Rica, tricks a tour group thinking they've gone to Costa Rica into believing that they were going to Costa Rica when in fact, they were taken to a part of Ecuador that was, apparently, indistinguishable from Costa Rica.

I'm really not kidding:

As Ecuador residents arrived, not in Costa Rica but another Ecuador airport, Tena, where they were given fake stamps in their passports as they went through a staged passport control. No attention to detail was spared as huge posters were placed over the welcome billboards at the airport. Adverts depicting Imperial beer and 'Esencial Costa Rica,' Costa Rica's national brand, were displayed in the airport to throw the group off the scent.

Even fictitious immigration documents and car licence plates were created to make the group think they were in Golfito, a port town in Costa Rica. On top of all that organisers used mobile phone and GPS blockers to keep passengers from using technology to discover the hoax. (...)

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In more serious airline news, the Congressional Research Service, a policy-analysis agency within the Library of Congress, released a 20-page report titled Terrorist Databases and the No Fly List: Procedural Due Process and Hurdles to Litigation. Footnote 41 (of 201!) reads:

Prior to 9/11, aviation security was handled by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). The FAA ordered air carriers not to board certain individuals who were deemed a threat to aviation safety. On 9/11, this "no fly" list contained 12 names.

Somehow, I guess I assumed that there were more than twelve people on the no-fly before 2001. But then again, in hindsight,

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The first was going to be about my favorite Operating Systems professor ending up in the Financial Times for her quotes at Davos on David Cameron's proposed policies banning strong encryption, but then it passed 450 words, and I spun it off into its own post.

Instead, (speaking of economics and expert opinions,) The Upshot asks how economists came to dominate the [public-policy] conversation, beating out historians, psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, and demographers:

Two hundred years ago, the field of economics barely existed. Today, it is arguably the queen of the social sciences.

These are the conclusions I draw from a deep dive into The New York Times archives first suggested to me by a Twitter follower. While the idea of measuring influence through newspaper mentions will elicit howls of protest from tweed-clad boffins sprawled across faculty lounges around the country, the results are fascinating. And not only because they fit my preconceived biases.

Using the new Chronicle tool that catalogs the entire Times archive, I discovered that in recent years around one in 100 articles mention the term “economist,” and these typically occur in the context of introducing a proponent of the dark arts. Far fewer articles mention the terms historian or psychologist, while sociologists, anthropologists and demographers rarely rate a mention. (...)

If you haven't clicked through yet, ask yourself as a quiz: what major world event let economists pass historians? It's pretty obvious when you think.

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Elsewhere in "economists", George Mason professor of Economics Tyler Cowen (of Marginal Revolution) is one half of MRUniversity, a site full of free open courseware covering topics in economics. Specifically, in the form of three-minute bites like this:

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The Upshot, when they're not putting out awesome data features, apparently publishes things like Obama's Community-College Plan: A Reading List, which is a useful read on (1) what is actually being proposed (2) how it compares to other similar proposals and programs (3) why any of this matters.

The odds of a Republican Congress passing an Obama proposal on any issue aren't very high... [But i]f nothing else, the Obama proposal seems likely to increase the profile of the universal-college movement. That movement echoes the universal-high-school movement of the early 20th century, as I mentioned in an article Thursday. (...)

And a short bit of opinion on the necessity of "universal college":

Yet we never stop to ask why 13 years of universal education has become the magic number -- and why it should permanently be so, given how much more complex our society and economy have become in the ensuing century. If nine years of free education was the sensible norm for the masses in the 19th century and 13 years was the sensible norm in the early 20th century, what is the right number in the 21st century?

Anyway, after spending a plane flight from SLC to Baltimore discussing universal-community-college with my mother, I've come around to the belief that this is by no means as simple as "just throw money at it" -- there are going to be lots of secondary market effects and unintended consequences -- but I think it's time we're having the conversation, at least. Maybe I'll try to write a thing later.

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Also in politics: If you're familiar with the Net Neutrality debate, this headline will mean

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According to a Harvard FAS report (as reported in the Crimson), there are now more students at Harvard studying "Engineering and Applied Sciences" than "Arts and Humanities". But fear not that we're losing our liberal-arts soul; there are still half again as many students in NatSci than SEAS, and more students studying Social Sciences than SEAS and NatSci put together.

One of the awesome benefits of the House System at Harvard (think kind of like Hogwarts's house system, except the Sorting Hat is a random-number generator, and it happens after your freshman year, rather than on entry) is that I've gotten to eat dinner a few times with Doug Melton, of recent "giant leap foward in the quest to find a truly efective treatment for type 1 diabetes" fame, but who's also been in the TIME 100 two times. He's a fantastic guy, and Eliot House is lucky to have him as House Master. For that matter, the world is lucky to have him as scientist, as well.

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Relatedly, there's not enough research funding to go around. The Director of the National Institutes of Health went

(The title of this blog post brought to you by "potential romantic comedy plots in five words or less")

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A few months ago, Harvard's George Vasmer Leverett Professor of Mathematics recommended a movie to his freshman Real Analysis class -- on some tangent in class, he noted that "it's a fantastic movie; you should all watch it."

The movie was Spring Breakers. So, the other day, a few friends and I borrowed the Jefferson 250 lecture hall (where we had once-upon-a-time taken RA with GVL Prof. Gross) and threw the movie up on the giant projector screen.

We turned it off after thirty minutes of nauseating dialogue, uncomfortable soft-core pornography, and implausible montages of "college kids" drinking "beer". It was bad. Really bad. I'm really not sure how Prof. Gross managed to sit through the movie himself.

But really, the problem here is that I still don't know why we were told to watch this vapid, gratuitous, teen-star nonsense. What I've considered so far:

• Benedict Gross has never seen more of the film than the opening party scene and the stuck-in-history-class scene, and made a suggestion off-the-cuff. As I recall, he went so far as to reference the latter in the discussion of the fact that no one was going to pay attention to Real Analysis the day before spring recess, anyway.
• The man wished for his students to associate excessive drinking with stupidity. It's true that, speaking to his Linear Algebra class before The Game, he told us "I used to be Dean of Harvard College, so I know what weekend it is. But if I'm walking through the