Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, When to Rob a Bank

This book is a collection of blog posts from the authors of Freakonomics, which is to say that everything in the book is freely available at freakonomics.com. So why buy it? Well, this collection is curated and organized and at $1.99, when I bought it, the price was right.

It's a mixed bag of stuff, some of the articles more interesting than others. The authors' schtick is that they tend to surprise with counterintuitive observations.

Within 48 hours of finishing this one, I did have occasion to refer to their discussion of the ecological impact of wrapping fruit. I linked to it in a Facebook comment in a thread where people were knee-jerkedly condemning a company for packaging apples in plastic tubes.

As with the paper or plastic question, the impact of this sort of packaging is not as obvious as Facebook readers may think. It's good to have someone out there pointing things like this out.