Starting this weekend, Planet Money's Adam Davidson will be writing an economics column in the New York Times Magazine. Here's an excerpt from his first column.

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Hosting a Halloween party? You don't have to go to Guitar Center and drop fifty bucks on a fog machine; if you're on a budget, you can cobble together a good-enough fog machine using a large candle, an aluminum pie plate, a soda bottle top, a gallon of distilled water, and a small bottle of glycerin.

The video above from YouTube user Household Hacker gives all the details: mix a solution of one part glycerin to three parts distilled water—this is your fog juice. You should be able to find glycerin at your local pharmacy for a few bucks, but it's also available on Amazon. For the fog machine itself cut the top off a 2-liter soda bottle and tape to a small aluminum pie plate. Place this on top of a lit candle (a large one with multiple wicks is best) and add a teaspoon or so of fog juice, which should be enough to fill the room.

When you want more fog you'll have to pour in another teaspoon of fog juice. This is less convenient than a commercial fog machine, but our MacGuyver'd version is also one-tenth the price.

5 Dollar Fog Machine | via The Consumerist

Here are paraphrased excerpts of a conversation between a local radio talk show host and a member of the local Occupy… movement.

Radio host:  I’ve seen the Occupy movement identify problems, but I haven’t seen solutions.  What solutions do you guys propose?

Occupier:  Well, it’s still early in the movement.  That’s next.  I can tell you we are working passionately on solutions.  There are a couple of good ideas that have percolated up already. 

One, we should amend the Constitution to only have campaign speech from real people.  That means that corporations and foreign entities should not be able to control this.

Another one, the Fed should help everybody, not just the big banks.  We need to give assistance to small businesses too.

Regarding the first solution, I would recommend that these folks closely study what happened after the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform.  This well-meaning legislation just pushed dollars from campaigns into organizations like MoveOn.org and Swift Boat veterans.  In other words, it didn’t really limit anything.

Regarding number two, eesh.  How tough is it to learn this lesson?  They don’t want to change the processes that lead to the corrupt distribution of taxpayer dollars.  They want to control it.  For the good of all of us!  To lead us to a new land!

Filed under: Bad Economy Tagged: Occupy, Talk radio

Chrome: The auto-detected search engines in Google Chrome are one of those niceties that makes to outshine Firefox among power users (type a few letters, press Tab, then search , but if you move to a different computer, all those shortcuts burned into your muscle memory are useless. Or at least they were. You can now enable search engine (and open tab) syncing in all versions of Chrome.

Here's how to set it up:

1) Visit chrome://flags/
2) Enable syncing search engines and open tabs
3) Go to chrome://settings/personal, click Advanced
4) Make sure the new options are selected
5) Use the same search engine shortcuts everywhere!

The greatest thing about syncing search engines? You can practice the fine art of keyword bookmarking and speed up and eliminate some of those repetitive keystrokes.

In testing, the search engine syncing worked like a charm. I didn't have any luck getting the open tab syncing to work across computers, though, so if you have better luck, let's hear how you got it to work in the comments. The feature isn't yet in the stable release of Chrome, so you need to be living on the bleeding edge of the dev channel to try it out for now. I stand corrected. Many commenters have pointed out that it's available in the stable build as well!

Thanks JoshSurber!

Even if you read our story earlier tonight on iPod Godfather Tony Fadell’s new company Nest Labs and its new Learning Thermostat, you may still be wondering how anyone could make a thermostat an object of beauty. So we sat down with Fadell to get a video demo of the device that brought him out of retirement and has been eighteen months in the making.

True to the Apple aesthetic it’s one big dial you can spin and push to control a sophisticated array of features.

It’ll be the first thermostat marketed directly to consumers. Can they get excited enough to plunk down a couple hundred dollars? My husband and I are finally putting a new heating system in our drafty San Francisco Victorian. After this demo, I was sold. How about you?