The weekend is a great time to catch up on some of the reading you skipped during the week.  So for all you “time shifters” out there, here is another set of long-form links.

TED, “The pernicious fact about financial bubbles is that everyone has an incentive to prolong them, and almost everyone who participates in them profits from them, at least until the bubble pops and the last ones in are left holding a very smelly bag.”  (Epicurean Dealmaker)

Economics and the laws of thermodynamics.  (The Psy-Fi Blog)

Has McKinsey comes to terms yet with the Rajat Gupta scandal?  (Businessweek, Felix Salmon, naked capitalism)

Do state business taxes matter?  (The Atlantic)

Problems aside, foreign capital is flowing into Iraq.  (NYTimes)

Five books Tim Harford recommends that find economics lessons in unexpected places.  (The Browser)

An excerpt on the design of the RAF’s WWII Spitfire from Tim Harford’s new book Why Success Always Starts with Failure. (Slate, ibid)

Why hasn’t Wikipedia devolved into a useless mess?  (The Awl)

An interview with Seth Godin.  (boing boing)

A profile of Salman Khan and the Khan Academy.  (Businessweek)

Is this the century of increased disasters, or does it just seem that way?  (Slate)

An excerpt from Game On! The Untold Secrets and Furious Egos Behind the Rise of SportsCenter by James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales.  (GQ)

Rick Bookstaber, “The real paradigm shift, or more like a paradigm drift, because it is slowly enveloping us, is that we are moving toward preferences and lifestyle where we will simply consume less. A lot less.”  (Rick Bookstaber)

Thanks for checking in with Abnormal Returns. For all the latest you can follow us on StockTwits and Twitter.