Category Archives: Short Thoughts

Is a straw ban. Everyone (except possibly a few nuts) is fully in favor of an actual assault weapon ban. Assault weapons have always been illegal. The problem is what an assault weapon actually is and what it is not. An assault weapon by definition is a automatic-fire capable carbine with a quickly replaceable magazine. These are illegal. Always have been. A single shot semi-automatic rifle is not a assault rifle. A full length rifle is not an assault rifle.

What the knuckleheads in Congress call an “assault weapons ban” is a “scary looking rifle ban” … which alas has the kindergarten sound that it deserves but want to avoid.

This has been a PSA from your friendly neighborhood blogger.

Apparently common construction practice is to build the sewage out piping from your house to extend 3-4 feet with heavy cast iron piping and to use two to three foot lengths of clay pipe after that. A consequence of this is local bushes and trees have roots seeking water sources find the joints in those clay pipes, insinuate themselves and eventually block the pipe. Which in turns either backs up in a basement drain or in a basement toilet, whichever is lower. Ours chose the drain … and a wonderful outflow of stuff was discovered late last night in our laundry room.

Synchronicity abounds however in that we were this weekend (and still have not finished) watching In Darkness, a WWII film concerning a group of less than a dozen Jewish men, women, and children hiding in the sewers in the then Polish Lwow, now Ukrainian city of Lviv. These people owed their life to an anti-semitic sewer worker and the complex nature of Polish/Ukrainian <=> Jewish Polish/Ukraine is explored in the movie. The book on which this is based Girl in the Green Sweater, by my understanding was authored by one of the young girls who survived that which the movie portrays. The synchronicity of course points to the sewage flowing in our basement and in the film … on the same day.

Recently, it seems, over and over the same theme keeps repeating. What passes for argument or reasons for believing or thinking a thing depends crucially on a failure of imagination. In rhetoric there is a list of known fallacies, it seems to me that “failure of imagination” is not given as one of those, but looking around seems to be perhaps one of the more important ones especially for it not being noticed so much. The structure of these arguments (as such) go as follows. Something is either A or B. It is not A therefore it is B. This fails (obviously) if possibility set (A or B) does not exhaust the possibility or the two sets A,B are not distinct.  Continue reading →

In a somewhat unlikely Star Trek NG episode the crew encounters a race which speaks, unfortunately, entirely through cipher that is coded references to historical events. Blog, well, neighbor Eli is in a huff because some philosopher of science (Signorelli) offers that the “language of maths” isn’t sufficient for human experience. He offers as counter example not a cipher but a number substitution code and suggests that if you encode ordinary language with numbers you’ve translated text into the domain of maths. Well, sorry. That doesn’t it, the medium is not the message. That you are viewing this short essay which is encoded in ASCII and transmitted via HTTP protocols over 802.1 specified media, i.e., numbers. The message is not maths.

A possible line of argument that Mr Signorelli have more difficulty defending is whether is this possibly apocryphal anecdote whether the speaker at the funeral in his speech was getting off track or whether he was using the language of Maths (in the real sense) to express and work out his grief at a colleagues passing.

On the other hand I might suggest a better avenue to counter Mr Signorelli in somewhat smaller domains. There is an audience and a market for combining ones’ passion for maths with other more basic passions, such as the artist Bathsheba and her wares (which I recommend and am an occasional customer). Consider that “ora” which can be bought as jewelry suitable as a gift for your lover … is two interlinked tetrahedra in its self-dual symmetrical glory … and its pretty. For the right recipient there might be a message of maths (not as transmission technology) but which conveys “I love you.” I’ll also offer that when I was dating the woman who would become my wife, I sent her (in the very early 90s) a love letter written on an HP-48 calculator and transmitted using the same calculator to her via programs written on the calculator (and its serial port) to send the letter via FAX when I was traveling. That is a way in which the medium and the message mix a bit, in that computer geekery was used to transmit, well, passion.

Drop in on departmental lecture in your local university maths building. What you hear there is the language of maths. That is what Mr Signorelli is arguing is in sufficient to transmit the breadth of human experience. Basically, he’s right, except that for those passionate about and fluent in that language it can be used to transmit some of those human messages and experience. It is hard even for the maths monomaniac to begin with “let’s consider a function of one complex variable” to say in that language “Let’s get pizza tonight.”

Last weekend, at the CSO (Chicago Symphony) I was privileged to hear a rendition of Ein Heldenleben (which translates as “A Hero’s Life”), note in the remarks below I’m drawing on the excellent program notes provided for the concert. Richard Strauss (pronounced Rikard with a hard “k” for the ch) wrote this to reflect and remind the listener of Beethoven’s Eroica. The Beethoven “Hero” Symphony itself was initially pointing to the Heroic life of Napoleon (and after general disappointment with Napoleon and his decision to invade Russia. But the hero in Strauss’ work is not Napoleon or Alexandar (neither the Tsar or the Macedonian conqueror) but … himself.

It’s an interesting thing, to witness a grand tone poem to the heroic image of … an urban mild mannered domestic fellow, who granted is a musical genius, but … the “heroic” scenes painted aren’t the normal visions of heroism. The foes vanquished in martial and magnificent phrases are … chattering art critics. The beautiful visions of love and romance, the young neighbor girl whom he was engaged to teach music, whom he subsequently married.

This vision, this recasting of the ordinary is a reversal of the contemporary Arendt inspired “banality of evil” … replaced in this case with a recasting into a frame reminiscent of Odysseus or Achilles … our more ordinary life. So “banality of evil” becomes the heroic banal.

St. Augustine as he begins his autobiography begins with … Creation. Augustine sees himself in cosmic context. Our countries founders saw themselves as a set apart from the common. In fact there was a notion that this sort of pride was a good thing. Perhaps what Ein Heldenleben is suggesting is that we take this notion into the ordinary. Or perhaps  put differently, our ordinary lives should not be seen as anything but extraordinary. That is, the ordinary per se is not heroic but needs to be recast in that mold, that is we all need to strive for excellence, not because “everyone is the best at something” (which is false) but because striving for excellence is required someone how sees himself as heroic.

This (feels?) like a theme/meme I’ve run into many times. Quoting from here:

There is much to be said about shame, but I struggle with the search for antidotes.  Those who make us feel shame are also most likely to chide us for suffering from it.  Part of Shelley’s point is that at the least, misrecognition of shame is to be avoided.  And some of the sources she identifies in her comment are the product of the wrong ideals; for example, receiving government assistance is a source of shame in a culture in which people with lucky and uneventful lives hold up extreme individualism and self-sufficiency as an ideal for everyone, while fancying they live up to this ideal.

Focus on the italicized (italics mine) sentence. Surely those who feel themselves not in the group of those “making us feel shame” are the ones who will be empathetically trying to assist those feeling said shame to get past, get over, and not feel that shame. Which in turn concentrates attention on that shame … making it felt. It might be just as likely that those who notice, empathise and try to rid us of our shame just plain make it worse … and possibly are even more prevalent than those who would “chide us” for it.

And who “makes anyone” feel shame? Shame, it seems to me, comes from a shared recognition of a failure to hold to a communal standard? No individual can make a shared understanding occur or create a communal standard. Only an extreme individualist might hold this as the fault of an individual. Right?

Mr Darrell at the Bathtub announces that billions of dollars will be lost to public schools if vouchers get passed. 

Census data tells us that there are 3.1 million students of ages 5-13. Let’s grant that to increase to 5 million to end of high school. Billions? Is he expecting mass exodus? If 20% of those students left for private schools .. there’d be no place for them. Clue in, the private schools can take how many more kids … a tens of thousands at best. The only way that would amount to billions is if the vouchers were worth hundreds of thousands per, which isn’t the case.

I do like this objection too: 

This voucher scheme would send public tax dollars to private and religious schools that are unaccountable to taxpayers.

He much prefers that other school system which is unaccountable to parents.

With the Dodd-Frank financial bill and Obamacare (or whatever it’s called) much more discretionary (ad hoc) power has been placed into the hands of the executive branch. It seems to me those supporters of these moves on the left should consider them in the light of, say, a Palin Presidency instead of a continuing succession of really “smart” liberals like Mr Obama (whatever “smart” means in this context, the meaning of which remains quite opaque to me).

To put it more bluntly, these bills place more political cheese to hand out to supporters and shore up your power as well as make your particularly political notions stick better. You should consider that to the good or ill not in the light of a President you favor but one which you do not.

And no, I don’t think Ms Palin will be President. That’s not the point. The point is to consider the next President getting much more discretionary power is one with whom you strongly disagree with his/her goals. It is my assumption that Ms Palin fits that description. 

I noticed a remark yesterday to the effect of “taxing the rich more still polls well” as an argument for the Democrats being for higher taxes “on the rich.”

Long ago I noted that “conservative/liberal” for many people tend to mean “more conservative/liberal” than I because most people view themselves as somewhat average. I’d offer that the tax the rich notion follows that same suit. That is to say, “the rich” means “people who make substantially more than I ever expect to earn.” In that sense, “tax the rich” is just another “tax somebody else” please and is to my view very suspect in that it really is just a way of trying to get free stuff/money by putting the hurt on some other fellow. 

The American virtue of self-reliance (as celebrated by Emerson) is fading fast. Why does the left hate it so? 

According to one spot recently noted on Wiki there is no theory which connects micro-economics and macro-economic relationships and quantities. In thermodynamics by contrast there are methods (statistical physics) which connect the microscopic dynamical relationships and movements of atoms and molecules with the thermodynamic (macroscopic) quantities. In thermodynamics, the features which are measured like pressure and temperature arose from directly measurable quantities like pressure. 

In macro-economics however, the features which are measured (which are not directly measured but estimated by proxy) are not different from the micro-economic measurables. Micro-economics is about money. So is macro. This seems … by analogy to be wrong. Statistical averaged variables which are significant are very different in nature and in dimension from the microscopic variables. 

One might suggest that these two features drawn by analogy hold for the two economic scales. Firstly that, macro-economic measures of merit should be directly measurable simple features. And secondly that these features should be expected to be very different in kind and character from those that are important on microscopic scales.