Certainly it is easy to create a literary aesthetics of brevity. The haiku and the aphorism have their admirers. Ernest Hemingway is widely thought to have invented a perfect short story in the form of a classified ad: "For sale, baby shoes, never used." Edgar Allen Poe famously developed a theory for why short stories are superior to novels. His explanation of that theory was, IMHO, longer winded than it had to be. The point, though, was that a story should have a unitary impact and this could be achieved best with a work that could be read in a single sitting. Yet one shouldn't let the aesthetics of the short haul have the last word. The world has room for Melville's and Tolstoy's and Victor Hugo's novels, and creating a Reader's Digest version thereof will never be the same. As for Hemingway's six word story? He didn't really write it. It is the work of a playwright named John deGroot who created a one-actor play about "Papa...
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This illustration is making its way around the more philosophical corners of the interwebs. In case I've given you an illegible variant of it, here are the captions, in sequence: 1. Shop for a new tie 2. Make macaroni 3. Do cardio 4. Don't inflate your ontology 5. Don't do it. 6. Vacuum the rug. The fifth cell includes an illustration of a unicorn and the square root of -1 as thoughts in the mind of the character doing various quotidian things. The warning, then, is not to attribute reality either to imaginary beings or to imaginary numbers. Leaving unicorns aside, I think there is something odd about the warning as it applies to numbers. The value of any number system, including the numbers we call real and those we call imaginary, consists entirely of its utility. So, for a pragmatist as to math, the square root of -1 stands on the same "ontological" footing as does -1, or as does 1. But I do like the cute minimalism of the illustrations here. ...
You think someone has just made a profound epistemological observation, but it turns out she was just referencing a song by Clarence Clarity. Until quite recently I hadn't even heard of Clarence Clarity, as a natural consequence of my out-of-touchness with contemporary music. But I've looked into his video "Will to Believe," and it isn't half bad. Here's the link. Click here.
This movie got terrible reviews. Indeed, it got at least one non-review review that turned into a discussion of why some movies should never get sequels, but Hollywood obliviously makes sequels anyway, and ... etc., the writer was off the the races then, writing about everything except this movie. But the theater was packed when I was there, and I enjoyed the show. Most people around me (admittedly not all) seemed caught up in it. This must have included at least some who weren't familiar with the original. I'll avoid any spoilers, which seriously limits how much I can say about a movie of this sort. But I'll plow on anyway. There is a Big Reveal moment that takes place on a barge in the middle of the Thames. So if you find London scenery inherently fascinating, that'll be a plus for you. The ending, the very ending, didn't work for me though. Perhaps the five minutes or so after the Big Reveal on the aforementioned barge might charitably be see as wind-d...
Meg Jacobs has written Panic at the Pump, a history of the 1970s energy crisis in the US which, in her view, destroyed post New Deal liberalism, bringing a generation of small-government conservatives to power. There were two distinct oil shocks: the first arising from the Yom Kippur War and the resulting embargo (1973-74), the second from the fall of the Shah in Iran (1979). I haven't read the book, except for brief excerpts available online. I notice it here only as a work likely to prove of interest for my astute and ever-curious readers. Here's one of those brief excerpts:"[T]he embargo stunned Americans, as if they had come under a surprise attack, if not an outright act of war, because of the serious implications for the economy and the country's security. By 1973, Americans relied on oil for almost half of their energy needs, and each day imports made up an expanding portion of the country's supply." Imports, the author says, were 36% of US oi...
A widespread opinion prevails that the science of economics has gotten more quantitative and algorithmic as computer hardware and software capacity has increased. The science has moved in that direction, in other words, simply because it could. In words Ira Gershwin once provided for his brother's music, "they tell all you chillen the debbil's a villain, but it ain't necessarily so." I recently encountered a very well-wrought argument that the impact of the computer revolution within economics is generally overstated. Here's a link f rom ssrn. In case anyone reading this doesn't know: that's the social science research network. I love it! You can get so much stuff free there that other sites are trying to get you to pay for. I also love the anthropomorphic desktop computer clip art I've posted here. Some days I'm just easy to please.
As I believe I've mentioned, my day-by day calendar displays a different Dilbert cartoon strip each day. Here is the text from two recent such strips. Day 1. Three characters: Dilbert, Personnel director Catbert (who is a cat, because they love to treat people as toys) and another cat. CATBERT: "This is Wulf. He used to work for a famous physicist named Schrodinger. He escaped before the experiment was finished and now he's both alive and dead at the same time." DILBERT: "Like a zombie?" CATBERT: "uh-oh." WULF: "Wow. I have half a mind to be offended by that." Day 2. Wulf is sitting with Wally in the break room. WULF: "I was Schrodinger's car back in the day. That's why I'm alive and dead at the same time. I know the truth about the afterlife because my dead half told my living half all about it. Do you want to know what happens?" WALLY: "Stop projecting your curiosity on me." [Drinks co...
Everybody's favorite avuncular billionaire, Warren Buffett, has said that the academic theory known as the capital asset pricing model and its underlying notion of beta (the systemic risk of a particular portfolio versus the market as a whole) is worthless. After all, he says, “ a stock that has dropped very sharply compared to the market … becomes ‘riskier’ at the lower price than it was at the higher price.” Value investors, like Benjamin Graham, know better. It may well be a bargain at the lower price, while it was an unreasonable risk while it was still at the higher price. Avuncular Charm Is there really paradox here? Let us now let ourselves be lulled by Buffett’s avuncular charm into seeing paradox where there is none. Let’s analyze this in pieces. I won't make you wait for the conclusion though. My own view is that though there are problems with the CAPM, Buffett's aphorism (if that's what the above sentiment is) doesn't address them. Indeed, C...
Sensible proposition recently advanced by Nicholas Humphrey: for the first few months of life an infant possesses not one unitary self but several different sub-selves. Native intelligence, memory, and the reception of sensory information. These seem to be the cores of the chief sub-selves Humphrey has in mind. Each has to learn that it is on the same team as the others, and ultimately each becomes a "faculty" of a single self. This reminds me of William James' phrase "blooming buzzing confusion." The phrase refers especially to the confusion of the data of the different senses into one unhelpful congealed lump in the infant mind. But part of the confusion may indeed by the absence of a single integrated self to do the integrating of the data. They aren't on the same team until they decide that they are on the same team.
Bloomberg Business recently ran a retrospective by Andrea Wong about what she calls the “petrodollar deal” between the US and Saudi Arabia, a deal she says was created in the summer of 1974, when treasury Secretary William Simon and an assistant, Gerry Parsky, went on a diplomatic mission for the Nixon administration. Simon passed away in 2000. Parsky, though, is still alive, and Wong seems to have been working in large part from Parsky’s recollections. Simon “understood how to sell the Saudis on the idea that America was the safest place to park their petrodollars.” A “strikingly simply” barter developed. The US would buy Saudi oil, and would provide the Sauds with military and diplomatic cover. In return, the Saudis would buy lots of US Treasury bonds, becoming a huge part of the financing of the ballooning US debt. There was also a diplomatic cable sent from King Faisal to the US Treasury months later, dealing with one small but critical a...