In the philosophy of law, "positivism" generally stands for the view that the law is the will of the state, as expressed in legislation understood as a natural, historical fact. It is antithetical to any theory that posits "natural law," a Way Things Ought to Be to which those legislators must respond at the cost otherwise of losing their own legitimacy. Also in the philosophy of law, "realism" stands for the view that there are no formal and direct inferences from rules of law to applications -- from what the legislators do to what the judges do -- or from precedents sent down from the appellate court up high to the decisions of the ground-level trial courts. Realism is a critique of formalism. Positivism and realism as so defined are neither at odds nor allied. They don't address the same questions, they do not share the same foes (natural law theory is not identical to formalism). Historically, though, representatives of positivism and realism...
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The death of President Kennedy is the first 'public' fact of which I have some memory. I had just turned five at the time (a little more than a month before). I have some earlier personal memories, including a happy one of playing around on a dumpster outside our family home -- then an apartment building in East Hartford. The big green dumpster was a blast. My big brother and I crawled around on it like it was a jungle gym. But by 1963 we have moved into a nice ranch style house in Enfield, with an actual backyard, and our own trash cans. No shared dumpster. Dad was working second shift at the time. He could now afford to commute to and from work from a suburb a fair distance to the north of East Hartford (he had moved us to the apartment at a time when it was necessary for him to walk to and from work there.) To be precise, he could afford to become a member of a five-man car pool that did so. He thus used his own car only once a week, leaving it with Mom the other day...
In Bali, more than a thousand years ago, in decentralized way, people seem to have arrived at a sophisticated system of irrigation management, run by committees known as subaks. As with many worldly matters, this was done under the guise of religion. The subaks placed water temples along the slope of mountains, at points critical to water's movement down the sides. The rice farmers planted in tiers along the mountainside, in places where the subaks were sending the water. Western scientists, arriving on the scene in the mid 20th century, advancing what they saw as a green revolution brought a new system. This was part of the "green revolution," which some called neo-imperialism. It was also a fiasco. Pest control was also critical in the transition. Under the traditional system, the fields weren’t harvested all at once or all seeded with the same crop. So although fields sometimes became pest infested, after the harvest those pests would starve. Th...
A random quotation from a recent book by Bruce I. Jacobs, pictured here, comparing the portfolio insurers of the late 1980s to the LTCM crisis of eleven years later. "But LTCM, like portfolio insurers, fell prey to the illusion of liquidity. Portfolio insurers believed investors would underwrite their insurance policies by buying stocks when portfolio insurers needed to sell stocks. The crash of 1987 disabused them of this notion. LTCM believed that lenders or investors would be available to lend it cash or act as counterparties to its increasingly risky positions. In the end, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York had to coerce LTCM.s counterparties into supplying that liquidity."
I wrote the following three years ago this week, and I repost it for the same seasonal reason I posted it when I did, one that will become clear to the reader in due course. The great mid-20th century theologian Paul Tillich wrote the words italicized below. They are worth repeating because it seems, reading them, as if Tillich is responding to some of the misguided evangelicals of our own day, who want to turn Creation into 'intelligent design' and repackage it as 'science' for secondary schools. "Knowledge of revelation does not increase our knowledge about the structures of nature, history, and man. Whenever a claim to knowledge is made on this level, it must be subjected to the experimental tests through which truth is established. If such a claim is made in the name of revelation or of any other authority, it must be disregarded, and the ordinary methods of research and verification must be applied. ...Knowledge of revelation is knowledge about th...
Does anybody actually use Kindles or Nooks any longer? There was a brief period, a while back, when a device dedicated to the storage and reading of eBooks seemed a coming thing. Amazon sold Kindles and Barnes & Noble stepped up to the same plate with Nooks. (And, true confession, I bought a Nook, which is stored away somewhere because I don't like throwing things away.) But laptops and tablets are cheap and small. One can use them for reading eBooks and for a lot more as well. There doesn't seem to be a market niche for dedicated eReader devices. My impression is that the market for such things has faded away. I have done no research on the subject at all, though. Readers should feel free to set me straight on this.
Blockchain technology, sometimes more formally called distributed ledger tech, or DLT, is a multi-functional advance, the economic importance of which is still uncertain. As a simple matter of definition, DLT refers to a system in which a record of transactions maintains itself digitally in a way not dependent on any one hardware device, and accessible throughout a peer-to-peer network. DLT, pioneered in connection with Bitcoin, and then the other cryptocurrencies, has escaped that bottle, and turns out to have a lot of applications. Quicker settlement is the easy point to make about blockchains in finance. The likelihood that this will have important consequences for trading is a natural next realization. Distinct, and less intuitive, there is the idea of “smart contracts,” as explained by Vitalik Buterin in his 2013 white paper. It is precisely in order to enable smart contracts that Buterin’s Ether, in contrast to Satoshi’s Bitcoin, is built with a more robust code, en...
There has been a fair amount of speculation about how the phenomenon of quantum entanglement could produce faster-than-light communication. This means, within the context of the physics of relativity, that a message recipient an appropriate distance away (say, on earth's moon base) could learn of events on earth before they happen. One common example of quantum entanglement involves socks. A physicist named Reinhold Bertlmann (who retired in 2010) was notorious among his colleagues at the University of Vienna for always wearing different colored socks. So if you observed only his left ankle, you could say something with certainty about the sock on the right ankle. If the left sock was pink, the right sock was NOT pink. In 1981, J.S. Bell actually wrote an article for a serious peer-reviewed journal of physics with that phenomenon in the title, "Bertlmann's Socks and the Nature of Reality." If we imagine that the pair of socks becomes separated, and the right ...
The James household of the 1850s consisted of a patriarch and matriarch, four sons, and one daughter. Let's run through the scorecard this morning. The patriarch was Henry James Sr., a graduate from Union College, a drop-out from Princeton Theological Seminary, and a participant at what seemed an earth-shaking movement at the time, but what has been nearly forgotten since -- Swedenborgian mysticism. The matriarch was Mary Robertson James, nee Walsh, Irish on her father's side, Scottish on her mother's, introduced to her future husband by her brother, when both of the young men were students together at Princeton. In long talks Henry persuaded her first that the Bible doesn't require the office of Minister (he was talking himself into leaving the seminary), and then that she should marry him -- in a civil ceremony, of course. (The officiant at the wedding was the Mayor of NYC himself, Isaac Varian.) Their oldest child was William James, who of course is the ins...
It has been more than five years since I posted here about the "twin paradox," an issue raised by relativity physics. I'll link you to that discussion: http://jamesian58.blogspot.com/2012/09/the-twin-paradox.html If you follow that URL, you will find that I have only in recent days received my first comment on that post. I find this in itself fascinating. It speaks to the whole internet-postings-are-forever thing. Once you put something out, you never know when somebody who might comment interestingly about the subject will happen across it. Anyway, my correspondent gives no name for himself beyond "The Physics Guy." He is apparently using my humble observations to plug his own new blog, Physics Talk. The first three entries of "Physics Talk" are now up, and the third of them (posted December 30, 2018) deals with the twins. I'm not overly impressed. His discussion of this paradox doesn't say anything my own discussion in 2013 didn...
Here’s a key point about trade. A bilateral trade deficit is NEVER by itself a policy issue. Consider a microeconomic parallel. I have a severe bilateral trade deficit with my barber. I’m a content provider for websites and my barber doesn’t even HAVE a website. He has no need for my services at all. But I regularly need my hair cut. So the trade between us is one way. I pay him cash, he provides a service to me. Is this alarming? No. Why not? First, because I do need the hair cuts and my barber does a good job of providing them. Second, because the price he charges is fair. If it weren’t fair, there would be other barbers in the world to whom I could turn. Third, because trying to cut my own hair would be an unproductive waste of my time — time better spent preparing content for websites. Likewise, there is nothing alarming if the US sells little to the People's Republic of China, and China sells a lot of stuff to us. In that case, China is the barber. Now, if I ...
From the presumption that Trump must be wrong, fallacious inferences follow. Yes, Trump is a horrible President on too many levels to enumerate. But remember what they say about a stopped clock? The US has no business having troops in Syria. If Trump is in fact intent on withdrawing them: good for him. [ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT NARRATIVE VOICE -- he is not in fact intent on withdrawing them.] If Mattis resigned over that: Mattis was in the wrong, and this is so EVEN IF it is true, as some reporting has it, that Mattis has been a check on some of Trump's worst impulses on other occasions. This is John Glaser, of CATO, on the subject: https://www.cato.org/blog/trump-right-withdraw-syria ------------- The latest news on this front, of course, is that the Trump administration wasn't serious. The troops are staying in Syria after all. It was all a diversion, presumably a way of drawing attention away at least for a brief spell from the new House of Representatives, the Mu...
I haven't said much in this blog about the whole Putin-as-puppeteer theory of the 2016 presidential election, and Mueller's investigation. But the days are running short until the Mueller report will drop from the presses, and with Pelosi wielding the gavel, we're getting onto some fascinating terrain. Fascinating for the intellectual consumption of an old poli-sci major from the distinguished Marist College program. The Hill recently listed "five things to know" about the Trump Tower Moscow project. For now I'll simply summarize that publication's discussion. 1) The timeline. Back when Michael Cohen was POTUS' personal lawyer, he testified that Trump's circle conducted discussions about such a project in late 2015, and that the idea had dissipated by the end of January 2016. That would suggest a real but somewhat limited overlap between those talks and the presidential campaigning. More recently, as part of his new status as a cooperatin...
The term "mondegren" means a mis-hearing of a song's lyrics, generally in a way that makes its own kind of sense. The term comes from a common mishearing of the phrase "laid him on the green" in a Scottish ballad: The Bonnie Earl of Moray. The first verse runs: Ye Hielan's an' ye Lowlan's O, where have ye been? They have slain the Earl of Moray And lain him on the green. If you hear that last bit, "Lady Mondegren" then the the bastards involved (the Gordons of Huntly) have committed two assassinations. The Gordons were cruel, but their cruelty was sex balanced. Anyway, I have been thinking lately of a very different song. "Papa was a rolling stone," by The Temptations. The key lyrics here are: "When he died, all he left us was alone." Now, I take the spelling "alone" direct from a lyrics site. It is the generally accepted spelling. But for years before it became so easy to check these thin...
Someone on a social media site recently challenged me to produce a short list of the biggest historical events since 2000. I took her to mean "since 2000 inclusive." And to keep the list respectably short, I've limited myself to one Big Event from each year. After a little thought, I came up with the following, which as you can see I'm reproducing here. I considered invoking an event in the world of baseball for the Big Event of 2004, but thought better of it. (New Englanders will know what I had in mind.) 2000: The world is devastated on January 1st by the consequences of the Y2K bug ... uh, never mind. The refutation "ambulando" of the Y2K doomsayers serves as evidence that the digital world is more resilient than it had been in the fears of some and the (semi-secret) hopes of other. 2001: Al Qaeda attacks US targets in Virginia and New York, kills thousands. 2002: The new “euro” notes and coins are introduced as circulating currency in m...