Random Thoughts

Pétionville, Cité Soleil  Two neighborhoods, same city Port au Prince.  They could not be more different. United Nations peace keeping headquarters, the Hotel Montana (the only hotel of international standard I am told.), missing Americans, missing officials, and  the president of Haiti lived/worked/vacationed in one.  Poor machete wielding street gangs where people literally ate mud to survive before the quake are in the other. All are suffering.  Haiti is a nation with faults more destructive than the one which caused the 7.0 earthquake.    This…

Yesterday evening, he succeeded in convincing his thesis committee to let him out with his PhD in hand. It's now Dr. Rugbyologist - if you thought he was belligerent before, just wait... Hopefully he'll be back to blogging when the hangover wears off (and he finishes moving to his new position). Read the feed:

It's interesting that in reading this review the first thing one is struck by is that Sowell is guilty of the very thing he's railing against.  Setting himself up as a individual intellectual with "ideas" to tell others how things should work. I'm sure readers of this post may argue that I'm doing the same thing and they would be correct.  Therein is Sowell's fatal flaw, because anyone with an idea can be labeled an "intellectual" and be subject to the criticism that he levels.  It is noteworthy that apparently, in his view, the only "intellectuals" worth criticizing are…

As someone that has little use for government, I find myself in the awkward position of actually defending it when I hear the utter nonsense put forth by people suggesting that the private sector can do a better job. There is no doubt that any large organization is going to do things wrong and generate a significant amount of inefficiency.  However, this is true of corporations just as it is with government.  Corporations do not hold a privileged position in somehow having solutions to these problems, because they often perform worse than government,but without the public visibility…

If left unaddressed, the U.S. government's growing debt will inevitably limit America's future wealth and risk a disruptive fiscal crisis, claims a new report from the National Research Council and the National Academy of Public Administration. The report lays out several tax and spending options that would stabilize the national debt within a decade as well as a set of simple tests to determine whether any proposed federal budget would lead to long-term fiscal stability. Delaying action for even five or 10 years will make addressing the problem more painful and costly, requiring even higher…

If you are unsure what a buzzword is, please first read:The Buzzword Blog #2 : What is a Buzzword? The Buzzword Blog #6 : CustomerThe word 'customer' comes via old French from the Latin consuetudinem, meaning 'habit' or 'useage'.  A customer is a person who habitually, as a matter of personal choice, exchanges his or her money for goods or services from a preferred supplier. Where there is no possibility of personal choice, no real exercise of preference, the term 'customer' is entirely wrong. In the U.K. at the present time, the term 'customer' has become a meaningless buzzword for use…

The more hands of online poker a player wins, the more money that person is likely to lose, concludes a study conducted by a Cornell sociology doctoral student. The likely reason being that multiple wins are common for small stakes poker, and the more someone plays, the more likely he or she will eventually be walloped by occasional – but significant – losses. The study, which was published online in the December issue of the Journal of Gambling Studies, analyzed small-stakes, medium-stakes and high-stakes hands of No-Limit Texas Hold'em with six seats at the table. The research not only…

Parents are acutely aware of the influence that friends exert over their children's behavior -- how they dress, how they wear their hair, whether they drink or smoke. And now a new laboratory-based study has shown that friends may also influence how much adolescents eat. The study appears online in the current issue of Annals of Behavioral Medicine and involved 54 overweight and non-overweight youth -- 24 boys and 30 girls -- between the ages of 9 and 11.  Each was assigned randomly to bring a friend or to be paired with an unfamiliar peer. Studyparticipants worked on a computer game to…

Science is inextricably interwoven with cosmology, with theology, with epistemology, with ethics, politics, and psychology, all of them crucial to exploration into the human condition. A cosmology cannot be taken seriously that is not consistent with modern mechanics and astronomy, nor an epistemology that is naive in its understanding of operationalism, quantum uncertainty, or the Gödel theorems. To understand Zeno's paradoxes, we do not study the classics, but Weierstrass and Cantor. - Herbert A. Simon, "Culture to the Nth Power", in Visions of Technology, ed. Richard Rhodes, p. 247 Read…

In an effort to be more environmentally conscious, the United States government is dolling out various rebates and tax credits to consumers who purchase more earth friendly, energy efficient appliances. While the aim of the rebate program may be admirable, economists from the University of Delaware say taxpayers will lose a significant portion of the $300 Million they are contributing to the federal government's appliance rebate program and the energy-saving program could actually increase energy usage. Their analysis is published in the 1st Quarter 2010 issue of the Milken Institute Review.…