« October 2008 | Main | December 2008 »
Sunday, November 30, 2008
Give your grandkids a hundred billion dollars for Christmas
Zimbabwe dollars, that is.
Posted at
00:51
Saturday, November 29, 2008
Gnome-o-gram: Tiling with Terabucks
Jonah Goldberg just published a column which begins with the sentence, “The costs of Washington's bailout fiesta are now so huge, you can see them from space.” Well, of course, I know Mr. Goldberg was being witty, but this is a literal-minded chronicle by a literal-minded chronicler, so let's work the numbers and see what a terabuck (T$, a trillion [1012] U.S. dollars would look like from space). The exercise may provide some perspective on the sums bandied about as ultimately futile attempts are made to ward off the grand deleveraging crisis.
To be specific, let's calculate the area covered by a trillion United States one-dollar Federal Reserve Notes. Each note is 6.14 inches wide, 2.61 inches tall, 0.0043 inches thick, and weighs about one gram. The area of one dollar bill is thus 16.0254 square inches—call it 16 exactly. The area of a trillion such bills is just 1012 times this figure, 1.6×1013 in2, or about 3986 square miles: a little less than the combined area of the U.S. states of Delaware and Rhode Island.
But the bailouts are a lot more than a terabuck, which seems more like the weekly tab as this thing snowballs. The current estimate for all of the bailouts, including the most recent of Citigroup. is 7.7 T$ (although, as Goldberg notes, some of this is in the form of loan guarantees and equity investments, which may ultimately be recovered [but if that were likely, why would private investors not put up the money?]). Let's assume here the taxpayer is, as they say in Texas hold 'em, “all in” and holding a losing hand, as is usually the case for taxpayers. Well, then we multiply the 3992 square miles per terabuck by 7.7, and get 30692 square miles of money, about the area of the state of South Carolina. If arranged in a square, it would be 175 miles on a side.
Posted at
20:01
Friday, November 28, 2008
Reading List: Forgotten Founder, Drunken Prophet
- Kauffman, Bill. Forgotten Founder, Drunken Prophet. Wilmington: ISI Books, 2008. ISBN 978-1-933859-73-6.
-
It is a cliché to observe that history is written by the
victors, but rarely is it as evident as in the case of the
drafting and ratification of the United States Constitution,
where the proponents of a strong national government, some
of whom, including Alexander Hamilton, wished to “annihilate
the State distinctions and State operations” (p. 30),
not only conducted the proceedings in secret, carefully
managed the flow of information to the public, and concealed
their nationalist, nay imperial, ambitions from the state
conventions which were to vote on ratification. Indeed, just
like modern-day collectivists in the U.S. who have purloined
the word “liberal”, which used to mean a
champion of individual freedom, the covert centralisers at
the Constitutional Convention styled themselves
“Federalists”, while promoting a supreme
government which was anything but federal in nature.
The genuine champions of a federal structure allowed
themselves to be dubbed “Anti-Federalists” and,
as always, were slandered as opposing “progress”
(but toward what?). The Anti-Federalists counted among
their ranks men such as Samuel Adams, Patrick Henry, George
Mason, Samuel Chase, and Elbridge Gerry: these were not
reactionary bumpkins but heroes, patriots, and intellectuals
the equal of any of their opponents. And then there was
Luther Martin,
fervent Anti-Federalist and perhaps the least celebrated
of the Founding Fathers.
Martin's long life was a study in contradictions. He was considered
one of the most brilliant trial lawyers of his time, and yet his
courtroom demeanour was universally described as long-winded, rambling,
uncouth, and ungrammatical. He often appeared in court obviously
inebriated, was slovenly in appearance and dress, when excited would
flick spittle from his mouth, and let's not get into his table
manners. At the Consitutional Convention he was a fierce opponent of
the Virginia Plan which became the basis of the Constitution and, with
Samuel Adams and Mason, urged the adoption of a Bill of Rights. He
argued vehemently for the inclusion of an immediate ban on the
importation of slaves and a plan to phase out slavery while, as of
1790, owning six slaves himself yet serving as Honorary-Counselor
to a Maryland abolitionist society.
After the Constitution was adopted by the convention (Martin
had walked out by the time and did not sign the document), he
led the fight against its ratification by Maryland. Maryland
ratified the Constitution over his opposition, but he did
manage to make the ratification conditional upon the adoption
of a Bill of Rights.
Martin was a man with larger than life passions. Although
philosophically close to Thomas Jefferson in his view
of government, he detested the man because he believed
Jefferson had slandered one of his wife's ancestors as
a murderer of Indians. When Jefferson became President,
Martin the Anti-Federalist became Martin the ardent Federalist,
bent on causing Jefferson as much anguish as possible.
When a law student studying with him eloped with and married
his daughter, Martin turned incandescent, wrote, and
self-published a 163 page full-tilt tirade against the
bounder titled Modern Gratitude.
Lest Martin come across as a kind of buffoon, bear in
mind that after his singular performance at the Constitutional
Convention, he went on to serve as Attorney General of the
State of Maryland for thirty years (a tenure never equalled
in all the years which followed), argued forty cases before the
U.S. Supreme Court, and appeared for the defence in
two of the epochal trials of early U.S. jurisprudence:
the impeachment trial of Supreme Court Justice Samuel
Chase before the U.S. Senate, and the treason trial of Aaron
Burr—and won acquittals on both occasions.
The author is an unabashed libertarian, and considers
Martin's diagnosis of how the Constitution would
inevitably lead to the concentration of power in
a Federal City (which his fellow Anti-Federalist George
Clinton foresaw, “would be the asylum of the base, idle,
avaricious, and ambitious” [p. xiii]) to the
detriment of individual liberty as prescient. One wishes
that Martin had been listened to, while sympathising
with those who actually had to endure his speeches.
The author writes with an exuberantly vast vocabulary which
probably would have sent the late William F. Buckley to the
dictionary on several occasions: every few pages you come across
a word like
“roorback”,
“eftsoons”,
“sennight”, or
“fleer”.
For a complete list of those which stumped me, open
the vault of the spoilers.
Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.Here are the delightfully obscure words used in this book. To avoid typographic fussiness, I have not quoted them. Each is linked to its definition. Vocabulary ho!This is a wonderful little book which, if your view of the U.S. Constitution has been solely based on the propaganda of those who promulgated it, is an excellent and enjoyable antidote.
malison, exordium, eristic, roorback, tertium quid, bibulosity, eftsoons, vendue, froward, pococurante, disprized, toper, cerecloth, sennight, valetudinarian, variorum, concinnity, plashing, ultimo, fleer, recusants, scrim, flagitious, indurated, truckling, linguacious, caducity, prepotency, natheless, dissentient, placemen, lenity, burke, plangency, roundelay, hymeneally, mesalliance, divagation, parti pris, anent, comminatory, descry, minatory
Spoilers end here.
Posted at
23:11
Wednesday, November 26, 2008
Recipes: Jamaican Jerk Boneless Turkey Breast
Last Thanksgiving, when I wrote of cranberries, I promised you an easy and innovative way to fix turkey without all the complexity beforehand and debris in the aftermath. I should have posted this earlier, but consider this a rescue recipe for perennial procrastinators. Forget the whole bird: there's no time left to defrost a whole frozen turkey, and, starting on the holiday, there's little probability you'll be able to obtain one which isn't frozen unless you have a bunch running around in the backyard and a hatchet. So, get yourself a plump boneless turkey breast between 1 and 1.5 kilograms (2–3 pounds). Now, this will be, of necessity, all white meat and if you prefer dark, that's a compromise you'll have to make in the interest of expedience. As soon as you get the turkey breast home, put it in a glass casserole dish large enough so it can sit flat upon the bottom with some space above, then spoon two tablespoons (30 ml) of Jamaican jerk seasoning (this is my favourite—no relation) and thoroughly rub it into the meat on all sides. This is hot stuff; if you have any cuts on your hands you may want to wear rubber gloves and in any case be sure to wash your hands afterward. Cover the casserole and place it in the refrigerator to marinate, ideally overnight, but even an hour or so will get the job done, albeit less than optimally, if time is limited. When the countdown clock reaches two hours before meal time, remove the casserole dish from the refrigerator and set it on the counter to begin to come up to room temperature. At the same time, begin to preheat the oven to 220°C (425°F). (If your oven has a circulating air system, use it. If not, add 10 minutes to the cooking time.) Peel two medium sized yellow onions and slice in halves, then place the four half-onions atop the turkey breast in the casserole. At T−75 minutes (one hour and 15 minutes), place the casserole in the middle of the preheated oven. From this point on you have nothing to do whatsoever in preparing the turkey, so you can work on vegetables, a salad, or watching football. At T0, remove the casserole from the oven and you'll find a moist, spicy turkey breast ready to carve and share with your guests, and plenty of juice to season the potatoes. What can go wrong? (Hey, I'm an engineer—that's what I'm all about!) In my experience, very little. Be careful that the lid on the casserole dish fits well and that it isn't askew: that can lead to the juice evaporating and the meat drying out. But apart from that on one occasion, I've made this dish dozens of times and had no other problems. After you've put the leftovers in the frigo, you'll have several days of delightfully spicy turkey sandwiches to enjoy. And next year I'll proffer an all killer, no filler recipe for when you're tired of turkey sandwiches!Posted at
23:48
Tuesday, November 25, 2008
Reading List: The Art of Chesley Bonestell
- Miller, Ron and Fredrick C. Durant III. The Art of Chesley Bonestell. London: Paper Tiger, 2001. ISBN 978-1-85585-884-8.
-
If you're interested in astronomy and space, you're almost certainly
familiar with the space art of Chesley Bonestell, who essentially
created the genre of realistic depictions of extraterrestrial
scenes. But did you know that Bonestell also:
- Was a licensed architect in the State of California, who contributed to the design of a number of buildings erected in Northern California in the aftermath of the 1906 earthquake?
- Chose the site for the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition (of which the San Francisco Palace of Fine Arts remains today)?
- Laid out the Seventeen Mile Drive in Pebble Beach on the Monterey Peninsula?
- Did detailed design of the ornamentation of the towers of the Golden Gate Bridge, and illustrated pamphlets explaining the engineering of the bridge?
- Worked for years in Hollywood doing matte paintings for films including Citizen Kane?
- Not only did the matte paintings, but designed the buildings of Howard Roark for the film version of The Fountainhead?
- Painted the Spanish missions of California as they would have appeared in their heyday?
Posted at
23:38
Monday, November 24, 2008
Snowman
Posted at
22:46
Saturday, November 22, 2008
Gnome-o-gram: “Managing the Economy”
One incessantly hears the legacy media prattle about the U.S. President or the Federal Government or the Federal Reserve or some other instrument of coercion "managing the economy". Have any of the people who write or publish such nonsense, or those to whom they impute such powers ever managed anything at all of substantial size? Dunno—but I have. I was founder and CEO of a company which went public in 1985 and today has a market capitalisation greater than that of General Motors. This is not to brag, just to cite experience relevant to the observations which follow. Let me tell you what it's like to “manage” an enterprise vastly smaller and far more easily directed than these railroad-era continental-scale debt-financed fiat money economies the politicians pretend to steer. The legacy media and, I suspect, politicians who haven't been there, assume the economy is something like a ship. On the bridge is a steady master, with a crew responding immediately to helm and engine orders, with progress plotted continuously on accurate charts. In reality, it's like this. You, Mr. or Ms. CEO, are sitting in your office. Your desk has dozens of levers you can adjust and dials you can twiddle affecting the disposition of financial resources within your organisation. Half of these do nothing; a third of the remaining have results opposite to your expectations; and the balance work in the expected direction, but with disparate and often nonlinear effect. All of these controls, for better or for worse, have no immediate effects upon visible results, but only after a lag which is often unknowable and interacts with the settings of the other controls. And you have no idea which of the controls have what kind of effect upon the results. Your information about the current state of affairs and the effects of your adjustments to the controls comes as measurements of financial aggregates which necessarily discard much of the detail subsumed into them. These aggregates are reported weeks or months after your changes to the controls are made, and you can see only the net effect of all your changes, not those due to each individual control, nor the lag times between adjustments and results. You know next to nothing about the inputs; you have a large number of controls about whose effects you are ignorant; and your feedback from results is ambiguous, impossible to trace back to the individual actions which caused them, and delayed by an unknowable interval from cause to effect. And you're supposed to manage that, and be responsible to the shareholders for the results? Now you may begin to grasp why CEOs get paid so much. Heck, when I was CEO of Autodesk, I was paid sixty thousand dollars a year to purport to do that, and, if I say so myself, I earned every nickel of it—well, most of 'em, anyway. Now consider how this scales. When you're running a small business, as I did from 1978 through 1982, you can keep everything in your head: cost of goods, inventory, key customers, quality issues, and development priorities. This is one of the main reasons small businesses are so efficient and form the backbone of every genuinely free economy. When you get bigger, there's so much going on it doesn't fit into the head of a single individual any more: you need to develop management tools to abstract the essentials from the raw data and highlight the priorities from which strategic decisions are made. As you get larger and larger, the “economy of scale” argument is that this is logarithmic and hence as the enterprise grows, the relative overhead due to management and administration decreases, but I would argue that it becomes geometrically more difficult: you are trying to aggregate more and more disparate data into each single item on a financial report, to be evaluated by somebody who has little or no knowledge of the detailed components which make up that number and yet must make decisions based upon it alone. Keep in mind the geometric growth in distance between reality and available management information as the size of an organisation grows. When you scale this up not just from the operator of a family business to a mid-sized publicly-traded company, but all the way to a national economy, the exponent kicks in hard, and it kills. The would-be “managers of the economy” stand before a vast control panel with thousands of unlabeled knobs, none of whose effects are known, bedizened with a multitude of gauges indicating nobody-knows-what-precisely, with unknown and unknowable delays between whatever they measure and what they display. Okay, go manage that. Which is why whenever you hear folks talk about “managing the economy” you should chuckle and place your assets outside of their reach and as uncoupled as possible from the consequences of their actions.Posted at
21:42
Friday, November 21, 2008
Reading List: Agent Zigzag
- Macintyre, Ben. Agent Zigzag. New York: Three Rivers Press, 2007. ISBN 978-0-307-35341-2.
- I'm not sure I'd agree with the cover blurb by the Boston Globe reviewer who deemed this “The best book ever written”, but it's a heck of a great read and will keep you enthralled from start to finish. Imagine the best wartime espionage novel you've ever read, stir in exploits from a criminal caper yarn, leaven with an assortment of delightfully eccentric characters, and then make the whole thing totally factual, exhaustively documented from archives declassified decades later by MI5, and you have this compelling story. The protagonist, Eddie Chapman was, over his long and convoluted career, a British soldier; deserter; safecracker; elite criminal; prisoner of His Majesty, the government of the Isle of Jersey, and the Nazi occupation in Paris; volunteer spy and saboteur for the German Abwehr; parachute spy in Britain; double agent for MI5; instructor at a school for German spies in Norway; spy once again in Britain, deceiving the Germans about V-1 impact locations; participant in fixed dog track races; serial womaniser married to the same woman for fifty years; and for a while an “honorary crime correspondent” to the Sunday Telegraph. That's a lot to fit into even a life as long as Chapman's, and a decade after his death, those who remember him still aren't sure where his ultimate allegiance lay or even if the concept applied to him. If you simply look at him as an utterly amoral person who managed to always come up standing, even after intensive interrogations by MI5, the Abwehr, Gestapo, and SS, you miss his engaging charm, whether genuine or feigned, which engendered deeply-felt and long-lasting affection among his associates, both British and Nazi, criminal and police, all of whom describe him as a unique character. Information on Chapman's exploits has been leaking out ever since he started publishing autobiographical information in 1953. Dodging the Official Secrets Act, in 1966 he published a more detailed account of his adventures, which was made into a very bad movie starring Christopher Plummer as Eddie Chapman. Since much of this information came from Chapman, it's not surprising that a substantial part of it was bogus. It is only with the release of the MI5 records, and through interviews with surviving participants in Chapman's exploits that the author was able to piece together an account which, while leaving many questions of motivation uncertain, at least pins down the facts and chronology. This is a thoroughly delightful story of a totally ambiguous character: awarded the Iron Cross for his services to the Nazi Reich, having mistresses simultaneously supported in Britain and Norway by MI5 and the Abwehr, covertly pardoned for his high-profile criminal record for his service to the Crown, and unreconstructed rogue in his long life after the war. If published as spy fiction, this would be considered implausible in the extreme; the fact that it really happened makes this one of the most remarkable wartime stories I've read and an encounter with a character few novelists could invent.
Posted at
23:23
Thursday, November 20, 2008
Les Quatre Saisons: Embedded Flash Video Available
Les Quatre Saisons is a time-lapse movie showing the development of a Swiss hay-mow adjacent to Fourmilab into residential housing over the period of a year from 2005–2006. This movie, originally available due to bandwidth limits only as downloads from The Internet Archive, can now be viewed in medium resolution directly from Fourmilab with an embedded Flash video player in the main Quatre Saisons page.Posted at
23:54
Monday, November 17, 2008
Gnome-o-gram: The Indiana Jones Economy
Mutt: Well, what's he gonna do now?So what's been happening with the stock market recently? Some observers have been calling the recent sell-offs and volatility an “Obama Market”, but that seems like nonsense to me. Markets discount information known to them in advance, and for more than a week before the election, the Obama President contract on Intrade was trading above 90%, and it never dipped below the 70s for more than a month before the election. So, I believe Obama's winning was priced into the market well before the election. (And hence it may be valid to attribute part of the pre-election sell-off to the expectation of his being elected.) But after the election, there haven't been any shifts in economic policy from the Obama camp which would justify the market pricing in different expectations. It seems to me that what's happened over the last couple of weeks is the realisation that Treasury and the Fed, like Indiana Jones, are just making up stuff as they go along, and have no coherent model or plan of action and have, in fact, not even followed the plan for which the US$700 billion was voted. That's what I think the market has been pricing in, and why we're seeing enormous swings both up and down on a daily basis. Just take a look at the CBOE Volatility Index; this can be taken as a measure of the extent to which investors, with their own money on the line, believe that there is no coherent policy in place to respond to the grand deleveraging now underway.
Marion: Hah! I don't think he plans that far ahead.
Posted at
23:49
Sunday, November 16, 2008
Tree in the Fog
Click image for an enlargement.
Posted at
23:22
Saturday, November 15, 2008
Reading List: A Manifesto for Media Freedom
- Anderson, Brian C. and Adam D. Thierer. A Manifesto for Media Freedom. New York: Encounter Books, 2008. ISBN 978-1-59403-228-8.
- In the last decade, the explosive growth of the Internet has allowed a proliferation of sources of information and opinion unprecedented in the human experience. As humanity's first ever many-to-many mass medium, the Internet has essentially eliminated the barriers to entry for anybody who wishes to address an audience of any size in any medium whatsoever. What does it cost to start your own worldwide television or talk radio show? Nothing—and the more print-inclined can join the more than a hundred million blogs competing for the global audience's attention. In the United States, the decade prior to the great mass-market pile-on to the Internet saw an impressive (by pre-Internet standards) broadening of radio and television offerings as cable and satellite distribution removed the constraints of over-the-air bandwidth and limited transmission range, and abolition of the “Fairness Doctrine” freed broadcasters to air political and religious programming of every kind. Fervent believers in free speech found these developments exhilarating and, if they had any regrets, they were only that it didn't happen more quickly or go as far as it might. One of the most instructive lessons of this epoch has been that prominent among the malcontents of the new media age have been politicians who mouth their allegiance to free speech while trying to muzzle it, and legacy media outlets who wrap themselves in the First Amendment while trying to construe it as a privilege reserved for themselves, not a right to which the general populace is endowed as individuals. Unfortunately for the cause of liberty, while technologists, entrepreneurs, and new media innovators strive to level the mass communication playing field, it's the politicians who make the laws and write the regulations under which everybody plays, and the legacy media which support politicians inclined to tilt the balance back in their favour, reversing (or at least slowing) the death spiral in their audience and revenue figures. This thin volume (just 128 pages: even the authors describe it as a “brief polemic”) sketches the four principal threats they see to the democratisation of speech we have enjoyed so far and hope to see broadened in unimagined ways in the future. Three have suitably Orwellian names: the “Fairness Doctrine” (content-based censorship of broadcast media), “Network Neutrality” (allowing the FCC's camel nose into the tent of the Internet, with who knows what consequences as Fox Charlie sweeps Internet traffic into the regulatory regime it used to stifle innovation in broadcasting for half a century), and “Campaign Finance Reform” (government regulation of political speech, often implemented in such a way as to protect incumbents from challengers and shut out insurgent political movements from access to the electorate). The fourth threat to new media is what the authors call “neophobia”: fear of the new. To the neophobe, the very fact of a medium's being innovative is presumptive proof that it is dangerous and should be subjected to regulation from which pre-existing media are exempt. Just look at the political entrepreneurs salivating over regulating video games, social networking sites, and even enforcing “balance” in blogs and Web news sources to see how powerful a force this is. And we have a venerable precedent in broadcasting being subjected, almost from its inception unto the present, to regulation unthinkable for print media. The actual manifesto presented here occupies all of a page and a half, and can be summarised as “Don't touch! It's working fine and will evolve naturally to get better and better.” As I agree with that 100%, my quibbles with the book are entirely minor items of presentation and emphasis. The chapter on network neutrality doesn't completely close the sale, in my estimation, on how something as innocent-sounding as “no packet left behind” can open the door to intrusive content regulation of the Internet and the end of privacy, but then it's hard to explain concisely: when I tried five years ago, more than 25,000 words spilt onto the page. Also, perhaps because the authors' focus is on political speech, I think they've underestimated the extent to which, in regulation of the Internet, ginned up fear of what I call the unholy trinity: terrorists, drug dealers, and money launderers, can be exploited by politicians to put in place content regulation which they can then turn to their own partisan advantage. This is a timely book, especially for readers in the U.S., as the incoming government seems more inclined to these kinds of regulations than that it supplants. (I am on record as of July 10th, 2008, as predicting that an Obama administration would re-impose the “fairness doctrine”, enact “network neutrality”, and [an issue not given the attention I think it merits in this book] adopt “hate speech” legislation, all with the effect of stifling [mostly due to precautionary prior restraint] free speech in all new media.) For a work of advocacy, this book is way too expensive given its length: it would reach far more of the people who need to be apprised of these threats to their freedom of expression and to access to information were it available as an inexpensive paperback pamphlet or on-line download. A podcast interview with one of the authors is available.
Posted at
00:44
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
Reading List: Tenured Radicals
- Kimball, Roger. Tenured Radicals. 3rd. ed. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, [1990, 1991, 1998] 2008. ISBN 978-1-56663-796-1.
-
If you want to understand what's happening in the United States
today, and how the so-called
millennial generation
(May 2008) came to be what it is, there's no better
place to start than this book, originally published eighteen
years ago, which has just been released in a new paperback
edition with an introduction and postscript totalling 65
pages which update the situation as of 2008. The main text
has been revised as well, and a number of footnotes added to
update matters which have changed since earlier editions.
Kimball's thesis is that, already by 1990, and far more and broadly
diffused today, the humanities departments (English, Comparative
Literature, Modern Languages, Philosophy, etc.) of prestigious (and now
almost all) institutions of higher learning have been thoroughly
radicalised by politically-oriented academics who have jettisoned the
traditional canon of literature, art, and learning and rejected the
traditional mission of a liberal arts education in favour of
indoctrinating students in a nominally “multicultural” but
actually anti-Western ideology which denies the existence of objective
truth and the meaning of text, and inculcates the Marxist view that
all works can be evaluated only in terms of their political context
and consequences. These pernicious ideas, which have been discredited
by their disastrous consequences in the last century and laughed out
of public discourse everywhere else, have managed to achieve an
effective hegemony in the American academy, with tenured radicals
making hiring and tenure decisions based upon adherence to their
ideology as opposed to merit in disinterested intellectual inquiry.
Now, putting aside this being disastrous to a society which, like all societies,
is never more than one generation away from losing its culture, and
catastrophic to a country which now has a second generation of voters
entering the electorate who are ignorant of the cultural heritage they
inherited and the history of the nation whose leadership they are
about to assume, this spectacle can also be quite funny if observed
with special goggles which only transmit black humour. For the whole
intellectual tommyrot of “deconstruction” and
“postmodernism” has become so trendy that intellectuals in
other fields one would expect to be more immune to such twaddle are
getting into the act, including the law (“Critical Legal
Studies”) and—astoundingly—architecture.
An entire chapter is devoted to “Deconstructivist
Architecture”, which by its very name seems to indicate you
wouldn't want to spend much time in buildings “deconstructed”
by its proponents. And yet, it has a bevy of earnest advocates,
including Peter Eisenman, one of the most distinguished of U.S.
architects, who advised those wishing to move beyond the sterility of
modernism to seek
a theory of the center, that is, a theory which occupies the center. I believe that only when such a theory of the center is articulated will architecture be able to transform itself as it always has and as it always will…. But the center that I am talking about is not a center that can be the center that we know is in the past, as a nostalgia for center. Rather, this not new but other center will be … an interstitial one—but one with no structure, but one also that embraces as periphery in its own centric position. … A center no longer sustained by nostalgia and no longer sustained by univocal discourse. (p. 187)
Got that? I'd hate to be a client explaining to him that I want the main door to be centred between these two windows. But seriously, apart from the zaniness, intellectual vapidity and sophistry, and obscurantist prose (all of which are on abundant display here), what we're seeing what Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci called the “long march through the institutions” arriving at the Marxist promised land: institutions of higher education funded with taxpayer money and onerous tuition payments paid by hard-working parents and towering student loans disgorging class after class of historically and culturally ignorant, indoctrinated, and easily influenced individuals into the electorate, just waiting for a charismatic leader who knows how to eloquently enunciate the trigger words they've been waiting for. In the 2008 postscript the author notes that a common reaction to the original 1990 edition of the book was the claim that he had cherry-picked for mockery a few of the inevitably bizarre extremes you're sure to find in a vibrant and diverse academic community. But with all the news in subsequent years of speech codes, jackboot enforcing of “diversity”, and the lockstep conformity of much of academia, this argument is less plausible today. Indeed, much of the history of the last two decades has been the diffusion of new deconstructive and multicultural orthodoxy from elite institutions into the mainstream and its creeping into the secondary school curriculum as well. What happens in academia matters, especially in a country in which an unprecedented percentage of the population passes through what style themselves as institutions of higher learning. The consequences of this should be begin to be manifest in the United States over the next few years.
Posted at
22:56
Sunday, November 9, 2008
Gizmos: Fourmilog iPhone Edition Available for Testing
Bleeding-edge trendy early adopters are invited to try the new iPhone edition of Fourmilog. This rendering shows the five most recent postings on this sporadically updated chronicle in primate-phalanx-friendly mode, horizontally scrolling to an already-rendered page containing the text and images of the article. This design is based upon the CSS style developed by Chris Coyier of CSS-Tricks and the jQuery JavaScript library. The site design is derived from that used by the iPhone edition of Power Line, although I've made many changes in developing my own Movable Type template for the site. This edition is still in a state of flux (I'm still trying to sort out issues with the dodgy horizontal scrolling in the iPhone version of Safari, among other mysteries), so I haven't yet linked it to the main Fourmilog page. Comments are welcome—that's what the feedback button is for! Although this edition is optimised for the iPhone, it is 100% compliant with the XHTML and CSS standards and renders correctly in competently-implemented, standards-compliant browsers such as Mozilla Firefox, Opera, and even Microsoft's Internet Explorer. I will doubtlessly be tweaking this over the next few days. Your comments are welcome, especially if they're based on accessing the site from an actual iPhone. The original iPhone was never sold in Switzerland, so I have tested this site only on an iPhone 3G; if there are compatibility problems with earlier hardware, I'm limited in resolving them by not being able to test on the actual device. Update: There having been no reports of problems with the iPhone edition in the last 24 hours, I've gone ahead and added an “iPhone Ready” button to the sidebar of the desktop edition which links to the iPhone edition URL. (2008-11-10 22:11 UTC)Posted at
23:39
Friday, November 7, 2008
Gnome-o-gram: The Harvard MBA Indicator
For decades, it's been a common observation that whenever the graduating MBA class from the Harvard Business School overwhelmingly opts for jobs in a given industry, that sector may be a bubble ready to pop. In essence, if you want to know what “the last big thing” is about to be, just look at where the aspiring masters of the universe are choosing to commence their careers. Below is the industry breakdown for the Harvard MBA Class of 2007 (the most recent for which figures are available) from this MBA Program Statistics report published by the School.| Industry (Class of 2007) | % | Median Base Salary |
|---|---|---|
| Manufacturing | 17% | $105,000 |
| Financial Services | 44% | $115,000 |
| Consulting Services | 21% | $120,000 |
| Other Services | 4% | $110,000 |
| Non-Profit | 2% | $90,000 |
| Government | <1% | $60,000 |
Posted at
21:32
Sunday, November 2, 2008
Reading List: Supreme Courtship
- Buckley, Christopher. Supreme Courtship. New York: Twelve, 2008. ISBN 978-0-446-57982-7.
-
You know you're about to be treated to the highest level
of political farce by a master of the genre when you open
a book which begins with the sentence:
Supreme Court Associate Justice J. Mortimer Brinnin's deteriorating mental condition had been the subject of talk for some months now, but when he showed up for oral argument with his ears wrapped in aluminum foil, the consensus was that the time had finally come for him to retire.
The departure of Mr. Justice Brinnin created a vacancy which embattled President Donald Vanderdamp attempted to fill with two distinguished jurists boasting meagre paper trails, both of whom were humiliatingly annihilated in hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee, whose chairman, loquacious loose cannon and serial presidential candidate Dexter Mitchell, coveted the seat for himself. After rejection of his latest nominee, the frustrated president was channel surfing at Camp David when he came across the wildly popular television show Courtroom Six featuring television (and former Los Angeles Superior Court) judge Pepper Cartwright dispensing down-home justice with her signature Texas twang and dialect. Let detested Senator Mitchell take on that kind of popularity, thought the Chief Executive, chortling at the prospect, and before long Judge Pepper is rolled out as the next nominee, and prepares for the confirmation fight. I kind of expected this story to be about how an authentic straight-talking human being confronts the “Borking” judicial nominees routinely receive in today's Senate, but it's much more and goes way beyond that, which I shall refrain from discussing to avoid spoilers. I found the latter half of the book less satisfying that the first—it seemed like once on the court Pepper lost some of her spice, but I suppose that's realistic (yet who expects realism in farces?). Still, this is a funny book, with hundreds of laugh out loud well-turned phrases and Buckley's customary delightfully named characters. The fractured Latin and snarky footnotes are an extra treat. This is not a roman à clef, but you will recognise a number of Washington figures upon which various characters were modelled.
Posted at
23:38