Jeff hunkers down............

As Sandy approaches, he pauses to write:

"Storms come with an inevitability. Yet we always seem to plan at the last possible moments. Warming yellow suns and bright full moons do make us poetic and lazy."

Hang in there, friend.

Nobody knows..................

Aerosmith..........................................Dream On

Dissolving...............................

Victor Davis Hanson, taking the long view, wonders if medieval city-states represent our future.  I'm sure that will turn out well.  Full interesting essay is here.  Excerpt here:

"High-tech communications of the 21st century are a force multiplier, in real time conveying the failures of redistributionist schemes, through cable news, Internet blogs and tabloids, and downloaded videos. A nurse in Des Moines has the power in the palm of her hand to read the Wall Street Journal, watch a YouTube video, or browse a news site at Google, accessing more information than what the aristocratic class was privileged to obtain just a few decades ago. The result is that we see and hear instantaneously what “They” do and say, even though we rarely meet them any more in our daily lives. They have become Orwellian visages on our collective screens, whose empty platitudes seem instantaneously familiar and yet irrelevant to the people we live, work, and enjoy our leisure with."

Shaping a generation..............Part 11

Birmingham, Alabama    1963

The long hot summer of 1965




Anti-War demonstrations in 1967





The 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago

Is he talking to us....................?

The trouble with teaching................

.............is those pesky students.  Cultural Offering posts a teacher's note about John Gurdon, the recent Nobel Laureate, strongly advising against his pursuing  studies in the field of science. Gurdon received a 2012 Nobel award for his breakthrough work that eventually opened the door for cloning.  One version of the tale is here.  Oxford University bragging about his work is here.  An excerpt with Gurdon describing his school experience is here:
he revealed that he put part of his later success down to avoiding the drudge of his school's science teaching: "you're better off not being taught a subject badly," he says. "I see it as an advantage to have not had to do the dreary kind of school science that people did have to do at that time."

This is wrong on so many levels............

Of course just under eleven minutes isn't a very long time to express oneself on a complex subject, but still...............



The Mighty E.opened this door by posting a quote from Renata Salecl.  Never having heard of her, the Oracle Google was consulted, leading to this video.

For me, I prefer a more simple philosophy.  As various Robert E. Parker heroes have repeatedly said, "Choice is good."

A constant in a changing world...............

image via

Not straight enough..............

 




















   "Job's father once taught him that a drive for perfection meant caring about the craftsmanship even of the parts unseen.  Jobs applied that to the layout of the circuit board inside of the Apple II.  He rejected the initial design because the lines were not straight enough."
-Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs

image via

Stand my ground..................

Tom Petty...............................I Won't Back Down

Halloween................

My hometown likes its Halloween.  Never have figured out why we don't celebrate it on October 31st like you'd think.  But, whatever, last night was the designated Trick-or-Treat night for the downtown.  Crowd estimates are a chancy thing, but somewhere between 600 and 1,000 kids and parents  ambled around the Square, gathering goodies from local businesses and organizations.  Looks like kids of all ages are having fun.

Shaping a generation..............Part 10

The great speeches...................

John F. Kennedy.................Inauguration Address
January 20, 1961                            "....ask not................"
full speech is here





Martin Luther King, Jr................The March on Washington
August 28, 1963                                         "......I have a dream......."
full speech is here






Mario Savio,................ the Berkeley Free Speech Movement
December 2, 1964          ".....put your bodies upon the gears....."

Debt..............................

At least one of the lines is moving the right way..............In retrospect, it seems much of the good economic times of the mid-2000's was mostly a debt-fueled illusion. The chart below would indicate that  the general public has been aggressively reducing their debt load.  One of these days, our government will have to follow suit.  I sure that will be a lot of fun.

Enlargeable chart and back-story from the Coyote Blog is here.

Cosmos....................

"To the dumb question, 'Why me?' the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply: Why not?"
-Christopher Hitchens,  Mortality

Understands....................

By request...................

Barry McGuire............................Eve of Destruction

Leadership..........................

Twinkling of starlight..........

Zager & Evans...........................In the Year 2525

Fierce tears....................

Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay, 
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

-Dylan Thomas


image via

Shaping a generation..................Part 9

Electric darkness.........................

     The expresso had been close to perfect, so Reacher went back to the same cafe exactly twenty-four hours later.  Two nights in the same place was unusual for Reacher, but he figured great coffee was worth a change in his routine.  The cafe was on the west side of Sixth Avenue in New York City, in the middle of the block between Bleecker and Houston.  It occupied the ground floor of an undistinguished four-story building.  The upper stories looked like anonymous rental apartments.  The cafe itself looked like a transplant from a back street in Rome.  Inside it had low light and scarred wooden walls and a dented chrome machine as hot and long as a locomotive and a counter.  Outside there was a single line of metal tables on the sidewalk behind a low canvass screen.  Reacher took the same end table he had used the night before and chose the same seat.  He stretched out and got comfortable and tipped his chair up on two legs.  That put his back against the cafe's outside wall and left hims looking east, across the sidewalk and the width of the avenue.  He liked to sit outside in the summer, in New York City.  Especially at night.  He liked the electric darkness and the hot dirty air and the blasts of noise and traffic and the manic barking sirens and the crush of people.  It helped a lonely man feel connected and isolated both at the same time.
-Lee Child,  The Hard Way

Fingers crossed................

Before much happens in the development of commercial real estate, the architects have to get hired and begin design work.  In our part of the world, over the past five years, a substantial portion of architectural work has been for school and jail construction.  That work seems to be winding down.  So.........we take the following chart to be good news.  Architectural billings appear to be increasing.  It's a good thing.  We hope their numbers continue to improve.

thanks to calculated risk, as always.

Alan Kay.................

I had never heard of Alan Kay until I started reading Walter Isaacson's latest tome, Steve Jobs.  It is a book filled with names, information, and insights that somehow have eluded me all these years.  Anyway, Alan Kay has said some neat stuff:

The best way to predict the future is to invent it.

If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough.

By the time I got to school, I had already read a couple hundred books. I knew in the first grade that they were lying to me because I had already been exposed to other points of view. School is basically about one point of view — the one the teacher has or the textbooks have. They don't like the idea of having different points of view, so it was a battle. Of course I would pipe up with my five-year-old voice.

Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible.

Technology is anything that wasn't around when you were born.

Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves.

Computing spread out much, much faster than educating unsophisticated people can happen. In the last 25 years or so, we actually got something like a pop culture, similar to what happened when television came on the scene and some of its inventors thought it would be a way of getting Shakespeare to the masses. But they forgot that you have to be more sophisticated and have more perspective to understand Shakespeare. What television was able to do was to capture people as they were. So I think the lack of a real computer science today, and the lack of real software engineering today, is partly due to this pop culture.

Most creativity is a transition from one context into another where things are more surprising. There’s an element of surprise, and especially in science, there is often laughter that goes along with the “Aha.” Art also has this element. Our job is to remind us that there are more contexts than the one that we’re in — the one that we think is real.

I hired finishers because I’m a good starter and a poor finisher.

The future is not laid out on a track. It is something that we can decide, and to the extent that we do not violate any known laws of the universe, we can probably make it work the way that we want to.

The real romance is out ahead and yet to come. The computer revolution hasn't started yet. Don't be misled by the enormous flow of money into bad defacto standards for unsophisticated buyers using poor adaptations of incomplete ideas.

A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points.

Free range...........................

From Seth Godin:

From Al Ross and the New Yorker:

Plucking.........................

“The art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest possible amount of feathers with the smallest possible amount of hissing”
-Jean-Baptiste Colbert

Ever have one of those days...................?

Me neither.

via

Sunshine.....................

Santana........................................Stormy




Classics IV.................................Stormy

Ice cream.........................

“Without ice cream, there would be darkness and chaos.” 
-Don Kardong

Luconda Dager, the fourth generation CEO of the family owned Velvet Ice Cream Company, spoke to our Rotary Club yesterday.  Velvet is an important part of the fabric of Licking County.  Among other things they are a significant employer, a generous community partner, a tourist destination, a quality producer of one of life's necessities, and a firm believer in a fine set of principles:

Not..........................

"Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable."
-John Kenneth Galbraith

Undernourishment......................

“The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment.”
-Robert M. Hutchins


image courtesy of the Activist Post blog

Tynan on self-commitments,......

...............habits and trust.  Full essay here.  Excerpt here:

"No habit is too small to go unchecked. About a week ago I had finished reading, turned off the light, and was drifting to sleep. Right as I was losing consciousness, I remembered that I had forgotten to floss. Now, flossing as a habit matters a good deal, but flossing on one particular night is pretty much irrelevant. That's what I told myself, too. But see, it's not about flossing-- it's about self trust. If I don't floss today, what will happen if I forget tomorrow? And if I can't trust myself to floss, can I trust myself to keep a todo list every day? And if I can't trust myself to keep a todo list, can I trust myself to get key things done every single day?"

     Fog

The fog comes
on little cat feet.

It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.

-Carl Sandburg

image via

Shaping a generation............Part 8

"Mired in stalemate".......Walter Cronkite on Vietnam (1968)

"Bad luck"............................

"Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded—here and there, now and then—are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty. This is known as ‘bad luck.’" 
-Robert Heinlein

thanks Glenn

Shaping a generation............Part 6A

I can remember having these drills in elementary school.  Not sure what the adults were thinking at the time, all I knew was it was more fun than working on the multiplication tables.

thanks bilbo

Just like Ronnie sang............

The Ronettes................................Be My Baby

Shipwrecked...................

"Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge in the field of truth and knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods."
-Albert Einstein

Opening paragraphs...............

"All his life, Charles Darwin believed that inheritance was much more important in shaping a man or woman than education or environment.  Nature rather than nurture was formative, in his view.  Though he knew nothing of the science of genetics, and never used the word gene, which was first recorded in English in 1911, more than a quarter century after his death, he is a classic case of genetic inheritance.  Indeed, two of his grandparents and his father can reasonably be classified as geniuses."
-Paul Johnson, Darwin: Portrait of a Genius

Brave........................

"Human nature is to need a map.  If you're brave enough to draw one, people will follow."
-Seth Godin,  Poke the Box

art via

Checking comfort levels..................

The Coyote Blog asks a good question..........

"This is a question that everyone should always ask at proposed expansions of government, and particularly Executive, power.  Choose the politician you least trust and/or disagree with the most.  Are you comfortable giving this power to that person?"

Full post is here

Shaping a generation...........Part 7

Jack Ruby assassinates Lee Harvey Oswald, JFK's accused assassin, on live TV, November 24, 1963.

It's that time of the season...........

thanks bilbo

They're just words....................

Debatable....................

WRM prepares for tonight's foreign policy debate.  Full essay here.  Excerpt us history majors like, here:

"Republicans today often see themselves as Winston Churchill arguing against Neville Chamberlain, but they need to remember that Chamberlain kept winning that debate politically until things reached such a point that even Chamberlain agreed that his policies had failed. Even if President Obama is as wrong about foreign policy as Neville Chamberlain was when he signed the Munich Accords with Hitler, Chamberlain was much more popular than Churchill in October, 1938 and would have crushed him in a general election."

I feel much better now.................

Jeff shows us the right way to have a debate..........

Jump back.......................

Toad the Wet Sprocket...........................Fall Down

While we may not all be Keynesians............

John Maynard Keynes       1883-1946

........can we agree that he said some really neat stuff?

"The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent."

"The expected never happens; it is the unexpected always."

“The boom, not the slump, is the right time for austerity at the Treasury.”

"... a speculator is one who runs risks of which he is aware and an investor is one who runs risks of which he is unaware."

 "Investing is an activity of forecasting the yield over the life of the asset; speculation is the activity of forecasting the psychology of the market."

"Long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is long past the ocean is flat again."

"When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?"

"It is better that a man should tyrannize over his bank balance than over his fellow-citizens."

"Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the capitalist system was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and, while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some. The sight of this arbitrary rearrangement of riches strikes not only at security but [also] at confidence in the equity of the existing distribution of wealth."

"This progressive deterioration in the value of money through history is not an accident, and has had behind it two great driving forces - the impecuniosity of Governments and the superior political influence of the debtor class."

"A sound banker, alas, is not one who foresees danger and avoids it, but one who, when he is ruined, is ruined in a conventional and orthodox way along with his fellows, so that no one can really blame him."

"When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals. We shall be able to rid ourselves of many of the pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden us for two hundred years, by which we have exalted some of the most distasteful of human qualities into the position of the highest virtues. We shall be able to afford to dare to assess the money-motive at its true value. The love of money as a possession — as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life — will be recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease ... But beware! The time for all this is not yet. For at least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to everyone that fair is foul and foul is fair; for foul is useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still. For only they can lead us out of the tunnel of economic necessity into daylight."

"The day is not far off when the economic problem will take the back seat where it belongs, and the arena of the heart and the head will be occupied or reoccupied, by our real problems — the problems of life and of human relations, of creation and behaviour and religion."

"If you owe your banker a thousand pounds, you are at his mercy. If you owe your banker a million pounds, he is at your mercy."

"Too large a proportion of recent "mathematical" economics are mere concoctions, as imprecise as the initial assumptions they rest on, which allow the author to lose sight of the complexities and interdependencies of the real world in a maze of pretentious and unhelpful symbols."

"Successful investing is anticipating the anticipations of others."

"Nor should the argument seem strange that taxation may be so high as to defeat its object, and that, given sufficient time to gather the fruits, a reduction of taxation will run a better chance than an increase of balancing the budget."

"The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back... soon or late, it is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil." 

"There is nothing so disastrous as a rational investment policy in an irrational world."

"It is the long term investor, he who most promotes the public interest, who will in practice come in for the most criticism, wherever investment funds are managed by committees or boards or banks. For it is in the essence of his behaviour that he should be eccentric, unconventional and rash in the eyes of average opinion. If he is successful, that will only confirm the general belief in his rashness; and if in the short run he is unsuccessful, which is very likely, he will not receive much mercy. Worldly wisdom teaches that it is better for reputations to fail conventionally than succeed unconventionally."

"You have not, I suppose, ever mixed with politicians at close quarters. They are awful... their stupidity is inhuman...."

"I find myself more and more relying for a solution of our problems on the invisible hand which I tried to eject from economic thinking twenty years ago."

Some links.....................

Halloween on a budget with Frugal Dad.........................

Trouble with your Second Chakra?  Visit Finer Minds..........

Does your heart rate make you a potential expert at bomb disposal?  Check in with Eric Barker.............

Ten wondrous photos of our solar system from Chase Jarvis.......

Maria Popova points to four 60 Second Adventures in Religion.......

Quiz time..........................

How Stuff Works offers the quiz: Can blogging make you rich?  While the quiz does not answer the question, I'd hazard the guess that a)  it's a long shot and b) you have to first try.  Technologically smart people suggest that there were 176 million bloggers in 2011.  While I have only visited an infinitesimally small percentage of available blogs, the majority of those I visit are making zero attempts at fund raising.  Perhaps they (we) are seeking riches that are not legal tender.

Anyway, if you take the quiz, the answer to #3 is $110,000.  That is the monthly take from advertising that Perez Hilton scored in 2007 (from about four million hits per day).

Unleashed......................

"For millions of years, mankind lived just like the animals. Then something happened which unleashed the power of our imagination. We learned to talk and we learned to listen.Speech has allowed the communication of ideas, enabling human beings to work together to build the impossible. Mankind's greatest achievements have come about by talking, and its greatest failures by not talking. It doesn't have to be like this.Our greatest hopes could become reality in the future. With the technology at our disposal, the possibilities are unbounded. All we need to do is make sure we keep talking."
-Stephen Hawking

image via hugh

Willing...................

"I learned the truth of the Zen saying that if you are willing to travel around the world to meet a teacher, one will appear next door."
-Steve Jobs

Shaping a generation.......Part 6

Fifty years ago, President Kennedy addressed the nation about Russia's attempt to place nuclear missiles in Cuba.  Short version below, full 18:42 minute speech is here.

I refuse to fetch..................

"I visualize a time when we will be to robots what dogs are to humans, and I'm rooting for the machines."
-Claude Shannon

Claude Shannon was one smart dude.  Much of our digital and cellular world has Shannon's work at its foundation.  This Michigan native gets some serious respect from the folks at Wikipedia, who state he:  "is also credited with founding both digital computer and digital circuit design theory in 1937, when, as a 21-year-old master's degree student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), he wrote his thesis demonstrating that electrical applications of boolean algebra could construct and resolve any logical, numerical relationship. It has been claimed that this was the most important master's thesis of all time."  Wow.  Hope that makes thing clear.  

Shannon is also quoted as saying, "Information:  the negative reciprocal value of probability" and "Information is the resolution of uncertainty." If I am doing my calculations correctly that means that the negative reciprocal value of probability equals the resolution of uncertainty.  What?

I'm rooting for the humans.

About my blog................

Relaux...............

The Mighty E...................opening doors and broadening horizons since  May 1, 2006.  Long may he blog! Thanks Doug

a pas de deux forever..................

Dan Fogelberg..............................Dancing Shoes

Gratitude...............

XI.

The sounds of engines leave the air.
The Sunday morning silence comes
at last.  At last I know the presence
of the world made without hands,
the creatures that have come to be
out of their absence.  Calls
of flicker and jay fill the clear
air.  Titmice and chickadees feed
among the green and the dying leaves.
Gratitude for the gifts of all the living
and the unliving, gratitude which is
the greatest gift, quietest of all,
passes to me through the trees.

-Wendell Berry

Shaping a generation..............Part 5

The Lone Ranger...........................................

On the contradictions of innovation............

From the Box of Crayons blog:

"The problem, put bluntly, is this: if Innovation was fighting the Status Quo in an extreme sports cage match, you’d bet heavily against Innovation getting much beyond the opening bell."

image via

Well, this explains a lot...............

“One aspect of this is that rationality of thought imposes a limit on a person's concept of his relation to the cosmos.”
-John Nash

image via apod

Understanding..................

Scott Sumner contrasts Paul Krugman and Milton Friedman - here.  Money quote here:

Never have I been more impressed with the advice I once received: “You cannot be sure that you are right unless you understand the arguments against your views better than your opponents do.
-Milton Friedman

Paradox...................

      God Is A Verb

I see God in
the instruments and the mechanisms that
work
reliably,
more reliably than the limited sensory departments of
the human mechanism.
And God says
observe the paradox
of man's creative potentials
and his destructive tactics.
He could have his new world
through sufficient love
for "all's fair"
in love as well as in war
which means you can
junk as much rubbish,
skip as many stupid agreements
by love,
spontaneous unselfishness radiant.

The revolution has come-
set on fire from the top.
Let it burn swiftly.
Neither the branches, trunk, nor roots will be endangered.
Only last year's leaves and
the parasite-bearded moss and orchids
will not be there
when the next spring brings fresh growth
and free standing flowers.

Here is God's purpose-
for God, to me, it seems,
is a verb
not a noun,
proper or improper;
is the articulation
not the art, objective or subjective;
is loving,
not the abstraction "love" commanded or entreated;
is knowledge dynamic,
not legislative code,
not proclamation law.
not academic dogma, not ecclesiastic canon.
Yes, God is a verb,
the most active,
connoting the vast harmonic
reordering of the universe
from unleashed chaos of energy.
And there is born unheralded
a great natural peace,
not out of exclusive
pseudo-static security
but out of including, refining, dynamic balancing.
Naught is lost.
Only the false and nonexistent are dispelled.

And I've thought through to tomorrow
which is also today.
The telephone rings
and you say to me
Hello Buckling this is Christopher; or
Daddy it's Allegra; or
Mr. Fuller this is the Telephone Company Business Office;
and I say you are inaccurate.
Because I knew you were going to call
and furthermore I recognize
that it is God who is "speaking."

And you say
aren't you being fantastic?
And knowing you I say no.

All organized religions of the past
were inherently developed
as beliefs and credits
in "second hand" information.

Therefore it will be an entirely new era
when man finds himself confronted
with direct experience
with an obviously a priori
intellectually anticipatory competency
that has interordered
all that he is discovering.

-R. Buckminister Fuller