selling wavesA graduate student in mathematics and a philosophy major take on politics and culture with the following aspirational motto: ‘Deregulate your mind.’Bentham's mummified corpse, like Lenin's, remains fresh in appearance- February 26, 2005 It&8217;s almost comforting that such invidious fluffy-minded sludge as this is floating around, as it seems, like religion, to keep the middle-brows hypnotized by &8220;beautiful sentiments&8221; which are so vague as to keep them from actually getting together and doing anything. It&8217;s sort of weird to hear this weakly Marxist social-democratic pap which used to be shouted from the rooftops now being whispered in a low monotonous whine. The author avows his fealty to Jeremy Bentham, not.http://www.sellingwaves.com/archives/2005/02/26/benthams_mummified_corpse_like_lenins_rema... The Doctor is out- February 23, 2005 RIP, H.S.T. (See also &8220;Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,&8221; &8220;Regrettably necessary,&8221; and &8220;Don&8217;t Vote!&8221;)http://www.sellingwaves.com/archives/2005/02/22/the_doctor_is_out/index.html "...you just get used to them"- February 13, 2005 &8220;Young man, in mathematics you don&8217;t understand things, you just get used to them.&8221; &8212;John von Neumann1 This, in a sense, is at the heart of why mathematics is so hard. Math is all about abstraction, about generalizing the stuff you can get a sense of to apply to crazy situations about which you otherwise have no insight whatsoever. Take, for example, one way of understanding the manifold structure on SO(3), the special orthogonal group on 3-space. In order to explain.http://www.sellingwaves.com/archives/2005/02/13/math_pictures/index.html But what about the antiquarians- February 12, 2005 "Those who do not learn from the mistakes of the past are doomed to repeat them." This is good advice, especially for democracies, which tend (as even Plato and Thucydides noted) to have short-term attention spans. But we shouldn't forget an equally important lesson, articulated most forcefully by Nietzsche: The health of a person and a people also depends vitally on the capacity to forget. Forgetting is necessary to free ourselves from imperfectly understood "lessons of history," so that we...http://www.sellingwaves.com/archives/2005/02/12/but_what_about_the_antiquarians/index.html Superstring cultists--tough luck- February 10, 2005 At the conjunction of this critique of reductionism in physics and this interview with Benoit Mandelbrot I think one sees the same basic dynamic at work: a devaluation of simplicity and generalization in math and science, what I suppose Mandelbrot might call &8220;smoothness,&8221; and a preference for the complex and the multifarious. To some extent this seems to cut against the basic scientific impulse to simplify, to generalize, which is what a law or an equation generally does. In...http://www.sellingwaves.com/archives/2005/02/10/superstring_cultiststough_luck/index.html Abuse I'll show you abuse!- February 5, 2005 Note to Curt: Just because the state claims the authority to apprehend and punish rapists doesn&8217;t mean that apprehending and punishing rapists is a form of state coercion. Nor is the notion that rape is bad an example of state coercion. Depending on your perspective, this is either a moral truth derived from Godreasonwhatever or a widely-accepted social convention. Similarly, the notion that one can own property is (again, depending on your perspective) either morally necessary or a...http://www.sellingwaves.com/archives/2005/02/05/private_property/index.html The abuse of a college education- February 2, 2005 &8220;Perhaps you&8217;re familiar with &8220;the tragedy of the commons,&8221; a social dilemma outlined by the late biologist Garrett Hardin in a famous 1968 essay of the same name. The dilemma is that when individuals pursue personal gain, the net result for society as a whole may be impoverishment. (Pollution is the most familiar example.) Such thinking has fallen out of fashion amid President Bush&8217;s talk of an &8220;ownership society,&8221; but its logic is unassailable.&8221; That...http://www.sellingwaves.com/archives/2005/02/01/the_abuse_of_a_college_education/index.htm... |