Short Takes
- Lip Reading Babies: Utter nonsense!
January 17, 2012 | 8:54 pmSays psychologist David Lewkowicz of Florida Atlantic University, who led [a] study published yesterday…
’The baby in order to imitate you has to figure out how to shape their lips to make that particular sound they’re hearing,’’
Can you “figure out” why this is utter nonsense? I should as obvious as monkey see, monkey do. With this sort of thing passing for science, we are surely doomed.
- The Mark of Cain
November 9, 2011 | 3:13 amWatching Herman Cain duel with his female accusers is like watching the Jerry Springer Show. Not a pretty picture. If you partake, be sure an wash you hands afterwards.
- The Truth About Sovereign Debt
November 1, 2011 | 4:01 pmDuring the housing bubble people bet on rising home prices by taking out loans on to-good-to-be true terms and investment banking made bets on the rising home prices by lending on to-good-be-true terms. Everyone drank the Kool Aid. Prices went down. Having made bad bets, home owners should default on their loans and bankers should take their losses. This is the simple-minded logic of every-man-for-himself market economics.
The nations that joined the EU placed bets on rising economic prosperity that would come from joining the EU and adopting the Euro and borrowing from the EU banks on to-good-to-be-true terms. The EU investment bankers made speculative bets on EU member nations by lending them billions on to-good-to-be-true terms. The borrower economies went down not up. Everyone drank the Kool Aid and having made bad bets the borrowers should default on their loans and the bankers should take their losses. This too, is the simple-minded logic of every-man-for-himself market economics.
So how do the bankers hold the world hostage to their bad bets? They claim they are too big to fail. In other words, the only game they know is heads they win, tails we lose.
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Archive for Short Takes »
- Lip Reading Babies: Utter nonsense!
Category Archives: Theory of Knowledge
Humans are not Evolving
Here’s an interesting idea: Humans are not evolving.
For humans to evolve we would have to allow variation to run wild and then stand by and watch while most variations wither on the vine to see some very few selected for, … Continue reading
Heresies
About one week ago I wrote a blog entry suggesting that Democracy and Capitalism were inherently incompatible. Thanks to some commenters, it soon become clear to me that the post was dangerously heretical and that I could end up getting … Continue reading
Rising U.S. Healthcare Costs: Figure It Out!
In the United States we think of healthcare as a business proposition. We call it “the healthcare industry”. Is profit and loss the most useful approach to caring for people’s well being?
Here’s a puzzle. See if you can put the pieces … Continue reading
What Learning Is
Your knowing of the world is not “inside your head”! There’s no hard drive in your skull—no root directory nor subdirectories in which binary files filled with tomes of knowledge are stored.
What a silly idea!
As counter-intitive as it sounds, the … Continue reading
A Fine Mess We’ve Gotten Ourselves Into
It’s the “holiday season”; a time when we hunker down around the fire and do a lot of story telling with each other. All over the world people are recounting the Christmas story of the birth of the baby Jesus … Continue reading
Who’s a Hack?
Dr. W. E. Deming, the physicist, statistician, business consulatant I most respect and admire, used to caution his audiences, beware of hacks. So who’s a hack and how can we know if you or I or us or they are … Continue reading
A Sailor’s Imagination
I am imagining a great sailing ship named the SS Profit. She is the instrument of ambitious commerce, transporting great volumes of cargo bought in some port at the lowest price possible and sold in another as high as possible. … Continue reading
It don’t mean thing if it ain’t got that swing
FWIW — The following riff was prompted by Barbara King’s post on NPR’s 13.7 blog, “Homo Narrans: Humans As Story-Tellers (And Listeners)“, in which the nature of memory came up.
In a comment, Barbara wrote, “…But does every story originate solely … Continue reading
Things Go Wrong
NYT, Dec. 7, 2011 – Japan Split on Hope for Vast Radiation Cleanup
In the United States, the average person gets six millisieverts of radiation a year. Around the Fukushima plant, officials evacuated areas where people would have gotten an estimated … Continue reading
Recipe: How to Succeed at Capitalism
NYT: JOHANNESBURG — An advocacy organization that helped to establish an international certification program to prevent the sale of so-called blood diamonds withdrew from the coalition on Monday, saying the effort was no longer effective.
Global Witness, is the first advocacy … Continue reading
Our Powerful Striding Minds
I hold to the idea that as mindful creatures we are naturally given to a joyous disposition. Our minds have come into being as our means for soaring high above a world that bubbles forth, enabling us to navigate our … Continue reading
Egypt Goes Islamist
NYT, December 1, 2011: CAIRO — Islamists claimed a decisive victory on Wednesday as early election results put them on track to win a dominant majority in Egypt’s first Parliament since the ouster of Hosni Mubarak…But a big surprise was … Continue reading
What’s Wrong with the Scientific Method
I’ve been involved in an online discussion about Deming’s model for creating knowledge (aka continuous improvement) called PDSA. Most correspondents have argued that PDSA is just another version of the “scientific method”.
PDSA is not the scientific method and for good … Continue reading
Fall Lines
I have started following NPR’s 13.7: Cosmos and Culture blog, primarily because Alva Noe is a contributor. Noe is the author of the book “Out of Our Heads” that impressed me greatly and I discussed in my entry “Dancing Feet” … Continue reading
Deming’s System of Profound Knowledge (SoPK)
Even if you are not involved in business management and know and care nothing about the ideas of the great teacher, Dr. W. E. Deming , the following discussion of what he resorted in his later years to calling, a … Continue reading →