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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- Lip Reading Babies: Utter nonsense!
Category Archives: Methods
Unknown Knowns
Donald H. Rumsfeld, then the United States secretary of defense, [said] that “There are known knowns… there are known unknowns … there are also unknown unknowns.” But the Irish problem, says Mr. O’Toole, was none of the above. It was … Continue reading
New Year’s Resolutions Predictions 2012
I did my first New Year’s Resolution blog back in 2010, resolving that we as a nation should set ourselves to work increasing goodness rather than misery. My resolution didn’t take. Since then, we’ve done more warring. Wealth differentials have … 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
Here’s the smell of blood, still
December 22, 2011, NYT, BAGHDAD — A wave of coordinated explosions ripped across Baghdad early on Thursday, killing at least 63 people, wounding more than 180 and jolting a country already unsettled by a deepening political crisis and the absence … 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
Acts of God man
In today’s NYT Science section: “Add Quakes to Rumblings Over Gas Rush”
Nine quakes in eight months in a seismically inactive area is unusual. But Ohio seismologists found another surprise when they plotted the quakes’ epicenters: most coincided with the location … 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
Reality Doesn’t Make Deals
“We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” — Albert Einstein
In an article in today’s NYT Dot Earth section, “Naomi Klein’s Inconvenient Climate Conclusions” Andrew Kevkin shares his e-converstation with Klein. The … Continue reading
The Wrong Story
Apropos of my post yesterday on the perils of nuclear power—a form of extreme energy production—Naomi Klein gives a wonderfully lucid explanation of how our dominant cultural story of an infinitely abundant world that will tolerate our most extreme efforts … 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
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 →