CapitalistImperialistPig

It has many times been convincingly demonstrated that I have zero talent for languages. Failed attempts to learn Latin, Russian, German, Spanish, and Japanese litter my history. I, however, am also not one to learn very well from my mistakes, so I am once again attempting Spanish. Rosetta Stone (Latin American) is my main tool here, but I also got this cheap beginning Spanish Reader for my Kindle. I am beginning to suspect that it might not be too current, since its Chapter on the US lists the population as 110 million! Also our money includes \$5,\$10, and \$20 gold pieces as well as \$1000 bills. What is cool is the fact that I can set my Kindle Spanish-English dictionary as primary and use it to quickly define words that I don't know, or find the conjugations of irregular verbs. It has been a lesson, however, in the limitations of the Kindle interface. I find the five-way navigation button a bit clumsy. A touch screen please.

Bee's new post is entitled This and That - I was briefly afraid that those might be the new names of epsilon and delta - but it is definitely in the don't miss category for it's pitiful story of an obviously talented lad who just couldn't make up his mind what he wanted to do with himself, switching aimlessly among majors. I liked Ed, but felt sorry for him, too, because, for all his potential, he lacked focus. He had been a history major in college, and a linguistics minor. On graduating, though, he concluded that, as rewarding as these fields had been, he was not really cut out to make a living at them. He decided that what he was really meant to do was study economics. And so, he applied to graduate school, and was accepted at the University of Wisconsin. And, after only a semester, he dropped out of the program. Not for him. So, history was out; linguistics, out; economics, out. What to do? This was a time of widespread political activism, and Ed became an aide to S...

The notion of a system and its state is a fundamental one in physical science and engineering. Both the words system and state derive from a Proto Indo European base word meaning to stand , and we use them in senses that have varying degrees of precision. In general, a system is a collection of things that "stand together," and the state of that system is the "way they stand together." In physics, a system might be a single elementary particle, a bottle of gas, a star, or the universe, and by its state we mean mean some collection of variables that specify that state. For an electron, for example, its charge, mass, velocity and position. In classical physics the state variables tend to be measurable numbers, what the quantum pioneers called c-numbers. Things become more abstract in quantum mechanics. The state of a quantum system is specified by something that we call a ray in Hilbert space . It's worth noting, though, that even the classical description is a ...

Malthus had the insight, which also proved crucial for Darwin, that Man and other creatures produce more offspring than can survive to adulthood if the population is to maintain a steady, or nearly steady state. Scarcity of resources ultimately limit the population by increasing the death rate until it matches the birth rate. Gregory Clark, in his book A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World, argues that the vast bulk of the human race has lived in Malthusian equilibrium for all its long history before 1800 and the onset of the industrial revolution. Modern humans may have numbered no more than 10,000 individuals 70,000 years ago, when the population apparently passed through a major bottleneck, and probably never exceeded a few million during our long careers as hunter gatherers. (This and other population estimates from Wikepedia ) Over the next seventy thousand years, our geographic range, technology, and numbers expanded dramatically. By 1800 there were some one ...

Do other people find Tyler's paragraph below as creepy as I do? We saw a dead guy on the side of the highway; apparently he was struck down by a passing car. Ill-advised pedestrian walks are a problem for many El Salvadorans in the United States as well . "More guns, less crime" I joked to Alex as we drove through the center city.

Many of the concepts of economics have a certain resistance to popular explanation. Arnold Kling nominated Arrow's (Nobel winning) Impossibility Theorem as a particular challenge. Tyler Cowen , Alex Tabbarok , and Steve Landsburg each took up the challenge: you can find their stuff at the links - I found them all incomprehensibly cluttered with irrelevant details. The basic notion involved is that when several people set out to choose among a set of alternatives, it's impossible to find a voting system that aggregates individual preferences yet satisfies all of some specified and plausible seeming fair decision rules. This probably won't surprise anybody who has tried to cooperatively plan a Thanksgiving dinner. As I said, I couldn't follow the reasoning in the links, but Wikipedia is pretty clear, and has both formal and informal statements of problem and proof. Tyler also links to this fairly simple yet detailed proof.

Just in case I decide to run for office sometime, I wanted to be able to claim an elite U background, like Christine "I am a muggle" O'Donnell (Oxford, correspondence course, sometime). I have now been to Harvard. Of course I didn't learn anything, except where to find the restroom near Anna's, nor did I enter any of the other buildings, but I was there for the "Head of the Charles." It's a pretty place, if not very close to my idea of what a University campus ought to look like. When we were approaching the Harvard square T-stop, I noticed that the guy in front of me looked like a cross between the real and movie Mark Zuckerbergs. Later I figured out that everybody at Harvard looked like Mark Zuckerberg except maybe for the Asians. OK, I'm sure that wasn't really true, but I did feel slightly freakish. Though there were lots of other tourists there to read the three lies and rub the toe of John Harvard's boot. I stopped by MIT too. ...