Look Like Flies

When your essay uses Orwell’s “complaints”:http://www.resort.com/~prime8/Orwell/patee.html on the decline of the English language to defend this:

bq. “The dictionary was my response to the market need to educate journalists and students about economic jargon that seemed very frightening to them,” Ms. Vainiene said in a phone interview. “It explains the concepts in simple words. But also”–and this is crucial–“explains them correctly.” The book notes, for example, that “social ‘justice’ is always related to the unjust redistribution of wealth, and ‘fair competition’ is almost always related to unfair government intervention in the economy.” In other words, Ms. Vainiene is trying to educate but also to eradicate the misleading and contradictory doublespeak that infects much economic language, especially as it is used in Europe.

either you’re trying to be a very funny fellow altogether, or you’re writing for the “Wall Street Journal’s Editorial Page”:http://www.opinionjournal.com/taste/?id=110007466. Or both, perhaps (I may be wrong, but I find it difficult to imagine that even the most debased of hacks couldn’t be aware of the ironies here).

(via “Best of Both Worlds”:http://bestofbothworlds.blogspot.com/2005_10_01_bestofbothworlds_archive.html#113051697458821043)

This is a very fun NYT Science Times article about one Norman I. Platnick, who has “discovered more than 1,200 new spider species, several dozen new genuses and a couple of new families.” In addition, he has been a major contributor to cladistics, “a method of sorting organisms based on the evolutionary features they share, all derived from their closest common ancestor.” I have to say that spiders freak me out; my nightmares often feature the banded-legged garden spiders of my South Carolina youth, totally harmless but swiftly enlarging through the summer to the size of my small spanned hands. Needless to say, equatorial rain forests have got some damn big spiders as well. I can recall an early morning hike through the small remaining section of primary rainforest in the Singapore Botancial Gardens, during which I saw the two biggest spiders of my life in high webs. Like, really big. Much bigger than tarantulas in the Carribbean, say. I spent the rest of the walk with my hand outstretched in front of my face; what if I were the first one along this path? Still, I have always been willing to catch even big wolf spiders under a glass, then slide a piece of paper beneath it, and throw them outside. I hope the arachnidae appreciate that. And hey, at least I don’t live in Australia! (This reminds me of the Terry Pratchett novel The Last Continent. Death and his butler attempt to retrieve information about the poisonous creatures of “Four Ecks” and are nearly crushed under an avalanche of books. Once they have decided to ask about the non-lethal animals a single sheet comes fluttering down from a high shelf, bearing the legend: “some of the sheep”.)

Fast on the heels of Henry’s post about Tom DeLay’s ‘I am become county sheriff’s office’ incarnation – another report of another powerful legislator managing a yet more abstract transmogrification [transmogrifaction?]: “According to the Associated Press, Alaska’s senior senator was the forefront today of a clash of generations and political philosophy.” Sounds Hegelian.

Adding my little bit to the Maggie Gallagher “pile”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/10/18/same-sex-marriage/ “up”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/10/19/same-sex-marriage-breakdown/ ; isn’t her “claim-in-passing”:http://www.volokh.com/archives/archive_2005_10_16-2005_10_22.shtml#1129815953 that the Roman Empire collapsed because of “death by sexual disorganization” rather entertaining? Sounds like a great way to go out to me; even more fun than Death by Chocolate (what clobbered the Aztecs, as any fule kno). Gallagher isn’t the first to advance this thesis – I “linked”:https://crookedtimber.org/2003/08/25/decline-and-fall/ a while back to a list which included childlessness and homosexuality among 210 extant explanations for the decline of the Roman Empire. But her claim seems no less ridiculous on its face than some of the other putative causes, which include bolshevisation, culinary excess, decline of Nordic character, female emancipation, Jewish influence, hyperthermia, tristesse and vulgarization. “Explaining” the collapse of Rome seems to be one of those historical Rorschach tests in which quack amateur sociologists stare into the inkblots and see their own prejudices and crackpottery staring back out at them.

We have a troll at the Valve, the Troll of Sorrow (among other aliases). I know, I know; just one. But that’s like having just one case of herpes. (Not that I would know, please believe.) We caught him from Adam Kotsko. I don’t blame Adam. We’ve tried the patent remedies. Deleting, IP blocking. A touch of disemvowelment. Nothing seems to reduce the unsightly swelling permanently. It’s an unusual strain, a platypus you wouldn’t believe in if it weren’t plainly real: antisemitic, homophobic, Quine, Russell and logical positivism-fixated. It’s strange that someone should be obsessed with providing slightly mistaken, severely tourettes-afflicted readings of the intricacies of the early 5’s of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. [click to continue…]

Hey up everyone, it’s the Prospect Magazine Intellectual of the Year contest!! I’m afraid that everyone at CT forgot to put our forms in (again!) although I see that bloody Yusuf al-Qaradawi did (and Airmiles too). This is a real shame, since I recently became The Most Important Thinker In The World. As Tyler Cowen pointed out in a post on Ray Kurzweil, the previous holder of that title, the secret to being the Most Important Thinker In The World is a mastery of the expected utility rule.

No matter how ludicrous your predictions, if they are sufficiently wildly utopian, then your thinking has a greater expected value than anyone else’s (see here for the general idea). Thus, if Kurzweil reckons that we will upload our consciousness onto software and live for ever as pure energy on the internet, then I say all that and a pony too! Not just any old pony by the way, but a super technonanopony! Which eats racism and shits pure gasoline … on the internet! Oh yeh and we will constantly be having multiple orgasms … and not just the normal kind either (more details to come). You might say that it’s pretty unlikely and I’ve failed to spell out important details, but as long as there is at least some probability that I’m right, then I am more important than Ray Kurzweil to the tune nU^(-rT), where U is the utility of a magic pony, n is the probability I’m right, r is the discount rate and T is the time it will take to sort us all out with one. Keep reading CT folks, because in expected value terms, it is only going to become more important!!
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A new “comic series”:http://accstudios.com/f/synopsis1.htm looks to be a must-buy (Preview available “here”:http://accstudios.com/f/comicpreview_page_covera.htm):

bq. America’s future has become an Orwellian nightmare of ultra-liberalism. Beginning with the Gore Presidency, the government has become increasingly dominated by liberal extremists. In 2004, Muslim terrorists stopped viewing the weakened American government as a threat; instead they set their sites on their true enemies, vocal American conservatives. On one dark day, in 2006, many conservative voices went forever silent at the hands of terrorist assassins. Those which survived joined forces and formed a powerful covert conservative organization called “The Freedom of Information League”, aka F.O.I.L. The F.O.I.L. Organization is forced underground by the “Coulter Laws” of 2007; these hate speech legislations have made right-wing talk shows, and conservative-slanted media, illegal. … Rupert Murdoch’s decision to defy the “Coulter Laws” hate speech legislations, has bankrupted News Corporation. George Soros has bought all of News Corps assets and changed its name to Liberty International Broadcasting. LIB’s networks have flourished and circle the globe with a series of satellites beaming liberal & U.N. propaganda worldwide. The New York City faction of F.O.I.L. is lead by Sean Hannity, G. Gordon Liddy and Oliver North, each uniquely endowed with special abilities devised by a bio mechanical engineer affectionately nicknamed “Oscar”. F.O.I.L. is soon to be joined by a young man named Reagan McGee.

Meanwhile, a mechanically enhanced Glenn Reynolds is presumably heading up F.O.I.L’s Tennessee branch.

via “Jesse Walker”:http://www.reason.com/hitandrun/2005/08/but_will_we_eve.shtml at Hit and Run (whose post has one of the most disturbing titles I’ve ever seen).

An unusual slice of spam showed up in my inbox, offering to induce severe erectile dysfunction at a very reasonable price. Subject line: “make love to any woman instantaneously.”

Now I know what you are going to say: Holbo, that’s two CT posts in the last month, both about spam. I know, I know. But it’s this hurly-burly modern life I lead. I find after I’ve read all the spam in my inbox, patiently weighing the merits and demerits of so many anonymous pleas to enage in so many complex financial transfers; after I’ve dutifully clicked all the links in all the comment spam that sprouted in the night … well, half the day is gone.

This may just be the single most random post ever on Crooked Timber, but I, er, soldier on. Perhaps an entomologist or two reads this blog? Leftist entomologists who are sticking it to the man with their ground-breaking research in Roraima? So, I live in Singapore, where we’ve got lotsa ants. Big soldier ants. Little stinging ants. Medium-sized stinging ants. Demi-hemi stinging ants. And so on. When I walk my daughter to school we often see them running in little glistening jointed rivers, 15 ants wide, streaming from the corpse of a snail to the detritus at the edge of the sidewalk. And when the new queen ants are making their maiden flights we are tediously overrun by drones, even on the nineteenth story. They throng to the lights if you forget to close the windows. They also tend to induce menlancholy “to dust thou shalt return” feelings, being, as they are, so poorly put together. Their wings fall off at the feeblest provocation, leaving them to crawl around on the floor in circles. It’s as if a heartless Nature has put them together with the least possible care, thinking, “well, if they haven’t made it to the queen by that time…”. I have to kill dozens of them, usually smushing them with a wadded-up paper towel which I then throw away. This seems a peculiarly modern response; “I’m done with this insect—let’s throw it away in the trash!” But what I am I supposed to do, herd them back to the balcony in some Jain fashion? If they’re in my apartment, they ain’t impregnating the queen. Anyway, if I were to brush against them even slightly, their stupid wings would fall off. This wasn’t my point, though. Yesterday, I went out for a swim with my daughter around 4 o’clock. There is a waist-high stucco wall all around the pool. When I went to put our things on a chair, I noticed a strange sight. The top edge of the wall was thronged with ants, all of whom had their abdomen flexed up at a 90 degree angle to their thoraxes. They weren’t interacting with each other much, and were mostly all facing the same direction. When I leant over to look they rippled back in waves, then slowly edged back to their original positions, abdomens high as flags. WTF was up with that, then? I was struck with the vague thought that they were cooling off, but that didn’t really make any sense. When I got out of the pool 20 minutes later, they were still there, rippling back and forth, peculiarly bent. Thoughts?

Jared Diamond tells us more about rat by-product consumption in the Old West in Collapse:

In 1849, hungry gold miners crossing the Nevada desert noticed some glistening balls of a candy-like substance on a cliff, licked or ate the balls, and discovered them to be sweet-tasting, but then they developed nausea. Eventually it was realized that the balls were hardened deposits made by small rodents, called packrats. that protect themselves by building nests of sticks, plant fragments, and mammal dung gathered in the vicinity, plus food remains, discarded bones, and their own feces. Not being toilet-trained, the rats urinate in their nests, and sugar and other substances crystallize from their urine as it dries out, cementing the midden to a brick-like consistency. In effect, the hungry gold miners were eating dried rat urine laced with rat feces and rat garbage.

These middens are quite valuable to paleontologists interested in finding out about local vegetation in specific periods; they serve as rough-and-ready time capsules. Diamond seems to have an interest in rats as food sources; he also tells us in passing about recipes for laboratory rat that circulated among British scientists during the post-WW II period of food rationing.

Lots of post ideas stacked up, so time to clear them by just publishing my notes:

Lessons from the Argentinean crisis and default, with applications to the current state of the US economy

• Massive devaluations work

(this could be part of a series including “Lessons from the UK experience, Lessons from the Asian crisis, the Mexican crisis etc etc etc)

Thoughts on current developments in Lebanon

• The important thing to note is that when the USA acts alone, a hundred thousand people die. When it stands together with France, putting the rogue state on notice that it can’t depend on its historic friends, we win without firing a shot. And this is a victory for unilateralism in foreign policy?

An introduction to Linear Algebra for Econometricians, pitched at a level which ought to allow you to read a graduate-level econometrics textbook

• X’X means a sum of squares
• (X’X)^-1X’Z is a linear regression of Z on X
• Most of the rest you can pick up from context.

That’ll do for the minute, cheers.

– The biggest news today, the election in Iraq, seems to have gone better than I would have dreamed. It’s no secret that I don’t think that the Bush administration has much to be proud of. But they deserve credit, along with the courageous Iraqi voters, for the first real elections in half a century. When Bush said that the terrorist hostility to the elections showed the emptiness of their vision, he was exactly right.

Iraq isn’t out of the woods. There may come a time when we look back and see how the elections made inevitable the Iraqi civil war/ next brutal strongman/ rise of our robot overlords. However, let the record show that, as of 1/30/05, I certainly didn’t have any better ideas.

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Zoë likes They Might Be Giants, "No!". Santa brought it. Amazing how many of the things Santa brought daddy likes, too. "The Edison Museum", for example:

The Edison Museum, not open to the public
Its haunted towers rise into the clouds above
Folks drive in from out of town
To gaze in amazement when they see it

Just outside the gate I look into the courtyard
Underneath the gathering thunderstorm
Through the iron bars, I see the Black Mariah
Revolving slowly in its platform
In the topmost tower, the lights burn dim
A coiling filament glowing within

The Edison Museum, once a bustling factory
Today is but a darkened cobweb covered hive of industry
The tallest, widest and most famous haunted mansion
in New Jersey!

Behind a wooden door, the voice of Thomas Alva
Recites a poem on a phonograph
Ghosts float up the stairs, like silent moving pictures
The loyal phantoms of his in house staff
A wondrous place it is, there can be no doubt
But no one ever goes in, and no one ever goes out

The Edison Museum, not open to the public
Its haunted towers rise into the clouds above it
The largest independently-owned and operated mausoleum.

As Henry James might have said, for actual implies possible (see p. 18): "It was an adventure, unmistakeably, … to be learning at last, in the maturity of one’s powers, what New Jersey might ‘connote’."

Not what ‘New Jersey’ might connote, mind you.

Consider this an open thread only for those in the maturity of their powers.

May I remind you, and this goes as well for those with lesser powers: there are disaster victims who need your help. Please consider donating generously. And – I am sorry to repeat myself – if you were going to buy something from Amazon anyway, please consider using the Search Box under the fold to do so. Costs you the same, and that way 5.75% goes to me and I give it to the Singapore Red Cross. Thank you, those of you who have helped already. (And, to our anonymous drunken monkey offerer of matching funds: they have been met. You may donate your 200 euros now. Thank you!)

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If anyone has a copy of “There’s No Land Like Poland” from _Not the Nine O’Clock News_ in convenient MP3 format, this would be a good time to send it to me.