Category: Random Draws

Different Standards for Different Folks

F. Scott Fitzgerald had noted that “the rich are different from you and me.” Ernest Hemmingway agreed and said, “Yes, they have more money.” Having more money is a significant difference because the most important of its derivate effects is that they have more power. The concerns of the rich are more important; their pain is more acute; their viewpoint is more worthy of consideration; their comprehension of the world more accurate. As Tevya, the poor farmer in The Fiddler on the Roof notes while dreaming of being a rich man, “When you’re rich, they think you really know.”
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Optical Illusions

Want to have some fun and waste time and learn all at the same time? Check out these optical illusions.

When I come across these sorts of things, I cannot stop marvelling at the amazing power of the world wide web.

Fixing the holes

I continue to fix the holes created by the move to wordpress. While doing that, I come across bits that I like and put them in the “My favorite bits” category. For instance, here is The Buddha’s Sermon on Economics. I find putting words in the Tathagata’s mouth a lot of fun. It is my way of paying reverence to the One Who Has Gone Before. All the Buddhists bits begin with “Thus have I heard …” because originally it was an oral tradition.

The other bit I fixed today was on the concept of opportunity cost. I call the piece “Casting Spells to Fix a Broken Car“.

Now back to our regularly scheduled boring stuff.

Trading Freedom for Security

In connection with the London bombings, came across this at Phoenix Muses:

Jihad al-Khazen, an op-ed columnist for the London-based pan-Arab Al-Hayat newspaper, wrote: “Such criminal terror acts prove that no measure is enough to fight terrorism.

“Actions that governments take to fight terrorism are totally justified because protecting life is a lot more important than protecting civil liberties.”

Brings to mind what Benjamin Franklin said about trading civil liberties for security. “Those who desire to give up freedom in order to gain security, will not have, nor do they deserve, either one.”

Of course it is unfair to juxtapose Franklin’s viewpoint with Jihad al-Khazen’s.

All the taste but less filling

Some apparently wise statements reminds me of lite beer: all the taste and less filling. These statements sound nice but are not reality based. Consider this for a moment this:

We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children. — Native American Proverb

It is supposed to appeal to our sense of conservation, of course. Since it is our children’s possession, we have to take care of it. Rather flimsy reasoning. It is not our property, says the proverb, and implies that this realization would compell us to conserve and not trash the place.

Let’s look at the evidence. Which car do people drive more carefully: rental cars or their own cars? Tell the average human that he owns the stuff, and he will be more concerned about conservation than if he were told that it belongs to someone else.

Want to know why public monies are wasted? Because the money the public official is spending does not belong to him. You are on an expense account? Well, don’t bother checking the right hand side of the menu. Want a forest to be destroyed? Make it nobody’s forest. The tragedy of the commons will trash it soon enough. Earth does not belong to you? Well, let’s have a party and who cares if we trash the place — it’s not mine in any case.

Want people to really care about something? Make them own the thing and see how they care.

The Reign of Terror

Just a quick note prompted by the bombings in London.

A moment of silence for the dead.

Brought to mind the poem “Before I start this peom” by Emmanuel Ortiz which I had first come across in Suhail Kassim’s blog post. Here are the last lines of that poem, for the record.

You want a moment of silence
Then take it
Now,
Before this poem begins.

Here, in the echo of my voice,
In the pause between goosesteps of the
second hand
In the space
between bodies in embrace,

Here is your silence.
Take it.
But take it all
Don’t cut in line.
Let your silence begin
at the beginning of crime.
But we,
Tonight we will keep right on singing
For our dead.

The whole poem is worth deep consideration.

Jane Goodall’s Lessons of Hope

In my list of heroes, Dr. Jane Goodall appears around the top. Her work among the chimpanzees of the Gombi National Park is the stuff of legends. She is the founder of Roots and Shoots — the Jane Goodall Institute, whose goal is “to promote care and concern for animals, the environment, and the human community.”

Lessons for Hope: Activities to sustain yourself and the world around you, is the kind of work she inspires. From their website: “Lessons of Hope is produced in collaboration with the Center for Applied Technologies in Education at University at Buffalo, is a web-based project, weaving service learning into high school curriculum. Inspired by the work of Dr. Jane Goodall, students are given opportunities to make a positive difference not only at school but also in their communities and even around the world. Lessons for Hope inspires high school students by helping them recognize their personal values and by encouraging them to translate those values into activities that benefit their communities.”

One of the lessons is the story of Jon.

Jon Stocking, a cook on a tuna fishing boat, was horrified to see how fishermen would accidentally trap and drown dolphins in their fishing nets while fishing for tuna. When he heard the crying of a baby dolphin and its mother gazed into his eyes, he found himself leaping into the water boiling with the thrashing of huge and terrified tuna, sharks, and dolphins. Jon, terrified himself, managed to release the dolphin and its mother. Then, with his knife, he cut the net and freed the rest of the animals.

Of course, Jon was fired. When he finally got home, he thought about the dolphin situation and all the animals being driven to extinction. What could he do? He had no degree and was not wealthy, but he desperately wanted to make a difference. So he founded the Endangered Species Chocolate Company. For each candy bar the company sells, “Chocolate Jon” donates 10% of the profits annually to organizations dedicated to fighting for the species’ survival. Dr. Jane and “Chocolate Jon” created a chimpanzee bar that raises money for the Jane Goodall Institute.

Heart warming, isn’t it?

36500 Days Ago

About 36,500 days ago, the man I admire the second-most published a paper called On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies. He was a patent examiner at the Swiss Patent Office in Berne. His name which I take with deep reverence was Albert Einstein. That paper introduced his theory of relativity to the world. For the record, a few lines from the introduction to the English translation of the paper:

. . . the unsuccessful attempts to discover any motion of the earth relatively to the “light medium,” suggest that the phenomena of electrodynamics as well as of mechanics possess no properties corresponding to the idea of absolute rest. They suggest rather that, as has already been shown to the first order of small quantities, the same laws of electrodynamics and optics will be valid for all frames of reference for which the equations of mechanics hold good.1 We will raise this conjecture (the purport of which will hereafter be called the “Principle of Relativity”) to the status of a postulate, and also introduce another postulate, which is only apparently irreconcilable with the former, namely, that light is always propagated in empty space with a definite velocity c which is independent of the state of motion of the emitting body. These two postulates suffice for the attainment of a simple and consistent theory of the electrodynamics of moving bodies based on Maxwell’s theory for stationary bodies. The introduction of a “luminiferous ether” will prove to be superfluous inasmuch as the view here to be developed will not require an “absolutely stationary space” provided with special properties, nor assign a velocity-vector to a point of the empty space in which electromagnetic processes take place.

[Thanks to Saheli’s Musings and Observations for the reminder.]