Ideas Worth Reading

High School History Errors 1

2007-02-12T07:48:00.000-08:00

Lies My Teacher Told Me : Everything Your High School History Textbook Got Wrong

Beginning in the West: Columbus "Discovers" Sacramento...

Lies that Got Believed, part II

2007-02-08T06:41:00.000-08:00

Trusted people can become decievers under great emotional stress.

Art Linkletter was someone I trusted, from his role in the delightful show "Kids Say the Darnedest Things," but it turns out he started a false urban legend. You may have heard of folks who took LSD and thought they could fly, and then jumped out of windows to their deaths.

It never happened.

According to Snopes, an urban legend investigation web page, Art Linkletter appears to have made up the story in order to sugar coat his daughter's suicide. The sugar coating might have been for his own benefit, or for the public's benefit.

Elsewhere, I have read that Linkletter had an embarassingly bad relationship with his daughter, to the point that it may have contributed to his daughter's suicide, but I couldn't find that. If anyone can confirm or deny that, I would be grateful.

This story bears some resemblance to an earlier post of mine, in which an embarassing "suicide" is blamed on some external thing which is believed by others to have power to change personality.

Incidentally, I found a web site that believed that the suicide was drug related, but which contains comments indicating that Art Linkletter does not deserve our trust.

David Oakey

No Treason by Lysander Spooner

2007-01-29T07:09:00.000-08:00

Two years after the American Civil War Lysander Spooner published an outrageous tract titled "No Treason" which argues that a social contract agreed to by some people isn't binding on all people.

It has implications for arguments depending on the authority of the U.S. Constitution, or any country's founding documents that claim to depend on the consent of the governed.

Eerily, it turns out that Spooner makes his case persuasively.

He makes outrageous claims, many of which he backs up with reasoning I can't refute.

Among such claims are:
S-That two men have no more natural right to exercise any kind of authority over one, than one has to exercise the same authority over two.
[Essentially, in that sentence, Spooner denies that democracies are more just than monarchies!]
S-Majorities, as such, afford no guarantees for justice.
S-It is not improbable that many or most of the worst of governments --- although established by force, and by a few, in the first place --- come, in time, to be supported by a majority.

Spooner's arguments have startling implications, but can we dismiss his arguments on the grounds of their implications? I think it is better to reject arguments because they are wrong in themselves. Dismissing arguments because they have unpleasant implications is sometimes wrong.

Spooner's language is a bit archaic, and he refers to events better known in his time than in ours, but can anyone make a good argument against his arugments?

David

Monopoly, the game, is propaganda

2007-01-24T06:45:00.000-08:00

Over the years, the strongest challenge to my minimize-the-government libertarian ideas has been anarcho-capitalism. This blog post isn't about that. The second strongest challenge to my libertarian ideas has been Georgism. Ultimately I rejected Georgism, but I don't have good arguments against it, and the arguments Georgists raise are fairly persuasive. This blog post isn't exactly about that, either.

It turns out that the famous game, Monopoly, has it roots in Georgism. One of the ideas of Georgism is that outright ownership of land is wrong. Folks ought to be taxed on the land and the tax money ought to be distributed to the landless. Unfairness of real estate is close to the heart of Georgism. And the game vividly depicts a nightmare world in which the whole human race (with a lone exception) will end up in Jail or the poorhouse--all due to the supposed evil of land ownership. So the game Monopoly is good introductory propoganda for Georgism. In real life, one can move away from excessive rents, which puts a downward pressure on rents--this is left out of Monopoly, and as a result, rents in Monopoly can get quite high.

Now to the main reason for this blog post: the history of Monopoly, and its predecessor, the Landlord's Game is worth reading.

The link mentions Georgism in passing, and discusses copyright and patent issues as well.

David Oakey

Price Gouging is both the consumer's friend and enemy

2007-01-01T20:14:00.000-08:00

...but mostly a friend.

After a disaster, price gouging gets a pretty bad rap. Someone gets hit by an earthquake or a snowstorm, and they have it rough. When prices go up, it seems like a slap in the face on top of the disaster. But rapid price jumps are likely to help the healing process speed up and get more goods where they are needed. On the other hand, folks feel deeply that there is an honest and just and fair price for a thing, and when you add that feeling to the pain of high prices right when you need a break the most, it is not surprising that folks call it gouging instead of inflation.

Why Price Gouging Is Good--even for the buyer

More on why price gouging Is good

In some cases, Price Gouging Saves Lives

It Doesn't Matter That Price Gouging Is Truly Good, Because It Feels Evil

Alas, in that last article, I pick up an objectivist undertone from the scornful use of the word
"altruist."

Why not put the issue in terms "the other side" uses? For instance, why
not ask the anti-gougers why they want people to suffer more and suffer
longer? Put them on the defensive, if they are wrong.

David Oakey

Responses to Disasters/Life isn't nasty mean brutish and short

2006-12-24T20:26:00.000-08:00

A researcher named Fischer discovered that the public and emergency services spend too much effort on preventing certain kinds of aftermaths to disasters that rarely happen--with the result that resources are not directed where they are needed most. I found out a lot about this before Hurricane Katrina and even before the northeastern power blackout. Fischer's research led me to expect that the media plays up panic and gouging and looting. When I heard about Katrina victims shooting at the rescue aircraft, I thought of Fischer and concluded that such guilty victims were mere rumors. But the reportage got worse and worse, and I started to doubt Fischer's research. Turned out much later, I was right in the first place, and so was Fischer. No aircraft reported being shot at. No babies were raped in the sports stadium. No confirmed murders at the sports stadium.

But the heavy reporting of false rumors of shooting at rescuers understandably frightened some rescue workers away.

Unfortunately, Fischer's book is too expensive for me, and the local libraries don't have it, but I pieced parts of his results together by reading reviews and excerpts. Here's one part of his research.

Fischer presentation on disaster myths

I'm interested in implications of Fischer's research for decentralized governance and self governance. Does it mean anything?

David Oakey

Acronym Finder Look up acronyms-abbreviations-initialisms

2006-12-24T20:23:00.000-08:00

Acronym Finder Look up 169,000+ acronyms-abbreviations & their definitions

I find this one useful. Note the tabs for narrowing down a search by industry.

David Oakey

The Cathedral and The Bazaar

2006-12-17T22:35:00.000-08:00

Homesteading the Noosphere

A Different Argument Against the Death Penalty

2006-12-11T06:25:00.000-08:00

At least, I haven't heard this argument before.

A Different Argument Against the Death Penalty

Politicians respond to incentives too.

2006-12-11T06:20:00.000-08:00

After clicking on the following URL, skip down to PUBLIC CHOICE: ECONOMIC ANALYSIS OF THE POLITICAL MARKET.
Public Choice Theory Analysis of the Political Market

David Oakey

Human beings are the ultimate natural resource

2006-11-26T22:02:00.000-08:00

A guy named Julian Simon said that there is a meaningful sense in which we will never run out of any raw materials. He backed up his claim with scads of data and references. His book "The Ultimate Resource II" is loaded with good news for the human race and for the environment. And his web site makes the text available for free.

Ultimate Resource II online

One of the chapter titles is "Why Are Material-Technical Resource Forecasts So Often Wrong?"

My favorite story about Julian Simon is the one where he made a bet with a famous doomsayer, and Julian won the bet.

David Oakey

Opiophobia -- Superstitious fear of narcotics may kill people

2006-11-20T06:48:00.000-08:00

People can die from the mass hysteria I call Fear of Narcotics and some others call Opiophobia. In an earlier post, I noted that there are links between racism and the earliest bans on drugs in the USA. However, even after the strength of the racism slacks off, the harm from these bans remain. I have known some people who suffered from pain when they were dying. Would proper doses of pain killers eased their suffering? My guess would be that they would, but I'm no doctor. Still, I would rather that real doctors' options were not limited by law, especially if the cause for the limitation is superstition.

David Oakey

Got Milk? Calcium Builds Strong Bones

2006-11-20T06:44:00.000-08:00

Here's another humorous commercial in the "Got Milk?" series, but to view it one should have a fast internet connection.

Got Milk? Calcium Builds Strong Bones

Mass Hysteria, part one

2006-11-13T06:52:00.000-08:00

When I was a teen, I played a harmless game with my friends. The game was unfamiliar to most people, and rising in popularity among youth, which made many people suspicious of it. But the suspicion level rose high due to a certain incident which badly hurt my hobby. The game was Dungeons and Dragons, and the incident was "the kid who disappeared while playing Dungeons and Dragons in real tunnels, and he died."

I resented the damage done to the reputation of my hobby. People unfamiliar with the hobby now had ludicrous misunderstandings of it.

It turns out that a detective concerned with the reputations of two kids connected to his investigation decided that it was best to risk the reputations of tens of thousands of kids he didn't know and, in effect, he spread lies about the game.

The origin of Hysteria against Dungeons and Dragons

It isn't the first time lies ruined a reputation. Consider Wertham's post hoc ergo propter hoc testimony to the U.S. Congress against comic books. The U.S. comic industry never recovered, and it was surpassed by the Japanese comics industry. It won't be the last time a reputation is damaged by lies.

David

Questions Frequently Asked of James Randi on myriad topics

2006-10-30T03:16:00.000-08:00

In two earlier
blog posts, I mentioned that the James Randi Educational Foundation has offered one million dollars for proof of supernatural phenomena. Frauds and deluded folks have frequently repeated similar excuses to one another over the years, in efforts to either avoid being tested for supernatural feats they claim they can do, or in efforts to explain away their failure to pass a test that they agreed beforehand was fair. Now Randi has a list of questions that have frequently been asked about the JREF million dollar challenge.

Questions Frequently Asked of James Randi on myriad topics

David

More Rebuttal to "Tale of the Slave" / Sorites Paradox

2006-10-30T03:08:00.000-08:00

In a recent post, I cited Nozick's parable, Tale of the Slave. Below is another rebuttal to Nozick's parable.

It took me more than 6 tries to get the following URL to work, so I will post the URL and the key points. I hope I do not violate the author's copyright by quoting the key part of it.
A Short Note on Nozick's "Tale of the Slave"

J. Bradford Delong wrote:
-------Begin DeLong Quote-------
There are, of course, two things that make this argument of Nozick's deceptive and objectionable:

1) The (false) implicit claim that there is a sharp dividing line separating "slavery" from "freedom," and that differences within the classifications are unimportant.
2) The (false) implicit claim that there are only two choices: Nozick's minimal state on the one hand, and a pure majoritarian dictatorship on the other. You have to go a long way beyond Nozick's #9 to get to anything that approximates what we have in America today.
-------End DeLong Quote-------

One of the responders to this on DeLong's web page pointed out that DeLong's first point is akin to pointing out Sorites Paradox.

According to the October 2006 Wikipedia article, Sorites Paradox

-------Begin Wikipedia Quote-------

is a paradox that arises from reasoning with predicates which seem not to have a sharp cutoff, such as 'bald', 'tall', and the like.
For instance, it seems plausible that no heap of sand will stop being a heap just because one grain of sand is removed. This, however, leads to seemingly odd results.
1. One million grains of sand make a heap.
2. If some collection of grains of sand make a heap, then that collection minus one grain will still make a heap.
3. So, 999,999 grains of sand make a heap.
Repeated applications of premise 2 (each time starting with one less number of grains), will eventually allow us to arrive at the conclusion that 1 grain of sand makes a heap. On the face of it, there are three ways to avoid that conclusion. Object to the first premise (deny that one million grains makes a heap, or more generally, deny that there are heaps), object to the second premise (it is not true for all collections of grains that removing one grain cannot make the difference between it being a heap or not), or accept the conclusion (1 grain of sand can make a heap). Few, if any, reply by accepting the conclusion.

-------End Wikipedia Quote-------

I found this to be a persuasive argument that Nozick's "Tale of the Slave" is less than it appeared to me at first. I still think that there is validity to the notion that we are less free than we ought to be, and that a pure democracy without guarantees of rights is not desirable, and that being allowed to vote in a large-enough group is little different in terms of changing results than being disallowed to vote, probabilistically speaking.

David

The Significance of the Octopus

2006-10-22T22:34:00.000-07:00

The Significance of the Octopus: A dreamlike vignette or a haunting prose poem?

This one gets me right there.

The Tale of the Slave

2006-10-22T22:25:00.000-07:00

This next parable made a strong impression on me for years, but I heard some rebuttals that got me thinking.

The Tale of the Slave

Here's the lesser of the rebuttals.

A response to libertarians and anarchists regarding the tale of a slave

And here's the preparation for the better of the rebuttals.

Xeno's Paradox (from Wikipedia)

David

Grandpa Japan (Sero-Ojiisan)

2006-10-15T21:15:00.000-07:00

This link requires a high speed connection. This is a magician from Japan. The first brief scene shows the youthful magician getting aging makeup. After that he has a few very clever close up magic acts. Understanding Japanese is not required, except that when he is on the passenger train, he repeatedly asks for tea just before reaching for the iced tea ad near the ceiling of the train.

Grandpa Japan

David Oakey

Sagan and Nuclear Winter (Lies that Got Believed, part 2)

2006-10-15T20:57:00.000-07:00

I was a fan of Carl Sagan's Cosmos science TV series. But heroes make mistakes and heroes have character flaws.

Sagan and Nuclear Winter (Lies that Got Believed, part 2)

Vangelis did the eerie and beautiful music to that series.

David Oakey

Lies that Got Believed, part 1

2006-10-08T19:28:00.000-07:00

Lies that Got Believed (Nuclear Winter. Scholarly Paper Presentation Methods influence results.)

Here's a snippet

"My guess is that they were telling the truth about their analysis. They may even have been correct in their conclusion. But the degree of uncertainty implied by that article was strikingly inconsistent with the confidence with which the nuclear winter conclusion was being trumpeted--largely by people who wanted other people to believe it because they thought that belief would reduce the risk of nuclear war."

David Oakey

Monkey Tuesday Theme Lyrics

2006-10-08T19:13:00.000-07:00

Definitely not in the category of Ideas Worth Reading, but I wanted to share
my delight anyway.

I wrote lyrics to a tune I'd heard on Penn Radio and emailed the lyrics in.

They played it on the radio. I was so delighted I jumped up and lept about.

Penn Radio on Tuesdays features folks calling in with stories about monkeys and mayhem. Whenever the host says "monkey Tuesday" the staff plays the Monkey Tuesday theme.

Monkey Tuesday Theme Lyrics
by David Oakey

monkeys on the air
monkey with the mike
screeching scratching biting
that we like

don't say chimpanzee
nor orangutan
all we say is monkey
bang bang bang

monkeys in the air
monkeys on the roof
tearing off the landau
wif their toof

now they have the pots
now they have the pans
let's go ape together
bang clang cans

Copyright 2006

Note: the "Monkey" in the second line is a verb, not a noun, and "Mike" could either be Michael Goudeau, the show's cohost, or microphone.

David Oakey

Friedman's Blog--Does the First Amendment Ban Public Schools?

2006-10-03T07:58:00.000-07:00

Does the First Amendment Ban Public Schools?

Power corrupts, and great power kills.

2006-09-25T06:45:00.000-07:00

When I saw "Schindler's List", I was deeply moved. I asked Mike B. what can we do to prevent such genocide from happening again. Mike suggested raising my children right and treating my neighbor justly. I do try to live up to that.

I got excited when I came across some research that might drastically reduce wars AND genocides and other kinds of internal governmentally-approved mass execution.

A CIA researcher discovered that "being a democracy" has a very strong correlation with "not going to war with a democracy" and with "not killing huge numbers of its own citizens."

That claim of his is somewhat in dispute, according to the wikipedia entry on "the democratic peace." I also found a researcher who said that the correlation is even higher if you replace "being a democracy" with something else. More on that another time.

But in any case, that CIA researcher uncovered a crucial fact. Governments of the 20th century were wildly bloodthirsty. There were even some governments that issued quotas to murder a certain number of citizens per period of time, according to his research.

20th Century Democide

David Oakey

Nocebo is the opposite of Placebo

2006-09-24T19:34:00.000-07:00

A placebo is a medicine that has no active ingredients, but which you believe to be effective, and your body either heals itself or (according to a controversial alternative theory) you merely tell the researcher that your body is healing in an unconscious effort to please the researcher. I hope I have described a placebo correctly.

A nocebo is the opposite.

Dr. Dean Edell - 'Nocebo' The Power Of The Mind Can Make You Sick

I should add that I believe Erin Brockovich worsened the nocebo effect on the people in the town her hit movie was about.

Odds of Resembles between Languages / False Cognates

2006-09-17T15:43:00.000-07:00

The first rule is, you must not fool yourself. And you are the easiest person to fool.
--Richard Feynman

On sci.lang we are often presented with lists of resemblances between far-flung languages (e.g. Basque and Ainu, Welsh and Mandan, Hebrew and Quechua, Hebrew and every other language, Basque and every other language), along with the claim that such resemblances "couldn't be due to chance", or are "too many" to be due to chance.

Linguists dismiss these lists, for several reasons. Often a good deal of work has gone into them, but little linguistic knowledge. Borrowings and native compounding are not taken into account; the semantic equivalences proffered are quirky; and there is no attempt to find systematic sound correspondences. And linguists know that chance correspondences do happen.

All this is patiently explained, but it doesn't always convince those with no linguistic training-- especially the last point. Human beings have been designed by evolution to be good pattern matchers, and to trust the patterns they find; as a corollary their intuition about probability is abysmal. Lotteries and Las Vegas wouldn't function if it weren't so.

Odds of Resemblance between languages

David Oakey

Urban Legends: Blinded by the Sun while Stoned

2006-09-10T18:37:00.000-07:00

I never took illegal drugs because I didn't want to damage my brain. Though I think one can damage oneself with various substances, I think that it is wrong to lie about what drugs can do in order to scare folks into avoiding them. Honesty is almost always the best policy. I think I've heard well intentioned lies called "pious frauds."

Here's a pious fraud I believed. From a fairly highly reliable urban legends web page (but check everything out for yourself!) comes the debunking of it. Urban Legends (Blinded by the Light)"

David

Is Voting A Moral Duty? Is Voting Worthwhile?

2006-09-10T17:05:00.000-07:00

Most people have heard the view that if you don't vote you can't complain. I've also seen a related view on bumper stickers, expressed as, "Don't blame me, I voted for _____" where the blank was whomever had lost a recent election. The implication is that voting for the loser absolved one of responsibility for the outcome. And lots of public service ads have encouraged voting. I think MTV endorsed the view that, "It doesn't matter how you vote, just do it."

But I heard something quite different a few times. One fellow in college said that voting was giving your endorsement of the outcome. He said something like this: if there were a vote between rulership by dictator Pol Pot or rulership by Thomas Jefferson, that if you had voted, and if it turned out that Pol Pot had won, then you had contributed to the legitimacy of Pol Pot's rulership. In essence, he was saying that if you DO vote you can't complain. Another fellow in the Southern California C.S. Lewis Society seemed to hold a similar view.

So the question arises of who is right? I don't have confidence in my answer yet.

For now my view is that non-voting is not immoral. Further, voting for a candidate who would have upheld restrictions on government is voting in self-defense, and one's vote in such a case ought not to be held against the voter.

Thoughts?

-----

I've never missed a chance to vote. Was it a waste of gas, research time, and driving time? If I had voted for the Democrat every time, no elections outcomes would have changed. If I had voted for the Republican every time, no election outcomes would have changed. If I'd gotten sick every election and been unable to vote, no election outcomes would have changed. Is voting worthwhile?

Here's an effort to analyze the odds.
Don't Vote. It makes more sense to play the lottery.

I hope nobody reads that and says, "But what if everybody thought that way?"

First and most important: that will never happen. People disagree, even on math or whether the earth is flat. "Everybody" will never think the same way. Second, if somehow most people thought that way, and as a result the numbers of voters dropped to one percent of last election's turnout, then the odds change, and it becomes somewhat more sensible to vote.

David

The so-called Wild West wasn't--but does that imply a hands off government works?

2006-09-04T16:08:00.000-07:00

The essay below was published in a journal on legal issues where it was reviewed by peers in the legal profession. I don't know what the peers had to say about it, except for two peers (professor of law and economics David Friedman, and economics professor Bruce Benson.)

The second most remarkable thing about the article is that the wild west wasn't wild -- it was more law-abiding than big cities on the east coast of the USA.

But the most remarkable thing about the article is that they draw a conclusion relevant to modern life: we could do with shockingly smaller government than we have now and have less chaos that today.

"The purpose of this paper is to take us from the theoretical world of anarchy to a case study of its application."

The Not So Wild West

Years later the authors went on to write a book on the same issue: The Not So Wild, Wild West: Property Rights on the Frontier. I haven't read it.

Here's part of a review of the book I found on Amazon.com.

---
Mention of the American West usually evokes images of rough and tumble cowboys, ranchers, and outlaws. In contrast, "The Not So Wild, Wild West" casts America’s frontier history in a new framework that emphasizes the creation of institutions, both formal and informal, that facilitated cooperation rather than conflict. Rather than describing the frontier as a place where heroes met villains, this book argues that everyday people helped carve out legal institutions that tamed the West.
---

David

The essay on the racist roots of drug prohibition

2006-09-04T15:56:00.000-07:00

Here is the transcript of the speech that convinced me that racism was a large component of the reason for drug prohibitions being written into law in the first place.

Transcripts of speeches show how a spoken speech is lacking compared to a proofread essay, but I haven't seen an essay online which captured the breadth of lawmaking while under the influence of racism that this speech reveals.

David

---

History of the Non-Medical Use of Drugs in the United States - by Professor Charles Whitebread. This is a fascinating and highly entertaining 20-page summary of the history of the marijuana laws in the United States. Transcribed from a speech by Professor Whitebread before the 1995 California Judges Conference.

Got Milk Commercial -- The Baby and the Cat

2006-08-27T20:13:00.000-07:00

Another humorous commercial from the Got Milk series. By the way, when I ran for the California Legislature, I opposed California's milk advisory board. (Their policies resulted in higher milk prices, and low milk consumption in California.) I wonder if they funded these commercials. Odd, that I enjoy some of their output.

This link is best viewed with a high bandwidth connection.

The Baby and the Cat

David

Christmas Movies and Bad Econonomics

2006-08-27T20:09:00.000-07:00

There are some Christmas movies that are pleasant tales; but if you think through the economics, well, humor ensues.

Christmas Movies and Bad Econonomics

The James Randi Million Dollar Challenge and My Mini Challenge

2006-08-23T20:45:00.000-07:00

A while ago I posted about the Randi Foundation challenge.
In the comments was this:

At 3:21 PM, Smokefoot said...
I have heard some people who feel that the Randi tests are rigged to guarantee failure. Certainly I have not seen any sign of this in the reading I have done on his tests, but it shows one way people deal with the failure to show beat Randi's test.

I got to thinking, how can I verify that some of the common excuses are merely lame excuses? I suppose I could accept the challenge, make a claim, pass the tests, and win the prize. Next best would be to make a claim, fail the tests but closely observe the process and be satisfied that all was fair.

The one thing I can think of that might be easier for me to verify would be to check the following particular excuse: the James Randi Education Foundation doesn't even have the money. On his web site Randi even explains how one might verify that the money is real. Shall we try and find out if the money is real, and thus show (to ourselves) whether the people who use that excuse are just scared to be tested?

David

What Makes People Think Like Economists?

2006-08-21T05:02:00.000-07:00

Somewhere I heard this joke: If you laid all the world's economists end to end, they still wouldn't point in the same direction.

So.

Do economists disagree with each other on everything?

And for that matter...

Are economists liberal or conservative?

The following web site answers these questions.

What Makes People Think Like Economists?Evidence on Economic Cognition from the Survey of Americans and Economists on the Economy

Buy a House, Lose Your Job?

2006-08-21T04:53:00.000-07:00

I stayed interested in economics because of the surprises it sometimes yields. Here's an example:

Buy a House, Lose Your Job?
The surprising connection between homeownership and unemployment.

Back to School Commercial

2006-08-16T08:40:00.000-07:00

This one got put in early by request.

Alice Cooper is a male rock and roll artist who emphasized a bad guy image, and he wore black mascara around his eyes. He had a hit song "School's Out Forever" decades ago.

This ironic link about buying back-to-school supplies is best with broadband.

School's out forever

David

Why Jews Don't Farm

2006-08-14T22:35:00.000-07:00

Historically, why haven't Jews been farmers?

Steven Landsburg's answer might be wrong, and the replies to the essay raise some good objections, but I found his answer interesting as a possibility.

David

Hotelling's Theorem (Why I'm Not Much Afraid of Running Completely Out of Oil)

2006-08-14T22:32:00.000-07:00

Some folks are quite worried that the world will run out of oil. There was even one fellow who seemed worried that perhaps a century off, someone will put his key in the ignition of his car and it won't start because there is no gasoline left in the world.

Hotelling's Theorem

That doesn't mean that oil won't get expensive, though.

David

Ozymandius (Why Boasting Is Embarrassing)

2006-08-07T07:37:00.000-07:00

A poem titled Ozymandias

I think Ozymandias is supposed to be Ramses the Pharaoh.

David

The James Randi Educational Foundation's One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge

2006-08-07T07:20:00.000-07:00

Decades ago, magician Harry Houdini disapproved of the swindlers who claimed to contact the dead, and thereby bilked grieving and vulnerable customers out of their life savings. Houdini went to seances. As a stage magician, he was skilled in how magicians misdirect people into paying attention to the wrong things and missing the tricks. At those seances he discovered (and unmasked) sneaky deceptions that had fooled otherwise skeptical people.

There is a stage magician today who continues Houdini's tradition. His foundation challenges anyone who claims they can repeatedly make something supernatural happen to come forward and show that they can do it while experts trained in misdirection watch. If they can show their powers under controlled conditions under their watchful eyes, they get one million dollars.

The James Randi Educational Foundation's One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge

What's interesting is the excuses are made by the folks who want to claim the million dollars. Some make excuses instead of taking the test. Others take the test and (so far) fail, and make different excuses after the test.

David

25 Miraculous Trends (over the last 100 years)

2006-07-31T07:03:00.000-07:00

The Greatest Century That Ever Was -- 25 Miraculous Trends

Lots of things are getting better, including some surprises.

Avoiding Common Logical Errors

2006-07-31T06:54:00.000-07:00

So you wanna avoid common logical errors?

I personally love to argue by analogy so it pains me to post this one. An argument by analogy is like chocolate: Everybody loves it. But I can't see a good argument against their reasons.

The Secret History of the Dismal Science--Economics, Religion and Race in the 19th Century Liberalism

2006-07-24T06:48:00.000-07:00

Economics has been called "The Dismal Science" and I wondered why until I read this website.

Secret History of the Dismal Science

Aaron Burr -- Got Milk?

2006-07-24T06:45:00.000-07:00

My favorite "Got Milk" commercial, perhaps my favorite commercial of all time.

Got Milk? Aaron Burr