The Rolleiflex 2.8D
17 hours ago
Partly collected thoughts.
One should strive to see the world and prioritize injustices free of pure self-interest - caring about grave abuses that are unlikely to affect us personally is a hallmark of a civilized person - but we are all constructed to regard imminent dangers to ourselves and our loved ones with greater urgency than those that appear more remote. Ignoble though it is, that's just part of being human - though our capacity to liberate ourselves from pure self-interest means that it does not excuse this indifference.From here, by Glenn Greenwald.
It’s strange to think that the housing crisis that caused the financial meltdown most negatively affects the one age demographic that didn’t own a home.The young adults who graduated during the past several years of economic mess are the so-called lost generation, unable to start a career, a family. Looking for stable, full-time employment.
CIP pointed out the the Caltech core curriculum is revised down from five terms each of math. and physics, to three terms each. There appear to be a variety of reasons.The transition from high school to college presents problems for all students, but for some students it is particularly challenging. At Caltech, many newly admitted students lack the background in mathematics that is necessary to succeed in Ma 1a. Unfortunately, few of them are even aware that their background in mathematics is deficient. This is not their fault. The mathematics curriculum in high schools is less rigorous than it was even a few decades ago. In conversations with Caltech students who have struggled with freshman mathematics, most report that they were star math students in high school, which of course is a major reason why they were offered admission to Caltech in the first place. Many of them, however, have never seen mathematics as it is taught at Caltech.
Those who struggle in Ma 1a usually continue to struggle in the rest of the core mathematics classes. They earn relatively low GPA’s during their first two years or so at Caltech, and when they graduate their GPA’s are significantly lower than those of other students. And not all who struggle with freshman mathematics succeed; such students are also less likely than their counterparts to graduate from Caltech. The students often report that, in the end, they have also not learned very much math, as too much of the material was beyond their ability to comprehend at the time it was presented. Currently Caltech attempts to assist such students in a number of ways but this assistance may be too little, too late.
In order to understand the specific reasons why many of our freshman struggle in Ma 1a, the undergraduate Academics and Research Committee conducted an online survey that asked a series of specific questions about the difficulties they encountered in Ma1a. From the survey results, the most common area of weakness that students identified was that of formal reasoning, writing proofs, and common proof techniques. The results thus corroborate what most people connected with Ma 1a have known anecdotally—that many Caltech freshmen, though computationally skilled, struggle with basic proof concepts. Moreover, a corollary obstacle to students thriving in Ma1a is that, because it is a “calculus” course, students feel like they should be mastering the topic with ease. They are thus reluctant to go to classmates, TA’s, or professors when they encounter difficulties.
She wasn’t just into guns. She was apparently stocked up for when the economy collapses and when everyone’s on their own with their guns.That area of Connecticut is apparently an enclave of such people, we are told.
But the gist is that over recent years the town of Newtown, CT. tried to place some limits on the rise of what might be called extreme gun-owning and shooting in the community. It wasn’t a fight between gun-owners and non-gun-owners but traditional gun owner and hunters versus people shooting close to other people’s homes, shooting at unlicensed firing ranges, firing military style weapons, even firing into explosives.
In short, the opposition of the extreme gun owners and the National Shooting Sports Foundation (the country’s second largest gun-rights organization, which happens to be located in Newtown) prevented anything from happening.Newtown was not (yet) a typical US town.
Which is why pediatricians have to be so nosy. They ask all sorts of personal questions, delving into family diets and discipline and urging caution around swimming pools and street crossings. They remind parents to make their kids wear helmets when biking and stay in booster seats even when big kids complain they’re too babyish. They also ask whether parents keep guns at home and whether they’re stored safely — with the ammunition and the firearm kept separately in locked cabinets, the key tucked away from children.But the N.R.A. took offense, and in Florida, the state of some of the craziest Republicans that the N.R.A. has in their pocket, they had a law passed in 2011, that penalizes physicians from inquiring about gun ownership. A doctor could lose his license and face a fine of upto $10,000. The Florida Medical Association originally opposed the legislation, and then caved, and supported the bill.
“Despite the State’s insistence that the right to ‘keep arms’ is the primary constitutional right at issue in this litigation, a plain reading of the statute reveals that this law in no way affects such rights,” wrote U.S. District Judge Marcia Cooke. “A practitioner who counsels a patient on firearm safety, even when entirely irrelevant to medical care or safety, does not affect nor interfere with the patient’s right to continue to own, possess, or use firearms.”Just how insane the N.R.A. and the politicians it has in its pocket should be evident by now. The N.R.A. does have members who seem sane, (e.g., here ) but because they do not reign in their organization, they are culpable for its insanity, and the insanity of gun violence in the U.S.A.
Indeed, the internal war in J&K, when scaled, does not begin to approach the levels of criminal violence present in those US metropolitan areas best known for their murder rates. The ‘death count’ in Jammu & Kashmir for 2003 stood at 836 civilians, 1,447 militants, and 380 security personnel. If this violence is aggregated (2,663), which is unorthodox but certainly presents the worst possible statistical picture, it scales out at 24.5:100,000 population. This would place Jammu & Kashmir between Memphis (24.7:100,000) and Chicago (22.2:100,000), in the 2002 murder rankings when examining American cities with populations greater than 500,000, well off the pace established by the likes of Washington, DC (45.8:100,000) or Detroit (42.0:100,000).Think about it, it really opened my eyes: the level of violence that led to fears of the break-up of India is tolerated as a normal phenomenon in the US of A. A national emergency it is not!
Year
|
Federal Receipts
Percentage of GDP
|
Federal Outlays
Percentage of GDP
|
Median Household
Income
(inflation-adjusted
dollars)
|
2000
|
20.9
|
18.4
|
$54,481
|
2001*
|
20.4
|
19.1
|
$53,646
|
2002*
|
17.5
|
19.0
|
$53,019
|
2003
|
16.4
|
19.9
|
$52,973
|
2004
|
16.3
|
19.8
|
$52,788
|
2005
|
17.6
|
20.2
|
$53,371
|
2006
|
18.5
|
20.4
|
$53,768
|
2007
|
18.8
|
20.0
|
$54,489
|
2008
|
17.7
|
20.9
|
$52,546
|
2009
|
14.9
|
25.0
|
$52,195
|
2010
|
15.1
|
24.1
|
$50,831
|
2011
|
15.4
|
24.1
|
$50,054
|
2012
|
15.8
|
22.8
|
|
... state regulatory agencies and local governments impose burdensome permitting and siting requirements that unnecessarily raise installation costs. Today, navigating the regulatory red tape constitutes 25 percent to 30 percent of the total cost of solar installation in the United States, according to data from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and, as such, represents a higher percentage of the overall cost than the solar equipment itself.
Many people were stopped in their tracks by the story. Was it possible in London, in a building of flats, for a person, an attractive woman, to fade into oblivion, so that no one thought to ask, "Where’s Joyce?" For nearly three years? So many people live alone in a big city, and some are old, less vivid, and without next of kin. They may be missing before they’re gone. But Joyce Vincent did not seem to fit that description. A tremor of anxiety, a fear of societal malfunction, went through London. It seemed like a warning, a measure of the times.
Two years ago, an overweight nutrition professor at Kansas State University went on a diet that was low in calories but consisted mostly of Twinkies and other junk food. In two months, he lost 27 pounds, lowered his bad cholesterol and raised his good cholesterol. His point was that for weight loss, calories mattered more than the actual content of the diet. Twinkie lovers rejoiced, but the nutrition world put its collective head in its hands.
The men who persecuted Deeyah in Norway and Britain were every bit as prejudiced and violent as neo-Nazis, but as it happens, they rallied under the banner of radical Islam rather than the swastika. A tiny difference, you might think. A mere trifle. But that tiny difference made all the difference in the world. No one came to Deeyah's defence. Not liberal-left or compassionate conservative politicians. Not the BBC or liberal press. Not Amnesty International or the "concerned" artists who take up so many leftish causes. No one cared. To defend an Asian woman from unprovoked attacks by Asian men was to their warped minds a racist or Islamophobic act. Unprotected and unnoticed, Deeyah slunk off to live in an anonymous suburb of Atlanta, and begin the long task of pulling herself together.
Devdutt refutes this narrow vision. He defines a myth as ‘subjective truth’. Any belief which someone subjectively holds potentially classifies as a myth. Equally, he critiques the standard Western assumption that scientific knowledge is rational and all other traditional knowledge, including mythological, is non-rational. As he sees the world, all beliefs are fundamentally irrational at their root. It’s just that the Western scientific view of the world has become so dominant, or ‘hegemonic’ in the jargon used by cultural theorists, that everyone assumes by default that this is the only correct way to view the world and all other ways must be inferior and irrational. Devdutt turns this idea on its head and argues that the apparently secular capitalism of the West in fact is a thinly veiled descendent of the Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian mythological traditions that have dominated Western civilization.
While this is a controversial hypothesis, the close relationship between economic and political ideologies on the one hand and religion on the other shouldn’t be. After all, it was Max Weber, the founder of modern sociology, who famously theorized that capitalism could arise in northern Europe because of the spirit of thrift and discipline embodied in the Protestant work ethic. Devdutt in a sense is taking Weber head on by suggesting, to the contrary, that capitalism really is only a disguised version of Protestant Christianity and not a logical outgrowth of it.
...Indologists in the panel ignored the book’s challenge to their guild, viz. that unlike specialists in any other field, they actively desired and worked for the demise of their subject, Hinduism.
The Blue Brain project represents an essential first step toward achieving a complete virtual human brain. The researchers have demonstrated the validity of their method by developing a realistic model of a rat cortical column, consisting of about 10,000 neurons. Eventually, of course, the goal is to simulate systems of millions and hundreds of millions of neurons.
In a more intuitive language, the Riemann zeta-function is capable of fitting any arbitrary smooth function over a finite disk with arbitrary accuracy, and it does so with comparative ease, since it repeats the performance like a good actor infinitely many times on a designated set of stages. - from here.