Remind me...

To write a story about Feynman diagrams. And a poem about candles. I'll know what you mean.

War! Huh! What is it good for?

Actually... Absolutely nothing. So, I hear people bring up the economic benefits of war every so often, mostly regarding how WWII "got us out of the depression." before I talk about how little sense this makes, I'd like to point out that the US had mostly recovered from the depression before 1940. Last I checked, the US didn't get involved until December 1941, so time disagrees with this theory.

Now, let's talk about wars. Specifically, let's talk about WWII. People talk about how American industry was mobilized for the war. This is true, but there's a subtle fallacy at play here. Jobs, in and of themselves, do not add to the economic vitality of a nation. If they did, we could have everyone working rolling rocks up hills, and letting them fall down again, and we'd have a booming economy. What does add to economic vitality is the creation of capital. Capital is a good which can be used to make more goods. In other words, a booming economy is an economy which is one which is increasing its capacity to produce.

So, the construction of the factories and machinery to create the weapons of war was economically healthy because it created capital, but it ends here. All of those factories went to work building supplies for the war. What we then have is capital-- raw goods (mostly ore and oil) and processed goods (metal alloys, gasoline, rubber) -- being turned into finished products. All well and good, but these products are leaving the economy: To go be used (and destroyed) in a war.

What, then do we have? Capital that is not being used to create more capital. Capital which is being used exclusively to push products out of the economy. We were wasting capital.

And this capital waste rears its ugly head in the shortages and rationing. Capital was leaving the economy at an enormous rate. The market response is hyperinflation: If goods are rare (as they will be if all capital is leaving the economy), goods are expensive. This also happened in Europe after WWI, because all of their monetary capital was going to reparations (Germany, Austria), or repaying loans (Allied powers). (To be fair, Weimar monetary policy didn't help the hyperinflation.)
This hyperinflation can be curbed by fixing prices, but as we saw in the 70s (and every other time prices have been fixed), this leads to shortages. The rationing in the US was a response to the shortages. These shortages were caused because the capital was leaving the country.

In case you hadn't caught this, rationing is not a sign of a healthy economy. It is quite the opposite.

Next. The Marshall Plan. Total US aid in Europe was over 1.2 Billion. A healthy economy does not need billions of dollars pumped into it. Money from the US even came after the European economy had started turn around: After a few years of mass shortages. So a few years after the war, the economy, while recovering, was still in shambles. Should war have brought about a boom?

Finally, take a look at all the poorest nations in the world. They all have one thing in common: They have been war-torn for at least 10 years. In almost all of these conflicts, the war started for socia-political reasons, and after a short time, much of the fighting became centered around mines. Why? Because the combatants ran out of money, and need a way to finance the war. But if a war is good for the economy, they shouldn't need half-working mines to fund their wars.

Poem

It's been a while since, I've given you a poem, eh?

***

Multitudes, multidudes in the valley of derision!
But the glory of the Lord is near in the valley of decisions,
and a wicked wind blows through the sea of visions
and revisions before the taking of toast and tea.

In His house we come and go,
talking, oh, of Michaelangelo.

Remember when David danced in his ephod?
Well, I stood by and scoffed:
The king of Israel naked (with the slave girls!)
for all the world to see!

And centuries later:
"Your mind is not far from the kingdom of Heaven."
My mind is close! O my soul, rejoice!
But, O soul, alack!
It seems you've fled the winter of despair,
and won't be coming back.

These pedals on a wet black bough,
they'll fall off soon, any day now--
drifting to the ground
like nameless faces, wandering through the crowd;
While my mind, lofty, in the clouds,
crashes into a mountain, and comes tumbling down.


***
There will be another one shortly.

Summer goals

Here's a tentative list of things I want to get done this summer... As with every break, I hardly expect to get all of it done:

• Understand Grothendieck's Axiom, and why it is (or isn't) important.
  
• Write a decent Binomial Heap in Haskell.
  
• Read Type Theory and Functional Programming or Proofs and Types.
  
• Read these lecture notes on Categorical Logic.
  
• Read all the minor prophetic books (and Daniel).
  Read all of the Epistles.
  
• Get comfortable with functors, monads and arrows in Haskell.
  
• Study for GRE. Especially, read Apostal's calculus.
  
• Make headway into the graph problem Dr. Pelsmajer gave me.
  
• Work with Beckman on something interesting...
  
• Pray more!
  
• Read The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus and Das Faustbuch.
  

There's more, I'm sure... There's always more.
Edit: Oh, dear! I got none of those done... sigh.

From qntm.org

You will not be able to stay home, blogger.

You will not be able to dial up, log in and cop out.

You will not be able to watch the revolution unfold on your RSS feed because the revolution will not be tweeted.

The revolution will not be tweeted; the revolution will not cost ninety-nine cents from iTunes; the revolution will not appear on Fark, Digg, Reddit or Metafilter, nor be brought to you by Randall Munroe, Ben Croshaw, Jack Thompson, Ron Paul or Stephen Colbert. The revolution will not be tagged "nsfw" or locked for editing by newly-registered users due to persistent vandalism.

The revolution will not have rounded corners because the revolution will not be tweeted.

*****
Read the whole thing here. Also read all of Fine Structure.

laughter and cynicism

Apparently I laugh a lot. I've known this for a while, but a conversation I had today reminded me. My whole family laughs a lot... probably much more than we have any real reason or right to. This is a bit odd since I think we all consider ourselves to be rather cynical on the whole. I realized a while ago that this is perfectly natural. This is because there are two types of cynic, one of which is always laughing.

First: what is a cynic? Cynicism can be characterized by the overwhelming desire to mock everything, fueled largely by the realization that the world is absurd and quite frankly isn't worth our time. Another key feature is the inability to take the world seriously.

There are two approaches here (actually there are a lot more, but we can make a lovely false dichotomy): scorn and ridicule.

The scornful cynic sees this ridiculous world and yearns for something that is not absurd-- for something meaningful, something consequential, something more worthy. Such a thing is nowhere to be found, so the scornful cynic mocks and derides everything-- he is, of course, above these trivialities, so why should he do anything besides mock them? The world is seen as a tiring mess of painfully evident errors that the cynic can't help but notice. Such a world cannot be taken seriously, but it demands to be, so the cynic lashes back in frustration.

The ridiculous cynic on the other hand takes all this absurdity as an infinite jest. The world is a joke being told by some grand comedian for the ridiculous cynic's enjoyment. There is a discord between the demands for seriousness and the absurdity of the world making these demands, which only serves to make the world more ridiculous-- like a chimp in a suit. As such, when the world demands to be taken seriously, the ridiculous cynic simply laughs in its face-- does that really expect to be taken seriously?

The scornful cynic, it seems, takes himself too seriously (why else let something so useless get to you?), while the ridiculous cynic does not take himself seriously enough. (Why else let yourself become as absurd as the rest of the world?)

The two types of cynics actually bring out the extreme in each other. The ridiculous cynic sees the epitome of absurdity in the scornful cynic: He demands (by taking himself so seriously) to be taken seriously, while refusing to repay the world in kind. On the other hand, the ridiculous cynic has let himself become truly absurd, and is certainly doing nothing worth anyone's time, which of course is what brings on a cynic's scorn.

On kitsch

Milan Kundera brings up kitsch a lot in The Unbearable Lightness of Being. He defines kitsch (incorrectly):
kitsch is the absolute denial of shit, in both the literal and figurative senses of the word; kitsch excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence.

This is not quite correct. Kundera is confusing two types of rejection: denial and exclusion. Denial seeks to forget, while exclusion makes the conscious effort to remember-- with disdain. Rather than deny shit, kitsch excludes shit from the beautiful with such vehemence that if something is not shit, it is regarded as beautiful.

"But!" you may be thinking, "kitsch rejects the truly artistic. This surely is not shit!" And you are correct; but I think Kundera offers a response: since shit is at the opposite end of the spectrum of beauty from art, they are, to use Kundera's words, "vertiginously close." And so, in order to exclude shit, kitsch rejects everything that reminds it of shit, including the artistic. The result is than kitsch accepts only the mediocre.

A pretty bathroom is an excellent example of kitsch. In order to exclude shit fully, all nonshit must be beautiful. The only way a pretty bathroom can be made ugly is for it to be covered in shit, so when there is no shit, beauty is guaranteed.