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virtus1
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Name: VIRTUS
Birthday: 1/1/1920
Interests: Public displays of praxeology, logicians, particle physics, and really good peaches.
Occupation: I'm preoccupied.
Industry: I don't own an industry. Sorr
Message: message me
Member Since:
6/16/2006
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| What is something or someone you find completely overrated?
I just answered this Featured Question, you can answer it too!
Politicians! | | |
| Values which speak to us.Some years ago, I was walking around Saffron Walden. A light snow fell the night before, and it was cold outside. As I approached St. Mary's on the High Street, I looked beyond the gates and up the narrow path through the courtyard. I approached the parish church and saw the snow piled neatly on the old gravestones which were pushed against the wall. The tower pointed to the heavens while the cold reddened my pale cheeks. Centuries of people have stood in this very spot forcing me to join an unbroken chain of humanity.
This was beautiful. This is the launching spot for my discussion of aesthetics.
Why is it beautiful. The old gothic church is pointy with its spire and gothic windows. From my viewing angle, its height and width didn't achieve the most harmonious ratio known as the golden ratio. The weather was not as appealing as a warm April day. Why was it beautiful? The place spoke to me of values which subjectively are most important. Lets ponder this.
Aside: My leg is healing and it won't need surgery. Yay. | | |
|  | Currently Listening
Bizet: Carmen (complete opera) with Maria Callas, Nicolai Gedda, Georges Pretre, Paris Opera Orchestra
By Georges Bizet, Maria Callas, Nicolai Gedda, Georges Prêtre, Orchestre de Théâtre National de l'Opéra de Paris, Choeurs René Duclos, Robert Massard, Jane Berbié, Andrea Guiot, Claude Cales
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Ouch.Today was a perfect day to ride the dirt bike. Right at the beginning, I screwed my leg up and will need crutches for a while. Expletive! Expletive! Expletive! Forget that. Blood is pooling in my foot as this is being written, and I expect it to look wild and Technicolor tomorrow. That will be slightly cool.
Seriously, though, the weather is too good not to ride. Medical advice be damned, I'm riding once I figure out how to kick start the 250. Some tape and my motocross boots (which provide lots of support) should get me to the track. Kicking the bike with my left leg isn't an option for several reasons, and I don't think bump starting a 2T is a good idea.
On a different note, pictures of the stirling engine under construction will be posted soon. Instead of riding, I mounted the standard, crankshaft, bearings, flywheel, power cylinder, and and machined the displacer gland. The machine should run after machining the displacer cylinder and sorting out the linkages. Some engineering changes have been necessary, but things are going quickly.
Soon discussions of aesthetics - the branch of philosophy which explores why things are beautiful will appear in this blog. | | |
| Rotten FoundationsA student came to me in a complete panic. His macro 2 professor started the semester with the typical dive into the mathematically themed version of mainstream economics. This version is the most incomplete and dissatisfying school of economics and the one that will surely turn off students to the satisfying ideas of praxeology and catallactics. I explained the same thing to him in non-mathematical terms and he got the picture right away.
Those in macroeconomics, heed this warning.
In the "standard macroeconomic model" the beginning assumption is firms combine labor (N) and Capital (K) in a true but incomplete function to produce output (Y). Mainstream assumptions are thus: Y=F(K,N) where changes to other economic variables are held constant and only one variable is changed in the economic experiment. It is assumed that labor and capital are perfectly substitutable as noted by the partial derivatives of labor and capital being equal to the partial derivatives of capital and labor and each being greater than zero. This function must become infinitely complex to reflect reality. For example, firms don't combine all of its labor and capital, and there are more inputs (or anti-inputs) which need to be reflected by this equation.
Does that sound even remotely realistic? Is it realistic to put a person with less than a high school education working in a chicken processing plant in a high energy physics lab as a physicist? Can we just replace the physicist with a computer? We can't do this.
From this mindless foundation, we discount the function of labor and capital, subtract the wage expenses, subtract material production costs, and subtract the installation costs of capital.This is done in the first half hour of class if things are going slowly. Households, decision criteria, lots of calculus and matrix algebra quickly swamp the budding scholar into a morass of black moods and irritability. The very foundations of this economic model are corrupt yielding error at every further step in the construction of the mainstream model.
Why do economics departments hold on to this dogma? Why shun a text based approach? Some say approaches like the Austrian approach will lead to the error caused by a lack of precision when the rigid frame of mathematics are removed. We must realize, though, the world does not revolve around the simplified assumptions (and aggregations) of L or K. We must understand that K means not only the machines in a microchip factory but the screwdriver in the corner of my desk. Tell your professors that neither labor nor capital are homogeneous. | | |
| Paranoid ParkParanoid Park
Not being satisfied with the previous version of this post, I replaced it. Once again, this is going to be a discussion of strictly my reaction to the movie Paranoid Park. There are several parts of the movie that mold symbols from the raw story, but these analytical points and they are not the point of this post.
Paranoid Park struck a nerve. Its main plot is unrealistic in that there was an accidental death attributed to the protagonist, Alex. Specifically, he accidentally kills security guard when Alex jumps on board a slow moving train just for a thrill ride. The security guard sees Alex and runs alongside the train beating the protagonist with a giant Mag-Light. This is a rugged aluminum flashlight that when filled with batteries can deliver quite a wallop. Alex uses his skateboard to defensively push the guard away, but the guard falls in front of a fast moving train on a parallel track.
The police connect Alex's skateboard to the guard’s demise. Duplicity is the crutch of the clueless, and the cops in the movie have a monopoly on that. Unrealistically, the police treat Alex’s "skater community" with kid gloves. To deal with the complex issues swirling in his life, Alex writes a letter to a character that breezes in and out of the film like a puff of smoke from a pipe. Writing about the events of the events of that tragic day, the director uses Alex’s letter to tie all the fragmented subplots together.
It is the collection of finished and unfinished subplots that make the movie. These fragments and the way the movie was filmed got to me.
Background:
I am a typical gen-x'er who grew up riding BMX, hung with skaters, and had all the typical latch-key kid hang-ups. My parents divorced, and I was allowed lots of latitude. Much of my time was spent hanging out with friends in a town that clearly defined who were locals and who were not. The sexual tension in several of the subplots echoed my experience. Alex seemingly walks the same path (main plot aside) that I walked. Is this film serious or is it just target marketing?
Some scenes in the movie look like they were shot in 8mm and provoke a gentle serene feeling. A neighborhood in the area was only half completed when they stopped building houses. Left at the end of this dead end road were several tall piles of packed dirt when the construction was abandoned. We built ramps out of scrap wood, and carved BMX track out of the old mounds of dirt. My friend D.O., his brother, and a group of us non-locals would ride and skate here.
There would often be a dozen of us hanging around and riding or skating. I sat, like Alex, and became absorbed. There wasn't music in my head like the film suggests, but still. I got it because I lived it. Even now, I can go to a motocross track or enduro trails and, after a good ride, can just get absorbed into watching the other people ride. When you are in the groove, everything seems to go in slow motion. It is serenity. The film captured this.
The Flick:
Some other subplots are similar. A cheerleader seduces Alex, and I lost my virginity to a cheerleader (really). My school was bent on preppy conformity, and I usually did my own thing. There is a great vignette where the cops hassle a bunch of skaters for riding on public sidewalks. Ditto. There are lots of differences in the fine details, but that is OK.
Alex comes off as just a nice guy in a world bent on worshiping heroes who are empty suits, and strange people being jerks. For example the antagonist (filmed as a guy with a creepy gaunt figure whose wrinkles cast strong shadows) bugs Alex to borrow his board. Alex politely tells him to bugger off. It is the antagonist who gets him to take a joyride on the side of the train. The antagonist represents temptation, and we can take the lesson that temptation leads to trouble. I recognize that now that I am older than 16.
In the movie and in life, society is really screwed up, and Alex just looks dispassionately at the world and shrugs his shoulders. What a statement.
Movies drive me crazy with boredom. They are usually gushy or sappy, they assume I am an idiot, or they feature humor that simply is retarded. Nearly any movie associated with MTV or Saturday Night Live is pure crap. In short, they are a waste of time and money. Paranoid Park isn't. | | |
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