camryl9's Public Library

...it's hard to believe they are still trying to get away with the claim that tax cuts will increase revenue and actually help with the long-term deficit -- that won't happen, it will make the deficit worse just as it did in the past.

There was a time when Republicans believed that both monetary and fiscal policy had a role to play in recessions, monetary policy in particular. Milton Friedman, for example, believed the Fed should intervene to stabilize the economy during a financial crisis. Today, however, Republicans do not believe that the Fed and Treasury should bail out banks even in a severe crisis. Saving banks, no matter how big, creates the incentive to take on too much risk and delays the necessary cleansing that needs to occur before we can return to economic health. Thus, no banks should be saved even if it means tolerating high levels of unemployment.

An ongoing debate in the foundations of physics concerns the role of mathematical rigor in theorizing. The contrasting views of von Neumann and Dirac provide interesting and informative insights concerning two sides of this debate. Von Neumann's contributions often emphasize mathematical rigor and Dirac's contributions emphasize pragmatic concerns. The discussion below begins with an assessment of their contributions to the foundations of quantum mechanics.

The recursive functions, which form a class of computable functions, take their name from the process of “recurrence” or “recursion”. In its most general numerical form the process of recursion consists in defining the value of a function by using other values of the same function. In this entry, we provide an account of the class of recursive functions, with particular emphasis on six basic kinds of recursion: iteration, primitive recursion, primitive recursion with parameters, course-of-value recursion, and double recursion. We then examine some theorems relating to these types of recursion.

One recurring theme that motivates the present discussion is the question of how the basic ideas and methods used in recursion theory, which is a defining area of of logic, derive from, or at least interact with, a wider mathematical and intellectual experience.

Some ideas are better than others. The machinery for distinguishing them is an essential tool in dealing with the world and especially in dealing with the future.
--Carl Sagan on mastering the vital balance between skepticism and open-mindedness

Rockstar-statistician Hans Rosling has previously explained why the washing machine sparked the reading revolution and how 200 countries changed over 200 years. In this shortest TED talk ever given, Rosling uses a stack of stones to explain how global population growth will affect wealth distribution in the future and what will happen to the gap between the rich and the poor.

lobby
The 15 freshmen Republican representatives in the House Tea Party Caucus each ran in 2010 on a populist anti-Wall Street message, highlighting their opposition to bank bailouts like the 2008 Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) and criticizing Washington for enabling the banking sector as it became “Too Big to Fail.” After winning, all fifteen received significant PAC contributions from the banking industry — and have become a reliable vote and mouthpiece for the financial industry, a ThinkProgress analysis of campaign contributions, voting records and public statements reveals. ...

dwarf, roof, Kennedy, octopus, etc.

“Yes, As soon as…”

Don’t get me wrong. A four-year college degree is still valuable. Over your lifetimes, you’ll earn about 70 percent more than people who don’t have the pieces of parchment you’re picking up today.

But this parchment isn’t as valuable as it once was. ...

The extraordinary rise in student debt is due to two related facts: the cost of a college education continues to increase faster than inflation, and state and local spending per college student continues to drop – this year reaching a 25-year low. ...

At some point in the not-too-distant future these lines cross. College is no longer a good investment.

That’s a problem for you and for those who will follow you into these hallowed halls, but it’s also a problem for America as a whole.

You see, a college education isn’t just a private investment. It’s also a public good. This nation can’t be competitive globally, nor can we have a vibrant and responsible democracy, without a large number of well-educated people.

So it’s not just you who are burdened by these trends. If they continue, we’re all f*cked.

education

women_in_stem_fields science

Based on my own experience and on many discussions with other writers, there seem to be a lot of different approaches to researching character and setting. Some of us just dive right in and either stop to do research as necessary or make notes about what we need to research and just keep writing around the blanks. ...

I’d advise choosing character details because they grab you, because they make the character more interesting and complex, because they’ll drive the story, or because they make an interesting cocktail with other characteristics.

writing

Matt Taibbi, rockstar financial journalist, has a new lengthy piece in Rolling Stone on How Wall Street Killed Financial Reform. I highly recommend the article, which covers strategies used by big banks to fight the implementation of the Dodd-Frank act. ...

Ok, here’s my problem with this narrative: Roosevelt didn’t do it! Well, FDR did in fact sign each of these laws into existence. But FDR was not the driving force behind them. ...

Why does it matter that Congress, not FDR, provided the momentum for Glass-Steagall? For one, I think it reminds us of the importance of Congress in making and enforcing the rules. Democrats controlled Congress in 1933 when Glass-Steagall was passed, but they continued to control it well past the law’s implementations – for more than the next decade, in fact. In contrast, Democrats lost control of the House before Dodd-Frank was implemented. ...

We tend to read back into history the modern executive, with their immense power. And that’s just bad history. ...The more we talk about “FDR did this” and “Obama should do this,” the more we naturalize the current power of the president as an inherent feature of the system. That makes for bad history, and also tends to foreclose discussions of the future.

Remix Culture is a term popularized by Lawrence Lessig to describe how we continuously reinvent and reuse bits of culture. The most obvious examples are song remixes, mash-ups, fan music videos, and the like. Lessig argues that copyright laws should be reformed to make such remixes easier for fans to produce and distribute. It turns out that Mark Twain held a quite similar opinion, as laid out in a letter he sent to Helen Keller in response to learning of an allegation of plagiarism against her based on the similarities between a story she had published and an earlier work. Here’s Twain: ...

intellectual_property

In The Great Transformation, Karl Polanyi argued that fascism and social democracy (e.g. the New Deal) both arose in the 1930s as reactions to the collapse of the free market order. It's 2012, and we're four years into another big economic downturn affecting wide swaths of Europe and the US. ...

And, this week, we see that Greece's neo-Nazi party, Golden Dawn,* has gained its largest vote share yet - though still only 6-8% - and will have representation in parliament. I don't know what happens next, but the political reactions to the contemporary economic crisis are going to be scary.

science

An entry into the Blown Covers weekly cover contest, themed “The Gays,” by writer and illustrator Ella German. The cover addresses the recent historic moment for marriage equality, also referencing Maurice Sendak, who had passed away the previous week. Though far from a gay rights activist, Sendak lived as an openly gay man with his partner of half a century. The two never had the opportunity to marry.

art

...this sentiment from Quesada manages to both insult all of Marvel’s female characters and all actresses everywhere in one fell swoop. But even more impressive is the fact that less than two weeks ago a movie debuted that is destroying box office records everywhere AND getting huge critical and fan acclaim.  A movie with a large ensemble cast, that stars, in part, one of Marvel’s greatest female superheroes, and one of Hollywood’s hottest young actresses, and this character and performance are also getting huge kudos.  I speak of course of The Avengers, and Black Widow, and Scarlett Johansson. ...




Yes…Marvel, can you please give me a job in your Public Relations department stat. Because this is not fucking rocket science.

sexism

video