weekly photo #55: Tide October 31, 2007
Posted by ocmpoma in : other , add a comment
Another of the pics I took recently; in fact, this is another from Andrew Molera State Park. One of the joys of visiting Andrew Molera is following the main trail down to where the Big Sur River hits the Pacific, curving around a beach (which is out of frame to the left) to hug a small cliff face (the end of which is visible in the right middleground). You can see the white tumult of an incoming tide there in the middleground — unfortunately, the photo, called “Tide”, doesn’t do justice to watching the waves ride above and against the river’s current, eventually coming to a sort of hovering standstill.
Tags for this article: art , Big Sur , California , photos
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founder October 30, 2007
Posted by ocmpoma in : society , add a commentfounder:
verb (used without object)
(of a ship, boat, etc.) to fill with water and sink.
That’s the second definition of founder, from dictionary.com.
Anyway, this post is prompted specifically by a post over at EvolutionBlog; specifically, this part:
“Michael Medved chimes in with his argument for the proposition that the American Founders wanted to establish a Christian nation, as opposed to a secular nation. Here is an example of his logic:
‘THE FOUNDERS NEVER WANTED TO ESTABLISH A SECULAR NATION. In fact, they repeatedly and insistently averred that the survival of liberty and the prosperity of the United States required a deeply religious society and a populace passionately committed to organized faith.’”
Now, unlike a lot of secularists and, shall I say, left-leaning folks I’ve read on the ol’ blogowebs, I don’t really think that the notion paraded here is incorrect. In fact, I’ll come out and say it:
I don’t think the founders wanted a country where religion was in any way marginilized or played ’second fiddle’ to a secular society — even where the sphere of government is concerned. I certainly think that they wanted to restrict the role religion played in government; the founders were fully aware of the destruction, civil and political as well as personal, caused by religious warfare. I certainly think that the founders wanted to avoid any formal endorsement of any religion by the government. But I have to agree with the statement that the founders were not seeking to establish a purely secular society. A secular-minded government, yes, but not a secular society.
But.
I also must insist on this fine point: I don’t give a fuck what the founders wanted.
The founders didn’t want a secular country? Big deal. The founders didn’t want a direct, popular election of the president. The founders didn’t want judicial oversight of the legislative or executive branch. (Judicial review is not in the Constitution, it came a bit later). The founders didn’t want women to vote. The founders thought that a black person who was owned by someone not only could legally be owned, but was quantified as worth 1/3 of a person, at least politically.
News flash for those who love to trot out the “founders’ intent” in an attempt to justify anything: the founders lived over two hundred years ago. The founders were mired, as are we all, in their place and time and culture. The founders had their share of short-sightedness; the founders had their share of bad ideas.
The founders were men, not demi-gods, and just because they thought something was a good idea, doesn’t mean that it was. The founders lived in a country that was radically different from the one we live in. The vast majority of people living in the United States when it was founded were white Christians. The second-largest group of people were slaves. The number of people who were non-Christian, or non-European, was a very small percentage.
To think that we should guide current policy based on what some people who lived over two centuries ago, in what is in effect no only a foreign country, but in another world, is nothing short of ludicrous. The one real stroke of creativity, the one real spark of pure genius which the founders had was to create a written constitution and form of government with a built in ability to change.
I repeat: I don’t give a fuck what the founders wanted the USA to be. This is our country, not theirs.
Tags for this article: politics , stupidity
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incentivizing peer review October 29, 2007
Posted by ocmpoma in : open access , add a commentVia A Blog Around the Clock, a post over at PLoS on improving peer review.
As I understand the peer review process, there are really only two incentives to reviewers to do a good job: first is the fact that it’s “part of the job” of being an academic, this is a rather soft incentive; second is the ability of a reviewer to keep bad ideas from being circulated, this is also not much of a real incentive, especially considering the work involved in doing a good review.
I like the idea of making the review process more open; preserving anonymity wouldn’t be too difficult and the process could be possibly be made more open to others who aren’t designated reviewers to comment, as well.
I agree wholeheartedly with Pedro Beltrao’s comment on creating a ‘reputation system’. I think that reviewers could have a rank similar to the citation rank, this would incentivize reviewers to do a good job and reward those scientists and academics who review as well as publish.
Tags for this article: open access , science
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heavy water October 28, 2007
Posted by ocmpoma in : other , add a commentUncertain Principles on how much rain you would need for a ton.
Tags for this article: science
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cluster October 26, 2007
Posted by ocmpoma in : other , add a commentI have to say, since I put it up on the page (thanks, Chris!), my clustr map (it’s down on the lower right) certainly grew some nice red dots. I’m especially impressed by the ones that popped up in places on that map that I would hardly have ever expected — including Hong Kong, South Africa, Saudia Arabia. I’d like to thank the ‘furners’ for dropping in and hope that they keep coming back for more!
Of course, I’d be remiss not to mention my regular visitors, who are mostly from the States and the UK — a big thanks to you, as well!
Update: Of course, the map’s reset now, so if you haven’t checked it out, well, you can watch it grow like a pox-infested… err… nevermind.
Tags for this article: maps
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RAND re-visit October 25, 2007
Posted by ocmpoma in : economics , add a commentMarginal Revolution has a follow-up post to the RAND study, apparent problems with which I mentioned earlier. RAND has responded; commenters on MR seem to disagree somewhat with Alex Tabarrok’s take that the study is vindicated…
Tags for this article: economics , politics , science
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re-allocation October 24, 2007
Posted by ocmpoma in : economics , add a commentAt Cafe Hayek, Don Boudreaux notes, with regards to the government using National Guard units that could be fighting fires deployed to Iraq, that
“…this war, while it does interfere with efforts to extinguish wildfires, does not interfere any more so than does nearly any other government program you care to name… To use a worker or raw materials fighting a war is to take that worker and those materials, at least for a time, away from other potentially valuable uses… …But the fact that the war effort detracts from the ability to get other goodies is not itself a sound argument against the war.”
While I of course agree that any usage of available resources detracts from a government’s ability to use those resources elsewhere, I think a key point is glossed over in the post. Taking all of, say, Arizona’s state police forces and re-deploying them along the border with Mexico, it would seem to me, has a much more significant effect on the state government’s ability to fight crime than does cutting funds from other programs in order to form an equivalent force.
In other words, the federal government’s use of resources which are already dedicated to fire-fighting for war-fighting has a greater effect on fire-fighting than other things such as using police to prosecute a “war” on drugs — especially when one factors in re-deployment costs. It would take much more time and money to pull the National Guard units deployed overseas back to the States than it would to pull police off of anti-drug units and deploy them to evacuate a fire zone.
So, I find that while I do agree that any government program automatically detracts from the government’s ability to engage in any other program, I must disagree with the equivalence that is stated (”…does not interfere any more so than does nearly any other government program…”). Of course, it is only fitting to note that putting National Guard units stateside to fight fires would dramatically lessen the government’s ability to prosecute the war.
Tags for this article: economics , politics
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weekly quote #5: Walter Isaacson October 23, 2007
Posted by ocmpoma in : other , add a commentI just finished reading Mr Isaacson’s biography Benjamin Franklin: An American Life. Overall I found it good in its pacing, detail, and perspective, although heavy-handed in its reverence of the founding and especially of the Constitutional Convention in the Philadelphia summer of 1787.
But, I find I must agree with Mr Isaacson’s assessment of Franklin’s key strength in that convention, found on page 491 of my edition, in “Conclusions”:
“Compromisers may not make great heroes, but they do make great democracies.”
Tags for this article: politics , quotation
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exaggerating for effect October 22, 2007
Posted by ocmpoma in : economics, food & drink, society , add a commentOver at Free Exchange, it is explained why beer is the economy.
And Paul Feldman guest posts at Freakonomics on how fire fighters can save us all from global climate change.
