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Who do you hope wins the election in Greece today? As a starting point for discussion, I thought the headline of this Guardian article “A Syriza victory will mark the beginning of the end of Greece’s tragedy” might well turn out to be true if Syriza do win, albeit not in the way the left wing authors expect. June 17th, 2012 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
 “Frustrated that his (and fellow Googler Peter Norvig’s) Stanford artificial intelligence class only reached 200 students, they put up a website offering an online version. They got few takers. Then he mentioned the online course at a conference with 80 attendees and 80 people signed up. On a Friday, he sent an offer to the mailing list of a top AI association. On Saturday morning he had 3,000 sign-ups—by Monday morning, 14,000. In the midst of this, there was a slight hitch, Mr. Thrun says. “I had forgotten to tell Stanford about it. There was my authority problem. Stanford said ‘If you give the same exams and the same certificate of completion [as Stanford does], then you are really messing with what certificates really are. People are going to go out with the certificates and ask for admission [at the university] and how do we even know who they really are?’ And I said: I. Don’t. Care.” Via Instapundit. He was quoting from an article by the Wall Street Journal. Of course, such “remote learning” is not quite as new as it might appear: even the Open University system in the UK has been going for more than 40 years. But the internet and related technologies are accelerating developments in this vein. Given all the issues surrounding the need to cut the cost of the public sector and improve standards and teaching, anything that can drive change in a better direction is a good thing. I wish this “education entrepreneur” well. If the best minds in Silicon Valley – and elsewhere – get involved, then this is one of those developments that will be arguably more significant than any amount of public service tinkering that usually makes more noise in the news. Of course, his supreme blog highness, Instapundit’s Glenn Reynolds, has been pushing the whole theme of there being a higher education “bubble” for some time, but being the kind of person he is, does not just complain. He likes to pounce on examples of how to move education in a saner direction. June 16th, 2012 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
I came across the nine-year-old girl blogging about her school dinners a few weeks ago. Now the local council have banned her from taking photos of her meals because they did not like the attention she generated. I think this amounts to a freedom of speech violation because the school canteen is not private property, it is controlled by the state. The council has annoyed the Internet; The Streisand effect looms over them. June 15th, 2012 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
“Historically, remember, Andrew Carnegie was a Scottish immigrant; John Roebling, a German one; Nikola Tesla, a Serb who emigrated from Croatia; Albert Einstein was a German immigrant who became a U.S. citizen in 1940; the great economist, Ludwig von Mises, was an Austrian immigrant; and Ayn Rand, author of Atlas Shrugged, a Russian one. The list could be indefinitely extended. In our day, Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, emigrated to the U.S. from the Soviet Union. Jerry Yang, co-founder of Yahoo, emigrated to America from Taiwan. Vinod Khosla, one of the founders of Sun Microsystems, is an Indian immigrant; Andreas Bechtolsheim, another of Sun’s founders, a German one. This list, too, could be greatly extended.” June 15th, 2012 | 24 comments - (Comments are closed)
News can travel fast these days, but this particular bit of news took its time reaching me. It started in Covent Garden, then went to Oddity Central, then to here, in Canada, and from there to here, which is based somewhere (I think) in a southern state of the USA, where I read it, I being about two pleasant little walks away from Covent Garden. And now it is here:
According to this, this gun is still perfectly legal here in Britain. Nevertheless, my first thought was (hence that link): isn’t there some kind of law here against replica guns? Call it the chilling effect. Would you prefer me to be more serious about guns in Britain? Not tonight thank you. The subject is too depressing. June 14th, 2012 | 3 comments - (Comments are closed)
Could Brussels have been taken over by saboteurs, a secret army of eurosceptic infiltrators and spies masquerading as officials? I only ask because it now almost seems as if Spain’s bailout was deliberately designed not merely to fail but to inflict maximum damage on the Spanish economy and the entire Eurozone. Rarely have I seen such incompetence. June 14th, 2012 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
I like this comment:
It’s from “Larry3435”, and is attached to a piece by Jennifer Rubin entitled Obama’s economic approach a dud with voters. It is important for libertarians like me not to confuse a bunch of people who think we probably shouldn’t have very much more government than we can pay for with people who think we definitely should have a lot less government than we can pay for, which is what we libertarians reckon, among other things. Still, it’s a start. June 13th, 2012 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
I usually agree with Roger Simon, but I have some points to pick with this attempt to compare Nixon with Obama:
Well, I suppose it is true that some of the regulation of pollution and so on did some good, and yes, the China issue was played fairly well. But this article commits a sin of ommission: there is no mention whatever of the abandonment of the gold link to the dollar (admittedly, the link was a mere formality by the early 70s anyway, but still) and the institution of price controls, a pure example of King Canute Economics. Nixon was not as evil as he is portrayed, maybe, and it is true that he pissed off a lot of the right people, but he also pissed off a lot of the wrong ones as well. I think that is possibly where Obama has a common bond. Not only has The One done things guaranteed to annoy conservatives, he hasn’t exactly been a great liberal president in the best use of that word, either. June 13th, 2012 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
A thing I keep banging on about is that a crucial stage in an argument occurs when the burden of proof gets reversed. Crackpot Theorists devise a Crackpot Theory. It unites them. It excites them. It excuses their shared belief that The Free Market Is Not Good Enough. They demand action from each other. They capture small parts of government departments that most people don’t give a damn about. They write small laws and get them passed. A few Critics notice, and start explaining that the Crackpot Theory is, maybe, a crackpot theory. The Crackpot Theorists say: No it isn’t! The Critics say: But you are making bad decisions! The Crackpot Theorists say: No we aren’t! As this phase of the argument gets seriously going, the Critics become ever more convinced that the Crackpot Theorists are indeed Crackpot Theorists, and because the Crackpot Theorists are behaving like the maniacal Crackpot Theorists that they are, the Critics grow in number, and in their certainty that the Crackpot Theorists are totally crackpot. The small bits of the government departments grow into big bits, and infect other bits. The laws they introduce get bigger and more intrusive. But sadly, nobody else cares, or not enough to stop all this. The money and inconvenience involved is still trivial, by the usual standards of government-imposed expense and inconvenience. Let the Crackpot Theorists have their fun! And besides: Maybe, just maybe, the Crackpot Theorists are onto something. Better safe than sorry! Anyway, what can you do? As the Crackpot Theory grows in power, powerless people start to notice and to cry out: Your Crackpot Theory is just an excuse for us to be taxed more! Alas, for many people this is a feature, not a bug. Throughout this phase of the history of the Crackpot Theory, the Critics of the Crackpot Theory are in the impossible position of having only one way of stopping the rise to prominence of the Crackpot Theory, which is to convince the Crackpot Theorists that they are wrong. Some Crackpot Theorists are convinced. Quite a few of them creep away in ashamed silence. A tiny few even say in public that they were wrong. But others of them are now so wholly dependent for their livelihoods upon the Crackpot Theory being true that they stick with it anyway, despite now suspecting or even knowing what total crackpottery it is. What can they do? Until, one day, the Crackpot Theorists pick a fight with a group of people powerful enough for their anger to actually matter, to the entire world. At which point, the burden of proof, hitherto weighing down only upon the shoulders of the Critics, now descends upon the shoulders of the Crackpot Theorists themselves. Suddenly, they have to convince the world that they are right and that their Critics are wrong. They have to convince their Critics that their Critics are wrong, just to shut their Critics up from saying what the world now wants to be told, namely that the fight with those powerful and angry people is a fight that is not worth having. But our Crackpot Theory says that we must have this fight! No matter what! The world must be saved, even if it is ruined in the process! I’m just thinking aloud, you understand. Having seen this (linked to just now by the ever-alert Instapundit):
Wei Zhenzhong, secretary general of the China Air Transport Association, said:
If that’s not a powerful and angry person threatening a trade war, I don’t know what is. If the trade war duly happens, next up: So, Crackpot Theorists, is your Crackpot Theory true enough to be worth stuff like this? Go ahead. Convince us. June 13th, 2012 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
Bishop Hill always likes to see the best in people. He assumes good faith unless it is overwhelmingly obvious that it is absent. So he is pleased to report that the House of Commons Committee on Energy and Climate Change has announce that it is to hold an inquiry into the economics of wind power. But this time, says the Bishop:
Confession: when I first read that, I assumed that I was reading this:
I have had to do a complete rewrite of this bit of the posting. I contrasted that with the following comments. In fact the following comments agree! Deep apologies. This is the biggest mis-reading I have ever committed as a blogger. I think. I hope. Anyway, back to that evidence-based policy making.
Or as I should have put: A commenter read most of the questions the Committee says it will ask as I did, at first, and he wondered: why the sarcasm? But most of the Bishop’s commenters The first one says:
And another says:
And another:
Biggest question of all: Is it actually necessary to fret about “climate change”? Something tells me that this Committee will assume a yes on that. So, take your pick. Better late than never, or too bloody late? Enough of the right questions, or too many wrong assumptions? What I mostly think is: Keep blogging away Bishop. Kudos for spotting this, and further kudos for reporting what gets asked and what answers are forthcoming, as I assume you will when the time comes. There is something very old fashioned about blogs like Bishop Hill. While the newspapers mostly now bang on about celebs and football tournaments, here is a blogger actually spotting some at least potentially quite significant news, and reporting on it. June 13th, 2012 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
I just watched a late night TV show done by, and about, the ventriloquist Nina Conti, who is completely new to me. Very good. Such are the wonders of the internet that I can immediately now share my pleasure with you, complete with a link to a much shorter but equally funny video. That’s her and the monkey doing the Montreal Comedy Festival. What I find so funny about Ms. Conti is that her personality on stage is so unstagey, so unshowbizzy, so un-actressy, just precisely as self-consciously embarrassed, yet gigglingly entertained, as she would be if she were talking to an actual monkey, on a stage, in front of lots of people. Yet what she is doing is the oldest of old school showbizz. Brilliant, I think. Acting of the highest quality. She is very ambitious. Not willing to be a regular old school ventriloquist. She will either take the ancient art to new heights, or fall off the mountain trying. Very admirable. Favourite line in the short video:
Also good:
The monkey sounds ever so slightly Welsh. I wonder why.
She seems totally sane. Apart, that is to say, from having an imaginary monkey attached to her arm. Does that make her mad? Or does it keep her sane? June 13th, 2012 | 3 comments - (Comments are closed)
Recent posting at WUWT? Gordon J. Fulks:
But the reason seems clear. Drapela is a climate skeptic. Says commenter number one:
Except that I bet that more people have been fired by American universities for being climate skeptics than were ever fired for being Communists. I favour a world in which people can be fired for any stupid reason at all, provided there is no contract saying otherwise. Employee beware. But this case does shine a bright light on what a huge industry-stroke-secular-religion Climate Catastrophism has become. The idea that the big money is all on the side of climate skepticism is ludicrous. Who pays for Oregon State University? Do they know what they are paying for? Do they like it? Might they be persuaded to stop paying? Maybe if questions of that sort were asked loudly enough, and if they started to be answered, Drapela might get his job back. June 12th, 2012 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
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