April 2008 Archives
I know, I know, you thought that you'd never hear the names Pat Robertson and Charles Taylor, infamous former president of Liberia, in the same sentence. It turns out that everyone's favorite televangelist apparently used his tax-exempt status and stature as a moral leader to raise millions of dollars for various "humanitarian operations" in destitute countries in Africa. It was, of course, only a mere coincidence that many of these countries happened to be well-endowed with diamonds. And again, it was mere coincidence that Mr. Robertson's "relief" money just happened to be used to fund diamond- and gold-mining operations. One particularly notable development was a deal struck with Mr. Taylor, described in an article in The Nation:
"Absolved of his sins, Robertson dug his heels back in African soil. In 1999 he signed an $8 million agreement with Liberian tyrant Charles Taylor that guaranteed Robertson's Freedom Gold Ltd.--an offshore company registered to the same address as his Christian Broadcasting Network--mining rights in Liberia, and gave Taylor a 10 percent stake in the company. When the United States intervened in Liberia in 2003, forcing Taylor and the Al Qaeda operatives he was harboring to flee, Robertson accused President Bush of 'undermining a Christian, Baptist president to bring in Muslim rebels to take over the country.'"
Critics of gentrification in Chicago will be happy to know that the South Side is still enough of a ghetto to have notoriety in popular music. While the latest homage is no "Bad, Bad Leroy Brown," Alec Brandon--my informant on all cultural and economic affairs in this world--recently informed me of Kanye West's new song and music video, "The Corner", about the life of drug dealing and related violence on the streets. For rap, it's actually not such a bad song, surprisingly. The CTA green line is featured often, including some shots of stations somewhere between the 55th and 35th street stations, there is a reference to "the stories told by Stony and Cottage Grove" (two streets which I live between), and some nice shots of Washington Park in the end. The funny thing is that Chicago really does look that depressing in the winter.
There has recently been a pervasive and disturbing trend in the teaching of elementary mathematics, emphasizing "real-world" applications and analogies as a means of teaching the subject. The approach necessarily reduces the stress placed on abstract formalism. Consequently, I believe that it is essentially useless and a waste of time to anyone who aspires to learn real mathematics as it is practiced today. But grandiose aspirations aside, there is a more pragmatic question that must be asked of this method of instruction: do the students learn better and faster? For some time now, this "applied" method has been lauded as being easier and more natural for students to learn. Shockingly, however, this hypothesis has not been rigorously tested. One of the first randomized experiments on the matter seems to indicate what I have suspected all along: students learn better from the abstract approach, while real-world analogies primarily serve to confuse and befuddle. While I doubt that such studies will have any impact on the generally incompetent primary mathematics education crowd, it's comforting to know that I am now learning mathematics the right way.
People thought that "Finite Simple Group of Order Two" was spectacular. I'm afraid the song "Baby Got Stats" provides some serious competition. Stata needs to adopt this for their next ad campaign.
I just wrote a very satisfying analysis of Robespierre's implementation of very unadulterated ideas from Rousseau in the French Revolution. I think that the French Revolution was a pretty faithful implementation of Rousseau, thereby giving good empirical evidence that he was catastrophically wrong in his Social Contract. It is amazing how influential that book became, considering how inconsistent and philosophically trashy it is, at least in my amateur opinion.
I recently had to write (a lamentably poor) essay on a number of texts, including this interesting essay by Kant:
Though, I disagree with a few points, Kant's view of enlightenment is a satisfying one. In particular, I am sympathetic to his belief that human nature and social structure conspire to repress the free exercise of reason. Even for the most intelligent and courageous people, it is difficult to be devoted to continual examination of ideas and questions. I won't deal with the many potential objections to this worldview, but I do think that one can consider Kant's argument as one of the reasons we see Kuhn's "scientific revolutions". Human nature is to always think along the path of least resistance, meaning that scientific knowledge proceeds within fixed paradigms until it totally self-destructs. Kant's argument is obviously not the same as Kuhn's, but the two seem very complementary.
