Richard Feynman

Richard Feynman: "Richard Phillips Feynman (pronounced /ˈfaɪnmən/, May 11, 1918 – February 15, 1988) was an American physicist known for his work in the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics, the theory of quantum electrodynamics and the physics of the superfluidity of supercooled liquid helium, as well as in particle physics (he proposed the parton model). For his contributions to the development of quantum electrodynamics, Feynman, jointly with Julian Schwinger and Sin-Itiro Tomonaga, received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965."

(A video will show up if you click "read more")

Full Length Movies (these are really worth watching):
The Last Journey of a Genius
The Pleasure of Finding Things Out
Some of his physics lectures are posted here (thanks Bill!).
And a great book: Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!

Here's a story from the book:

Blogs I like...

This will be useful when I'm not at my computer. Generally I don't feel like I'm wasting my time if I'm reading something on these blogs because I learn something new.

Science Related:
Neurologica Blog
Frontal Cortex
Evolutionary Psychology Blog
Political:
Ezra Klein
The Monkey Cage
Randomness:
The New Yorker Blogs
The Daily Dish

Always validate your prejudices always.

Please forgive me for my previous posts. I understand that they were very "2009" and did not follow the "retro" look that this blog is "going for". I wish you knew how funny I think I am.

So, as I have "grown up", mostly starting around 2006 (probably), I have practiced critical thinking and have significantly dropped my prejudices. My previous feelings or beliefs weren't influenced by any one person, I wasn't preached hate or encouraged to judge people. However I heard everyone's subtle racism and sexism and I was absorbed in TV and music that fed those prejudices. I never felt that I was significantly better than another "race" or gender, but I definitely thought I was somewhat better, whether I would admit it or not.

The biggest observation I have made by just listening to people talk, is that the majority of people don't consider themselves racist. They will just make remarks like "it is what it is", or "thats the way things are". What these people are not realizing is that they are constantly validating their negative feelings towards other groups of people. You might not think that you do this sort of thing, but ask yourself what happens when a woman cuts you off in traffic. What if it is an Asian person who cut you off? You will definately make a note, likely verbally, about the person who did this and how their physical appearance ties in to the decision that they made. You will add this to your fucking bank of "See, (insert defining human characteristic) can't drive!!!" Now what happens when someone just like you does the same exact thing. You will likely say "What a dick!". You will not consider this at all as a reflection of this persons skin color or age or gender, because they are just like you and you don't possess any traits that make mistakes such as this!

A bigger problem is when there seems to be "proof" for why you feel a certain way. I immediately think about white people who will make statements about the crime rate and prison populations of "those blacks". This is where critical thinking is very important, you don't believe any stat that you hear at face value. Just because these statements are true, it does not accurately reflect the true nature of any black person. There are variables that produce this outcome. Generations of people born into poverty and crime, you were lucky enough not be one of them, who do you think you would be in those conditions? If you think that the Civil Rights Act of 1968 means everybody starts living on a level playing field in "nice" neighborhood and can now get good education and good jobs, than you are incapable of critical thinking. If you understand the recent history of the United States of America, you will surely understand why those numbers exist.

Maybe another time I can write, "If you born as black inmate #3, you would surely be black inmate # 3, you are not special".

Random People

After deleting (editorial decision from my corporate overlords) Shane's last post, I'll be continuously updating this useless post (probably).

Randomly thought of people:
Charles Ferguson
Matt Dillahunty
Richard Feynman
Malcolm X
Dexter Filkins
Bill Easterly
Carl Zimmer
Bertrand Russell
Zainab Salbi
Noam Chomsky
Atul Gawande
George Packer
Robert Sapolsky
Jane Meyer
Frederick Douglass
Paul Krugman
Carl Sagan
Peter Singer
Robert Crumb
Matt Taibbi
Jennifer Michael Hecht
Bill Moyers
Cass Sunstein
David Foster Wallace
Andrew Bacevich

Techno-triumphalism!

Awesome series on the perils of relying solely on "rational" or "technological" systems to dictate decision making on a whole societal scale:

Pandora's Box (1992) BBC

Part 1 details the Soviet Union's massive Stalinist techno-bureaucracy and the resulting tragic comedy of wholly top-down planned economies. Teh world.

Look at this child...

The 65-year old "dude" behind Abercrombie & Fitch.

From a Salon.com article:

He wants desperately to look like his target customer (the casually flawless college kid), and in that pursuit he has aggressively transformed himself from a classically handsome man into a cartoonish physical specimen: dyed hair, perfectly white teeth, golden tan, bulging biceps, wrinkle-free face, and big, Angelina Jolie lips...Jeffries wouldn't discuss any of that with me, and he fidgeted nervously and grew visibly agitated when I asked about several of the many controversies and lawsuits he has weathered in his 14 years at the helm of A&F. Our first bump came when I mentioned the 2002 uproar over the company's thongs for middle-school girls, which had "Eye Candy" and "Wink Wink" printed on their fronts. "That was a bunch of bullshit," he said, sweating profusely. "People said we were cynical, that we were sexualizing little girls. But you know what? I still think those are cute underwear for little girls...As far as Jeffries is concerned, America's unattractive, overweight or otherwise undesirable teens can shop elsewhere. "In every school there are the cool and popular kids, and then there are the not-so-cool kids," he says. "Candidly, we go after the cool kids. We go after the attractive all-American kid with a great attitude and a lot of friends. A lot of people don't belong [in our clothes], and they can't belong. Are we exclusionary? Absolutely.

He's been amazingly successful at his job, but in 2009 he got paid $71.8 million dollars while his company made $254,000 total (compared to $273 million in 2008).
Why did this company have to exist when I was in middle school?

21st Century Blogging Criteria. June 2002 updated update.

Bozo.

Bozo.

Live with and die from the

Bozo.

Feel Free in your thoughts
Feel Free in your body(s)
Live Free or die changing your mind.


Give all you have to yourself.
This is blueprint to European success.


Get away from it, separate for now.
Come back after apocalypse.

The honorable pastor Manning...

The real life uncle ruckus.

New season of Boondocks starts May 2nd.

Read this fucking shit. tell me if it's good

This is my "FINAL FUCKING PROJECT" of college in regards to my Urban Studies Minor, and I want to post it on the Internet. Internet is always capitalized. Sad.

So there it is, you friends of mine who give a crap.

Also, download Eric's album. It is the greatest piece of music he has made. It is real and is part of the whole sad universe always.

"Turn off the TV" -President of the USA

There is a profound problem with the societal conversation in America. I could probably attempt to tie tons of different elements of opinion on how a healthy society communicates with one another, and James Madison's "factions" or interest groups and how each working to serve their own purposes creates a potentially disastrous fracturing of cultural opinion, and so on, but I would rather talk about the irony of this moment in the history of human civilization, the modern state, and the United States.

The presidential position is one that implies a position of some element of control over the whole "union" of the USA. As head of the federal government, presidents have varying degrees of control over political and social discourse. National structures, such the media, corporations, and federal systems such as the military or social security are the things that allow Americans of many different regional and cultural backgrounds to find commonalities through uniting in a common message or understanding. As President Obama currently attempts to press for difficult reforms at a national level, the issue of how to communicate these proposed changes becomes the whole "issue."

What am I trying to say? I think that the president is screwed because the previous methods that have been used to communicate are becoming lost in a fractured partisan environment that may have reached its "natural" conclusion. In other words, maybe a strong federal government in a place as vast as the United States has its limits, and frustrated statements by our president reveal this difficulty.

Statements that we should go out and "talk to folks" are interesting, but I don't know if anyone really can do this through an objective lense. People are always "talkin' to folks," and reach some pretty innovative solutions on a small but potentially useful scale, but faced with the size of a governmental or corporate structure, little can be done with those conclusions or ideas.

The structures that define the modern state are inherently indifferent to the "talking to folks" level of social interaction. But at the same time, the national media is not allowing any kind of honest discussion of the merits of certain reforms to take place. In the end, giant corporate interests control the conversation, and individuals and small local groups are left feeling hopeless and apathetic. I don't know what happens next.

A very ugly ape...

Robert Sapolsky:



He starts speaking about 6 minutes into the video. He's one of the most entertaining lecturers I've seen. After watching you'll understand what it means to be a human a little better.

Natural Thinking 101

Simplify any topic of discussion so that you can incorporate any talking point to make a strong statement about life.


walk naked in airport.

If you thought politics couldn't get any worse...

Corporate free speech has been unleashed. I suppose this is just the logical progression of the American political system.

For some background, to understand the case, watch the Bill Moyers Journal.

The New York Times:

Bitterly divided, the Supreme Court ruled Thursday that big business can spend its millions to directly support or oppose candidates for president and Congress, a decision that sharply reverses a century-long trend to limit the political influence of corporations and labor unions.

EJ Dionne:

Substantively, supporters of this decision say it is about free speech. It's not. Corporations are not individuals, as Congress recognized when it first limited the role of corporate money in politics back in 1907. Corporations are created by law, and they should not be treated the same as we treat live human beings. "The court's ruling threatens to undermine the integrity of elected institutions around the nation," Justice John Paul Stevens wrote said in his dissent. He's right.

Jeffrey Toobin:

Second, it has long been a staple of conservative thought to criticize “judicial activism”—the practice of unelected judges imposing their own policy judgments to overrule the will of the people’s elected representatives. But it is hard to imagine a more activist decision than the Citizens Union case. Congress passed the McCain-Feingold law, and President George W. Bush signed it, in the knowledge that the Supreme Court had repeatedly blessed restrictions on corporate political activity. But Justice Anthony Kennedy’s opinion blithely overturned Court precedent, and rejected the work of the elected branches—all in service of the bizarre legal theories that (1) corporations have the same rights as human beings, and (2) spending money is the same thing as speaking. This was judicial activism of the most egregious kind. Indeed, it wasn’t as much a judicial opinion as it was Republican talking points.

One Year

New Yorker reflections
George Packer:

But the fundamental reason why the soaring emotions of the inauguration have soured just a year later goes beyond anything that Obama can do. The country is in deep trouble, not just with ten percent unemployment (though that accounts for a lot of unhappiness), but with chronic, long-term social and economic problems. Whatever responsibility George W. Bush and his Republican Party might bear is almost forgotten; in the age of the iPhone and cable news, that was half a century ago. These problems, which can be summed up as the decline of the American middle class, have been so resistant to solutions that the readiest and most reasonable stance is profound skepticism. It is so much harder politically to do something affirmative than to stand in the way and say it can’t be done. Obama has made his job all the more difficult by trying to do something—and in some cases succeeding—without offering much of a challenge to the people standing in the way. So he pays the price, and they do not.

Hendrick Hertzberg:

Absent only the filibuster...Obama by now would have signed landmark bills addressing health care, global warming, and financial regulation, and a larger, better-designed stimulus package, too.

Obama came into office with a slightly better-than-average electoral mandate, but he was immediately faced with difficulties of a size and type that his post-mid-century Democratic predecessors were not: a gigantic economic emergency whose full effects weren’t felt until halfway into his first year; two botched wars in chaotic Muslim countries; an essentially nihilistic opposition party dominated by a pro-torture, anti-intellectual, anti-public-spirited, xenophobic “conservative” movement; and a rightist propaganda apparatus owned by nominally respectable media corporations and financed by nominally respectable advertisers. Excuses? Maybe. Good ones, though. Sometimes excuses actually excuse.

Junot Diaz:

All year I’ve been waiting for Obama to flex his narrative muscles, to tell the story of his presidency, of his Administration, to tell the story of where our country is going and why we should help deliver it there. A coherent, accessible, compelling story—one that is narrow enough to be held in our minds and hearts and that nevertheless is roomy enough for us, the audience, to weave our own predilections, dreams, fears, experiences into its fabric. It should necessarily be a story eight years in duration, a story that no matter what our personal politics are will excite us enough to go out and reëlect the teller just so we can be there for the story’s end. But from where I sit our President has not even told a bad story; he, in my opinion, has told no story at all.

Philip Gourevitch:

Obama’s gentlemanly refusal to engage in the bare-knuckle partisanship that his opponents delight in means that it is easy for the public—war-weary and buffeted by economic insecurity—to see him as responsible for the catastrophes he is trying to ameliorate. And this is ultimately the puzzle that his presidency poses: he lacks in office the inspirational ability to connect to a broad public that made him a star to begin with.

And Paul Krugman, from the New York Times:

The Obama administration’s troubles are the result not of excessive ambition, but of policy and political misjudgments. The stimulus was too small; policy toward the banks wasn’t tough enough; and Mr. Obama didn’t do what Ronald Reagan, who also faced a poor economy early in his administration, did — namely, shelter himself from criticism with a narrative that placed the blame on previous administrations...But he didn’t. Maybe he still dreams of bridging the partisan divide; maybe he fears the ire of pundits who consider blaming your predecessor for current problems uncouth — if you’re a Democrat. (It’s O.K. if you’re a Republican.) Whatever the reason, Mr. Obama has allowed the public to forget, with remarkable speed, that the economy’s troubles didn’t start on his watch.

James Surowiecki:

I never understood the somewhat messianic qualities that certain voters ascribed to him: Obama has been exactly the kind of President I expected him to be (and the kind of President I hoped he would be), namely rational, pragmatic, thoughtful, and even-tempered. But clearly many voters—even, oddly enough, some of those who didn’t vote for him—expected a miracle worker. When they got a problem-solver instead, one with little authority over Congressional Democrats and no authority at all over obstructionist Republicans, they were disappointed. Still, I don’t know that there was a way to avoid this—campaigning is, to some extent, always a matter of getting people to believe you'll make more of a difference than you actually can. And I don't think people’s disappointment should obscure what has been accomplished: if you had told people in March of last year, when predictions of complete doom were rampant, that the economy would be growing at a four-per-cent clip in the first quarter of 2010, few would have believed you. As has been pointed out numerous times, “Bad as things are, they would have been much worse without me,” isn’t exactly inspiring. That doesn’t make it any less true.

"Looking at the bright side of life..."

"In the past, every man was his own boss. But this ended when the whiteman came. When they told us to work, we worked. They themselves chose the days when we worked and we made sure we always turned up on time. We knew nothing of money or even what it looked like. What we liked were shells. Shells were what we wanted."

"We were given to the whiteman's carriers in return for shells like these. My people gave me to the strangers to get their wealth. I was just a young girl, my breasts were still small. The strangers paid for me and the other young girls, with shells and steel axes. They were very wealthy and bought many more girls. We were terrified. We cried mother! father! We thought they'd eat us. In fact they were kind to us. We had sex together then we knew they were men. That's right - not spirits - just men...we saw they were humans with sex organs like ours. At first we thought they had none, but they were men all right!"

Haiti Earthquake

We need to save lives today. Haitians, living in a society which does not provide for its citizens needs because of factors and systems completely outside of their control, are disproportionately affected by natural disasters, to the point that these are very human-created disasters. It, therefore, is crucial that for those living in this disastrous environment today and for the foreseeable future, for all efforts possible to be taken by individuals and organizations based in rich, developed nations.

Moving forward, and this is the step that will undoubtedly not be taken, developed nations, and the influential institutions within them must change the ways that they relate to poor states throughout the globe. In a “global era,” rich nations are implicit in the human catastrophes that occur as a result of natural disasters. By creating a global economic system that can only work through the exploitation of workers and resources in developed nations, and the problems created in nations like Haiti unable to produce such an environment favorable to foreign economic investment, political and economic actors in unison in the developed world continue to create conditions disastrous for those living in the developing world. Nothing short of a complete re-imagining of relations between states is required, one that takes into account the ways in which the current global economic system distorts the idea of human kindness and sympathy.

That being said, donations of time and money in rescue efforts by individuals and organizations in rich nations are crucial in the period after such a dramatic disaster as the one seen in Haiti. Responses to human disasters repeatedly show that people in rich nations are deeply affected and moved to respond post-disaster. If only the true disasters, the systemic ones, were the ones that created wall-to-wall media coverage, potentially the magnitude of the real problems faced by individuals throughout the developed world would be more widely understood by the average citizen. As it stands, there is no indication that the people of Haiti, who will benefit from a surge of generosity in the short-term, will receive any significant larger voice in the global economic system long-term. This is the ongoing human crisis of global capitalism.

Yeah, She Looks Pretty Young...

But She looks great in those jeans.





Just Sayin'.