Reasoned Consideration

For all the progress made in machine translation, some things are perhaps still best done by humans:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2011/jul/05/teaching-english-fractal-grammar-claypole " Bring chaos theory to English language teaching By relying on grammar rules in class, learners are in danger of becoming detached from the dynamism of spoken language" Sigh, this old relativist bunkum again, re-packaged in pseudo-scientific drivel by making "non-sequitious" references to fractals. The rules of grammar may be flexible and may appear elusive at the fringes, but they are certainly not "chaotic"; there is a huge difference between "playing with language" within the confines of its complex but flexible "rules" (e.g. the "does my broadband look big in this" example), and simply making grammatical errors that reflect errors in both thinking and elementary sentence construction (e.g. dangling modifiers). Pretty much by definition it is children that do not know the difference, and you first need to learn and master the f...

When an entire generation of teens and their parents are simultaneously online, it will become 'your parents network' and kids will want a new network to interact more covertly ... ?

More: The Tau Manifesto This would really help with teaching of math ...

Been creating some online tutorial videos for our software, TLex, tlTerm, tlCorpus, tlDatabase , etc., e.g.: More here: http://www.youtube.com/user/tshwanedje

Paul Krugman, 2002 : "To fight this recession the Fed needs more than a snapback; it needs soaring household spending to offset moribund business investment. And to do that ... Alan Greenspan needs to create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble." Brilliant idea, mission accomplished, that turned out so well. Maybe the thinking goes something like this: Feed the goose that lays the golden eggs to the people, and hope they vote for you during the feast, before they realize where the meal came from.

Peter Schiff Blog: A Mockery of a Sham : "Back in October of 2009, when Congress first announced the formation of a commission to investigate the cause of the 2008 financial crisis, ..." It's sad that sham, essentially fraudulent economic reports seem to have become 'standard fare' in US political power-mongering, to the extent that barely anyone even bats an eyelid at such shameless propaganda that Castro or Mugabe would be proud. Truth goes right out the window. Worse, many people just mindlessly and trustingly slop up the official fictional account.

From http://www.facebook.com/pages/I-bet-Ludwig-von-Mises-can-get-more-fans-than-John-Maynard-Keynes/367822059871 : "A laptop is a third-order good. The machinery used to produce a laptop is a second-order good. The mines used to produce the machinery are a first-order good. An economy grows when consumers save their money instead of buying laptops, and it gets invested in mines and machinery that yield cheaper/more laptops in the future. The economy knows to invest in mining equipment when there is a low interest rate/lots of savings, because there will be savings consumed in the future when the mine's material has been made into laptops. When gov't price fixes the interest rate low and there is a shortage of savings, the economy invests in more mining equipment, but the consumer is buying laptops and not saving, so the economy's resources are stretched too thin, and the Hayekian triangle on the top left becomes concave, and as consumption (C) and investment/savings...

A cool mural at the Museum of Natural History in Maputo, Mozambique ... a 'brief history of life on Earth':

There's a fine line between feeding feedback from not-too-bright focus group users back into the software design, and effectively letting those users make design decisions. (Am I supposed to say such things? Luckily nobody's reading.)

Great video. So who should the public trust, the people with a track record of getting things wrong, or the people with a track record of getting things right?

"The constitution doesn't need to be 'interpreted'. It's not written in Chinese. It needs to be obeyed. It needs to be enforced. There is nothing to 'interpret'. What happens is our courts have ignored the constitution ... they call ignoring it, interpreting it."

Next time you're right about something - anything - don't be too quick to be proud; rather, consider whether the underlying mental framework of analysis by means of which you initially arrived at your conclusion was truly rational, properly researched, and unbiased. If not, it may really only be by happy accident that you were right, which neither signals any kind of achievement, nor demonstrates any predictive power for being right about other things in future. When people are "right by accident", there is a risk that they will regard it as validation of their flawed reasoning methods, and use them again. As the saying goes, "even a broken clock is right twice a day". We should scrutinize our own reasoning methods as much when we're right as when we're wrong; ask yourself questions like "Why was I right? Was it for the right reasons? Were my sources sound? Was I ultimately really only guessing?"