Author Archive

– which is here (h/t Instapundit):

There will be no trucks after the singularity. Plenty of delicious lunches and really great furniture, though.

[Jonathan adds: Click the photo to display a bigger version.]

Amazon search on “revolution 1848“: 17,292 results

Amazon search on “revolution 1989“: 7,972 results

Via Pejman Yousefzadeh, I hear that Norman Borlaug has passed; NYT obit.

In the face of caviling from scarcity-mentality “environmentalists,” he saved a billion lives. Requiescat in pace.

Via Brian Doherty and Pejman Yousefzadeh, I learn that Rose Friedman has died. Requiescat in pace.

The College Crunch Top 50

Apologies if this is a repeat; I just heard about it from Pejman Yousefzadeh.

See also Alan Henderson’s retrospective.

A bit of a Chicago Boy, as it turns out. Thanks to Pejman for the tip. Requiescat in pace.

Background is at Facebook, Twitter and peers for sale – privately.

My initial impression is that this could be an ingenious adaptation to an obnoxiously overregulated environment. Or it could be crushed by regulators and their enablers; given that a Republican Congress and President were willing to saddle us with Sarbanes-Oxley seven years ago, it is not easy to imagine our current complement of parasites reacting dispassionately to private stock exchanges.

Note that I do not meet the minimum qualifications (net worth $1M, annual income $200k for past 2 years); this is just to elicit discussion by knowledgeable people (the minimum qualifications for which I also do not meet).

I just received the appended message in e-mail from a friend in Europe. I have left it entirely unedited. Right now I feel so grateful that we don’t have to do things like this here. Never forget those who died for your freedom.
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“A recollection touched him, booklegged stuff from the forties and fifties of the last century which he had read: French, German, British, Italian. The intellectuals had been fretful about the Americanization of Europe, the crumbling of old culture before the mechanized barbarism of soft drinks, hard sells, enormous chrome-plated automobiles (dollar grins, the Danes had called them), chewing gum, plastics … None of them had protested the simultaneous Europeanization of America: bloated government, unlimited armament, official nosiness, censors, secret police, chauvinism … Well, for a while there had been objectors, but first their own excesses and sillinesses discredited them, then later …”

– Poul Anderson, Sam Hall

A recurring theme in this forum … David Baron, call your office: Deer enters, runs around KCI’s Terminal A (Kansas City Star).

Maybe it was running from a mountain lion (”Mountain lions are now fairly common in suburban areas of California and have recently been sighted as far east as urban Kansas City, Missouri, where several have been hit by cars.”).

I could live well on the venison from deer that have wandered through my yard if I could 1) dispatch them quietly and 2) field-dress them without attracting attention.

(UPDATE: beaten like a rented mule by Cheryl Rofer; see http://chicagoboyz.net/archives/6619.html)

Apologies in advance for exceeding the recommended “above-the-fold” limit:

If war consisted of one decisive act, or a set of simultaneous decisions, preparations would tend toward totality, for no omission could ever be rectified. The sole criterion for preparations which the world of reality could provide would be the measures taken by the adversary — so far as they are known; the rest would once more be reduced to abstract calculations.

… if all the means available were, or could be, simultaneously employed, all wars would automatically be confined to a single decisive act or a set of simultaneous ones — the reason being that any adverse decision must reduce the sum of the means available, and if all had been committed in the first act there could really be no question of a second.

– Carl von Clausewitz, On War (Book I [On the Nature of War], Chapter 1 [What is War?], section 8 [War Does Not Consist of a Single Short Blow]), 1832

At what point shall we expect the approach of danger? By what means shall we fortify against it? — Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant, to step the Ocean, and crush us at a blow? Never! — All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest; with a Buonaparte for a commander, could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years.

– Abraham Lincoln, Address to the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois, 27 January 1838

Time-of-flight equation for a ballistic missile:

t – t₀ = √a3/µ [2π + (E - e sin E) - (E₀ - e sin E₀)]

– Bate/Mueller/White, Fundamentals of Astrodynamics (Dover, 1971)

Having deliberately refrained from reading any of the other roundtable contributions so far, lest I become overwhelmingly intimidated, resign from my contributor status, and tell Lex to forget he ever heard of me, I have decided to comment on one very small portion of Book I, specifically Chapter 1, section 8 (page 79 in the edition we are reading). Because, of course, for an American baby boomer, no war that directly affected the entire population was, prior to the late 1980s, expected to be anything other than a single short blow.

So, with the sure knowledge of my limited qualifications ever before me, and the entirely unmanaged risk of merely restating, and poorly, what someone else has already said, I begin …
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– is to remind us all of this anniversary. Slogan swiped from Rockwell ca 1978.

– of the rendezvous, that is. PIAR Items:

Issue 1

• Description: Overcorrected for anticipated too-early arrival time.
• Area of Improvement: Change Management
• Root Cause: Assumed functional highway network. Ha!
• Mitigation: Allow 2x as much time if going anywhere on the Edens or the Kennedy.

Issue 2

• Description: Initially parked in wrong garage.
• Area of Improvement: Documentation
• Root Cause: Didn’t ask hotel operator for detailed instructions.
• Mitigation: Ask next time.

Issue 3

• Description: Missed rendezvous with Carl.
• Area of Improvement: Communication
• Root Cause: Didn’t check comments on planning post after early Saturday morning.
• Mitigation: Graze (Midwesterners don’t surf) through the blog at T-2 hours. Exchange mobile phone numbers. Buy Carl a plate of barbecue.

Issue 4

• Description: Wore Bill out walking too far.
• Area of Improvement: Planning
• Root Cause: Unduly elaborate itinerary.
• Mitigation: Traveling-salesman algorithm; taxicabs (implemented).

Issue 5

• Description: Appeared drab and uninteresting by comparison with other attendees.
• Area of Improvement: Work Error (1959-present)
• Root Cause: Couldn’t keep up with Bill’s knowledge of Chicago goings-on and economy/tax issues or Tatyana’s tales of camping trips on river islands in Siberia and eye for architectural/design details.
• Mitigation: Surround self with boring friends, or just get a lot more people to show up next time so I can revert to lurk mode.

Best Practices (I did do some things right)

• Followed Jonathan’s advice and took pictures at Blommer Chocolate; see above, and click for larger.
• Oh, yes. Oh, my, yes. Oh, yes, yes, yes-yes-yes, oh God yes!*
• Not only was the music at Buddy Guy’s terrific, but they’ve got a killer chocolate cake dessert.

* yep, swiped it from Stephen Green, who I’m pretty sure swiped it from this

(Ref this earlier post.)

Saturday, 4 PM CDT, 171 W Randolph (lobby of the Allegro Hotel). Wear your official ChicagoBoyz attire for prompt recognition. Agenda:

1. introductions
2. walk to Millennium Park (3/8 mi E), take pictures
3. walk to Blommer Chocolate factory (W to Canal, N to Kinzie, W 1 block; just over 1 mi from Millennium Park), take more pictures (this spot recommended by Jonathan)
4. sunset, 6:04 PM
5. eat someplace
6. proceed to Buddy Guy’s Legends (E to Wabash, S to venue; 1¼ mi from Allegro); artist info

Forecast is for sunny and 60° F at midafternoon, winds ENE at 8 mph. Hit it!

Yahoo! News/AP: “American Yoichiro Nambu of the University of Chicago won half of the prize for the discovery of a mechanism called spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic physics.”

• announcement
• press release
• scientific background
• information for the public/populärvetenskaplig information/a møøse once bit my sister
• Yoichiro Nambu’s page at the UofC’s “Experts Guide”

We are great and we are grand … we make bombs beneath our stands!

UPDATE: UofC news office release.

From Goleman’s Social Intelligence, pp 120-121:

Unhealthy narcissists typically lack a feeling of self-worth; the result is an inner shakiness that in a leader, for example, means that even as he unfurls inspiring visions, he harbors a vulnerability that closes his ears to criticism. Such leaders avoid even constructive feedback, which they perceive as an attack. Their hypersensitivity to criticism in any form means that narcissistic leaders don’t seek out information widely; rather, they selectively seize on data that supports their views, ignoring disconfirming facts. They don’t listen but prefer to preach and indoctrinate.

An entire organization can be narcissistic. When a critical mass of employees share a narcissistic outlook, the outfit itself takes on those traits, which become standard operating procedures.

Organizational narcissism has clear perils. Pumping up grandiosity, whether it is the boss’s or some false collective self-image held throughout the company, becomes the operating norm. Healthy dissent dies out. And any organization that is cheated of a full grasp of truth loses the ability to respond nimbly to harsh realities.