punk

You'll note that your cutoff is about when Hollywood started having to compete with television. When television started being able to make and air good inexpensive shows, Hollywood couldn't really market a solid little movie anymore. So Hollywood started going for what TV couldn't do: expensive productions, lots of extras, in short spectacle.

This isn't entirely fair. Most older movies are just as bad as most contemporary movies. The fact that you, right now, are watching an older movie means that it is one of the ones that is good enough that people actually remember it. All the rest are forgotten. I think the top of contemporary movies are on par with the older movies that remembered (i.e. the top of older movies).

Oh there are several real-world reasons. 1. The dollar is worth a lot less internationally. So even if supply and demand were constant across the world, it is going to take more dollars to buy oil. To a large extent Americans are seeing the fact that their money is worth a lot less than it used to be. 2. Globally demand is increasing. China and India have a lot more cars on the road now than they used to have. Americans have to get used to the fact that they aren't as rich as they thought they were, and more people want these things than just them. Anyway, all speculators really do is take risk away from the producers and so on, and take it on themselves. The producer sells the risk by excepting a given return, and the speculator gambles that the future return will be higher.

I've always understood that the US has oil reserves for military reasons. I mean as long as we have a military that needs oil to go, we should have supplies on hand for that end. So if we use up the reserves just to have cheaper gas, doesn't that weaken us militarily in the long run?

I don't recollect Aristotle talking about "fiction" in general, rather he talked about specific genres that we would group under "fiction", in this case "tragedy" and "comedy". In the case of tragedy, the goal is "catharsis", or a sort of "purging". Everything else Aristotle is saying about tragedy is with an eye to making this "purging" the more effective (that is how to arouse the feelings and state of mind in the viewer so that the "purging" works). I think the place to start would be to think of movies you've watched or books you've read that left you feeling sort of "empty" or "released" afterwards as though some sort of burden had been taken away from you, and think that what Aristotle is trying to explain is how to achieve this effect on the viewer/reader.

You do appreciate why the average scientist isn't going to do this experiment. I mean it isn't exactly sexy science, and it probably isn't going to be good material for a dissertation. I am curious what the end products of the decomposition are. I mean if the bacteria are producing large amounts of cyanide, one might be concerned.

Realistically, this probably gives you some insight into Rand's relationship with certain members of her own family. Probably it is in the book because that is the way Rand looks at these things from her own personal experiences.

I don't know if it is "discrimination", but it is entirely reasonable that currency should be distinguishable by touch for blind people. It seems like this should have been able to be taken care of decades ago without involving the courts.

It is "Neetchuh". Anyway, Nietzsche is quite a good poet in the German. It is always hard to translate poetry though. I'd say though, unless a person reads poetry for pleasure to the point where they've learned how to actually read poetry as poetry (as opposed to reading it as prose, which is what most people do), then one shouldn't try to read TSZ. Or to put it another way: If you can read Shakespeare for pleasure then read TSZ, if you don't really enjoy the poetry in Shakespeare, don't try TSZ and read "Beyond Good and Evil" instead. To some degree "Beyond Good and Evil" is the prose explanation of TSZ.

One ought to bear in mind that Kafka is a German-speaking Jew living in Prague. Thus to the majority Czech population he is an outsider speaking a foreign language, and then among the German population, as a Jew he is an outsider. One should remember also that he is Jew in Eastern Europe in the final decades leading up the Holocaust. What Kafka is largely trying to capture is this experience. This is the experience of the foreigner (or alien) living among people who don't understand him, don't want to understand him, and are continually passing judgement on him. They have their own world they live in and understand but will not allow the foreigner to participate in, but nevertheless hold the foreigner accountable. The foreigner wants to fit in even though he knows he is an alien and never can, and that everyone around him would rather he would just go away forever. It is good to keep the concentration camp in mind when reading Kafka, as this was the final outcome of the society he (and his characters) are moving in. Anyway, if this sort of thing doesn't appeal to you, then don't read Kafka, but this should illustrate something of his mindset and what he is trying to convey.

Indeed. Every time there is a bailout it only instills in folks the confidence that there will be a bailout next time around. The result is they take bigger risks than they would have if they had no confidence in a bailout, and this is the sort of behavior the leads to one crisis after another.

I think Mandelbrot (book) makes the very good point that the reliance on normal distributions in economic theory is probably wrong. So your underlying process in the theory has the wrong behavior.

He didn't believe in any sort of god that any Judeo-Christian type of religion would recognize. The "god" that appears in Spinoza is more of a personification of the laws of nature. Most people (especially the churchmen of the day) took his "god" as poorly veiled atheism. Let us recall that science was somewhat in its infancy at the time, so you didn't have an overall scientific worldview like we take for granted now (and recall that even now our scientific world view inclines to a kind of determinism which denies free will). So take the philosophical and metaphysical points of view science now makes common-place away. What sort of explanations of the universe and man's place in it would one have other than religion and superstition? In essence Spinoza is providing the first scientific worldview (like the one we now take for granted) to compete with religion and superstition. Spinoza is the first to be saying "look, I can explain the universe with gods and magic" (again, his "god" is poorly veiled atheism, and recall too how contemporary scientists talk about "god", even when they don't mean anything recognizably like the "god" of judeo-christian tradition, and often mean little more than the laws of nature personified). There is the appeal. We just take what he provided so for granted now that we miss how new it was at the time. On Edit Remember too that with Spinoza and the Romantics were talking about the period before Darwin, so a non-religious account of human origins is something of a tricky matter.

One should keep in mind that in the 17th and 18th centuries "Spinozist" was used to mean what "atheist" is used for now. Spinoza essentially gave people of the day a philosophy which could compete with dogmatic church theologies in scope but which described man free from any divine and supernatural tyrannies. This is the basic influence he had on the Romantics, a vision of man freed from god and religion with a fullness of scope to make the philosophy equal to any Christian or Jewish theology. There is a tendency in philosophy to miss the forest for the trees. The forest of Spinoza's thought was the important part, people would quibble with this detail here and this detail there. In more literary terms this is rather like take a great novel and focussing on this incident here and this incident there, and missing the overall thrust of the novel.

The philosopher that more romantics seem to have consciously acknowledged as a philosophic influence was Spinoza. You'd probably be better off finding Aristotle's influence on Spinoza and then Spinoza's on the romantics. Spinoza's "Ethics" has the attributes you are naming, and has often been considered philosophical poetry (despite its overt mathematical feel). I think Peikoff said something to the effect that he would have become a Spinozist if he hadn't come across Objectivism.

Ignore this.

No, it is a conventional quantum field theory with the symmetries of E8. As I understood the paper, the inclusion of gravity would go by way of loop quantum gravity. E8 is just a very very complicated algebra. People had actually been looking at E8 for a while for some sort of unification. As I recall he is simply trying to establish that the U1xSU2xSU3 algebra of the standard model comes out as a subalgebra of E8, and of course that other particles are predicted (since the full algebra will contain more particles than the subalgebra). I recall also that he got the three generations of leptons and quarks to come out fairly nicely as well. The generations of leptons are: electron / electron neutrino muon / muon neutrino tauon / tauon neutrino The generations of quarks are: up / down charmed / strange top / bottom

You may as well be asking why people don't spend more time reading "great" literary novels, or why do they watch simplistic TV instead of some great movies by Kurosawa or Welles or someone. Hey it is good to read a trashy novel which is light and fun every once in a while, and I'm sure everyone has an objectively shallow TV show they enjoy watching. Life is short. Have some fun. Not everything needs to be "deep".

Wasn't Cramer telling his listeners to hold onto Bear Sterns right up to its crash?

Batman. As a fan of Miller's "The Dark Knight Returns", I think his take on their relationship is right. Superman is an overgrown boyscout, and they wouldn't get along.

I'd argue that it is wrong to reduce Greek tragedy to the realm of petty morality play (i.e. bad things happen to those who get to big for their britches). Tragedy is fundamentally a heroic artform. The idea is that how a person acts in the worst possible situation reveals their genuine worth and character. Tragedy is about a heroic individual rising above a horrible situation. Admittedly there is a certain fatalism that makes tragedy often similar to Camus' "The Myth of Sisyphus". Orestes is caught between conflicting demands neither of which he can shrug off, but is heroic in how he handles this. Antigone and Prometheus stand up for themselves against an unjust tyrant. Oedipus is arguably a bit more existential and poses the question whether one would truly wish to know everything about themself. Oedipus must confront what he is. The argument is in the direction that a heroic person is heroic by who they are, and not what they accomplish and what they do or do not suffer. But, whereas everyone can play the hero when times are good, only the truly heroic can play the hero in the bad times.

Indeed. Given what companies like Walmart pay in advertising to generate good will among the public, you'd think they'd just skip this one and chalk up the money lost as "advertising", or rather as "avoiding negative advertising".

"Just a mediator particle" is a little bit of understatement. The Higgs is needed to break the symmetry in the Weak interaction. This broken symmetry is actually a big deal. "God particle" is hyperbole, but it isn't "just a mediator particle" in the scope of the overall theory.

I've always heard this story was basically a pro-life parable, with the hoos standing in for fetuses. "Just because it is small doesn't mean it isn't alive" (or something like that).

What about the critique coming up in the "Too Big to Bail" thread - That a big problem with the economy is that we have "welfare/socialism for the rich" which has resulted in wealth gravitating to the incompetent. We should remember that the government doesn't simply interfere in the economy to take from the rich and give to the poor, it also interferes to transfer money from rich to rich, and the people getting the money, while they have political pull, don't necessarily have economic smarts.