Random Thought

I've decided I never want Chris Christie to be my bridge partner.

Goldfish

Goldfish

source

 

Tasty snack

 ~~~

Silverfish

 source

Not so much

QoD - From SoBe

Fun fact: remove all of the vowels from Reince Priebus and you get RNC PR BS.
                          ---   Southern Beale

Bumper Sticker of the Day

Seen on Washington St. downtown Royal oak, MI.

$10,000 Reward

Schrödinger's cat

Wanted Dead or Alive

Random Thoughts - Republican Violence Against Women

A small number of Republicans voted for the

Violence Against Women Act.

Then they actually read the thing and discovered

it was prevention, not encouragement.

What the Hell?!? Friday - Just Cruisin' Edition

A Cruise Missal is a prayer book taken along in case you need divine intervention to survive the event.

~  :  ~  :  ~

Life is a Cabaret

Be glad it's not a Carnival

Random Thought du Jour

It would be a great step forward to have an African, Asian or Hispanic Pope. 

But I'll be content if the next one simply isn't a Nazi.

Quotes of the Day, With a Dash of WTH?!?

A man must be orthodox upon most things, or he will never even have time to preach his own heresy.
-- G. K. Chesterton

Quoted by John Holbo, at CT, where (in comment #13) Jim Harrison adds:

 Rhetoric, after all, has always been about making the worse case defeat the better.

But (of course) I wholly misunderstand (you remember my definition of misunderstand) rhetoric.

The Real World of Real Work

I was reminded again of this, while reading this comment from Steve, at his own blog (following Art's link.) 

My sister, after abandoning the Berkeley Phd astrophysics program, ended up [with no programming experience] programming those Visa mainframes that process billions of transactions a night — in assembler! I asked her once if she used any of her higher math from college, calculus and such. “No,” she said, “we pretty much just add and subtract. On rare occasions we’ll get really abstruse and multiply or divide.

Which is tangential to the topic Steve, et. al. were discussing, but keys right into something that I was thinking about.  I have two degrees in Chemistry, B. S. and M.S.  I worked in industry from early June of 1968 until the end of November in 2008 - a tad over 40 years.  If you aggregated all the time I spent doing actual chemistry, it might total a few months; certainly it was far less than two years.  If you aggregated all the time I spent doing things where my knowledge of chemistry directly informed my ability to function, it would total somewhere in the range of 15 to 20 years.  Dealing with Mechanical Engineers threw this into stark relief.  A typical Mechanical Engineer simply would have been incapable of doing my job.  Just as I would have been incapable of doing her's - for that 30 to 50% of the time, unless I received some amount of specific training.*  Also, I'll posit that specific engineering knowledge was a relevant enabler to the M.E. no more than 50% of the time.

Here is a related anecdote.  Some of my musician friends are employed as computer programmers.  Their education is in music.  Their employer specifically seeks musicians because training them is especially easy.  There is some sort of fit between the musician's mind and the tasks to be performed.

My point is that doing something other than what you were educated to do is not a misuse of talent, except in the most egregious examples - frex PhD' physicists driving cabs, Engineers delivering pizzas, Accountants digging ditches, Economists doing economics.  (Sorry, couldn't resist the dig.)

Realistically, your education does not prepare you for the world of work, and most specifically, the chance of it preparing you for the job you actually get is almost vanishingly small.

__________________________________________

* Some of this is skill and training related, and some has to do with individual brain idiosyncrasies, interest level and willingness to learn.  I'll bet I could learn the M.E.'s job with very little additional training.  Engineering is applied math, and I'm reasonably good at that.   Not so the other way around.  At the briefest mention of anything remotely chemical, the M.E.'s eyes glaze over.  Persist, and they will run, screaming, from the room.

Random Thought

On the Continent of Westeros, to be a singer is an inordinately risky occupation.
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September 11 Thoughts

I'm a patriotic guy - a real patriot who actually loves his country knowing full well that it is full of flaws and imperfections, not a phony who places some partisan ideal above the good of the country - as you have seen for several years now from the Repugnicant party, nor a flag-waving purblind zealot.  So I wonder about how my countrymen react on this day. 

I'm not much of a fan of the Zits cartoon, but if I could have embedded today's entry here I would have.  It's thoughtful, poignant, and can interpreted in a variety of ways.  SoBe looks at 9/11 in a way that would not have occurred to me, but I think she gets it about right.

Yes it was a tragedy.  Maybe even a day that will long live in infamy.  And we shouldn't forget.  Not that anyone really can.  But we take too many of the wrong messages from the event, and our country's misbegotten reactions to it.  I will leave pondering those things as an exercise for the interested reader.

And we are wallowing in 9/11-itis.  Every sports event of the weekend had some ceremonial remembrance.  It's all over the newspapers and television.   I don't know how much of this is genuine, how much of it is knee-jerk hearding behavior, how much is exploitation, how much is sensationalism, and how much is cynical commercialism.  So I'm really torn about how to react.

But I don't think this wallowing is healthy.
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Quote of the Day

"Ars longa, vita brevis, occasio praeceps, experimentum periculosum, iudicium difficile."  - Hippocrates 

Questions:

Why is this quote from the ancient Greek "Father of Medicine" passed down to us in Latin translation?

Why do we usually only get the "Ars longa, vita brevis" part, which might suggest rather a different meaning than the entire phrase?

If this can be rendered into English as 'life is short, the art (craft/skill) long, opportunity fleeting, experiment treacherous, judgment difficult', would you interpret the meaning as, 'it takes a long time to acquire and perfect one's expertise (in, say, medicine) and one has but a short time in which to do it'.
 
And couldn't this be pretty well be summed up as, "Ars longa, vita brevis"

H/T to Argyle at The Corner
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A Thought about Karl Smith

I find myself in frequent disagreement with Karl Smith.  This is no surprise, really, since he is a free-market ideologue with quasi-libertarian tendencies (not that there's anything wrong with that.)   I try to be pragmatic rather than dogmatic, and do not share his belief system.

Karl posts at MB more frequently than either Niklas or Adam (on whom I have given up, and will not waste my time reading.)  Karl is a bright - possibly brilliant - guy.  But many of his posts are poorly conceived, poorly thought through, or simply fatuous.  I scratch my head over this.

It seems especially odd to me, since I put a lot of thought, word-smithing, proof-reading, and even work into my posts.  Whether it's actually good thought and fruitful work, I'll leave to my readers to decide; but it is certainly an attempt to think hard and get something right.

I've concluded that for Karl, blogging does not serve the same function that it does for me.  My guess is that he just throws stuff out there as it occurs to him, without regard for quality or even sense.  It's a test site for ideas, somewhat like brain-storming, rather than a forum for imparting thoughtful communication.  Why have a critical filter, when your readers - who are taking it all quite seriously - will do this part of your thinking for you, and likely in ways that you'd never think of yourself? There are some kernels of knowledge in there, but the chaff to wheat ratio has driven me to this conclusion.

I think this makes Karl unique among the econ bloggers I read.  Even Tyler Cowan, whom I read seldom and likely would agree with even more rarely (for reasons cited above,) seems serious and thoughtful about his posts. Not so, Karl.  At least not always.

Or am I all wet?
.

Haiku Wednesday - Crabby

CRABBY!  
(Three very different and unrelated takes on the theme)

I

Today* I am one

Year away from Medicare

So - why be crabby?

II

The least happy dwarf

Living up to his name. Why 

So crabby, Grumpy?

III

Obama lets down

His base - AGAIN! - but can't get

Why we're so CRABBY!


* P.S. -- Jean Sebelius is now 145!

What The Hell?!? Friday - Random Thought Edition

Since none of those old three-masted sailing ships had computers, they were all barque and no byte.
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What The Hell?!? Friday - Random Thought Edition

At rehearsal the other night, I had a strange awareness of the bone in my left upper arm, but not the right, that occurred on the 2nd and 4th counts of a measure, but not the 1st and 3rd.

This is my askew, off-beat sense of humerus.
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Random Thought

On the universal applicability of Massage Therapy

During my massage session this morning, the therapist mentioned that if you use your body, you will have knots in your muscles.  She then added that if you don't use your body, you will have knots in your muscles. 

Thinking then upon the life styles of the laborers and the indolent, along with ancient wisdom that it rains equally on the rich and the poor, I came up with this.

The haves have knots,

and

The have-nots have knots.