Faré writes The Citizen's Credo, quoted in full:#

I believe in the Holy Trinity: I believe in the Almighty Godvernment, incarnate in Our Saviour The President, and blessed by the Holy Spirit of The People. Hallelujah!

I believe The President is born nominated without the Sin of Selfishness because he's been blessed by the Holy Spirit of The People. I also believe the Holy Spirit of The People divinely inspires the Congress of Bishops, and that though each and every single Member of Congress may be a despicable jerk, the collective outcome of the deliberations of its councils is the wise and infallible will of The People. Hallelujah!

I believe that the majority is always right, even though I may never quite agree with it. I believe that the Holy Spirit of The People may edict law in any and all domains of life, and that people must conform to Its Choices of Society. Hallelujah!

I believe that the Godvernment is an infinite source of wisdom, that brings Trust were there couldn't otherwise be, that provides Public Services what wouldn't otherwise exist. I believe that the ultimate solution to any and all problem in life is that the Godvernment should unblock the proper funds by inserting the proper lines in the sacred book of budget. Hallelujah!

I believe that the Godvernment will help us resist temptation, deliver us from Evil, and wipe Evil from the face of the Earth, if only everyone prays together, and abides by Its holy Rules. I believe that whatever Rules the Godvernment edicts are Just, that even if they seem unjust, they are it is Just nonetheless that they be enforced, and that it is a blasphemy to suggest that there could be better ways of finding Rules than by referring to the Holy Authority of the Godvernment.

In the name of the Godvernment, The President, and the People, Amen.

THE SCIENCE OF GENDER AND SCIENCE - PINKER VS. SPELKE - A DEBATE#

Cato Policy Forum: Does the World Trade Organization Serve America's Interests in the Global Economy?#

How could I not link to Michael Feldman linking to Girls and Corpses.#

PhD Comic #592#

Alex Tabarrok quotes Justice Thomas' dissent. Read it.#

Charles Miller says something I agree with. We need audio/video links.#

Tony Pierce is ze smooth.#

he other day i was sitting in a chinese restaurant in chinatown with a beautiful girl who i couldnt keep my eyes off. i couldnt keep my hands off her either.

at some point i swallowed my beef brocolli and said baby how does it feel to be the hottest chick in this restaurant.

she looked around and nearly spit out her kung pow shrimp from laughter.

Monkey Money#

Bryan Caplan suggest we learn from the power of the Dark Side.#

Sith review with funny cartoons.#

Almost forgot how great Tony Pierce is.#

have i ever come close to marrying someone? no. the two girlfriends who i lived with id ask to marry every day that i was with them. i never produced a ring or got on my knee but that was probably because they punched me in the gut anytime i ever mentioned marriage.

if either of them had said yes my life would be worlds different than it is now and i seriously doubt i would be blogging today. i got very lethargic and satisfied when i was in those relationships and i dare say dull. there was a great deal of love there but not much to blog about. besides the wild monkey sex.

but id love to be married one day and id love to create a few dozen offspring and name them all george foreman or prince.

The Pleasures of Counting, by T. W. Körner, was recommended to me by my Chaos Theory professor Vidhu Prasad.#

The book is a mathematician's attempt to show that beautiful and interesting mathematics appears throughout virtually every field and that it's actually important. This is wrapped in, essentially, a history of math around the time of the two wars of the twentieth century.#

The book was very interesting with regards to the history of people and mathematical ideas I had not heard before, but when I came to the parts I understood well: fractals, group theory, algorithms, and cryptograhy; I could essentially only read for the clever quips.#

The biggest problem with the book, actually, was the author's unabashed socialism and constant mockery of liberty, as well as the most incredible example of The Fatal Conceit I've ever read at the end of the first part.#

Still I recommend the book.#

I thought this excerpt from the part of physics was very clever:#

Although it lies outside the main concerns of this chapter, I cannot resist including an application of number theory to biology. Some bamboos live for 80 years or more without flowering, then flower, set seed, covering the ground beneath thickly with seeds, and die. Other, more common bamboos flowers and seed more frequently but do so in synchrony, all seeding at the same time. At first sight this seems a curious and wasteful procedure since many more seeds are produced than could possibly produce new bamboos. The key to the riddle lies not in the bamboos themselves, but in the numerous insects and birds which can consume the seed s-- predators, as the biologists call them. The bamboos are providing so much seed in such a short time that the predators cannot eat all of it and some must survive.

Promising as this strategy of 'predator satiation' appears, it will not work if the bamboos seed every year because the seed eaters will then adjust their own breeding seasons so that their young can take advantage of the annual feast. Few species of bamboo flower more often than once in 15 or 20 years. There is a species of cicada in the Northern United States which follows a similar pattern, living underground as 'nymphs' for 17 years and then emerging above ground in millions and, in the space of a few weeks, completing their life cycle by becoming adult, mating, laying eggs and dying. A relate species in the South does the same but with a cycle time of 13 years.

Why do we have 13 and 17 year cicadas, but no cycles of 12, 14, 15, 16, or 18? Thirteen and 17 share a common property. They are large enough to exceed the life cycle of any predator, but they are also prime numbers (divisible by no integer smaller than themselves). Many potential predators have 2 to 5 year life cycles. Such cycles are not set by the availability of periodical cicadas (for they peak too often in years of non-emergence), but cicadas might be eagerly harvested when the cycles coincide. Consider a predator with a cycle of five years: if cicadas emerged every 15 years, each bloom would be hit by the predator. By cycling at a large prime number, cicadas minimise the number of coincidences (every 5 x 17 or 85 years, in this case). Thirteen and 17-year cycles cannot be tracked by any smaller number. (p. 107)