Eagleheart: Paradise Rising [adult swim]’s oddball crime “drama”, Eagleheart, starring Chris Elliott, Maria Thayer and Brett Gelman, returns for its third season November 14, with a new twist, as a season-long plot will wind its way through the show’s traditionally...

New York Comic Con 2018: Batman: The Animated Series At the 2018 New York Comic Con, DVDTalk’s Francis Rizzo III sat down with Batman: The Animated Series creators Bruce Time and Eric Radomski, and actors Kevin Conroy, Loren Lester,...

Roddy Hart and Tommy Reilly: Composing Anna and the Apocalypse At the 2018 New York Comic Con, DVDTalk’s Francis Rizzo III sat down with Anna and the Apocalypse composers Roddy Hart and Tommy Reilly to discuss writing the music...

Killing It: The Cast of Anna and the Apocalypse At the 2018 New York Comic Con, DVDTalk’s Francis Rizzo III sat down with several members of the cast of Anna and the Apocalypse, including Ella Hunt, Malcolm Cumming, Sarah...

Title: COPD (Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease)
Category: Diseases and Conditions
Created: 12/31/1997 12:00:00 AM
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Category: Diseases and Conditions
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Category: Diseases and Conditions
Created: 3/24/2008 12:00:00 AM
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Title: Senior Health (Successful Aging)
Category: Health and Living
Created: 2/19/2003 12:00:00 AM
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From WFLA: Here’s how many Floridians have ordered the new Jimmy Buffett license plate TAMPA, Fla. (WFLA) — Florida lawmakers this year approved a new Jimmy Buffett-inspired specialty license plate to honor the late musician. …

The post Pre-Sale for the new Margaritaville license plate first appeared on BuffettNews.com.

“Skinny Boy,” the new single by Original Coral Reefer Guitarist, Roger Bartlett and Steven Taylor, is now available for download exclusively at The Songwriters Joint. Featuring an all-star lineup including TC Carr, John Frinzi, and members of …

The post Skinny Boy released in honor for Greg “Fingers” Taylor first appeared on BuffettNews.com.

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What do Lady Gaga, Justin Timberlake, Beyonce, Harry Styles, Alicia Keys, Sting, Jennifer Lopez, Madonna, Ice-T, Queen Latifah, and Taylor Swift all have in common?

(C’mon, actually think about the question for a bit, don’t immediately jump to the answer. While there is a tendency for people to want immediate gratification, in fact, that whole quick shot of info, be it trivial, made-up, useful, or even critical, is predicated on things like websites, there is something to be said for the satisfaction that can be derived from figuring things out, whether this is solving Wordle or answering the question above.)

(At this point I figure that there may have been a sufficient amount of physical distance on this page between the question and the answer, and certainly if you’ve read through this parenthetical material you’ve had a time gap which, as we are at words right now, that’s about 30 seconds of silent reading time or just under a minute if you’re annunciating it, so. . . .)

They are all members of SAG-AFTRA, the trade union for actors.

As such, they are all potentially affected by a recent agreement between SAG-AFTRA and Narrativ, which describes itself as “A Marketplace for Advertisers to Buy Talent Likeness.”

Note, not “Talent.” But a similitude of talent.

Read more at Glorious Noise...

From 1989 to 1994 there was a show with a prescient title and approach, a show that gave rise to people including Jon Stewart and Marc Maron: “Short Attention Span Theater.” It presented bits and clips, standup and skits. Quick takes in keeping with the short attention spans that were existing then and arguably shrinking even more so now.

Market research firm MIDiA has recently conducted its annual survey of independent labels and distributors to create what it describes as “the definitive view of the independent music economy.” Modesty notwithstanding, it has sliced, diced and riced data from 5,500 companies in that space—which represents $10.6-billion of recorded music revenue—so its assessment is undoubtedly substantive, especially as it adds in financials from major labels and artist distribution platforms, thereby achieving, it claims, 93% of all recorded music revenue on a global basis.

The big labels, of course, make big money. Universal Music Group reported its Q3 2024 earnings last week, which has it that for the first nine months of 2024 the company had revenues of €8,396 million, which is a 6.3% increase over the same period in 2023. Focusing just on the Recorded Music category, the revenues were €6,335 million, up 4.9% year-over-year—and last year wasn’t at all bad.

Read more at Glorious Noise...

DVDTalk.com staff writer and film critic Neil Lumbard has compiled a list of some of the best releases of...

This is a reasoned argument by Joanna (Why I Don't Vaccinate My Children) posted on Erwin Alber's VINE facebook page which was started in 2009, to help parents make an informed choice on behalf of their children. Image credit topnews.ae Joanna responds (below) to a lady who published an article saying that unvaccinated children are the cause of recent increased pertussis (whooping cough) outbreaks in areas where vaccination is actively pursued......

Many thanks g to Cristina in Greece for her report on this - originally published on her justiceforgreece blog as A seed For Change a documentary project by Alex Ikonomidis and the declaration on seed freedom Alex Ikonomidis is a Greek film maker who lived, studied and worked in Lebanon. After returning to his native Greece and serving his time in the military, he took up his profession there and was happily going along, producing in the world of media and advertising when, suddenly, the economic crisis hit. Through the crisis, Ikonomidis recognized that when money becomes more and more scarce, it is important to be where food is grown. This brought him to embark on a documentary project. A Seed for Change is his soon-to-be-released feature length film documenting why agriculture must start with seed freedom. Chemical inputs are often toxic and are disruptive to human health and the environment. "Standardized" seeds, as imposed by the agro-chemical conglomerates through legislation pushed through in much of the civilized world, are destroying our heritage of biological diversity, created by nature and harnessed by farmers for producing our food over thousands of years....

The European Union on Tuesday took the debate about genetically modified crops to the public with a survey asking citizens to share their thoughts on organic farming, reports Phys.org in a recent article titled EU asks citizens to join debate on GM food Image credit: americanoverkill.com The article continues ... The bloc's 500 million consumers are invited to complete an anonymous online questionnaire on the European Commission's Agriculture and Rural Development website (ec.europa.eu/agriculture/consultations/organic/2013_en.htm). The consultation, which ends on April 10, is part of a review of European policy on organic agriculture. The survey is available in all official EU languages. English is the one linked here, but other languages are available from a drop-down menu at the top of the page. The Phys.org article, putting emphasis on the GM angle, goes on to say......

More and more evidence is coming to light that Dr. Wakefield was on the right track when he researched the connection between the MMR vaccine and intestinal inflammation in the vaccinated children. Was Dr. Andrew Wakefield Right After All? Wakefield’s Lancet Paper Vindicated New Published Study Verifies Andrew Wakefield’s Research on Autism But how did Dr. Wakefield first get into the sights of the UK vaccine industry and how was the campaign against him mounted? Martin Walker, the author of "Dirty Medicine" and a number of other books on health, closely followed the case that eventually resulted in Dr. Wakefield's exile from the UK. He describes how it all happened and how the vaccine manufacturers were able to bring down the full weight of government and the courts against both Wakefield and the many parents who were suing for recognition of the damage vaccines had done to their children. "As a campaigner of 40 years, I think that what surprises me most about Dr Wakefield’s case, is how easily and how completely we were defeated by the pharmaceutical companies, how over a thousand parents and children were written out of history together with their adverse drug reactions. Part of this defeat for the parents, the children and the doctors concerned was grounded in an unfortunate understanding that pharmaceutical company executives were decent people and humanitarians. In fact the pharmaceutical companies, their corporate structure and their relentless pursuit of profit, their fraudulent practices represent one of the last remaining shibboleths, in our society which need to be completely reformed, democratised, divested of vested interests and made public from top to bottom." We do learn from experience. That is why we should pay attention to how this case went so wrong and why the campaign to ruin those researchers and to leave the damaged children by the wayside was mounted in the first place. So it won't happen again. Here is Martin Walker's essay....

We have previously published articles by the Australian AIDS-and-biology researcher Cal Crilly, and here is yet another installment. Cal is someone who digs into scientific studies. He does biological detective work and finds gems that hide in plain view, things we don't normally understand and that even the experts do not see as they are not trained to put discordant facts together and question basic assumptions. What this new article tells us is that retroviruses - the same kind that are thought to cause immune deficiency or AIDS - are useful and necessary for our immune system to function correctly. That of course tends to leave the hypothesis of a viral causation of AIDS in grave trouble. I say 'hypothesis' because no one has proven, or even come close to a coherent explanation for, the mechanism of AIDS causation by HIV. How does a retrovirus that is by nature a benign particle, cause devastation of the immune system? Here we have several scientific studies published in the world's finest journals, which attest to the fact that retroviruses are part and parcel of the human organism, that they are needed to provide certain defensive capabilities against invaders, and that they are not pathogenic. So we might ask ourselves why HIV tests (thought to indicate the presence of a retrovirus) are still performed, and why doctors are still recommending the use of toxic anti-retroviral drugs to kill what, rather than a foreign invader, appears to be part of normal human metabolic processes. Cal Crilly lays it out for you, citing and linking the sources......

Multiple sclerosis is curable if recognised as Lyme disease. The cause is a cyst-forming bacterium, Borrelia Burgdorferi, which causes lesions that degrade brain and spinal cord tissue.

“Perhaps you’re familiar with “the tragedy of the commons,” a social dilemma outlined by the late biologist Garrett Hardin in a famous 1968 essay of the same name. The dilemma is that when individuals pursue personal gain, the net result for society as a whole may be impoverishment. (Pollution is the most familiar example.) Such thinking has fallen out of fashion amid President Bush’s talk of an “ownership society,” but its logic is unassailable.”

That response seems like a pretty damn obtuse interpretation of the essay, simply because the essay is nothing if not a plea for the creation of property rights. Furthermore, while it is true that Hardin claims that pursuing individual gain leads to group catastrophe, the word “when” in the paragraph above implies that there are times when the individual doesn’t, whereas Hardin claims that individuals basically always pursue their own interest, which is the problem in high-density situations where some amout of coordination is necessary. However, upon re-reading it, I realize that for Hardin property rights only forms a part of a wished-for imposition of coercive measures which will prevent individuals from pursuing personal gain at the expense of their environment. Which makes sense, because property rights, for all this may get lost in the ceaseless ideological wrangling today, are themselves forms of state-imposed coercion. Dismiss the semi-metaphysical nonsense in Locke and Kant about gaining “just propriety” over an object by making a visible mark on it. Think about it: animals control exactly as much “property” as they can defend; cheetahs peeing on trees only works because they will fight to defend what they have claimed. By contrast, think about who adjudicates the (in theory) incontestable property rights: the authorities, i.e. in our society, the State. The corollary of this, of course, is that nationalized or federal property is not “public property,” in the sense of property owned by the public—quite the contrary. The dichotomy between it and “private property” is spurious. “Public property” is simply property owned by the government. This no doubt seems obvious and intuitive, but based on the foolishness I cited above, it bears repeating that property rights, whether granted to others by the government or to itself, are not opposed to coercive state power but are in fact the very essence of it. That fact is perhaps more apparent in regards to so-called “intellectual property.”

As a marginal note, Hardin’s essay, despite the pithiness of its central analogy, is rather dispiriting insofar as it takes Hegel’s statement that “Freedom lies in the recognition of necessity” as its motto and guiding spirit. That formulation is, as I believe I have said before, perfectly monstruous. Freedom means nothing if it is not the absence of restriction, and it is perhaps a sign of the evasive confusion of priorities in Western culture that one would pretend to celebrate this value in such a way while in fact describing its opposite. Freedom is not an act or a thought, but rather a set of conditions under which action and thought occur. This is the same idealistic debasement of the language that has turned love into a deed: making love.

Note to Curt:

Just because the state claims the authority to apprehend and punish rapists doesn’t mean that apprehending and punishing rapists is a form of state coercion. Nor is the notion that rape is bad an example of state coercion. Depending on your perspective, this is either a moral truth derived from God/reason/whatever or a widely-accepted social convention. Similarly, the notion that one can own property is (again, depending on your perspective) either morally necessary or a widely-accepted social convention that seems to work pretty well (here I’m dispensing with Communists and other fools who have nothing intelligent to say on the matter). Either way, the fact that the state claims ultimate authority to adjudicate property disputes does not make private property a form of state coercion. (Further reading)

“Young man, in mathematics you don’t understand things, you just get used to them.” —John von Neumann¹

This, in a sense, is at the heart of why mathematics is so hard. Math is all about abstraction, about generalizing the stuff you can get a sense of to apply to crazy situations about which you otherwise have no insight whatsoever. Take, for example, one way of understanding the manifold structure on SO(3), the special orthogonal group on 3-space. In order to explain what I’m talking about, I’ll have to give several definitions and explanations and each, to a greater or lesser extent, illustrates both my point about abstraction and von Neumann’s point about getting used to things.

First off, SO(3) has a purely algebraic definition as the set of all real (that is to say, the entries are real numbers) 3 × 3 matrices A with the property A^TA = I and the determinant of A is 1. That is, if you take A and flip rows and columns, you get the transpose of A, denoted A^T; if you then multiply this transpose by A, you get the identity matrix I. The determinant has its own complicated algebraic definition (the unique alternating, multilinear functional…), but it’s easy to compute for small matrices and can be intuitively understood as a measure of how much the matrix “stretches” vectors. Now, as with all algebraic definitions, this is a bit abstruse; also, as is unfortunately all too common in mathematics, I’ve presented all the material slightly backwards.

This is natural, because it seems obvious that the first thing to do in any explication is to define what you’re talking about, but, in reality, the best thing to do in almost every case is to first explain what the things you’re talking about (in this case, special orthogonal matrices) really are and why we should care about them, and only then give the technical definition. In this case, special orthogonal matrices are “really” the set of all rotations of plain ol’ 3 dimensional space that leave the origin fixed (another way to think of this is as the set of linear transformations that preserve length and orientation; if I apply a special orthogonal transformation to you, you’ll still be the same height and width and you won’t have been flipped into a “mirror image”). Obviously, this is a handy thing to have a grasp on and this is why we care about special orthogonal matrices. In order to deal with such things rigorously it’s important to have the algebraic definition, but as far as understanding goes, you need to have the picture of rotations of 3 space in your head.

Okay, so I’ve explained part of the sentence in the first paragraph where I started throwing around arcane terminology, but there’s a bit more to clear up; specifically, what the hell is a “manifold”, anyway? Well, in this case I’m talking about differentiable (as opposed to topological) manifolds, but I don’t imagine that explanation helps. In order to understand what a manifold is, it’s very important to have the right picture in your head, because the technical definition is about ten times worse than the special orthogonal definition, but the basic idea is probably even simpler. The intuitive picture is that of a smooth surface. For example, the surface of a sphere is a nice 2-dimensional manifold. So is the surface of a donut, or a saddle, or an idealized version of the rolling hills of your favorite pastoral scene. Slightly more abstractly, think of a rubber sheet stretched and twisted into any configuration you like so long as there are no holes, tears, creases, black holes or sharp corners.

In order to rigorize this idea, the important thing to notice about all these surfaces is that, if you’re a small enough ant living on one of these surfaces, it looks indistinguishable from a flat plane. This is something we can all immediately understand, given that we live on an oblate spheroid that, because it’s so much bigger than we are, looks flat to us. In fact, this is very nearly the precise definition of a manifold, which basically says that a manifold is a topological space (read: set of points with some important, but largely technical, properties) where, at any point in the space, there is some neighborhood that looks identical to “flat” euclidean space; a 2-dimensional manifold is one that looks locally like a plane, a 3-dimensional manifold is one that looks locally like normal 3-dimensional space, a 4-dimensional manifold is one that looks locally like normal 4-dimensional space, and so on.

In fact, these spaces look so much like normal space that we can do calculus on them, which is why the subject concerned with manifolds is called “differential geometry”. Again, the reason why we would want to do calculus on spaces that look a lot like normal space but aren’t is obvious: if we live on a sphere (as we basically do), we’d like to be able to figure out how to, e.g., minimize our distance travelled (and, thereby, fuel consumed and time spent in transit) when flying from Denver to London, which is the sort of thing for which calculus is an excellent tool that gives good answers; unfortunately, since the Earth isn’t flat, we can’t use regular old freshman calculus.² As it turns out, there are all kinds of applications of this stuff, from relatively simple engineering to theoretical physics.

So, anyway, the point is that manifolds look, at least locally, like plain vanilla euclidean space. Of course, even the notion of “plain vanilla euclidean space” is an abstraction beyond what we can really visualize for dimensions higher than three, but this is exactly the sort of thing von Neumann was talking about: you can’t really visualize 10 dimensional space, but you “know” that it looks pretty much like regular 3 dimensional space with 7 more axes thrown in at, to quote Douglas Adams, “right angles to reality”.

Okay, so the claim is that SO(3), our set of special orthogonal matrices, is a 3-dimensional manifold. On the face of it, it might be surprising that the set of rotations of three space should itself look anything like three space. On the other hand, this sort of makes sense: consider a single vector (say of unit length, though it doesn’t really matter) based at the origin and then apply every possible rotation to it. This will give us a set of vectors based at the origin, all of length 1 and pointing any which way you please. In fact, if you look just at the heads of all the vectors, you’re just talking about a sphere of radius 1 centered at the origin. So, in a sense, the special orthognal matrices look like a sphere. This is both right and wrong; the special orthogonal matrices do look a lot like a sphere, but like a 3-sphere (that is, a sphere living in four dimensions), not a 2-sphere (i.e., what we usually call a “sphere”).

In fact, locally SO(3) looks almost exactly like a 3-sphere; globally, however, it’s a different story. In fact, SO(3) looks globally like , which requires one more excursion into the realm of abstraction. , or real projective 3-space, is an abstract space where we’ve taken regular 3-space and added a “plane at infinity”. This sounds slightly wacky, but it’s a generalization of what’s called the projective plane, which is basically the same thing but in a lower dimension. To get the projective plane, we add a “line at infinity” rather than a plane, and the space has this funny property that if you walk through the line at infinity, you get flipped into your mirror image; if you were right-handed, you come out the other side left-handed (and on the “other end” of the plane). But not to worry, if you walk across the infinity line again, you get flipped back to normal.

Okay, sounds interesting, but how do we visualize such a thing? Well, the “line at infinity” thing is good, but infinity is pretty hard to visualize, too. Instead we think about twisting the sphere in a funny way:

You can construct the projective plane as follows: take a sphere. Imagine taking a point on the sphere, and its antipodal point, and pulling them together to meet somewhere inside the sphere. Now do it with another pair of points, but make sure they meet somewhere else. Do this with every single point on the sphere, each point and its antipodal point meeting each other but meeting no other points. It’s a weird, collapsed sphere that can’t properly live in three dimensions, but I imagine it as looking a bit like a seashell, all curled up on itself. And pink.

This gives you the real projective plane, . If you do the same thing, but with a 3-sphere (again, remember that this is the sphere living in four dimensions), you get . Of course, you can’t even really visualize or, for that matter, a 3-sphere, so really visualizing is going to be out of the question, but we have a pretty good idea, at least by analogy, of what it is. This is, as von Neumann indicates, one of those things you “just get used to”.

Now, as it turns out, if you do the math, SO(3) and look the same in a very precise sense (specifically, they’re diffeomorphic). On the face of it, of course, this is patently absurd, but if you have the right picture in mind, this is the sort of thing you might have guessed. The basic idea behind the proof linked above is that we can visualize 3-space as living inside 4-space (where it makes sense to talk about multiplication); here, a rotation (remember, that’s all the special orthogonal matrices/transformations really are) is just like conjugating by a point on the sphere. And certainly conjugating by a point is the same as conjugating by its antipodal point, since the minus signs will cancel eachother in the latter case. But this is exactly how we visualized , as the points on the sphere with antipodal points identified!

I’m guessing that most of the above doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but I would urge you to heed von Neumann’s advice: don’t necessarily try to “understand” it so much as just to “get used to it”; the understanding can only come after you’ve gotten used to the concepts and, most importantly, the pictures. Which was really, I suspect, von Neumann’s point, anyway: of course we can understand things in mathematics, but we can only understand them after we suspend our disbelief and allow ourselves to get used to them. And, of course, make good pictures.

---

¹ This, by the way, is my second-favorite math quote of the year, behind my complex analysis professor’s imprecation, right before discussing poles vs. essential singularities, to “distinguish problems that are real but not serious from those that are really serious.”

² As a side note, calculus itself is a prime example of mathematical abstraction. The problem with the world is that most of the stuff in it isn’t straight. If it were, we could have basically stopped after the Greeks figured out a fair amount of geometry. And, even worse, not only is non-straight stuff (like, for example, a graph of the position of a falling rock plotted against time) all over the place, but it’s hard to get a handle on. So, instead of just giving up and going home, we approximate the curvy stuff in the world with straight lines, which we have a good grasp of. As long as we’re dealing with stuff that’s curvy (rather than, say, broken into pieces) this actually works out pretty well and, once you get used to it all, it’s easy to forget what the whole point was, anyway (this, I suspect, is the main reason calculus instruction is so uniformly bad; approximating curvy stuff with straight lines works so well that those who who are supposed to teach the process lose sight of what’s really going on).

It’s almost comforting that such invidious fluffy-minded sludge as this is floating around, as it seems, like religion, to keep the middle-brows hypnotized by “beautiful sentiments” which are so vague as to keep them from actually getting together and doing anything. It’s sort of weird to hear this weakly Marxist social-democratic pap which used to be shouted from the rooftops now being whispered in a low monotonous whine. The author avows his fealty to Jeremy Bentham, not Marx, and calls it utilitarianism not Marxism, but there are many illegitimate fathers along this line of thought.

The root of the idea is that, now that neuroscience has supposedly made it possible to actually identify what makes us happy, the idea of happiness has become quantifiable, and hence a program of providing the greatest happiness to the greatest number of people has become objectively possible. However, the author does not make the slightest effort to apply these wonders of modern science to actually determining what the alleged sources of human happiness are. The neuroscience tack is really just a defensive ploy to ward off the eternal charges that utilitarinism is simply a euphemism for an authoritarian imposition of values. As for espousing his positive program for what constitutes human happiness, it is simply the usual liberal middle-class canards, with not surprisingly a socialist edge: more time to spend with family, a decent wage for everyone, blah blah blah. But he seems to make two pretty criminally unsubstantiated assumptions: one is these sources are essentially the same for everyone, or at least could be under certain conditions, and the other is that they do not inherently conflict with anyone else’s.

I say under certain conditions could be, because in evaluating our current society he seems to privilege envy of other’s material well-being as the principal determinant of happiness. His theory is that above a certain level of material subsistence people are motivated primarily by status-seeking and the desire for a high rank within their social group. Therefore, the increasing wealth of the society will not increase happiness because people measure their well-being relative to the group, not by their absolute prosperity. This is always been a flaw in the concept of the “war against poverty”; I’m not sure it’s much of an argument for socialist economic redistribution. But actually if you read his section on the value of income taxes carefully, he doesn’t even seem to be arguing that they are useful insofar as they can be redirected to the less prosperous, although he does evidently believe that a certain amount of money contributes more to the happiness of a poor person than to a rich one’s. Rather, he seems to think that taking money away from the properous is valuable in and of itself, because it will supposedly make them less focused on the “rat race,” more family-oriented, etc., etc. In short he seems to be advocating a net impoverishment of society.

All of which may be consistent with the program of a good little socialist, but does not necessarily accord marvelously with his own evidence about the supposedly quantified happiness of humanity. The research that he cites non-specifically supposedly indicates that people’s feeling of happiness has not risen in the last half-century, but he does not cite anything which indicates that it has necessarily declined. He cites rising rates of depression and crime as presumably implicit indicators of greater unhappiness, but he does not seem to acknowledge the possibility that in our hyper-medicated and surveillance-based society perhaps people simply report depression and crime more. In any event, if roughly similar numbers of people today as in the ‘50’s report themselves happy (and we believe them), despite the increase in prosperity, that might perhaps indicate that happiness is not fixed to material well-being. Which may be consistent with his general point, but not with his idea of increasing happiness by manipulating income levels.

And even if it did, it seems rather difficult to countenance any social program predicated upon appealing to one of humanity’s most depraved instincts, namely envy. The author acknowledges that his ideal of taxation is mainly motivated by the desire to pander to people’s envy, but he seems to think that their envy will be sated by the loss of prosperity of those around them and that after that point there will be no more. So the envy of the less prosperous will be satisfied by the losses accrued by the more prosperous, which will somehow not be counter-balanced by the chagrin of the more prosperous at the prospect of seeing their status diminished. Very logical.

One of the more egregious presumptions of utilitarians is that non-utilitarian social systems somehow aren’t concerned with seeking the greatest good for the greatest number of people. On the contrary, that’s the defining problem of practically every social and political theory I can think of, and they all either seek or claim to have found the answer—whether such a solution exists, I have my doubts, but that’s why I’m a skeptic about politics. This is a handy trick by utilitarians: they say “I believe in the greatest good for the greatest number of people.” Which is practically begging the question: “As opposed to whom?” It’s useful because it tends to conceal the fact that their real agenda is generally somewhat more specific, and tends to consist in the autocratic notion that one or two measures of social living can be authoritatively determined to be the sources of happiness, and then divided up in a centralized fashion. Those that are the most insistent on the idea of liberty are generally those that are the most skeptical about the possibility of the notion of happiness being either quantitatively defined or generalizable. In other words, only indviduals can determine their own sources of happiness.

For the author, on the other hand, the fact that certain stimuli trigger certain areas of the brain at the times when test subjects profess pleasure has solved the problem of determining happiness. Of course, as mentioned, he never really bothers with the results that those studies have yielded. Somehow the fact that he considers envy to be a principal element of human happiness does not place very severe limits on the harmoniousness of individual happiness. Nor does it constitute a tyranny of the majority, because he claims that in an ideal utilitarian society the happiness of the most unhappy would be considered of pre-eminent importance. Of course, at the beginning of the article he cited the equal importance of each individual’s happiness as the fouding tenet of his theory, but I’m sure it all sorts out in the end.

Among social factors responsible for unhappiness, he cites divorce and unemployment as of pre-eminent importance. Of course, rates of both divorce and unemployment in the crassly materialistic and religious United States are much lower than in the much more overtly utilitarian-embracing Europe, but it would be a bit embarassing for him to admit this after avowing that all traditional value-systems outside of utilitarianism and “individualism” are dead.

Personally the question of the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people doesn’t exactly compel me constantly, although the issue of personal happiness tends to impose itself intransigently. I would have thought that evolutionary biology would have provided an adequate explanation of this, as well as the recurrence of what we call altruism. But such an idea of course suggests that happiness, whatever that is, is not really the point of our little existences, and that the more imperious competitiveness of life will ultimately subvert all of these little trifles of pleasure and pain. But in the meantime, we have these debased statistical notions of happiness to amuse us in an idle hour.

It seems to me that if one’s “objective” measure of happiness is electrical stimulation in the cerebral cortex, the most efficient utilitarian solution to the problem of human happiness would be strap everyone onto hospital gurneys and stimulate the “happiness” part of their brain all day long. If one does not wish to be this deterministic about it, perhaps one should allow more latitute to individuals to discover their own conception of happiness. Personally, I have found happiness generally to be an idea for the unhappy and something rarely spoken of by the happiness; mention of practically guarantees that it is not present in the environment where it is uttered. I don’t deny that what you might call love is the real bridge between personal happiness and moral obligations, and the only true means by which the desires of oneself and of others are united, but such a sentiment can never be mandated; it is entirely resistant to intellectual compulsion. Utilitarianism, which sometimes does a decent job of faking morality, is nevertheless ultimately predicated on the pleasure principle, and hence is wholly inadequate to uniting the moral and the pleasurable except when love truly pertains. In that case, of course, political theory is entirely superfluous, which is why this is all a waste of time.

p.s. I don’t claim that people’s behavior necessarily reflects what really would make them happy, but presumably it does at least reflect what they consciously value. Hence, if I were the author I would have been a bit skeptical of using the results of “surveys” of what people claim to value when the results don’t correlate with their behavior, i.e. they claim that spending time with family is most important, but they spend a disproportiante amount of time working (at least according to him). So either people are not really being forthright (consciously or unconsciously) in responding to surveys, or there is not actually a problem of priorities. In either case, he’s way over-valuing surveys as a guide to what will make people happy.

Wo Vorschriften als ebenso belastend wie sinnlos empfunden werden, neigen manche Normadressaten zu wenig kooperativem Verhalten, wie heute im

Der Jahrgang 2008 des Bundesgesetzblatts Teil I endet mit der Seite 3104. Das ist dem

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Stop what you are doing.

Click on this link to the Personal Bee home page:

http://www.personalbee.com

Then email or comment on this message with your thoughts about what we are doing right and wrong. Tell me, from looking at the home page, what business you think we are in. Tell me how you would use this and how you would get others to use it...

thanks!

Ted

Everyone on the Internet fears the day that Google will enter their market. Today the fear was tangible for Rollyo and Swicki. The Financial Times reported that Google will launch tomorrow (Tuesday) "...a customisable search engine that users can carry on their own blogs and other websites..." and compares the new service to Rollyo.

Matthew Ingram carries the photo of a shark on his post about this development. Ingram points out that when Google entered the calendar market, competitor Kiko gave up and sold themselves. He asks whether or not this was the right decision -- pointing to Paul Graham's post at the time "Google Does Not Render Resistance Futile."

I find myself agreeing with Paul and Rex Hammock puts his finger on it when he writes:

There’s a social networking aspect of Rollyo that probably won’t be a part of the Google product, however the Google product will likely offer publishers, including bloggers, an instant way to monetize narrow search in the Adsense program they’re already participating in.

For all of the things that Google has done right in technology, they have done very little well in the category of social. It isn't too late for them to learn but if history is any guide, they will miss the importance of the social network in search as well.

And frankly having a strong competitor forces you to do the two things which you most need to do in any case when you are a small business -- innovate constantly and be 500% better than your larger competition. Then Google can educate the market about why the market needs your product and then you can deliver on the market's expectations. That is what YouTube did.