Tuesday, April 15, 2008
cougars in chicago
this is not entirely accurate, as i have it on good authority that many locals are well-practiced in the art of cougar hunting.
note: this is not the FH's first cougar post. she was almost eaten by the feline variety in 2004.
also, thanks for the tribune link, jdt!
Labels: personal
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what jefferson 1 is about.
to me, this is certainly not about the questionable dancing of some participants, or the questionable activities of thomas jefferson. to me this is not about misuse of public property, it is not about race. this is not about the interaction between the jefferson 1 and the officer, the group's motives, or what the law should be.
this is about the transparent enforcement of a clear rule of law, and the need for easy access to laws. officers could not cite any type of rule authorizing the arrest. this strongly suggests they either a) didn't know one or b) didn't think she needed to know. this is about detaining a human being without citing or, as it seems, having, just cause. it's moreover about the real possibility that countless individuals outside the jefferson 1's socioeconomic status are arrested without being shown the law in writing. and they may not have the resources to fight back. they mayn't feel that they even should fight back. that is what this is about.
the albeit flawed founders were generally in favor of a government with clear, set rules not subject to the whim of the ruler like their former king, or his extensions in the form of a state. this is about that perhaps-impossible ideal, as certainly there are unavoidable gray areas in enforcement. but this is about asking the law's representatives to move a little closer towards that ideal.
that's what i think, anyway.
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Monday, April 14, 2008
mill's psychology of subjection
An active and energetic mind, if denied liberty, will seek for power: refused the command of itself, it will assert its personality by attempting to control others.he (and likely, his wife) further argue:
To allow to any human beings no existence of their own but what depends on others, is giving far too high a premium on bending others to their purposes. Where liberty cannot be hoped for, and power can, power becomes the grand object of human desire; those to whom others will not leave the undisturbed management of their own affairs, will compensate themselves, if they can, by meddling for their own purposes with the affairs of others.this puts to mind another theory on power-seeking, a rephrasing of adler's theory in j. burns' leadership:
human beings strive toward power to overcome and compensate for inevitable childhood feelings of inferiority, impotence, and dependence on adultsso, subjection creates the desire for subjecting in its victims. (n.b. the cycle of subjection bastiat attributes to other causes)
of course, mill's essay has many more gems than this. visit the librivox project page to be notified when the audiobook is complete. better yet, volunteer yourself!
Labels: misc. psych, political
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Sunday, April 13, 2008
illegal peaceful assembly
find details here from:
the event's co-organizer
the agitator
megan at the atlantic
outside the beltway
below the beltway
julian sanchez
f & s .org
peaceful assembly is, at times, restricted. what about this case? certain elements seem suspicious, including that police refused to give badge numbers or cite cause for arrest. the memorial website states that it is open 24/7, but that "for planned events dependent upon the activity and number of participants a permit may be required." the number and nature criteria are oddly missing. the phone line is closed on weekends so we must wait for monday to find out.
but whatever the case, it reminds me of a certain movie about dancing...
update: eye-witness interview
update 2: great article in the american spectator on the incident. though the eye-witness interview is down, footage of the incident is online now.
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Tuesday, April 08, 2008
haudenosaunee: the first libertarians?
one thesis drove home repeatedly was: indians weren't much different than europeans. that is, they had large, structured, complex societies. for example, tenochtitlan was bigger than london or rome. these societies had astronomy and mathematics, philosophy and war, oppression and freedom. some had authoritarian socialism, yet others had limited representative government and equal rights for all people. his concluding argument is laid bare using the example of the haudenosaunee. he goes so far as to call them libertarian, despite their collective land use, and cites highly circumstantial evidence that they may have shifted colonial thought - and even the scottish enlightenment - towards individual liberty and equality.
of equal interest was his criticism of environmentalists - rather, preservationists. he notes that the "wilderness" seen by 1491 visitors was largely designed, but overrun and decomposing, and full of domesticated plants. indians manipulated their environment to suit their needs, e.g. converting "perhaps one quarter" of what we now consider the south american rain forest into farms and gardens, domesticating many trees and vegetables, and controlling game populations. he argues that what we see as "nature" is really the result of entropy, as sickness wiped out the majority of the indian population who were then incapable of maintaining their large farms and gardens. to his argument, there is no one "nature," rather sustainable and unsustainable environmental manipulations.
my main question while reading, though, was: well, why were they so "behind" europeans? they couldn't sail ships to colonize spain, after all. from the book, it seems to be a combination of factors, the principle one being the lack of beasts of burden, which in turn made the meso-american invention of the wheel useless, which prevented the flurry of development seen elsewhere. i'm sure that many other, perhaps more prominent, factors (such as lack of disease immunity) are involved. ideas?
Labels: misc. science
Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond is in a a nutshell about this divergence. It also won the Pulitzer.
By 
chris, at
Tue Apr 08, 10:45:00 PM
i should read that. however "collapse" disappointed me so much that i have been put off him.
By ns, at
Tue Apr 08, 11:06:00 PM
I have Collapse. I read about a chapter and was thoroughly uninterested. GGS is orders of magnitude better, and worth reading at least the first 2-4 chapters.
By chris, at
Tue Apr 08, 11:27:00 PM
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Thursday, April 03, 2008
is new york safer?
why does this ranking seem so wrong? perhaps because it is. as someone pointed out at lunch, this is the per capita rate. although your probability of getting shot in new york is much less according to the per capita rate, it would be much higher than sprawling indianapolis using a per mile rate. that is because new york is very small; all those murders are concentrated on a tiny island.
i don't advocate always living life by statistics. however, if i am going to think about statistics, they'd better be the right ones. when i walked outside, i would ask myself: what is the probability of someone getting shot on this block right now? that is per mile rate, not the per capita rate (and neighborhood, time of day, etc. rates).
in conclusion, nyc may be safer than it used to be. but you'll still have to carry your mace on your next visit.
Labels: decision making
Umm. Were the NYC stats just for Manhattan? Manahattan is a small island (about 25 sq miles), but only a single borough. NYC has four other boroughs comprising 303.3 sq miles, which is only a smidgen smaller than Indianapolis at 372 sq miles. And your per mile rate seems rather dubious. How would you calculate the probability of the Bernoulli trial without having sample space defined on the occurrence/non-occurrence of the event? A rate of 20 per mile versus 200 per mile doesn't tell me very much about the probability of my being murdered. I'd be much more concerned by the former if the population is only 40 individuals within a mile, than the latter with a population of 400,000 individuals.
By chris, at
Fri Apr 04, 03:04:00 PM
good point re: manhattan chris. i can't so far find the answer, and what, if 7.3 is not for just manhattan, that rate is. will report back.
you're right i think about probabilities. though imo whatever that probability is, it doesn't matter to that one in x number of people who does get shot.
By ns, at
Fri Apr 04, 06:39:00 PM
At the close of 2007, Manhattan had 70 murders. Brooklyn, the most populous borough had 200, and so on.
http://tinyurl.com/5vrz3c
That's all out of 500 murders in entire city - not just Manhattan - for the year, the lowest since 1963.
More importantly for the question of whether visitors to NYC need to worry: Just 100 of those 500 murders involved people who were not acquaintances with their assailant. That's the number that one would have to worry about if one was just visiting the city. The largest component of the other 400 were probably involved in the drug trade, in which case not getting involved in the NYC drug trade probably lowers your chance of getting shot quite a lot.
As to your last line: Of course it doesn't matter to the person getting shot, but is that really the question? Or is the question, really, what is the likelihood of getting shot?
thanks for all of the useful info! i agree there are many more statistics of use than general murder rates, when considering how safe you are. but as to the question of "is the question, really, what is the likelihood of getting shot?" i am not sure, it is maybe a philosophical question. if i get shot, the probability of me getting shot was 100%, so the statistic that i was "safe" was of absolutely no use to me and had no predictive validity. i realize this is not a kosher view.
By ns, at
Tue Apr 08, 07:52:00 PM
You having been shot doesn't change the underlying probability (from either a frequentist or Bayesian perspective); your having been shot is the realization of random variable. The probabilities we've been talking about would be conditional on not having been shot yet, in which case we ought to think of them as hazards (the instantaneous proby that x will happen right now | on x not having happend prior to now). Of course all this would be conditional on other covariates (age, current location in NYC, involved in drug running, etc). Further (and albeit ironically, ns) once you've been shot, you will become a statistics.
By chris, at
Tue Apr 08, 10:41:00 PM
yup. my inarticulate point was that in as much as an event is randomly-selected, the probabilities rather speak to a long-term accumulation of events than to one event itself. kind of. or something.
By ns, at
Sun Apr 13, 06:08:00 PM
speaking of statistics:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/08/science/08tier.html?ex=1208318400&en=282eaa1e2cb5d56f&ei=5065&partner=MYWAY
By ns, at
Sun Apr 13, 06:10:00 PM
The point of the post, as I gathered, was "is NYC safer" in terms of murder and you tried to argued that it was not, in fact, as safe as statistics suggest.
However, it is, in fact, safer, in fact incredibly safe as compared to many other big cities.
If the point of your post had been: "getting shot sucks", then I would've been happy to accept that as true.
whoa, easy now wacked econ. i try to maintain a friendly and cheerful environment here at FH, so please be nice. i have readily agreed about many points by commenters (commentors?) on this post, and in my last comment was simply continuing a conversation that arose on statistics in the comments section (that was the "point" was referring to.
cheers, and be happy!
n
By ns, at
Wed Apr 23, 01:51:00 PM
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