DavidMcK

I've recommended this book on another thread and I'm quite sure people here will find 'Climatism!' by Steve Goreham to be informative and marvelously focused and well researched. Strange how I can't find a single environmentalist critique against this book; you would think that such a drastic and anti-agw book would be picked on.

As a reference for those who want to know more, I recommend a book called 'Climatism!' by Steve Goreham. If you are confused by the science and want a concentrated presentation of some of the environmental issues, the first four chapters are priceless. The rest of the book (I've read 3/4 so far) is also interesting and very skeptical of AGW (man made global warming).

I suspect that OL people have a disproportionate share of night owls ...I work the night shift at AA at JFK for example, so the am post times don't mean much to me.

Your donation sounds like a great idea Brant; I was just thinking the other day that we would probably find out more about how NB really works after he dies that we can know now. My 2 cents on this whole discussion is a comparison between using herbs in say South America for medicinal purposes without having a theory of disease, or a theory of biology. You wouldn't repudiate something that seemed to have efficacy because of a lack of knowledge, you would either wait for the knowledge to come later or find out yourself. Same difference for therapy techniques.

It was always confusing to me that the most masculine people I knew were the men who absolutely hate women, they treated women badly with total disrespect, they called them bitches, etc. etc. It seemed if you liked women you were soft or possibly effeminate; maybe even gay. Of course women just lapped up that kind of treatment.

It is interesting you mention William Randolph Hearst since Wynand was supposedly based loosely on Hearst's career (reference Citizen Kane and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Randolph_Hearst ). The Fountainhead seems to have captured so much of American history without even really trying. I enjoyed the article on New York architecture; someone used to give 'The Fountainhead' tours or 'Ayn Rand's New York' tours (I can't recall the title). If someone wants to give a similar tour please quote me a price.

Patrecia Neal was in 'The Day the Earth Stood Still' and 'Hud' and I loved her characters and acting in those two movies. Gary Cooper is of course famous for 'High Noon' which I also like. It takes more than actors to make a movie though, and to me 'The Fountainhead' novel was the most exciting work of art I had ever read or seen; not so the movie.

Thanks for the quote, that's terrific. World history seems to be a seesaw between those two points of view. "The first lesson of economics is scarcity: there is never enough of anything to fully satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics." - Thomas Sowell

It is stilted and the actors act like they are in a strait jacket; all the excitement and exotic elements of the novel are somehow filtered out. I suspect that Rand's micro-management of the final product had a lot to do with how boring the movie is.

Especially since Betrand Russell was the instigator or supporter of the 'Better Red than dead' phrase.

That's one of my favorite ideas and phrases from WTL also! I've often thought that it could just as well apply to Objectivism as to plumbing and the state. Just because we need philosophy doesn't mean we have to live for it...philosophy is suppose to live for us not the other way around.

Here's a link that describes the rally that Mike is attending, and it really bothers me. How Capitalism and religion got intertwined is beyond my comprehension (many of the New Deal types came from the Christian religion at the beginning of the 20th Century). This evokes hordes of Christian soldiers marching as to war for me. http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2010/08/28/at-rally-beck-positions-himself-as-new-leader-for-christian-conservatives/?hpt=C1

The purpose and function of the train wreck is to give a compressed stylized vision of the stylized compressed vision represented by 'Atlas Shrugged'. In other words the train wreck story is a miniature version of the whole idea of 'the strike'. Notice that all the decision makers who could have stopped the train wreck have been removed, or will lose their jobs and livelihood if they decide to assert themselves and stop the train from entering the tunnel. The conductor is drunk, the British intellectual is demanding nationalization of the railroad, the people in power have been placed there by the passengers, power has been transferred from the front of the train to the back, and they run smack dab into another train placed their by other bureaucrats. It is all very symbolic and clever the way she integrates this story with the totality of the novel. I admit it bothered me until I realized how true it was: e.g. Nazi Germany got the kind of government they were demanding, and the intellectuals and average person went along with the idea that the main choice was some form of dictatorship (fascism vs. socialism), so who was responsible and or guilty for what the Germans had to suffer through? The Nazis were legally elected.

Trust in the economy means that you trust that market forces will set a price of milk, gasoline and everything else such that the signal tendency is the most efficient allocation of resources. Further if you trust the market to do such important things with life saving products, why not trust the market to know what to do when it comes to the supply and demand for good government? I'm not claiming that everything will be easy, and I'm aware of inflation and ABCT (austrian business cycle theory) and I still believe that when things get bad enough they will get better: that the demand for good government will increase when there is a shortage of good governments....as a matter of fact you can already see it happening if you care to look.

Platinum is actually easy to buy, you can very often find it in the same places as gold is sold in the form of bars (bullion). I like gold better, but platinum is used in things like catalytic converters so an economic recovery might influence the price of platinum more than gold. If you are a doomsday type gold would be better accepted. I like the gold stocks (such as Newmont) which means I still have trust in the economy; that we are going to have more inflation but still a functioning economy.

Actually I cheated and found a problem so similar online that I had the answer. Also I found this, a much more difficult way to solve it from someone with a screen name of HallsofIvy (an ivy leaguer maybe?): Mar2-09, 01:56 PM You can also use the "Lagrange multiplier" method. In order to minimize f(x,y,z), while subject to the condition g(x,y,z)= constant, then the gradients must be in the same direction- \nabla f[\itex] must be a multiple of [itex]\nabla g or \nabla f= \lambda\nabla g (\lambda is the "Lagrange multiplier")- so you differentiate both functions. Here, f(x,y,z)= 2xy+ 2yz+ 2xz and g(x,y,z)= xyz= 256. \nabla f= (2y+ 2z)\vec{i}+ (2x+2z)\vec{j}+ (2y+ 2x)\vec{k} and \nabla g= yz\vec{i}+ xz\vec{j}+ xy\vec{k} so 2y+ 2z= \lambda yz, 2x+ 2z= \lambda xz, 2y+ 2x= \lambda xy. Since we don't really need to determine \lambda one method I like to solve equations like these is to divide one equation by another: \frac{2y+ 2z}{2x+ 2z}= \frac{y}{x} and \frac{2x+ 2y}{2y+ 2x}= \frac{x}{z} Those can be written as y^2+ zy= xy+ yz or y= x and xz+ yz= xy+ x^2 or z= x. That is, x= y= z (which is reasonable from symmetry considerations). Putting x= y= z into xyz= 256, we have x3= 256= 28= 43(4) so x= y= z= 4\sqrt[4]{4}. Edit: I found this criticism a few posts down from this: Mar2-09, 04:11 PM HallsOfIvy: You're wrong, just because you didn't read the question carefully enough. It's a box with no top; your f(x) is wrong. A few posts down from this complicated answer is a very simple answer (with no math) from csprof2000 (I found this today btw): Mar2-09, 04:14 PM Derill03: I actually worked this out without doing a line of math, and I think you hearing it is good for you. You probably already know that a cube has the lowest A/V ratio of any parallelpiped (box). You're looking for what is essentially a parallelpiped sliced in half which, were it whole, would have area 512. The best one for you is an 8x8x8 cube. Cut it in half, and you have an 8x8x4 shape with exactly the characteristics you wanted. If the cube was the best parallelpiped, the half-cube will be the best half-parallelpiped. This is from here: http://www.physicsforums.com/archive/index.php/t-296518.html

Since we are on foreign films, how about 'Burnt by the Sun' a Russian movie about a general who was killed by the monster he believed in. It was a 1994 movie.

No, I took calculus in college, failed it and had to take it over in the summer and finally made a 'C' (with an easy teacher). The feeling when I walked in and took the final the first time is hard to describe (dismayed maybe?). Your question was easy compared to that final.

I'm not too familiar with Schumpeter (though I believe the 'creative destruction' phrase comes from him) but from George's quote above it should be pointed out that from the Objectivist point of view those 'utilitarian' arguments will never win; so his pessimism might have been well founded from his own point of view. This is why Rand is so important; people really don't care that Capitalism has lifted vast numbers of people from a short nasty brutish existence; they only look at the morality of Socialism vs. the (what they perceive as) the immorality of Capitalism. She questioned that ethic and provided a moral basis for Capitalism. Why wasn't she more optimistic then? She thought people were children who would always choose the alleged comfort of altruism with its hold on people who are stronger than most than the kind of person who was less afraid of taking responsibility. I believe there are reasons to be optimistic about the long term prospects of Laissez Faire, but it would take a long article to specify why. Basically I believe people have the capacity to grow, change and learn.

I recently bought a 'Nook' (the Barnes and Noble e-reader) so I'm just now exploring e-books. The recently published best sellers are just as expensive as the paperbacks, but since I don't buy these I've found free e-books on the internet. So far I've downloaded a number of economic texts from the Ludwig von Mises web site; Anthem, the (nearly) complete works of Shakespeare for $0.95, a price hard to beat. I'm still looking e.g. for N. Branden's books as well as others. Google has some e-books for free as well as other web sites, but I'm open to suggestions from someone who is further along the learning curve.

8 X 8 X 4

Thanks George for posting this: I've always wondered why we have books about the first second of the universe and next to nothing was said about the more fascinating question of what was the first second before the Big Bang. We were promised a Big Toe (theory of everything) years ago..a formula we could wear on T-shirts that summed up everything, and maybe we'll finally get it.

This is actually very encouraging to me because it shows the utter inability of the other side to even answer a plain question. We aren't fighting giants we are fighting moral midgets -oops- 'little people'.

Happy Birthday Robert.

In the link above you can also find Nathaniel and Barbara Branden's 'debate' or discussion about Rand and 'Atlas Shrugged' by doing a search (just put N. Branden and Freedom fest in the search window). It lasts about 50 minutes and on the other side is a science fiction writer and the head of Whole Foods.