Monthly Archives: December 2007

A PLAY-OFF SYSTEM FOR THE PRESIDENTIAL NOMINATIONS?

A PLAY-OFF SYSTEM FOR THE PRESIDENTIAL NOMINATIONS? Now is the time for football bowl games and for sportswriters arguing for a college football championship playoff system. Why not have playoffs for the Presidential nominations? The playoffs could take many forms, … Continue reading

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LOOKING BACK– OPPOSITION TO SAVING LIVES BY USING CHECKLISTS.

LOOKING BACK– OPPOSITION TO SAVING LIVES BY USING CHECKLISTS. I posted here about Atul Gutwande’s argument that doctors would do a better job if they used checklists for complicated procedures. I was surprised that they didn’t already use checklists. In … Continue reading

Posted in Science | 1 Comment

DIEHARD MARXISTS.

DIEHARD MARXISTS. Stoppard has a memorable character in ROCK ‘N’ ROLL, a professor who is a devoted Marxist, whose loyalty to Communist regimes cannot be shaken. The character seems to be completely unaffected by the restrictions on freedom that his … Continue reading

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EAST GERMANY AND WEST GERMANY.

EAST GERMANY AND WEST GERMANY. There was a controlled experiment run for about forty years comparing Communism in East Germany and capitalism in West Germany from an economic point of view. The East German economy was a huge failure. West … Continue reading

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HAVING ONE BIG INK BLOT ON YOUR RECORD.

HAVING ONE BIG INK BLOT ON YOUR RECORD. I think that it is sometimes an advantage to have a huge blot on one’s historical copybook. An example is Richard Nixon. Watergate dominates any other negatives on his record; those other … Continue reading

Posted in Economics, History | 3 Comments

STOPPARD AND THE FALL OF THE IRON CURTAIN.

STOPPARD AND THE FALL OF THE IRON CURTAIN. ROCK ‘N’ ROLL is one of the few works of fiction that I am aware of that have dealt with the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Iron … Continue reading

Posted in History, Literature, Theater | 1 Comment

ROCK ‘N’ ROLL.

ROCK ‘N’ ROLL. We got to see another wonderful Tom Stoppard play. ROCK ‘N’ ROLL has a two act structure that reflects the history of Eastern Europe before and after 1989. The first act is in many ways painful. The … Continue reading

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SHAKESPEARE AND NEUROSCIENCE.

SHAKESPEARE AND NEUROSCIENCE. Jonah Lehrer (author of PROUST WAS A NEUROSCIENTIST) links here to a report by Phillip Davis on an experiment which measured the brain’s reaction to some Shakespearean language. The experiment measured the effect on the brain of … Continue reading

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IN PRAISE OF SCROOGE.

IN PRAISE OF SCROOGE. Steven E. Landsburg (the Armchair Economist), who is an illustration of Robertson Davies’s proposition that “[A]ll economists are rapt, fanciful creatures; it is necessary to their profession”, praises Scrooge. In fact, he has a whole chapter … Continue reading

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MERRY CHRISTMAS!

MERRY CHRISTMAS! God bless us, every one!

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