As far as I can tell from reading op-eds about the need for a second stimulus, this is how things got to be the way they are:

° After the financial crisis everyone got scared about the future and stopped buying the crap they don't really need.

° The companies that make the crap people don't really need, anticipating a decline, laid off people, sometimes preemptively.

° The laid-off people then had to stop buying not only crap they don't really need but some of the things they actually do need.

° That affected the companies who make things people really need, and so they laid off people too.

° If everybody would just start buying stuff they don't really need then pretty soon everyone would be able to buy the stuff they really need.

Legendary Service

The other day I needed to buy a gift and saw that TD Bank sells gift Visa cards. I like TD -- they are open 7 days a week and someone always asks you how they can help you when you walk in there, and it always looks pretty empty.

They obviously don't sell a lot of gift cards because it took about fifteen minutes to complete the transaction -- someone had to find the keys to the vault to retrieve their stash of cards. Nevertheless, I bought one and after I got home, read the fine print.

It turns out, if you don't spend it within a year, they start to use pay you negative interest each month until it disappears. Cheapo phone cards do this to you month by month, but now banks too. It is a stimulus. Sometimes a great notion.

Legendary People

Koestler on Newton

"What he achieved was rather like an explosion in reverse. When a projectile blows up, its shiny smooth symmetrical body is shattered into jagged, irregular fragments. Newton found fragments and made them fly together into a simple, seamless, compact body, so simple that it appears as self-evident, so compact that any grammar-schoolboy can handle it."

Koestler on Descartes

"Descartes' wide-open mind boggled in horror at the idea of ghost arms clutching through the void- as unprejudiced intelligence was bound to do, until 'universal gravity' or 'electromagnetic field' became verbal fetishes which hypnotized it into quiescence, disguising the fact that they are metaphysical concepts dressed in the mathematical language of physics"

Like Stefan Zweig, Koestler, I just discovered, committed joint suicide with his wife.

Quotes from Koestler's The Sleepwalkers:

"One of the points that I have laboured in this book is the unitary source of the mystical and scientific modes of experience;"

"The inertia of the human mind and its resistance to innovation are most clearly demonstrated not, as one might expect, by the ignorant mass – which is easily swayed once its imagination is caught – but by professionals with a vested interest in tradition and in the monopoly of learning. Innovation is a twofold threat to academic mediocrities: it endangers their oracular authority, and it evokes the deeper fear that their whole laboriously constructed edifice might collapse."

Courtesy??

Google has released a new upgrade to their operating system for Android mobile phones, and it is a bit of an improvement, so good for them. It is nevertheless endlessly astonishing to me how people can sell you stuff that doesn't work. In the days when you bought a phone from Western Electric, if it was flawed you returned it and got a replacement or a refund. Google sells consumer devices with buggy software and has absolutely no customer support. Zero. I can understand no customer support for searching the internet or twittering, since you're not paying for it and it's funded by other people's money, but I'm paying for my phone.

Professionalism

For reasons too complex to go into (well maybe not: actually, the logic board seems to have a flaw in it), Apple has kindly replaced my two-year-old 24" iMac with a new 27" iMac. I connected the new machine they shipped me overnite to the old one with a FireWire cable; on switching it on it asked me whether I wanted to transfer Applications as well as Internet settings and Documents. I said yes. Two hours later my new machine looked exactly like my old one (except that behind the scenes it was running Snow Leopard rather than Tiger and it was 3" bigger); the dock still contained every application I have ever used; I didn't have to reinstall any software again, not Word, not Illustrator, not Mathgematica, not Matlab which requires Xwindows from Unix, not even Parallel Systems and Microsoft Windows XP which runs under it, and the Windows programs I use ran as before and remembered the last file they opened. There is a number to call for help. But I didn't need it.

#$%!@ Respek!!!

I'm always interested in how people get to make discoveries, and Jeremy Bernstein pointed me at Arthur Koestler's book The Sleepwalkers, a history of man's view of the cosmos. I've read only part of it. It has a wonderful account of Kepler's discovery of his three laws of planetary motion. Koestler stresses several things that strike me:

First of all, Kepler's unique contribution. Many discoveries are part of the zeitgeist; if not for Heisenberg then Schrodinger, if not for Apple then Microsoft, but if not for Kepler, then nothing. No one else came close. And without Kepler, no Newton.

Second, until Kepler, astronomy was about explaining the shape of the orbits. Kepler brought physics into astronomy by focusing not just on their shape, but also on their motion, the speed with which planets moved, the ratio of orbital times to orbital distances. His law that"planets sweep out equal areas in equal times" is the law of conservation of angular momentum. And Kepler came close to understanding gravity. He understood that elliptical orbits are the result of a force from the sun and a force from the planet, i.e. the tension between gravitation and inertia.

Kepler couldn't have done any of this without Tycho Brahe's data. And he took data seriously -- 8 minutes of an arc was enough for him to invalidate one of his own wrong theories; before him 8 minutes of an arc was ignorable for the sake of complying with Aristotelian principles.

But Kepler didn't slavishly follow data. He played leapfrog with theory, intuition, guesswork and data, somehow knowing when to pay attention to one rather than another, trampolining from method to method at the right time until he finally, after years, got everything right. And here we are.

I was thinking about the futility of low interest rates and easy credit as the cure for everything and a Yiddish proverb my parents used to use jumped into my head:

Es helft wie a teiten, bankes

It means

It helps like leeches for a corpse

but it's more pithy and rhythmic in Yiddish.

Reading the papers lately I sometimes momentarily feel that I get a hint of a glimpse into the frustration behind the French or Bolshevik revolutions (though I know where my head would end up too).

Today's New York Times has an article about the accoutrements that accrue to some museum directors: not just good pay but also apartments for free whose rent, paid by the museum, is not taxable, because they invoke some clause that says that, like university presidents, if they are required to live on ("near") the premises, then their rental doesn't count as income. Not all museums push this envelope, only the regulatorily edgier ones.

And there's the constant stream of news about investigations into Congressman and Senators who play the system for money, dodging the rules they oversee. And the letters to the editor who pity the Congressman and Senators being investigated because they say that everyone does it and these few are being scapegoated.

This red fiber of entitlement is so deeply threaded through the fabric that no single law can disentangle and remove it. Probably it was always that way and I've just begun to notice it more.

Finally, a sensible Op-Ed about AI and the premature and naive attribution of human qualities to human artefacts:

Jaron Lanier in the NY Times

There are people in the world who can walk on both sides of the street simultaneously and you have to admire them.

Berkshire Hathaway just marked down their long-term derivatives positions by $1.4 billions while Warren Buffett talks about weapons of mass destruction.

George Soros is also pretty cool: a master speculator with one hand and writing about the inappropriate kinds of speculation with the other. Not necessarily inconsistent, I'm willing to admit, but nevertheless a feat.