A nice debate on Keynesian Economics vs. Austrian Economics within the context of our current financial troubles. The professor seems to be having a tough time facing reality.
I have a constant thirst for knowledge and learn something new just about every day. Today I'm starting a new blog series to document what some of those little things are that I've learned.
In the evening, after our Thanksgiving meal, we got to playing a game. This was a new travel trivia game my dad had found in the $5 bin at Ollies. The game had a two second time limit for answers, which kept it moving quickly, and the questions turned out to be relatively easy, meaning everyone had a decent chance of answering correctly and not feeling stupid. I learned a few things, the most memorable being that there is not just a single definition of a ton. I always knew as ton as 2000 pounds. It turns out that is a short ton, commonly used in the U.S. A long ton, on the other hand, is defined as 2,240 pounds and is used more commonly around the rest of the world. Both short and long tons are defined as 20 hundredweights, but a hundredweight is 112 pounds in the Imperial system and 100 pound in the U.S. system, accounting for the discrepancy in the two versions of a ton.
Most of the people involved in the debate to reform our healthcare system need to go back to history class. They push us to repeat the same mistakes again and again, never learning. How can they rationally expect to solve our healthcare crisis by using more government programs and controls when those are the very things that got us to where we are today? The majority of the problems with our current healthcare system in the U.S. are because of government involvement and more government will make it even more expensive and less effective.
Of course the vast majority of politicians propose only government-based solutions because of their self-interest in growing government power and because they think the short-term benefits to their constituents will keep them in power and the downsides won't surface until after they've left office. But the current proposals will not only completely bankrupt the country, the result is highly likely to be even less effective than the current system.
I hadn't found much use for the Genius playlists iTunes added in version 8. I tried it a few times but generally found the song list it generated to be lackluster compared to those I'd put together myself. Until tonight. Maybe it's a matter of picking the right song from which to generate a Genius list. Tonight I chose Reminiscing by Little River Band and ended up with a wonderful playlist of 70's soft rock:
I'm not sure what got me started thinking about it--perhaps listening to Skeptics Guide podcasts--but lately I've been thinking a lot about how our brains store memory. I think the two biggest questions I have in life are what is the universe about and how do we think and remember. I doubt the first will be answered in my lifetime but the second likely will.
Wikipedia is a wonderful resource for following the chain of topics to learn something new. I start with memory and move on to long-term memory. I learn the role of the hippocampus and about how long-term potentiation chemically creates memories in our brain. But I'm still left with the big question of how do we perceive. It's one thing to have stored pathways in the brain; it's another to be able to make sense of them. I'll have to keep thinking that one over.
I hadn't found much use for the 