Reading List

Maxis investors and telecom regulators should read this
People looking at new business model should look at this.
Everyone must read this.
And I'm planning to go through this.

The Deads Arise

No this is not a post related to zombie banks or literal zombies. Rather this will be on dead economists but not-so-dead ideas.

Among of my monthly ritual is a visit to Economics section in Kinokuniya but I've been skipping that for 2 straight months. From the last visit I found out that the Economics section has actually grow. The financial crisis actually increase the cottage industry of everything-is-wrong-with-capitalist system kind of books. So that's explain the enlargement of the section.

But what really surprise me is the inclusion of more classics in the collection. I have never encounter Jane Jocobs' works being on sale here and quiet shock to find Cities and the Wealth of Nations and the Nature of Economics. While Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations is a staple, now you can find The Theory of Moral Sentiments.

Classics works in economic uses logic and rhetoric to make its point while recent works rested on assumption-based logic and built model around them. I rarely go through classics because I find it time and mentally consuming to digest the messages. I did go through it because I know they will heavy on the principles but short on facts. 

Maybe that is needed, some willingness to retrace on what background that we lay our foundations. And I do welcome it.

By the way I ended walking out with this, this and this. Currently I'm reading this.

2012

Hollywood has gotten few end-of-the-world movies in the next few months. Now it’s 2012, then it would be The Road, Book of Eli and Legion. But the genre itself is getting tired with cliché endings, which is the world as we know it will restart itself as long as there is hope.

But this cliché ending may actually be the state of mind of many around the world. The desire to destroy the status quo and the second chance to build a new world according to our utopian version. But of course in order to move to the inflection point where a brave new world is possible, chaos will reign first and those who survive the chaos will lead in the new world.

I believe that the new beginning is just a state of mind. There can never be true beginning. With modern record-keeping techniques, eliminating the past and moving into a new uncharted territory sounds impossible. But maybe with epic proportion disasters that render every data storage facility useless or even humanity forgotten to read, write and talk; then I believe true new beginning can happens.

Battle Studies - John Mayer

The new John Mayer record reminds you how great it is to be single and loving it. The guitar riffs are much better than previous records. Taylor Swift make a swift appearance on on a song.

Curiosity

A great speech by Jim Leach.

“Is There an Inalienable Right to Curiosity?”
September 10, 2009
University of Virginia
Charlottesville, Virginia
(As delivered)

President Casteen, faculty, and friends of the University of Virginia.

It is an honor to join in celebrating the re-opening of the University of Virginia Art Museum and the new exhibition “Thomas Jefferson’s Academical Village.”

Jefferson was the most erudite of our founders, matched in certain areas only by Franklin and Witherspoon. A student of history and philosophy, and almost anything else that could be read in an accessible book, Jefferson was influenced by the greatest foreign aid ever given a country—the ideas of the Enlightenment. The framework of his political thought borrowed particularly from two of Britain’s most progressive thinkers, John Locke and David Hume.

In the context of Jefferson’s love for this university and his authorship of the most powerful revolutionary document in history, I thought it might be adventuresome to posit another way of describing the meaning or perhaps the effect of the most compelling political phrase ever penned.

Jefferson, the wordsmith of American democracy, affirmed for posterity a trinity of inalienable rights: “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

The first two Creator-endowed rights that he stipulated in the Declaration—“life” and “liberty”—were derived from Locke, who had decreed a triad of rights: “life, liberty, and property.” For Jefferson, the precept of private property was presumably implicit in the third, his most imaginative utterance—“pursuit of happiness”—an obliquely expansive phrase co-opted, perhaps indirectly, from the writings of a somewhat obscure Swiss natural rights theorist named Burlamaqui.

On an almost daily basis in American jurisprudence judges render opinions that interpret laws and sometimes the meaning of the Constitution itself. Interpreting the Declaration of Independence is a less frequent venture for historians and political scientists in large measure because it was so well crafted and, as a revolutionary rather than governing document, so singular in purpose. Yet the philosophy it reflects holds meaning for peoples the world over. While the specific abuses of authority cited were specific to a time and place, the underpinning precepts that were asserted were universalist in meaning and application.

Just as the Constitution was designed to accommodate changing circumstance, the Declaration takes on new and in many ways profounder relevance as society evolves. It is a bedrock of values in a world where change and its acceleration are disruptive constants.

Accordingly, I would pose the question: Could what Jefferson affirmed be summarized or considered in effect as advocacy of an inalienable right to be curious and pursue curiosity?

By background, 99 percent or more of the people who ever lived on the planet by the end of the 18^thcentury could only reflect the social status and pursue as occupations whatever their parents did. Curiosity, which may be a natural condition of children, didn’t apply expansively to adults because in their daily pursuits they had so few choices. Lack of education and social and economic immobility put pervasive constraints on the imagination.

While to my knowledge Jefferson never addressed the subject of curiosity, he himself was a living embodiment of an inquisitive mind. A right to be curious would have been a natural reflection of his own personality. After all, perhaps with a bit of exaggeration, it was said of this Virginian that he knew all the science that was known at the time. And as the exhibition opening today of his original drawings, prints, and letters commemorating his “academical village” demonstrates, he had a personal grasp of engineering, surveying and architecture, both landscape and structural.

Jefferson was a student of the classics and believed in classic forms. He was also a modernist. He relished innovation, political and architectural. The designer of the serpentine wall would, I am sure, have appreciated the juxtaposed nearby installation on campus of the work of another creative engineer—Alexander Calder. And I am confident that he would have been excited that Calder’s majestic outdoor stabile would become complemented this week by the addition of a whimsical Calder mobile inside this wonderful museum.

He would also, I am sure, have marveled at the collection of aboriginal works given the museum by John Kluge. Jefferson the Curious could also be described as a cultural anthropologist. Cogitating about various religions of the world, he studied their points of convergence and concluded that what mattered most was not where they differed, but where they found common ground.

Many might find the importance I give the concept of curiosity itself a curious thought. But curiosity is imaginative thinking. And imagination fortified by knowledge is a powerful force. It is exactly what oppressive states fear. That is why oppressors are invariably censors. They attempt to close the ears of their people and cloak them with orthodoxy of one kind or another. But the human soul is by nature curious and responds to imaginative thought. It is no accident that it was a playwright in Czechoslovakia, a humanist labor leader in Poland, and a Pope in Rome who established that the human spirit is more powerful than a tank commander reporting to an ideologue in the Kremlin. Ideas matter. And when ideas are amplified by recognition that alternative models of governance exist, whether they be in far-away or adjacent places, people-centric approaches become more easily imagined and demanded.

In this context, Jeffersonian thought may have been as relevant to resolution of the Cold War as the geo-strategies of any 20^th-century leader.

In politics, process is our most important product. In learning, Marshall McLuhan’s assertion that the medium is the message retains certain resonance. We are all discomforted with aspects of this controversial contention. But there is another side to the technology that incentivizes couch-potato citizenship. The computer revolution holds out the prospect that the digital library could become an international citadel for the pursuit of curiosity.

The NEH is proud to have partnered with the University of Virginia in a host of significant digital projects: preparing a multimedia archive on Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Dolley Madison digital edition; providing digital teaching methodologies for Dante; cataloging and creating electronic access to Buddhist literary texts; and cataloging the Tibetan Buddhist canon.

The NEH has also partnered with the university in supporting the scholarly editing and print publication of the papers of George Washington and James Madison.

We also are helping to support Princeton and the University of Virginia in digitizing the papers of Jefferson. But digitization is more than archiving records of historical and literary figures and relevant religions. Understanding history requires a sense of how events affect the lives of ordinary citizens. Accordingly, in an extraordinarily successful undertaking a decade ago, the NEH and the University of Virginia partnered in a digital project that compared the historical experiences of two Civil War era communities, one in a union town in Pennsylvania, the other in Virginia.

I would like to conclude with the observation that the future is now the province of the curious. Individual rights may by nature be inalienable, but history demonstrates that they must be nurtured to be protected and embellished. The great revolution that Jefferson helped precipitate and the learning monument he established here in Charlottesville are about the democratization of ideas as well as institutions of government. The two go hand-in-hand. The cornerstone of democracy is access to knowledge. It is what provides citizens the ability to apply judgment and perspective to issues of the day.

The curious pursuing their curiosity may be mankind’s greatest if not only hope.

Best Paragraph Today (September 1,2009)

From a 2004 publication:

...the environment changes,it should come as no surprise that the heuristics of the old environment are not necessarily well suited the new. In such cases, we observe 'behavioral biases' - actions that are apparently ill advised in the context in which we observe them. But rather than labeling such behavior irrational, we should recognize that suboptimal behavior is not unlikely when we take heuristics out of their evolutionary context. A more accurate term for such behavior might be 'maladaptive'. The flopping of a fish on dry land may seem strange and unproductive, but underwater, the same motions are capable of propelling the fish away from its predators.

One of the element that is incorporated into the Adaptive Market Hypothesis.

Up and away we go

I just finished watching it. Just like any other Pixar movies, they told you to dream big and exciting things will come to you even when the credits roll.

I'm just disappointed that Partly Cloudy was not shown in the beginning.

Happy Ramadhan