Russ Carnhan is the Representative for the 3rd Missouri House of Reps. district. Today I wrote him to express my opinion of his vote on the $700 Billion bail-out bill.
Dear Sir,
Your vote on the recent wall street bail-out bill is extremely disappointing. As a person who works for a living, I am keenly aware of the purchasing power of the U.S. Dollar. As you may have noticed, this purchasing power has been eroding steadily for the last 100 years, and has recently accelerated its decline. Your vote to debase the currency by at least $700 Billion this Monday is extremely damaging to those who do not own investment banks or receive contributions from them. This additional money, in addition to driving up commodity prices across the board, will also permit the firms which have proven to be not economically viable to continue in operation. You will be personally responsible for prolonging the downturn by preventing the failed investments and the overpriced securities from clearing out of the market, if you press forward with this approach to any further attempts to pass a bail-out bill.
My question to you, and I would very much appreciate a reply, is this:
You swore to uphold the constitution when you were sworn into office. The constitution forms the ground rules for our federal government. Where in the federal constitution do you find the authority to grant the treasury secretary the ability to become a purchaser of failed securities? Do you not feel restricted by the 10th amendment, and its explicit reservation of all powers not specifically delegated to the federal government to the people and the states?
Recently I have been experimenting with GUI programming, specifically with GTK+ and Gnome. I first developed a Gnome app to referee and display othello games between AI’s developed for a class I was taking(more on this later). I then moved on to cellular automata. Specifically, the one dimensional CA’s mentioned in the wikipedia article, based on Wolfram notation. I have attached some images of the program running, some filling up with one rule, others toggled between several rules.
Friends of mine are currently traveling through Morocco on their honeymoon. They are blogging about their experiences at The Train to Marrakesh. Watch for interesting content.
Here is a video of Nomad, a robot that my partner and I programmed as an assignment for graduate school. The name Nomad comes from a Star Trek episode called “The Changeling”. Our Nomad was programmed to utilize the wavefront algorithm in order to navigate the course. The competition was set up as predator vs prey, with half of the teams designated predators, and the other half as prey. The objective for the prey was to get from the starting position to one of two goals on the other side of the arena, then to play a song indicating that the robot knows it reached its objective. The goal of the predator was to tag the prey before it could reach one of the goals, also singing once this was accomplished, to indicate that the robot knew it had tagged the prey. Nomad was programmed as a prey-bot.
I have been using quizlet.com for about a year now to help me study the Russian language. Quizlet allows users to create sets of virtual flashcards. If this sounds boring to you, you are a philistine and need to go look right away. Otherwise, this is in an interesting thing, and you will look anyway.
I suggest trying an example. For instance, a set on WWII. Check out the different methods of study, from review, to learn, to test, to games like scatter and space race.
So far, the most common reaction to the news of Arthur C. Clarke’s death has been “he was still alive?” Yes, indeed, and he was living in Sri Lanka, formerly Ceylon. He moved there initially to seek sunken treasure, and succeeded. He then started the Arthur C. Clarke diving school in Hikkaduwa.
For those unfamiliar with his work, Arthur C. Clarke was considered among the elite in the Science Fiction field, especially among the “Hard SciFi” genre, which can be described as Science Fiction that strives to stay within the boundaries of known science. His most popular work is his collaboration with Stanley Kubrick on the film “2001: A Space Odyssey”. He is also famous for the “Rendezvous With Rama” series of novels.
There is a story going around of an interesting astronomical event occuring on or near the time of Arthur C. Clarke’s death. Apparently one or more stars which had previously gone super nova, became visible, for brief time by the naked eye, on the night of Clarke’s death. There is now a movement to name this event the “Clarke Event”.
2001: A Space Odyssey provides a good analogy to power and the abuse there of. HAL represents the powerful. He proclaims a great happiness in working with people(those without power) and a great enthusiasm for “the mission”(the general welfare). HAL has direct control over most functions of the ship. The people can just sit back and allow him to show them what to do. It is also likely that HAL actually believes his own statements about wanting the best for the crew and wanting to accomplish the mission.
I liken this to the typical politician’s seeming desire to do good for his constituents. He has a mission, and seems to enjoy working with the people whom are under his all-encompassing care. However, due to inherent inconsistencies in the logic of centralized power structures, the mission and the love of the crew can be cast into conflict. At this point, some realize the error, and side with the crew, over the mission. However, many politicians side with the mission, at the expense of the crew, often-times without even realizing it. In fact, the most likely justification one may receive from such a politician will be that he was acting for the greater good(of the crew).
We can plainly see the consequences to the crew when they seem to HAL to be obstructing the success of the mission. First one is flung off into space, then those that are unable to defend themselves are put to death in their sleep. Just as HAL snapped, so do governments snap, usually with just as deadly a result. An example of a government feasting upon its constituents is that of the Soviet Union during any point in its history. The supposed motive behind the Soviet government was the “improvement” of all citizens. Of course, throwing people who disagree with the methods and sometimes even the goals of the soviet government into mental institutions is not in the best interests of those individuals.
Since each individual has individual goals in his life, there can be no aggregate “greater good” of all of humanity. Aggregating such an individual valuation necessarily smooths over enough detail of the desires of individuals to render such a concept useless. As a result of this observation, I believe that it is impossible for any politician or centralized power broker to be acting in the “best interests” of the whole of the population or even working for the “greater good”.
