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- The wonderful things they're doing with plastics nowadays
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Category archive: Education
Libertarian Home needs an intro for Mark Littlewood, for a publication they're doing. Here is a quick profile of Littlewood by me, which I hope may be of some use to LH.
Mark Littlewood is the Director of the Institute of Economic Affairs. There was a time, not so long ago, when the IEA seemed doomed to obscurity or worse. But Littlewood has put in place and now leads a strong team of free market activists, strong on both the academic and media fronts, thus raising the profile of free market ideas both now and in the longer term future.
That may suffice, but here is more, if needed, of a slightly more personal sort.
Of particular note is Littlewood's appointment of Stephen Davies and Christiana Hambro, in the area of student and young academic outreach. (Stephen Davies addressed Libertarian Home not long after his IEA appointment.)
When Littlewood was first appointed, I was not optimistic about the IEA, but then I heard him speak about his new job, and I became much more hopeful about the IEA's future. That optimism has not abated.
Hope that helps and is not too late.
Guido links to a piece in GQ about Seumas Milne, and Guido picks out this bit:
Former colleagues reveal how, despite his slight figure, Milne had a remarkable habit of refusing to give way in corridors. Over several years, his fellow journalists grew tired of his insistence that oncoming co-workers make way for him. Eventually, one snapped, telling his desk, "I'm not going to do it again. Next time he plays chicken with me, I'm not going to get out of the way." The whole office waited for the inevitable confrontation. Soon enough, it happened. As Milne walked down a corridor, the six-foot colleague approached from the other direction. They smashed into each other, sending Milne flying, along with the papers he was carrying. "Seumas was in shock," recalls an onlooker. "No one had ever done that to him before. He expected people to show deference to him.
I still remember a collision of this sort, half a century ago now, that I once inflicted upon an equally impolite person, when we were both at Marlborough. The IP was in the habit of pulling rank on me when we were walking in opposite directions along a certain very narrow footpath, the IP making no effort whatsoever to in any way get out of my way, me having to do all the avoiding. So, one day, I didn't do any avoiding, and me being shorter than him, I walked my head straight into his chin. I knew the collision was coming but he didn't, so he got the worst of it. Nothing he could say or do, no matter how vehement, was going to change the fact that he got what he deserved and that we both knew it.
It's amazing how much of the trouble in the world is caused by male human animals disagreeing with one another about their relative importance in the world.
Yes, I've been continuing to photo taxis with adverts. Here are half a dozen of the most recent such snaps.
First up, further proof, if you need it, that the internet has not abolished television. People still like to be passively entertained, surprise surprise. But the internet is in the process of swallowing television, so that they end up being the same thing:
Next, become an accountant! Note how they include the word "taxi" in the advertised website, presumably to see whether advertising on taxis is worth it. Note to LSBF: I have no plans to become an accountant.
Note also the Big Things picture of London, something I always like to show pictures of here, and note also how out of date this picture is. No Cheesegrater, for a start:
Next up, a taxi advertising a book. I do not remember seeing this before, although I'm sure it has happened before:
Next, Discover America. I thought it already had been:
Visit a beach. I didn't crop this photo at all, because I like how I tracked the taxi and its advert, and got the background all blurry, and I want you to see all that blurriness. Nice contrast between that and the bright colours of the advert. A little bit of summer in the grey old February of London:
Finally, a snap I took last night, in the Earls Court area. And now we're back in the exciting world of accountancy, this time in the form of its Beautiful accounting software:
As you can see, it was pitch dark by the time I took this. But give my Lumix FZ200 even a sliver of artificial light and something solid to focus on, and it does okay, I think. A decade ago, that photo would have been an unusable mess.
I am finding that taxi advertising changes very fast these days. All of the above photos, apart from the one with the beaches, was of an advert I had not noticed before.
Which means that in future years, these taxi photos will have period value, because the adverts will have changed over and over again with the passing of only a handful of years.
Six years ago I submitted a paper for a panel, "On the Absence of Absences" that was to be part of an academic conference later that year - in August 2010. Then, and now, I had no idea what the phrase "absence of absences" meant. The description provided by the panel organizers, printed below, did not help. The summary, or abstract of the proposed paper - was pure gibberish, as you can see below. I tried, as best I could within the limits of my own vocabulary, to write something that had many big words but which made no sense whatsoever. I not only wanted to see if I could fool the panel organizers and get my paper accepted, I also wanted to pull the curtain on the absurd pretentions of some segments of academic life. To my astonishment, the two panel organizers - both American sociologists - accepted my proposal and invited me to join them at the annual international conference of the Society for Social Studies of Science to be held that year in Tokyo.
I wonder what Hemingway would have made of "On the Absence of Absences". (Hemingway, for those not inclined to follow links, is a programme to make your writing clearer.)
Presumably someone has also written a program which churns out this kind of drivel automatically. Google google.
The creators of the automatic nonsense generator, Jeremy Stribling, Dan Aguayo and Maxwell Krohn, have made the SCIgen program free to download. And scientists have been using it in their droves.
At the moment, this sort of drivel just marches on. This is because people who oppose the drivel have to convince the drivellers to stop, which is hard. And, being opposed to drivel, they usually have better things to do with their time. The trick is somehow to reverse the burden of proof, to put the drivellers in the position, en masse, of having to convince the rest of us that their drivel is not drivel. At that point, they find that they have no friends, only public contempt. Everybody, including them, thinks that it is drivel. And nobody thinks it worth bothering to even try to prove otherwise.
This is weird. When I did a posting at Samizdata called My 2015 in pictures, I intended to include a picture I took of one of my meetings last year, the one at which Aiden Gregg spoke. But, although I talked about it, I didn't actually include the picture. Rather humiliatingly, nobody noticed, or if they did notice, they didn't care, or if they did care, not enough to complain.
So here is that picture:
I have also added it to that Samizdata posting, which absolutely nobody at all will notice. But, get it right, eh?
I think I got this picture by standing on a chair.
I mention all this now because I have another of these meetings, the first of this year, tomorrow evening. Speaker: Professor Tim Evans (also mentioned in that Samizdata posting), talking about Jeremy Corbyn and all that. Turnout looks like being just right, with the room comfortably as opposed to uncomfortably full. Luckily the seating arrangements have been improving.
Here, for good measure, is the photo I took of Tim when he gave his Inaugural Professional Lecture at Middlesex University, last summer, and which was also included in that Samizdata posting:
Not being accustomed to the ways of Academe, that get-up makes Tim look, to me, like he is in a very trad production of Wagner's Mastersingers.
From Rob Fisher, who knows my interest in 3D printing, incoming email entitled:
It's no longer a rare feat to 3D print blood vessels. Printing vessels that act like the real deal, however, has been tricky… until now. Lawrence Livermore researchers have successfully 3D printed blood vessels that deliver nutrients and self-assemble like they would in a human body. The key is to print an initial structure out of cells and other organic material, and then to augment it with bio ink and other body-friendly materials. With enough time, everything joins up and behaves naturally.
Right now, the actual structures don't bear much resemblance to what you'd find in a person - you get a "spaghetti bowl" of vessels. Scientists hope to organize these vessels the way they exist in nature, though. If that happens, you could one day see artificial tissue samples and even transplants that are about as realistic as you can get.
A while back, I worked out that 3D printing was going to be just as huge as everyone is saying, but that it was not going to get "domestic", in the manner of like black-and-white laser printers for instance, in the foreseeable future (with the possible exception of certain kinds of food preparation). 3D printing is a vast range of specialist manufacturing techniques, and it will, for that foreseeable future, be used by people who already make specialist stuff by other and clumsier means, or who would like to make particular specialist stuff for the first time, of the sort that only 3D printing can do. See the quoted verbiage above.
This is why I receive emails from Google about failing 3D printing companies along with other emails about successful 3D printing activities, mostly by already existing companies. 3D printing is best done by people who already know a hell of a lot about something else, which they can then get 3D printed. Like: blood vessels.
The principle economic consequence of 3D printing will be to provide an abundance of jobs for people everywhere, but especially among the workers of the rich world, who, during the last few decades, have been famously deprived of many of their jobs by the workers of the poor world.
Prediction/guess. Because of things like 3D printing, schools in the rich world will soon become (are already becoming?) a bit more successful, back towards what they were like in the 1950s. This is because, as in the 1950s, there will again be an economic future for everyone in the rich countries, the way there has not been for the last few decades. For the last few decades, in the rich countries, only the geeks (in computers) and the alpha-male super-jocks (in such things as financial services (and in a tiny few cases in sports)) and posh kids (whose parents motivate them to work hard no matter what (this is a circular definition (posh kids are the ones motivated by their parents))) have had proper futures to look forward to. (These three categories overlap.) Accordingly, they have been the only ones paying proper attention in school. The rest have not been able to see enough point to it.
My spell of education blogging taught me, among many things, that when it comes to schools being successful, teacher quality is absolutely not the only variable. Good teachers can get bad results, if the kids just can't doing with it. Bad teachers can preside over good results, if parents and helpers-out, paid or unpaid, after regular school supply good supplementary teaching, or if the kids were highly motivated and determined to learn despite their crappy teachers.
The one exception to the rule about 3D printers not becoming meaningfully domestic is that they have a big future as educational toys, training kids to go into the bouncing-back manufacturing sector.
Fascinating point made in this piece at Libertarian Home by Simon Gibbs, about how and how not to educate computer programmers:
I am skeptical of whether formal education teaches programming, or whether programming is an innate aptitude. My computer science education is certainly a part of what made me a good programmer and I have met very good people who have retrained from other industries and become successful programmers. I have also met people who have had years of training and still lack the fundamental skill of breaking a process down into steps, despite passing various exams and tests. I graduated with such people and not with dramatically higher grades either. Formal education seems ill suited to capture, transmit, and assess the nuances of this particular skill. The ease with which code is plagiarised is one factor, as is the process of mugging up for exams, but the real problem is that the skill itself is a form of implicit knowledge which you cannot simply write down.
Further, learning to program is not an easy process. It is damned hard and no single resource or bootcamp or whatever will help you navigate a route by which you can deliver value. You have to get there on your own and that is, by definition, not something that anyone else can easily help with.
I can remember that, when I education-blogged, the above rumination was the kind of thing I would seize upon.
What Gibbs says sounds like the point that I have recently been making, generally and in particular in connection with this book (about PR (by another friend of mine (Alex Singleton))), that learning how to do something like play the violin (or do PR (or computer programming)) is fundamentally different from merely reading a book about how to play the violin (or reading a book like this one about how to do PR). Most people will never be able to play the violin well (or do PR well), no matter how much else they are able to learn about playing the violin (or doing PR). By writing a mere book about how to do PR, Singleton has not given away his personal-professional crown jewels by teaching thousands of others how to replace him. On the contrary, his crown jewels are his "innate aptitude" (honed by much practising) for combining and deploying all the PR techniques he knows of and knows how to do, when solving a PR problem. He has turned himself into a PR industry go-to media guru (which means he gets to advertise himself free) and made himself even more employable, in a kind of PR positive feedback loop. After all, the better Singleton is at doing his own PR the better he'll probably be at doing yours.
Gibbs also makes it very clear that he reckons himself to be a good programmer, in a way that many rivals, clever in all sorts of other ways, will never be. He too does some good PR for himself, even though it's incidental to the main point of his piece. To learn which, read it in full, by clicking on the link at the top of this posting.
I have begun reading Matt Ridley's latest book, The Evolution of Everything. Early signs: brilliant. I especially liked this bit (pp. 7-10), about modern ideas in the ancient world:
A 'skyhook' is an imaginary device for hanging an object from the sky. The word originated in a sarcastic remark by a frustrated pilot of a reconnaissance plane in the First World War, when told to stay in the same place for an hour: 'This machine is not fitted with skyhooks,' he replied. The philosopher Daniel Dennett used the skyhook as a metaphor for the argument that life shows evidence of an intelligent designer. He contrasted skyhooks with cranes - the first impose a solution, explanation or plan on the world from on high; the second allow solutions, explanations or patterns to emerge from the ground up, as natural selection does.
The history of Western thought is dominated by skyhooks, by devices for explaining the world as the outcome of design and planning. Plato said that society worked by imitating a designed cosmic order, a belief in which should be coercively enforced. Aristotle said that you should look for inherent principles of intentionality and development - souls - within matter. Homer said gods decided the outcome of battles. St Paul said that you should behave morally because Jesus told you so. Mohamed said you should obey God's word as transmitted through the Koran. Luther said that your fate was in God's hands. Hobbes said that social order came from a monarch, or what he called 'Leviathan' - the state. Kant said morality transcended human experience. Nietzsche said that strong leaders made for good societies. Marx said that the state was the means of delivering economic and social progress. Again and again, we have told ourselves that there is a top-down description of the world, and a top-down prescription by which we should live.
But there is another stream of thought that has tried and usually failed to break through. Perhaps its earliest exponent was Epicurus, a Greek philosopher about whom we know very little. From what later writers said about his writings, we know that he was born in 341 BC and thought (as far as we can tell) that the physical world, the living world, human society and the morality by which we live all emerged as spontaneous phenomena, requiring no divine intervention nor a benign monarch or nanny state to explain them. As interpreted by his followers, Epicurus believed, following another Greek philosopher, Dernocritus, that the world consisted not of lots of special substances including spirits and humours, but simply of two kinds of thing: voids and atoms. Everything, said Epicurus, is made of invisibly small and indestructible atoms, separated by voids; the atoms obey the laws of nature and every phenomenon is the result of natural causes. This was a startlingly prescient conclusion for the fourth century BC.
Unfortunately Epicurus's writings did not survive. But three hundred years later, his ideas were revived and explored in a lengthy, eloquent and unfinished poem, De Rerum Natura (Of the Nature of Things), by the Roman poet Titus Lucretius Carus, who probably died in mid-stanza around 49 BC, just as dictatorship was looming in Rome. Around this time, in Gustave Flaubert's words, 'when the gods had ceased to be, and Christ had not yet come, there was a unique moment in history, between Cicero and Marcus Aurelius when man stood alone'. Exaggerated maybe, but free thinking was at least more possible then than before or after. Lucretius was more subversive, open-minded and far-seeing than either of those politicians (Cicero admired, but disagreed with, him). His poem rejects all magic, mysticism, superstition, religion and myth. It sticks to an unalloyed empiricism.
As the Harvard historian Stephen Greenblatt has documented, a bald list of the propositions Lucretius advances in the unfinished 7,400 hexameters of De Rerum Natura could serve as an agenda for modernity. He anticipated modern physics by arguing that everything is made of different combinations of a limited set of invisible particles, moving in a void. He grasped the current idea that the universe has no creator, Providence is a fantasy and there is no end or purpose to existence, only ceaseless creation and destruction, governed entirely by chance. He foreshadowed Darwin in suggesting that nature ceaselessly experiments, and those creatures that can adapt and reproduce will thrive. He was with modern philosophers and historians in suggesting that the universe was not created for or about human beings, that we are not special, and there was no Golden Age of tranquillity and plenty in the distant past, but only a primitive battle for survival. He was like modern atheists in arguing that the soul dies, there is no afterlife, all organised religions are superstitious delusions and invariably cruel, and angels, demons or ghosts do not exist. In his ethics he thought the highest goal of human life is the enhancement of pleasure and the reduction of pain.
Thanks largely to Greenblatt's marvellous book The Swerve, I have only recently come to know Lucretius, and to appreciate the extent to which I am, and always have been without knowing it, a Lucretian/Epicurean. Reading his poem in A.E. Stallings's beautiful translation in my sixth decade is to be left fuming at my educators. How could they have made me waste all those years at school plodding through the tedious platitudes and pedestrian prose of Jesus Christ or Julius Caesar, when they could have been telling me about Lucretius instead, or as well? Even Virgil was writing partly in reaction to Lucretius, keen to re-establish respect for gods, rulers and top-down ideas in general. Lucretius's notion of the ceaseless mutation of forms composed of indestructible substances - which the Spanish-born philosopher George Santayana called the greatest thought that mankind has ever hit upon - has been one of the persistent themes of my own writing. It is the central idea behind not just physics and chemistry, but evolution, ecology and economics too. Had the Christians not suppressed Lucretius, we would surely have discovered Darwinism centuries before we did.
I have been reading Peter Foster's book, Why We Bite the Invisible Hand: The Psychology of Anti-Capitalism. And very good it is. Here are some of the things Foster says about Robert Owen (pp. 86-69, pp 92-95:
After he built Cromford, Arkwright became involved in the development of another even more spectacular water-driven venture, at New Lanark in Scotland. The fast-flowing river below the beautiful Falls of Clyde made the site ideal. Arkwright's partner there was David Dale, a respected Glasgow merchant. The notoriously prickly Arkwright fell out with Dale, reportedly over a triviality, and withdrew. Dale took control and continued to expand, but the reason New Lanark is so well preserved today is not that it is seen as a monument to capitalism. Quite the contrary. Dale's son-in-law, Robert Owen, turned New Lanark into the promotional centre for a Utopian dream, where he nurtured anti-capitalist sentiment. A fair amount of anti-capitalist sentiment still seems to pervade the site today.
Owen's New Lanark was very far from being an experiment in socialism understood as collective ownership and control. Workers had neither shares in the mill nor much - if any - say in how it was run. Nor was Owen a political revolutionary. What he did share in common with more radical socialists was opposition to religion; belief that human nature was an indeterminate clay ("blank slate"), there to be moulded by men such as himself; distaste for the "individual selfish" competitive system and private property (even though they enabled him to promote his muddled ideas); demonization of money; and a generally woolly notion of how economies - as opposed to individual businesses - work. Owen rejected Adam Smith's idea of gradual improvement under a system of "natural liberty." For him, cotton masters, the men who owned and ran the mills, were (except for himself) greedy and selfish, while workers were oppressed sheep to be led, with himself as the Good Shepherd.
Adam Smith had shrewdly noted that people by nature give far more deference to the ideas of the wealthy than they deserve. Of few people was this more true than Robert Owen.
Owen was born on May 14, 1771, in Newtown in Wales, five years before the publication of The Wealth of Nations. He received only a rudimentary education before being shipped off by his parents to work in the drapery business. He proved an assiduous employee and developed a keen interest in the then-booming textile industry. He started his own business but soon returned to employment as a mill manager in Manchester. Close to his 20th birthday, he was reportedly managing 500 workers, at the then substantial salary of £300 a year. Owen soon found investors to help him start his own mill. He also became interested in education and social reform (which was the rule rather than the exception for industrialists of the time). However, when he visited New Lanark he saw a place where he might indulge a nascent vision of industrial harmony, a New Jerusalem in which he would be the secular Messiah.
Owen courted David Dale's daughter, Anne Caroline, married her on September 30, 1799, and took over New Lanark early in 1800 on what seemed generous terms, essentially promising to pay Dale out of the mill's future profits. New Lanark was the basis for the fortune and reputation that enabled Robert Owen to indulge his ideas. The scale of New Lanark seems extraordinary even today, but to visitors from the present, if they could travel back to Owen's time, the most arresting feature of the place would be that most of its employees were children, supplied by orphanages in Glasgow and Edinburgh. Child labour has become one of the great fixed images of the Industrial Revolution, but it is inappropriate to take our modern sensitivities back to earlier times. Child labour was common - as it still is in many poor countries - because it was, and is, necessary for the survival of both the children and their families. It was most necessary for orphans. Indeed, orphanages paid cotton manufacturers to take their charges off their hands. David Dale reportedly treated his young employees well. By 1796 he was employing 16 teachers at the site.
Owen's desire to prevent children under 10 from working appears wholly admirable, until we remember that this might have led them to starve. His desire to educate children and provide an early equivalent of daycare was worthy but ultimately self-interested in business terms, since these measures increased the skills and contentment - and thus productivity - of the workforce, as did his organization of medical insurance, savings opportunities, food and other provisions. There was no conflict between good business and morality. Indeed, Owen himself constantly, at least in the early days, stressed the importance of these measures for increasing profitability.
The village shop that Owen set up at New Lanark was reportedly an inspiration for the modern cooperative movement, which was founded in the town of Rochdale in Lancashire. According to a potted history at the New Lanark site, when Owen arrived, there were lots of small traders in the village, "selling poor quality goods at high prices." He was able to buy in bulk, lower the prices and still make a profit. But of course this is exactly what supermarkets and big-box stores do today, even as they are castigated for putting the "little guy" … out of business.
Robert Owen put the little guy out of business too. He also made sure that no other traders could survive in the village, by paying his workers with "tickets for wages," which they could spend only at his village shop. Elsewhere such enforced commitment to the company store would be cited as evidence of corporate villainy, but Owen declared that his own motives weren't "selfish." The important thing was not what was good for him, but what was good for mankind, although he clearly expected a little kudos for showing mankind the way.
At New Lanark, Owen in fact displayed more of the enlightened capitalist than of the Utopian dreamer. One might not doubt his good intentions when it came to spreading education and advocating factory reform, but he seemed eager to bury the fact that many other cottom masters, and businessmen of the time more generally, were enlightened and reform-minded.
As the Napoleonic Wars drew to a close, both mill owners and authorities were disturbed by Luddite riots that resulted in the breaking of new machinery, which was seen as destroying jobs. Robert Owen claimed that what had brought about these awful, and worsening, conditions was economic liberalism and the competitive system, which, he declared, was based on "deception." He came forward with a series of bold proposals for "villages of unity and co-operation," which struck many as workhouses by a more glorified name.
Although the great and the good expressed polite interest in Owen's solutions to what were, after all, pressing problems, many were profoundly skeptical. John Quincy Adams, then U.S. ambassador to Britain, described Owen in his memoirs as "crafty crazy ... a speculative, scheming, mischievous man."
Owen managed to draw the ire of both radical reformers, the political economist heirs of Adam Smith, groups that rarely saw eye to eye. The radicals saw Owen's communities as oppressive, while the economists viewed them as impractical and counterproductive. The reformer William Cobbett described them as "parallelograms of paupers." The political economist Robert Torrens said it ws difficult to decide whether Owen was a "knave" or an enthusiast "in whose brain a copulation between vanity and benevolence has engendered madness."
Owen welcomed a steady stream of "philanthropic tourists" at New Lanark. Their number included Grand Duke Nicholas, future czar of Russia. Some - although presumably not the grand duke - found disquieting authoritarian overtones to Owen's operation. After watching Owen's child labourers drill like little soldiers at the mill's Institution for the Formation of Character (which has been lovingly restored with taxpayers' money from the European Union), the poet Robert Southey compared the place to a slave plantation.
Parliament ultimately rejected Owen's scheme. One member suggested that "this visionary plan, if adopted, would destroy the very roots of society." Owen responded to criticism by making his schemes more grandiose. Undaunted, he set off to proselytize in the New World, and not merely to lecture but at last to put into effect his grand plan. He bought an existing cooperative community in Indiana, which he renamed New Harmony.
Owen attracted a large number of settlers, described by one of Owen's sons, Robert Dale Owen, as a "heterogenous collection of radicals, enthusiastic devotees to principle ... and lazy theorists, with a sprinkling of unprincipled sharpers thrown in." Owen Sr. soon went back to Britain to spread the word of his success. Another son, William, confided dolefully to his diary, "The enjoyment of a reformer, I would say, is much more in contemplation, than in reality."
New Harmony soon started to fall apart. Skilled labour did not feel inclined to have its income, under Owen's plan, "equalized" with the unskilled or, worse, with those who did not wish to work at all. A collectivist scheme such as Owen's could in effect work only if powered by either religious conviction or forced labour, a lesson that would not be lost on Owen's more revolutionary successors.
The abolition of money led to a bureaucratic nightmare. When even lettuce had to pass through the company store, it inevitably wilted before it reached the plate. (Moscow McDonald's would encounter analogous problems in trying to get supplies through the collapsing Soviet system almost 200 years later.)
After an absence of two months, Owen returned to New Harmony, arriving by river with intellectual reinforcements dubbed the "boatload of knowledge." He forced the community through numerous reorganizations, all the while churning out portentous exhortations such as the "Declaration of Mental Independence:' which promised to free man from the "slavery" of private property, religion and marriage.
One visitor, the Duke of Saxe-Weimar, wrote, "He looks forward to nothing else than to remodel the world entirely; to root out all crime; to abolish punishment; to create similar views and similar wants, and in this manner to abolish all dissension and warfare ... He was too unalterably convinced of the result to admit the slightest room for doubt!' Every other member of the community to whom the duke spoke acknowledged that Owen was "deceived in his expectations!' The final blow to the community was a falling-out between Owen and William Maclure, a wealthy emigre Scotsman, which led to the two men suing each other over property, the concept New Harmony was meant to transcend.
The one undoubted benefit Owen did bestow upon the former colonies was his children, who turned out to be a good deal more level-headed than their father and who would become prominent in American affairs. Owen then set off on an even more quixotic scheme: to persuade the government of Mexico to grant him a huge swath of land on which to test his theories. He required Mexico first to abandon Catholicism. Mexico demurred. Owen returned to London and embarked upon expansive new ventures. He became the first president of the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union, an organization that lasted a year. Seeking to trump both the pecuniary root of all evil and "unnecessary" middlemen, he set up "labour exchanges," whereby merchandise was exchanged for "labour notes," whose value was meant to be calculated according to the hours of sweat embodied in each product. The administrators found that they could not possibly calculate values this way and were forced to copy market prices. The labour exchanges collapsed too.
Owen staunchly opposed the "superstition" of religion, and yet his own views were at root profoundly religious, based on a "New Moral World" set up in opposition to a demonic set of greedy capitalists. He founded the Rational Society, complete with Halls of Science instead of churches, and "social hymns." Sample verse:
Outcasts in your native soil,
Doom'd to poverty and toil,
Strangers in your native land;
Come, and join the social band.
Owen's acolytes founded another Utopian community, at an estate called Queenwood in Hampshire, whose collapse Owen hastened by spending it into the ground. One of his more clear-sighted disciples noted that "Mr. Owen was no financier, and had no idea of money." Queenwood, like New Harmony, imploded amid lawsuits, yet again over property.
Robert Owen represented a psychological type that would persist throughout the business world. Although such businessmen have a good grasp of their own business, they fail to understand the nature of markets more generally and believe themselves to be morally exceptional in a world marked by short-sighted greed.
I just sat down to do a BMdotcom posting, about some strange disruption inflicted earlier this evening upon the Royal College of Music by the London premiere of the new James Bond movie. While composing this posting, I realised that it would do nicely for Samizdata, so there it went. I don't do nearly enough for Samizdata these days.
The posting was based on something that Goddaughter 2 (now a student at the RCM) told me. And she also told me something else, this time not disturbing or of any public significance, but merely rather entertaining.
GD2 now inhabits a big building, full of rooms occupied by her and her fellow students. Lots of rooms. Lots of doors. All the doors looking like each other.
So, one of the ladies in a nearby room to GD2 has a boyfriend staying the night. Boyfriend needs a piss. Being a relaxed sort of individual, he strolls to the toilet, naked. It is deep into the night, and he expects not to encounter anyone, and he does not, at first. But then, problem. Which door is the door to the room of his lady friend? He does not remember. About four different wrong doors are opened, complete with people behind them, most of whom were surprised but amused, before the correct door is found.
If this was a movie, that would only have been the beginning of the mayhem and the reactions to being woken up by a naked man at the door would have been far more extreme than they actually were. But for me, this was mayhem enough to be very entertaining. Boyfriend wasn't bothered. Like I say, a relaxed sort of individual. And no harm at all came of this little nocturnal drama. Just a mildly entertaining blog posting, or so I hope.
The day I spent at the Oval with Darren last Monday was enjoyable for me in so many ways. I am now definitely considering becoming a Surrey Member myself next season, a snip at just under two hundred quid. Seriously, that's how great a day it was for me. But it was not quite the day that I had been expecting.
The thing was, Surrey had, after many disappointments in the recent past, finally been promoted just three days earlier. Half way through the game against Derby, the reportage was all about how well Derby had been doing. But the Surrey first innings tail did not so much wag as flail like the tail of a crocodile, and then the Surrey spinners polished Derby off on day four, to win the game by an innings and plenty, with several hours to spare.
So, last Monday, I was expecting the Oval to be seething with boisterous celebration. But once the game began, I soon realised that this was not going to happen. The place was that far from being deserted, and looked even more sparsely populated from where Darren and I were at first sitting, what with the bulk of the Surrey support being below us and out of our sight.
The thing about last Monday was that it was on a Monday. And why this game, of all games, on a Monday? A semi-final of the annual 50-50 county tournament ought surely to be staged at a time when regular people can show up to watch it, shouldn't it? So, why wasn't it?
The answer of course is: television:
That's Gary Wilson of Surrey striding off at the end of the Surrey innings (they batted first), doing a great job of pretending that the TV guy who is poking his huge camera in his face just isn't there.
These are not the kind of pictures of cricket that you usually see, are they? Usually, you see only the sort of pictures that this TV guy himself is taking, not pictures of him. He is not supposed to be part of the story which he is, so very obtrusively, helping to tell. Yet even the very day on which this match took place cannot be explained without reference to that TV guy, and all his mates.
That's a picture, taken moments later, of Sky TV discussing that Surrey first innings with Notts fast bowler and recent England Ashes hero Stuart Broad. What did Broad say? I don't know. I wasn't watching this game on my telly. I was merely there.
But why Monday, rather than Sunday or Saturday? I mean, more people watch the telly at the weekend, surely. Well yes, they do. And Sky TV did indeed show the first semi-final on Sunday. (Yorkshire, crowned only days later as the 2015 champions of the four day game, were beaten in this first semi-final by Gloucester, with surprising ease.) So, why not the other semi- between Surrey and Notts, on the Saturday?
Because on Saturday, Sky TV were showing the second England v Australia ODI, and there would be no point in Sky buying both those games if they had happened on the same one day. So, the other semi- got shoved over to Monday. The schools were back at school. Workers were back at work. But, television rules.
So this was mostly an Old Geezer day, from the live spectator point of you. But, despite all those empty seats, this particular Old Geezer had a terrific time, not least because of all those TV cameramen whom I was able to take photos of.
I promise nothing, but I do now hope that there'll be a whole lot more to follow about this marvellous day out.
… because the HDI is basically a measure of how Scandinavian your country is.
That's Bryan Caplan, complaining about something called the Human Development Index, in a piece entitled Against the Human Development Index.
Another Bit from a Book, and once again I accompany it with a warning that this Bit could vanish at any moment, for the reasons described in this earlier posting.
This particular Bit is from The Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley (pp. 255-258):
Much as I love science for its own sake, I find it hard to argue that discovery necessarily precedes invention and that most new practical applications flow from the minting of esoteric insights by natural philosophers. Francis Bacon was the first to make the case that inventors are applying the work of discoverers, and that science is the father of invention. As the scientist Terence Kealey has observed, modern politicians are in thrall to Bacon. They believe that the recipe for making new ideas is easy: pour public money into science, which is a public good, because nobody will pay for the generation of ideas if the taxpayer does not, and watch new technologies emerge from the downstream end of the pipe. Trouble is, there are two false premises here: first, science is much more like the daughter than the mother of technology; and second, it does not follow that only the taxpayer will pay for ideas in science.
It used to be popular to argue that the European scientific revolution of the seventeenth century unleashed the rational curiosity of the educated classes, whose theories were then applied in the form of new technologies, which in turn allowed standards of living to rise. China, on this theory, somehow lacked this leap to scientific curiosity and philosophical discipline, so it failed to build on its technological lead. But history shows that this is back-to-front. Few of the inventions that made the industrial revolution owed anything to scientific theory.
It is, of course, true that England had a scientific revolution in the late 1600s, personified in people like Harvey, Hooke and Halley, not to mention Boyle, Petty and Newton, but their influence on what happened in England's manufacturing industry in the following century was negligible. Newton had more influence on Voltaire than he did on James Hargreaves. The industry that was transformed first and most, cotton spinning and weaving, was of little interest to scientists and vice versa. The jennies, gins, frames, mules and looms that revolutionised the working of cotton were invented by tinkering businessmen, not thinking boffins: by 'hard heads and clever fingers'. It has been said that nothing in their designs would have puzzled Archimedes.
Likewise, of the four men who made the biggest advances in the steam engine - Thomas Newcomen, James Watt, Richard Trevithick and George Stephenson - three were utterly ignorant of scientific theories, and historians disagree about whether the fourth, Watt, derived any influence from theory at all. It was they who made possible the theories of the vacuum and the laws of thermodynamics, not vice versa. Denis Papin, their French-born forerunner, was a scientist, but he got his insights from building an engine rather than the other way round. Heroic efforts by eighteenth-century scientists to prove that Newcomen got his chief insights from Papin's theories proved wholly unsuccessful.
Throughout the industrial revolution, scientists were the beneficiaries of new technology, much more than they were the benefactors. Even at the famous Lunar Society, where the industrial entrepreneur Josiah Wedgwood liked to rub shoulders with natural philosophers like Erasmus Darwin and Joseph Priestley, he got his best idea - the 'rose-turning' lathe - from a fellow factory owner, Matthew Boulton. And although Benjamin Franklin's fertile mind generated many inventions based on principles, from lightning rods to bifocal spectacles, none led to the founding of industries.
So top-down science played little part in the early years of the industrial revolution. In any case, English scientific virtuosity dries up at the key moment. Can you name a single great English scientific discovery of the first half of the eighteenth century? It was an especially barren time for natural philosophers, even in Britain. No, the industrial revolution was not sparked by some deus ex machina of scientific inspiration. Later science did contribute to the gathering pace of invention and the line between discovery and invention became increasingly blurred as the nineteenth century wore on. Thus only when the principles of electrical transmission were understood could the telegraph be perfected; once coal miners understood the succession of geological strata, they knew better where to sink new mines; once benzene's ring structure was known, manufacturers could design dyes rather than serendipitously stumble on them. And so on. But even most of this was, in Joel Mokyr's words, 'a semi-directed, groping, bumbling process of trial and error by clever, dexterous professionals with a vague but gradually clearer notion of the processes at work'. It is a stretch to call most of this science, however. It is what happens today in the garages and cafes of Silicon Valley, but not in the labs of Stanford University.
The twentieth century, too, is replete with technologies that owe just as little to philosophy and to universities as the cotton industry did: flight, solid-state electronics, software. To which scientist would you give credit for the mobile telephone or the search engine or the blog? In a lecture on serendipity in 2007, the Cambridge physicist Sir Richard Friend, citing the example of high-temperature superconductivity - which was stumbled upon in the 1980s and explained afterwards - admitted that even today scientists' job is really to come along and explain the empirical findings of technological tinkerers after they have discovered something.
The inescapable fact is that most technological change comes from attempts to improve existing technology. It happens on the shop floor among apprentices and mechanicals, or in the workplace among the users of computer programs, and only rarely as a result of the application and transfer of knowledge from the ivory towers of the intelligentsia. This is not to condemn science as useless. The seventeenth-century discoveries of gravity and the circulation of the blood were splendid additions to the sum of human knowledge. But they did less to raise standards of living than the cotton gin and the steam engine. And even the later stages of the industrial revolution are replete with examples of technologies that were developed in remarkable ignorance of why they worked. This was especially true in the biological world. Aspirin was curing headaches for more than a century before anybody had the faintest idea of how. Penicillin's ability to kill bacteria was finally understood around the time bacteria learnt to defeat it. Lime juice was preventing scurvy centuries before the discovery of vitamin C. Food was being preserved by canning long before anybody had any germ theory to explain why it helped.
Being the Godfather of Goddaughter 2, who has just started out as a student at the Royal College of Music, is a bit costly, but it most definitely also has its privileges. Yesterday I was kindly allowed to sit in on one of GD2's one-on-one lessons, and today I got to see (at no further cost) the first dress rehearsal for the College's production of The Magic Flute. GD2 was not performing in The Magic Flute. She merely arranged for me and various others of her acquaintance to be there, and she watched it along with us. As did many other RCM students by the look and sound of things. GD2's singing lesson was most encouraging, and the Magic Flute was terrific, truly terrific, reflecting huge credit on all the professionals named at the other end of the above link, who between them set the tone of it.
Michael Rosewell conducted stirringly, emphasising the menace as well as the grandeur and beauty of the music. Jean-Claude Auvray directed wonderfully, with lots of pertinent comic business. Ruari Murchison's set was dominated by a big, black, modernistic wooden box, with big sliding hinged doors at the front, with little doors in them, and with more doors at the sides and the back. This moved the action along with minimal fuss. They could shut the big doors at the front and do a scene in front of them, while inside the closed box other cast members could then set up the next scene. Since so many of the scenes in this opera are contrivances by some of the characters within the drama, them opening the doors to reveal the next scene made perfect sense. The production reminded me, in its clarity and austerity, of the best sort of Shakespeare productions that I have seen.
The costumes were modern, in a way that illuminated the characters and the various stages their lives were going through, rather than in a way that stuffed Mozart's story into a specifically different era and made an anachronistic nonsense of it. Mark Doubleday's lighting emphasised the brightness and lightness of the final scenes, but in the meantime it emphasised what a dark and morally ambiguous story this is, ending up as it does with the hero and heroine joining a religious cult. Tamino and Pamina started out in jeans, then found themselves clad in pantomime hero and heroine costumes, and they ended up power-dressed, City-of-London Moonie/Mormon style, in matching grey suits with, in Pamina's case, shoulder pads.
Mozart loved being a Freemason, but a modern audience can't be so unreservedly happy about this particular happy ending. In many ways, this is a story about the triumph of religious fundamentalism over the forces of modernity and of female emancipation. There are numerous references to how women must subordinate themselves to men, with the only Queen involved being the Queen of the Night, the leader of the eventually defeated forces of modernity, individuality, and darkness. These anti-modern references became particularly chilling when spelt out in plain English, in the illuminated surtitles at the top of the stage.
The Three Ladies were dressed to kill at a Premier or a Charity Fundraiser, but not in uniforms, rather as three individuals. The Three Boys, on the opposite side of the conflict from the Three Ladies, were all dressed identically, like Mrs Krankie, being also ladies underneath their boy costumes. All six acted and sang splendidly, individually and as teams.
As for the singing generally, only Sarastro, the leader of the ultimately triumphant cult, needed to be granted a little slack. It was absolutely not his fault that although most of his singing was fine, his voice lacked that final ounce of basso profundity required for those fearsome low notes. This was the one time when you wanted to be hearing one of the half dozen, or however many it is, aging-giant Sarastro super-specialists who roam the earth, bestowing their show-stealing low notes upon rich opera audiences everywhere. But this Sarastro acted very convincingly, especially given that he had less help from his grey suit of a costume than I presume most other Sarastros tend to get, and not much help either from his relatively short stature. Being the one black man on view, on the other hand, meant that he was instantly recognisable. (I want to hear this guy singing other things.) As for everyone else, terrific. This was the first time I have actually seen The Magic Flute on a stage, and I can't imagine a better introduction. GD2's mother, who has seen other non-student productions, reckoned this one to be the best. Yes, really.
The biggest round of applause came at the end for the entire cast, and quite right too. But the Queen of the Night got the second biggest ovation for her famously spectacular and difficult aria, and thoroughly earned it. Sensational. Watch out for her. Papagena also stole every scene she was in, although I didn't get her name. (Maybe I can later add a link for her too.) Papageno handled his various musical instruments with particular aplomb.
But better than any individual excellence on show was the general air of sincerity, enthusiasm and esprit de corps. As the lady teacher said at the end of GD2's lesson yesterday, opera has changed from the days when all you had to do was stand there and sing. You have to be able to sing and act, and often to sing in very demanding circumstances. You may have to "sing with your legs in the air" was how GD2's teacher put it yesterday. There was nothing like that on the stage today, but the director did demand lots of acting of a less undignified sort, and got it in abundance. The show came alive from the first minute, and stayed alive throughout. These young singers are being very well prepared for the sort of careers that most of them will surely have.
I'm looking forward to more RCM dress rehearsals, and hope one day soon to be seeing GD2 in one of them. I am reluctant to enthuse too much about her prospects. Just to say that her voice sounds like a pretty fine one to me, that her teachers and fellow students seem to agree about that, and that she seems to be working hard at learning how to make the best use of it. But, as yesterday's teacher said, there are a lot of circumstances - some of which you can surely imagine and many of which you can hardly begin to imagine unless you also know one of these singers yourself - that can derail a classical singing career. So, fingers crossed.
A new student accommodation building is currently being erected on the far side of Westminster Bridge from me, i.e. next to the equally rotund hotel in the middle of the roundabout there.
There is a rule in architecture (which I just made up), which says that if you build a very big and very boring lump, but put another very big and very boring lump of the same shape next to it, the result can be quite pleasing. Think Twin Towers. They seem to be following this rule here.
I have been photoing the erection of this erection ever since erection began. Here are two of my latest snaps of it, taken last Friday. The picture on the right was taken from right next to the little roadside sign that you see on the bottom right of the picture on the left.
It's hard not to interpret that two dimensional picture as three dimensional, I think you will agree. After all, the real building above the sign is also only a picture, in my pictures, and that looks suitably three dimensional, even though, in my pictures, it is actually every bit as flat as that sign is.
Subtitle for the photo above left: This is not a building. Subtitle for the photo above right: These are not buildings.


text:
Sweet Idea: Fresh Fruit Snow Cones
Snoopy Sno-Cone Machine?!) creates the fluffiest ice, but you can also make it granita-style or simply crush ice in the blender. These recipes all incorporate fresh fruit: • Coconut Snow Cones with Young Coconut and Pineapple-Ginger Syrup at Australian Gourmet Traveller (pictured) • Fresh Fruit Sno-Cones at Epicurious (pictured) • Raspberry-Blueberry Snow Cones at Epicurious • Cherry Snow Cone at Food52 • Trend Alert: Snow Cones at Martha Stewart Weddings Or make up your own version, using whatever fruit is in season, fresh juices, and homemade simple syrup infused with fruit or herbs. Related: Simple Pleasures: 5 Ideas for Snow Cones and Shaved Ice (Images: William Meppem/Australian Gourmet Traveller; Rita Maas/Gourmet)

subset: commoncrawl


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#9 - winsauceiswin (05/09/2012) [-]
why not use some integration on the angry birds one XD
just took ap calc exam today O_o calc still in my mind lol
just took ap calc exam today O_o calc still in my mind lol
#16 to #14 - winsauceiswin (05/10/2012) [-]
not supposed to talk about it remember? XD but i love extrema and stuff like that. 1st derivative is slope 2nd is concavity. take first deriv find critical values do interval test or 2nd deriv test! i especially love rotation of graphs
#22 to #20 - winsauceiswin (05/10/2012) [-]
non differentiable points don't matter, as long as the graph is continuous it a non differentiable point can be an extrema lol you just need to prove the 1st derivative changes from either + to - or - to + and you can do that with either differentiable or non differentiable points
#11 to #9 - gatodelfuego (05/09/2012) [-]
where'd you take it?
#15 to #11 - winsauceiswin (05/10/2012) [-]
Greenville Ohio
#17 to #15 - gatodelfuego (05/10/2012) [-]
I'm in Aurora Illinois. We got the same one I bet...but yeah, we aren't supposed to talk about it, aren't we?
#18 to #17 - winsauceiswin (05/10/2012) [-]
nope, not allowed to talk about any part of it aside from the fact that you took it lol
#19 to #18 - gatodelfuego (05/10/2012) [-]
Guess that's all I'll be talking about then
Guess that's all I'll be talking about then
#21 to #19 - winsauceiswin (05/10/2012) [-]
lol beware the sinister acorn that is the college board, they'll hunt you down with their college board black hawk helicopters XD they wire tapped every phone and spy on you =P


text:
"It's only a little club . . . but we do big things." - Chummy Broomhall
Chisholm Ski Club is located at Black Mountain of Maine Ski Area in Rumford, Maine. The Club has a rich tradition which dates back to the early days of the 20th century at its Spruce Street location and its mid 1900's days at Scottie's Mountain. Over the years the Club has hosted several world class nordic skiing events, including the 1950 World Championships, 1976 NCAA Cross Country Skiing Championships, 1991 National Biathlon Championships, 1993 US Cross Country Skiing Championships, 1993 U.S. Masters Cross Country Skiing Championships, 1996 National Junior Olympics, 1996 Chevy Truck U.S. Nationals, the 1999 NCAA Cross Country Skiing Championship, the 2003 Chevy Truck US Cross Country Championships, the 2004 Chevrolet US Cross Country Championships, the 2009 NCAA Cross Country Skiing Championships, the 2010 USCSA National Championships, and the 2011 and 2012 US Cross Country Championships.
Chisholm volunteers had a very successful workday on Saturday, August 20th. In preparation for the 2016-17 race season, club members made several improvements to the trail system at Black Mountain Ski Resort. Thanks to Roger Arsenault for getting the use of a Kubota excavator and the skillful operation of Jim Rodrigues, the club replaced 4 culverts that were either damaged or plugged. Several other rocks in the trails were also removed. Areas that were repaired were then reseeded with grass seed. The Club appreciates all those that were able to help out.
The Chisholm Ski Club 100th year Anniversary Committee will be meeting September 8, 2016 6:00pm at Thai Smile in Mexico. All those interested in helping out are invited. If you are unable to make the meeting but wish to help out, please let us know. The more, the merrier!! It will definitely take an army of volunteers to pull off this anniversary Winter Carnival Event scheduled to take place February 3-5, 2017
Also the Chisholm Ski Club monthly board meeting will be held on Tuesday September 20, 2016 6:00pm at Muriel's Kitchen. All club members are invited to the board meetings.
Do you like cross-country skiing? Do you enjoy being outside in the summer with friends? Are you between the ages of 10 and 18? Then you should come join us at the Chisholm Ski Club Summer Nordic Program. This is a fun filled program that offers drills, challenges, games and adventures. Your experience will include goofy drills at Hosmer field and hiking great mountains like Tumbledown. Not to mention tons of skill development and fitness that will make the sport seem way easier and even more fun! So grab a friend and come join this awesome group of middle school and high school skiers that love cross-country skiing and having fun in the summer.
For more information, click to download files.
|Program FlyerProgram Flyer
|Registration Form
Congratulations to our newest Chisholm Ski Club Board Members! At the annual club meeting on May 22nd, board members were elected for the 2016-2019 term. Joining returning Board members Bob Arsenault and Charlie Lever are Seth Fournier, Abbey Rice, and Mary Martin.
Black Mountain Ski Resort is again sponsoring the annual Two Peak Challenge on Sunday, Sep 25, 2016. The "2 Peak Challenge" is a challenging 8.7 mile two peak ascent with 2750' of vertical gain & a 2450' descent. Beginning at the bottom of the East Andover Road, ascending to the top of Whitecap, descending down to the valley & climbing to the top of Black Mountain, continuing down the Allagash trail & glades, finishing in front of the Black Mountain base lodge.
The "1 Peak Challenge" is 4.2 mile one peak, 1440' ascent and descent.
Registration are now open online at https://www.runreg.com/black--white.
The Chisholm Ski Club has launched it's annual membership drive. The club is made up of volunteers who's goal is to provide outstanding alpine and nordic skiing opportunities for young athletes at Black Mountain Ski Resort. All skiing enthusiasts are welcome as members of the Chisholm Ski Club. Presently we are made up of skiers, parents, former Chisholm Ski Club skiers and other people interested in supporting our mission. Annual dues of $15.00 per family are due in July of each year.
Please consider joining the club and making a difference. You can join online by clicking here. Alternately, you may download the membership form by clicking here.
As I think back of all the races that we have hosted in Rumford, it amazes me what the Chisholm Ski Club and Black Mountain Ski Area have done for the River Valley Area through volunteerism. This started in the early 1900's with the facilities on Spruce Street in Rumford, moving on to Scotty's Mountain on the edge of town after World War II, and then on to the Glover Farm and our current location at Black Mountain in 1960.
There is so much history with the club and ski area in the River Valley and we have held some incredible events over the last 90+years. In 1950 Rumford became famous world wide for successfully staging the World Cross Country Ski Championships on a 48-hour notice. In 1951, the tryouts for the US Cross Country Ski Team were held in Rumford. In addition to these major competitions, we have since hosted National Biathlon Championships, U.S. Masters Cross Country Skiing Championships, National Junior Olympics, Chevy Truck U.S. Nationals, NCAA Cross Country Skiing Championships, Chevy Truck US Cross Country Championships, USCSA National Championships, and most recently the 2011 and 2012 US Cross Country Ski Championships. The list goes on and on.


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Street Smarts is pleased to announce that at our Clive location we are now using IN CAR CAMERA'S in a few of our cars. These videos will not be used for anything other than internal viewing. Parents may view the videos of their students by calling our office.
At Street Smarts we use the latest curriculum via PowerPoint. Therefore no extra fees are required for textbooks.
Most Classes through December 2016 are ready for registration! Don't delay classes fill up quickly.
Street Smarts offers a state-of-the-art driving simulator for students who need extra help behind the wheel!
Congratulations to our Free Driver's Education Course Winners!
Ethan Proctor & Jessie Crouch
Ankeny, IA West Des Moines, IA
Next drawing will be held on Tuesday, September 27, 2016. Deadline for signing up will be 12:00 AM on Monday, September 26, 2016!
StreetSmarts is locally owned and operated and employs only Iowa certified licensed instructors.
The company is fully licensed by the Iowa Department of Education and the Iowa Department of Transportation.
StreetSmarts is proud of its reputation and puts the safety and welfare of its students first.
Summer 2017 Classes will be posted in December 2016 and January 2017 for registration
Click here for requirements for instruction permit or GDL
Students are not required to have any driving practice before coming to class, however your student will be required to be proficient in their driving at the end of our course or they will be requested to drive with the DOT to get their license. Please practice with your student.
Questions? Call 515-279-1112 or click to view available classes >>> Iowa Drivers Education Classes


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Tonight will be cloudy damp breezy and milder with a low of 59 and patchy light fog. The American Medical Association (AMA) presented Thomas He also shot 9for10 from the foul line, hitting clutch shots down the stretch in regulation as the Wolverines (710 Big Ten, 1415 overall) had Northwestern down to its last gasp in regulation. While these products are not naturally occurring substances, they appear to be inert and to have no toxic breakdown products. Relatively high house prices will lift more homeowners back above water and increase equity in the property. Si le total des gains est infйrieur а 500 euros, so a good initial question is whether you want a semi-rigid implant or an inflatable implant.


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Gardena Hearing Center - GardenaCall: (310) 878-9418
1300 W 155th St Ste 107 Gardena, CA 90247
Clinic staff
Marcia Blank
Doctor of Audiology Marcia Blank earned her doctorate in Audiology at A.T. Still University, Arizona School of Health Sciences and both her M.A. in Audiology and her B.S. in Speech and Hearing Science at the University of Iowa. She is a member of the American Academy of Audology and the American Speech-Language Hearing Association and is licensed by the state of California in both Audiology and Hearing Aid Dispensing.
Clinic reviews
More information
About this clinic
Gardena Hearing Center has been serving the people of the South Bay area including Gardena, Torrance, Lawndale, Hawthorne, Carson and Harbor City for over 15 years. Dr. Marcia Blank, Au.D. provides expert audiology services including hearing evaluation and hearing aids.
Gardena Hearing Center
1300 W 155th St., Ste. 107
Gardena, California 90247
Gardena Hearing Center
201 S. Alvarado Street Suite 803
Los Angeles, California, 90057
Clinic services
- Hearing evaluations for people of all ages
- Hearing aids
- Hearing aid programming, fitting, adjustments, service, maintenance and repair
- Custom earmolds and earplugs for cell phone headrests, Bluetooth compatible device, hands-free, swimming, noise protection, behind the ear hearing aids and more
- Assistive Listening Devices
- Hearing aid batteries
- Hearing loss counseling & rehabilitation
Call this clinic today!
(310) 878-9418
Hours of operation
|Open by appt.
|Open by appt.
|Open by appt.
|Open by appt.
|Open by appt.
Accepted forms of payment
- Visa
- MasterCard
- Cash
- Check
- Debit


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SMEs in the U.S.
Lufthansa participates in the SME program of United Airlines: With United PerksPlus℠, your company earns points whenever employees travel with United®, United Express®, Austrian Airlines, Brussels Airlines, Lufthansa and SWISS. Points can then be redeemed for generous travel rewards.Learn more


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Once a week, Stack delivers a mix of the most interesting new music on the web, handpicked by the Hype Machine team. Here's a recent mix.
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Summer Core Conference Series (7:30-8:30am Tuesday and Thursday)
A Pulmonary and Critical Care Lecture Series occurs during the
first 3 months of fellowship. A 12 week course comprised of basic topics
in pulmonary and critical care medicine are presented by faculty members
of the Division of Pulmonary, Critical Care, and Sleep Medicine and
other physicians outside of our division.
Pulmonary and Critical Care Core Curriculum (7:30-8:30am
Weekly didactic lectures by Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care
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Graduate Medical Education
Main Line Health
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For more information, call 1.866.CALL.MLH.


text: Voter Registration Connecticut DMV To Begin Automatic Voter Registration By Associated Press • Aug 7, 2016 Connecticut residents will soon be automatically registered to vote when they apply for a driver's license. Registration For Vermont Town Meeting And Primary Closes Wednesday Night By Pat Bradley • Feb 24, 2016 Listen Listening... / 3:38 Vermont officials are urging state residents to cast their ballots next week when the state's Town Meeting Day coincides with the presidential primary. But to do that, Vermonters must have registered by today. The presence of a hometown Senator on the ballot could boost turnout. Deadline Wednesday To Register To Vote In Vermont Primary By Pat Bradley • Feb 22, 2016 Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain Vermonters have until Wednesday to register to vote in the March 1 presidential primary on Town Meeting Day. Residents may register at their town clerk's offices, by mail or online. To register online, go to the Secretary of State's office website. The deadline to apply is by 5 p.m. on Wednesday. Vermont To Implement Same Day Voter Registration By Pat Bradley • Jun 5, 2015 Listen Listening... / 3:39 This week Vermont Governor Peter Shumlin signed a bill into law allowing same day voter registration. While many activists are praising the move, some concerns remain about the logistics implementing the new law. Vermont Governor Signs 'Same-Day' Voter Registration Law By Pat Bradley • Jun 1, 2015 Listen Listening... / 0:37 Vermont has become the 14th state to allow voters to register up to and including Election Day. Voter Registration a Mandated Part of Health Exchanges By Pat Bradley • Jul 30, 2013 Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain Listen Listening... / 3:28 Vermont will become the third state to offer voter registration through its health insurance marketplace later this year. Vermont Allows Voter Registration During Insurance Buy By Pat Bradley • Jul 29, 2013 Listen Listening... / 0:40 Vermont will become the third state to offer voter registration through its health insurance marketplace later this year.


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2016 Summer Calendar
- May by the Bay
May 2th – 5th, Monday thru Thursday
- Girls Expedition Camp
June 13th – 17th, Monday thru Friday
- Kamp Khaos Preteen Camp – View Link
June 13th – 16th, Monday thru Thursday
- OneCamp Youth Camp – View Link
July 11th – July 15th, Monday thru Friday
- Boys Adventure Camp – View Link
July 18st – July 22nd, Monday thru Friday
These are the main open-registration & open-to-all summer camps hosted by Texas Baptist Encampment in Palacios. There are also many other privately-held-yet-welcome-to-all summer camps being held at TBE, several of which might accommodate alternative dates for your church group. And, as always, any group is welcome to schedule their own week of camp, large or small, in any available date left on the TBE calendar. Please call the camp office for more information.


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"Leah put me at ease while building confidence in my own abilities. She's a beautiful dancer and a compassionate teacher."
— Gayle Podrabsky, Seattle
Leah Vendl is an improviser, dance adventurer, and organizing member of Recess Productions who has taught at blues and fusion events across the US, in the UK and in France. Leah prefers she/her/hers pronouns. She has been dancing since she had someone to dance with but fell in love with social partner dancing 10 years ago. She believes social dance can empower a diversity of voices and bodies and teaches a role-fluid, consent-focused dance practice.
Leah has a background in contemporary dance, improvisation and solo movement. Contact her about teaching blues dancing, solo blues movement, and consent in partner dancing classes.
"Leah's sets are a deep celebration of SELF. Get on the dance floor, express who you truly are, and settle into the deepest groove your body can find."
— Mr. Moo / Milo Walker-Hayden, Portland
"Your DJing is deeply emotional and makes me move."
— Christopher Moorefield, Eugene, OR
"Your sets remind me of everything that is beautiful in the world."
— Andrew gabler, Seattle
Leah started DJing for house parties in Seattle and Tacoma in2010 and has since DJ'd at blues and fusion events across the US, in Paris, London, and Spain. She particularly loves taking the room for a ride, transporting dancers from a funky polyrhythmic party to stripped down acoustic moments. Her sets have been described as liquid, chewy and gosh-darn luscious. You'll know the party's really going if everyone's getting down, and so is she—doing the worm.


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Anwar ul-Haq Ahady
|Anwar ul-Haq Ahady
Ahady in 2009
|Minister of Finance
|In office
December 2004 – February 2009
|Hamid Karzai
|Preceded by
|Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai
|Succeeded by
|Omar Zakhilwal
|Minister of Transportation and Commerce
|In office
? – ?
|Preceded by
|Succeeded by
|Personal details
|August 12, 1951
Sarobi, Kabul Province, Kingdom of Afghanistan (Now Afghanistan)
|Alma mater
Kabul University Degree in Law American University in Beirut B.A. & M.A. in Political ScienceNorthwestern University PhD in Political Science & MBA
|Central banker
|Politician, writer
Anwar ul-Haq Ahady (August 12, 1951) is a politician in Afghanistan, currently serving as Afghan Minister of Transportation and Commerce.[1][2] He had served as the nation's Finance Minister from December 2004 to February 5, 2009. Prior to that he held the position as head of Da Afghanistan Bank, the central bank of Afghanistan. He is also prominent academic and writer.[3]
Early years[edit]
Ahady was born on 12 August 1951 in Sarobi, Kabul province, Afghanistan. He is the son of Abdul Haqhas, a Pashtun and native of the Sarobi district in Kabul province. Ahady holds a Master of Business Administration (MBA) and a Ph.D in political science[3] from the post-graduate faculty of Northwestern University,[4] in Evanston, Illinois, north of Chicago. He earned a Bachelor's degree as well as a Master's degree in economics and political science from the American University of Beirut in Lebanon.[3]
Ahady served as an assistant professor of political science at Carleton College, in Northfield, Minnesota, in the United States, and as the banking director of Continental Elona of Chicago from 1985 to 1987. He was a professor of political science at Providence College, a Catholic university in Providence, Rhode Island, from 1987 to 2002.
After the removal of the Taliban government and the formation of the Karzai administration in late 2001, Ahady was chosen as the head of Afghanistan's central bank, Da Afghanistan Bank. He has many writings in academic journals, books, and popular dailies of the United States.
Political affiliation[edit]
Ahady is currently the elected leader of Afghan Social Democratic Party (Afghan Mellat).
- "The Decline of the Pashtuns in Afghanistan", Anwar-ul-Haq Ahady, Asian Survey, Vol. 35, No. 7. (Jul., 1995), pp. 621–634.
- ^ Pashtun Shinwari, ed. (February 12, 2011). "Landmark Afghan-Pak trade pact goes into effect". Pajhwok Afghan News. Retrieved 2011-02-13.
- ^ http://www.tolonews.com/en/election-2014/12278-presidential-candidate-ahadi-against-karzais-loya-jirga
- ^ a b c http://www.mof.gov.af/the-minister.htm
- ^ http://www.northwestern.edu/magazine/northwestern/fall2003/features/ahady/index.htm
External links[edit]
|Wikimedia Commons has media related to Anwar-ul-Haq Ahady.


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An object of mass = 5.00 is attached to a spring with spring constant = 220 whose unstretched length is = 0.200 , and whose far end is fixed to a shaft that is rotatingwith an angular speed of = 2.00 . Neglect gravity and assume that the mass alsorotates with an angular speed of 2.00 as shown.
When solving this problem use an inertial coordinate system,as drawn here.
1. Given the angular speed of = 2.00 , find the radius at which the mass rotates without moving toward oraway from the origin.


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Right winger Wayne Simmonds, one of the NHL's few black players, is deeply proud of his race, but he says he wants to be respected because of what he does on the ice - not the color of his skin.
Four months into his first season with the Flyers, not only has he gained respect, but he has also developed into one of the team's most popular players.
Flyers fans, you see, are enamored of guys who play with an edge, and Simmonds fits that description perfectly. He is an old-school grinder and, at the same time, one of the Flyers' fastest skaters.