This week is the big winter holiday – the Solstice. At 06:08 GMT on Saturday (just after midnight Central time) the northern hemisphere will being turning back towards the sun. We celebrate it by blowing out the many candles that are lit and enjoying a few moments without light or sound – just the music of the spheres to contemplate for a moment. This is our holiday for the season.
Glory and Promise
The winter clouds hung low over West Seventh Street as I walked down it today. Thick and bubbly, they cast a shadow of ice and cold yet to come which made me want to seek comfort in the Mad Hatter Café as quickly as I could get there. Before I could sprint inside, a new moment arrived, a glimmer of hope in the form of a thin ray of sun between the clouds. It was a “glory”, a ray of inspiration that only lasted a moment.
Desperate Cry for Attention
I have been thinking about why people write.
It’s not at all obvious in many cases. Certainly, the vast majority of writing out in the world is done to convince or to inform, the latter often a form of convincing. When a church group tells the world, “We are having our Christmas food drive,” they are informing the world of the project for the purpose of getting people involved; it is an appeal to convince potential volunteers of the need. A grant is a call to elicit money from someone else. Writing to convince makes up the bulk of what is written, and the need is generally obvious enough.
Compound Interests
This week I’ve gotten quite a few letters, and I picked out one that I thought was fairly representative.
With the financial mess that we see, I think there are two problems with what you have been saying. First, hasn’t this all been hyped in the media already so we know all about it already? Second, the people in the banks and so on have a very big interest in sorting this out so why do you think that they can not or will not do it?
The Game
Today is the day that the Nobel Prize in Economics is presented to the men who laid the foundation of “Game Theory”. The basic idea is that in any complex system individuals behave according to the rules and develop a strategy for winning, or at least achieving their own personal goals. From there, setting up a good economic system is nothing more complex than creating a good board game with a healthy equilibrium.
Barataria - The work of Erik Hare 