tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-50904032008-07-20T12:51:20.770-06:00y-intercepthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03389285761013186443noreply@blogger.comBlogger895125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5090403.post-32620189366281169482008-07-15T13:54:00.007-06:002008-07-15T16:14:18.596-06:00

This post has two sections: an examination of the Tolerance Paradox and a part on the rise of the Public School Monopoly. The Tolerance ParadoxMy last post was about the accusation that America, as a whole, was monocultural. I argue that the United States has been far more accomodating of cultural diversity than other nations. In being accomodating of other cultures, we have also been

y-intercepthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03389285761013186443noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5090403.post-49256514072494917842008-07-14T02:40:00.003-06:002008-07-14T02:54:05.714-06:00

Recently, a prominent progressive presidential candidate, who I will not mention, derided Americans for not learning other languages. It just so happens that I am an elitist bilingual snit, and multilingualism is something that I've been interested in for some time. Have you every noticed that an extremely large number of people around the world seem to be able to learn passable English, while

y-intercepthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03389285761013186443noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5090403.post-81583259877811738952008-07-13T15:23:00.000-06:002008-07-13T15:24:30.569-06:00

I took a picture of the installation of the I80 700 East Bridge. They built the bridge by the side of the interstate and are moving it inplace with a block and tackle arrangement. The bridge is massive. The freeway will have four lanes in both direction. 700 South has three traffic lanes along with left turn lanes. The Columbus Library on 500 East in South Salt Lake sports a mission style

y-intercepthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03389285761013186443noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5090403.post-65496752062158498592008-07-12T12:11:00.003-06:002008-07-12T13:10:44.845-06:00

In the work Aristotle and His Children, Richard Rubenstein makes a compelling case that appreciation for Aristotelian analysis leads to prosperity. History seems to present a series of awakenings where a group realizes the power of logic. The society would have a Renaissance of culture and would suddenly find itself dominating the world. This Renaissance is not unique to Western culture. The

y-intercepthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03389285761013186443noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5090403.post-71482289935022080682008-07-12T02:41:00.002-06:002008-07-12T02:53:51.340-06:00

I don't know why I am doing this, but I've been throwing large number of hours into rereading the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle. At first, Plato's dialectical style of writing appears more intriguing. He bounces from topic to topic, and explores multiple sides of every issue. You can read Plato two millennia after the writing and get the impression that he is saying something relevant to

y-intercepthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03389285761013186443noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5090403.post-91943229286236599312008-07-10T11:12:00.003-06:002008-07-10T11:38:52.242-06:00

The Tribune has an article on the shrinking Salt Lake City. Salt Lake City has been on a steady decline since the 70s. It shrank both under the ineptitude of DeeDee and under the dominion of Rocky. This last round of shrinkage is surprising because, in the latter half of Rocky's dominion, the city allowed a small number of extremely rich, extremely well connected developers to put in high density

y-intercepthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03389285761013186443noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5090403.post-67132133527551111002008-07-08T16:34:00.002-06:002008-07-08T16:37:51.540-06:00

Workers were removing the portable classrooms from Churchill Junior High School. A few years back, Wasatch Junior High School burnt down. I assume this means that the new Wasatch school is up and running. I understand the new building includes an innovative concept called sprinklers. Here are shots of the moving building: ~ ~ ~

y-intercepthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03389285761013186443noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5090403.post-90851305960942622672008-07-07T22:57:00.005-06:002008-07-08T12:59:36.319-06:00

The page on Plato is just over 1000 words. The idea that I wanted to convey is that the Platonic Academy made great advances in knowledge. The idea behind the academy was that there was a hierarchy of pre-existing forms behind mathematical, ethical and governance concepts. The idea kind of makes sense in mathematics since geometry, algebra, number theory and other mathematical structures seem

y-intercepthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03389285761013186443noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5090403.post-79159634286196786342008-07-05T13:05:00.002-06:002008-07-05T13:12:48.567-06:00

I use three different discount webhosts in different cities. All three went down this last week. The host of the Rich Theory project has been down for 24 hours. I guess they had July 4th off. I suspect that the host had something catastrophic happen. Which probably means that I lost stuff. I might move the site. The problem is that, when a webhost has outages for over a day, everyone pulls

y-intercepthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03389285761013186443noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5090403.post-5894136594659502842008-07-04T17:57:00.006-06:002008-07-04T19:09:22.064-06:00

Today is the day that the little people celebrate "A Fourth of July." As your intellectual superior, I feel obliged to point out that we've only progressed through a seventh of the month so far. We won't be through a fourth of July until the seventh and ... ... hey, why are you throwing watermelon at me? I just was trying to educate these people ... Anyway, the important holiday in Utah is the

y-intercepthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03389285761013186443noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5090403.post-87095402821746887362008-07-03T14:12:00.008-06:002008-07-04T12:27:17.715-06:00

Perhaps Michelle Obama is right. Perhaps we are becoming a mean base nation. I was on a walk with Coco up Neff Canyon when we came across a big old yellow cat in the middle of the trail. Since I had my camera with me, I decided to unleash Coco to see what she would do. The yellow cat was pretty big; So, I figured it could take care of itself. While processing the pictures for my web site it

y-intercepthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03389285761013186443noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5090403.post-26048861233361484412008-07-02T13:25:00.003-06:002008-07-02T14:11:25.463-06:00

Plato was a superb mathematician. In mathematics (especially in geometry) you can imagine abstract shapes with extremely well defined properties. One amazing thing about mathematics is that you can approach the subject from a large number of different perspectives and come back to many of the same forms. So, if you started math by studying numbers, you would discover many of the same things that

y-intercepthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03389285761013186443noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5090403.post-44749554607374833982008-07-01T16:21:00.003-06:002008-07-02T00:42:35.237-06:00

I decided to read Copplestone's History of Philosophy before popping up the next two articles. One thing that struck me was the large number of independent schools that were concurrent with Socrates and Plato. Many were all run by the much maligned "sophists." It was not until Aristotle started his own Lyceum that his work on scientific enquiry matured. Legend tells us that the sophists had

y-intercepthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03389285761013186443noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5090403.post-32553432145984092022008-06-30T14:09:00.003-06:002008-06-30T14:19:47.190-06:00

I spent the last several days going through big piles of books on Socrates. Oddly, the Chapter on Socrates only has 900 words and is not much different than it would have been if I did not read through the reams of books. Socrates is clearly one of the most important philosophers of western history. You can follow threads of his thought throughout history. Mentioning everything that is

y-intercepthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03389285761013186443noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5090403.post-14452514865768547512008-06-28T01:51:00.004-06:002008-06-28T13:58:06.711-06:00

The Bush Administration and BLM are currently taking heat for imposing a freeze on new solar energy projects. I applaud the freeze. A smart alternative energy program would support alternative fuels when the market for alternatives is weak. The market for solar panels is through the roof and demand is exhausting supplies; Therefore, there should be a freeze on subsidized solar installations.

y-intercepthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03389285761013186443noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5090403.post-62137659490075381972008-06-28T00:58:00.004-06:002008-06-28T02:10:30.397-06:00

BTW, I added an outline feature to the Rich Theory project. The resource pages now shows a record of revision. If you write a blog post about any of the articles in this project, you can use the "request a link" feature on the resource page. If the post is real, I will approve the link back to your post. I like the "requested link" structure better than "trackback"

y-intercepthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03389285761013186443noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5090403.post-23684047705375679712008-06-27T23:38:00.004-06:002008-06-27T23:52:53.561-06:00

In the article on the Dialectics of Zeno I wanted to emphasize that many of our problems are not the result of character flaws of the people engaged in dialogue, but the form of the argument. Parmenides and Zeno of Elea made astute observations about the nature of the cosmo. Their work also showed that the Pythagoreans, atomists and other schools of thought on the cosmos simply did not have the

y-intercepthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03389285761013186443noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5090403.post-61644994309325017882008-06-27T11:58:00.005-06:002008-06-27T13:42:49.738-06:00

Salt Cycle advocates a thing called Bikes and Bombs. In this sport, you take a kids bike up to the top of Trax, then bomb down city streets. Judging from the site, and, by people bombing down the main walk in the U, the experience is even more intense if you use a lot of obscenities. I admit that, even before the installation of Trax, I had dark thoughts of taking a bus to the top of a hill and

y-intercepthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03389285761013186443noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5090403.post-44015339441851078702008-06-26T13:59:00.004-06:002008-06-26T14:03:45.379-06:00

I agree with Barrack Obama. McCain's program to give the company a $200 million award for inventing a better battery, fuel cell (or whatever) is a gimmick. The market already will award all of the best in category solutions. There may be some need for government in research investment, but not in the final reward. Unfortunately, Obama's counter proposal of spending $150B on an energy initiative

y-intercepthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03389285761013186443noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5090403.post-32303483502190047302008-06-25T15:31:00.003-06:002008-06-25T15:49:48.170-06:00

The main point I want to make in the Pythagoras article is in the section titled "Imposing the Grid. The demonstration showing that the hypotenuse of the unit square is not commensurable with the edges shows that it is natural to create systems that are not commensurable with each other. If you took two pieces of graph paper and turned one at a 45 degree angle to the other, you would find that

y-intercepthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03389285761013186443noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5090403.post-30483626771122534402008-06-25T02:10:00.002-06:002008-06-25T02:31:14.629-06:00

I finished the article on Pythagoras to Rich Theory. I did the orginal research on this work some 20 years ago; so I am going through books and online sources to verify things. It is long and tedious. I admit, I am having a much harder time than I thought I would. Terminology in mathematics keeps changing. Of course, I am actually trying to make a point that terminology changes. The

y-intercepthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03389285761013186443noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5090403.post-30805569469714198522008-06-23T22:31:00.003-06:002008-06-23T22:56:00.776-06:00

The Gloucester Pregnancy Pact story shows how difficult it is to separate myth from fact. Kathleen Kingsbury of Time Magazine wrote an article claiming that some of the 17 pregnant teens at Gloucester High School did so intentionally as part of a strange pregnancy pact. The girls now deny that anyone would have done such a silly thing. It is possible that Kathleen Kingsbury did a poor job

y-intercepthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03389285761013186443noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5090403.post-24177462057413640202008-06-21T11:43:00.002-06:002008-06-21T12:53:09.343-06:00

It is strange how we end up spending time dwelling on issue that we don't like. I've spent the last three days trying to write a page called of myth and math. Myth is a loaded term like "propaganda." One might say that propaganda is the process of making myths for partisan gain. The gist of rich theory is that the existence of myth is not a problem. Myth actually plays a vital role in the

y-intercepthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03389285761013186443noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5090403.post-67027283976661742232008-06-19T13:31:00.003-06:002008-06-19T16:30:21.347-06:00

Working on the premise that anything one feels like doing is equivalent to a man and women making a commitment to raise a family ... Some young girls have just embarked on a super fun alternative lifestyle. A group of teenage girls (all under 16) from Gloucester High School in Massachusetts entered a super fun pregnancy pact. 17 are having babies and it will all be super fun. The babies will all

y-intercepthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03389285761013186443noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5090403.post-13186732319457006992008-06-18T10:24:00.005-06:002008-06-18T11:07:42.615-06:00

In the last post, I brought up the classical liberal view of perspective. This view has individual people running around with different view of the same reality (dare I mention that reality is truth). The modern view (i.e., the tradition of Hegel and Marx) claims there to be an elite group of scientists who have a higher perspective. Hegel and Marx claimed to be using science to see the

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