Textbook Innovations

In my web building programs, I've noticed that there has started to be a number of great innovations in the textbook market.

Campus Book Rentals and Chegg.com are programs that rent textbooks online. Renting is a good alternative for cash strapped students as you don't tie up your cash buying then reselling books each quarter.

CourseSmart is an effort by textbook publishers to go digital. With this program, students can download electronic copies of textbooks at prices substantially lower than for hardback books. The program saves trees. Above all, electronic books are easier to move about. I lived in my car during my college years and had to sell books 'cause there's only so much room under the front seat.

In the K12 market, I've noticed through the years that many of the most interesting innovations seem to be happening on the homeschool front and with private schools as individuals and small businesses rush to find quality learning materials. This industry is way too big for me to sum up.

The other cool innovation that I think will completely swamp the textbook world is growing number of open source textbooks on the market. The great thing about open source is that it will allow professors to grab a curriculum for their class and embellish it.

I love things that actually empower professors.

I've downloaded a read a few open sourced math books. But have only scratched the surface of what this innovation might bring to the world.

Culture of Corruption

I guess Obama's plan was to stimulate the economy by making Conservative books fly off the bookshelves. Of course Bush made progressive books fly off the shelves. I added tomes of Chomsky and others to my bookshelves during the Bush administration.

My observation is that the country almost always heads in the opposite direction of the US president.

I've been seduced into buying Michelle Malkin's Culture of Corruption.

For folks wandering what Obama's organized communities will look like in ten years time, they might check out The File which explores Timothy Garton Ash's encounter with the East German version of Acorn in the 1980s.

Nien Cheng had provides a look at her life through the Cultural Revolution (a change campaign by Moa) in Life and Death in Shanghai.

It is sad. The left is slamming Michell Malkin with racial slurs for daring to criticize the annointed one. I suspect that many oriental Americans had enough experience with Mao to know that annointed ones aren't quite as nice as they are cracked up to being.

Women and Money

Any progressives reading this blog: Suze Orman is a person that needs struggling against. We need to struggle against her big time. This blog will discuss who this peoples' enemy is. What this peoples' enemy is doing and why it is so horrible.

Suze Orman is the peoples' enemy who keeps showing up on TV giving advice on how to save money, avoid debt and become financially independent. This is diametrically opposed to progressivism which aims to reduce people to depenency on the state. Financial independence leads to independent thinking, which leads to the questioning of progressivism itself! We can't have that! There is a reason why PUBLIC SCHOOLS don't teach basic money management skills!!!!

What this peoples' enemy is currently doing is a major threat that has the potential of creating disunity in the progressive movement. Suze Orman is launching a major iniative to encourage women of lower incomes to save. This is the plan: First you buy and read Women and Money. Somewhere in each book is a special code that qualifies the reader for a special high interest TD Ameritrade Account. Participants who manage to transfer $50.00+ a month into the account for 12 months will get a $100 bonus transferred into the account. Low income women save $600 over the year. They end up with $700.00 plus interest! The Save Yourself web site has the full scoop on this plan.

The real danger with this type of program is that when people become used to saving money and financial planning; there is a chance they will continue doing it and enter the middle class. Once in the middle class, they will stop being peoples and start being individuals.

IT IS A THREAT TO THE PROGRESSIVE BASE!!!!!!!

Now for the reason why this is horrible and must be stopped: If women figure out how money works; they no longer need men!!!! This is like the greatest conceivable threat to the survival of men.

If you know of any low income women. Warn them against buying this book. This is not the type of information we want in their hands. Suggest that they spend their money on lingerie to attract a sugar daddy. A sugar daddy can protect them.

PS: Don't let any right wing kooks know about this program. Right wing kooks and free marketeers might just go out an tell low income women to buy the book as saving money will help low income women get on the road to a better future.

Emerging Markets

Did anyone else notice that the Federal Reserve rate hikes failed to lower long term interest rates. The phenomena had many people puzzled. The reason for the change is that our interest rates are no longer determined by the Federal Reserves ... but by China.

The Emerging Markets is a new must read by Antoine van Agtmael that explores the fundamental economic shifts occurring as the emerging markets (once called the third world) rapidly eclipse the first world. Funds investing in the emerging markets have been realizing an astounding 37% growth per year. The emerging market is no longer simply using cheap labor to replicate inventions from the first world. The third world has become the primary stage for research and development. For that matter, most of the real cutting edge technology showing up on shelves these days (such as the plasma TVs, iPhones, etc.) are coming from the emerging markets.

The United States is even likely to lose its edge in education as emerging markets build universities that rival those of the first world.

Scary Things and Natalie

This is scary. Natalie R. Collins is being chased by a Missionary raping stalker. I guess some would say it serves her right saying the things she says.

Actually, I like Ms. Collins. I don't think she deserves bad things to happen to her. Natalie writes about the dark side of LDS Culture. My impression from both her blog and books is that she likes people who happen to be LDS. She just doesn't like some of the undercurrents of the culture which end up undermining people's good intents. She uses fiction to help distill idea. From my point of view, Natalie seems authentically interested in finding the best way to proceed in life. She just released a new work called Behind Closed Doors which combines the darker elements of Mormonism in a thriller murder mystery.

As for this post. I think Natalie's stalker incident helps illuminate the contrast between critical thinking and crazed hatred.

Modern education holds "critical thinking" as the highest ideal. Unfortunately, many people who follow this path of hyper-criticism seem drawn into worlds of paranoia and hatred. It seems to me that true "critical thinking" is going to find more than just the faults of a person or group. In the case of Mormonism, I see legions of wonderful people who are trying their very hardest be good human beings. Yet strange things happen at a subliminal level which seems to undermine the community at large.

The type of critical thinking that we need in this world is the type of critical thinking that finds the good and bad in things and lets us accentuate the good and root out the bad.

Most of the progressives I know are authentically good people. They did not just wake up one day saying: "I want to increase the amount of hatred in the world; so I will become a progressive." Most of them came about being progressive by actually wanting to solve the problems of the world. They would go to meetings be told the talking points of the day and come out convinced that the way you go about affecting change is to criticize the hated enemies of the progressives. Of course, this supposedly effective means of progressing society through hypercriticism ends up destroying the ability to engage in discourse, which ends up making things worse. (As you may have guessed, Progressives actually drive me battier than Mormons. Mormons have an excuse. Their bishop made them do it. Since progressives claim to be intellectuals; They should know better.)

Critical thinking that is driven by an authentic desire to make the world better. Otherwise it degenerates into an attack dog style hyper-criticism that leads nowhere.

This is Our War

I am at the downtown library again. There was a copy of the work "This Is Our War" by Devin Friedman on the desk. I ended up reading that book rather than working on the project that I had planned. This is a coffee table book with images taken by US soldiers during the first year of the war in Iraq. A large number of soldiers brought digital cameras and this is one of the most photographed and documented wars in history.

The images reminded me of how upset I was during the invasion of 2003. The Shock and Awe campaign that caused so much destruction in the country ripped my heart apart.

It is strange how I tend to be out of sync with the rest of the nation. The Shock and Awe Campaign that shot Bush's approval ratings through the roof, was the low for me. The fact that Bush stayed the course during and after the Iraqi election, and the fact that he is still standing behind the Iraqi government and against the terrorists boosts my approval.

Anyway, I just put this portfolio from the US soldiers on my recommended reading list.

Court Activism Revisited

I just finished Richard Epstein's short work How Progressives Rewrote the Constitution.

Mr. Epstein views recent Judicial Activism from a classical liberal perspective and finds the various twists of modern liberals (Progressives) lacking. Progressive courts have changed the focus of legal interpretation from one that sought to protect the rights of individuals to control their labor and property to one that allows arbitrary power graps by political insiders who claim themselves champions of "social progress."

Historically, most of these social progress schemes have failed to deliver social progress. They generally do little more than make the people with political power rich and more powerful.

Anyway, I found this "Classical Liberal" critique of Progressive Court Activism a refreshing break from the ideology driven Conservative and Libertarian critiques of the modern progressive courts. Epstein does not hold the argument that we have to return to some perfected bygone past. Instead the work shows the muddle that has bubbled out of the Progressive Activists courts for what it is. The end result of the Progressive movement is to concentrate power in the hands of the politically powerful while alienating the mass of people they claim to represent.

Philosophy of Mind

Philosophy of Mind (Edward Feser, 2005) is an interesting introduction to the Philosophy of Mind and the influence that this subject has had on philosophy at large. Modern philosophers sought a completely material explanation for mankind and cast aside the Western tradition which saw mind as something separate from the brain. Feser's work provides an overview of the different methods used to attack the mind/brain problem.

It seems to me that this mind/brain problem is one of the big gaps between modern and classical liberalism. Modern dialectical materialism held that science has a complete explanation for everything. The thing we think of as a mind is just an illusion caused by chemical processes. The classical world saw science as a useful tool, but not as a complete perfect system that describes everything. To the classical liberal, the edges will always be blurry.

Feser's short sweet introduction to the Philosophy of Mind takes a road through the various attempts to create a complete material description of the mind. At the end of the work, the mind remains blurry hinting that perhaps the classical tradition was right after all.

Darwinian Fairytales

I just wasted some time reading the work Darwinian Fairytales by David Stove. This work is a bit closer to the discussion that we should have about Darwinianism than the silly Intelligent Design debate that was the rage last year. The idea that humans should be classified as a primate, or that we descend from an ancestors that apparently branched off other species of primates is an elegant theory that fits in well with the fossil record and all the evidence we have in form of DNA and biology.

Noting that man has a common heritage with the rest of the critters on this little blue planet of ours is not a problem.

The problem with Darwinianism is all of the philosophical fluff that has been injected into the science of evolution. Darwinianism itself is largely a fusion of Kant / Schopenhauer transcendentalism with with select 19th century prejudices.

Arguably, many philosophers have tried to use new sciences to construct new religions with the scientist as priest and the gene as the new diety (the causal agent that manipulates our existence).

The work has a few insightful essays on the excesses of Darwinian philosophies. The work does a good job showing that metaphors like the selfish genes or the struggle for survival provide an incomplete view of the reality of evolution. The article evens takes a few jabs at scientific determinism and the inanity of sociobiology (Unfortunately, the book was written before evolutionary psychology became the craze.)

The real value of evolution is the increased understanding it gives of the make up of the universe. Unfortunately, the beautiful science of evolution is often used as the basis for garbage philosophies. The science of evolution shows us how the life on this world came to be, but it does not completely explain why man is here.

We appear to be sitting on a very old planet in a very large universe. The real science of evolution is expanding our understanding our this situation. Philosophies such as scientific determinisms, Darwinism, and attempts to raise science to a religion have detracted from this understanding.

Judas Gospels

On the plus side of things. The National Geographic presentation on the Judas Gospels sounds intriguing.

What people seem to be discovering is that the modern view of the ancient world is a bit skewed. I basically learned that Christianity was a back water cult that emerged among uneducated, illiteral masses.

Rodney Stark's work, The Rise of Christianity, held an interesting thesis that religions tend to start among recently marginalized segments of society. In the case of the ancient world, this was the Hellenic Jews in Alexandria and other former Greek outposts.

The Greeks were the intellectuals of the ancient world. Prior to Christ, Ancient Greece had fallen to Rome. Hellenic culture still survived in many outposts. The population would have still been relatively well educated but politically marginalized. If this is the case, the Christianity would have inherited both the Greek view of philosophy, the Judaic tradition of rule of law along with Christ's message of compassion and respect for life.

The appearance of the Judas Gospel and the increased availability of other texts from this time seem to be indicating that this was a time of open positive discourse.

House Thinking

I am listening to talking heads on the radio about a new book called House Thinking by Winifred Gallagher. The book is based on historical research on ways that we think about the rooms in our house.

Most of the redesign discussion I've heard in the last several years have dealt primarily with the effects that the redesign has on the resell value of the house, taxes or on the all important mortgage. The discussion of how we actually live in the house takes second stage. For example, today people are spending outrageous amounts on kitchen redesigns ... this is happening at a time when people are doing less cooking.

Of course, we are not unique in building our houses around false ideals. The reasons houses of 50 years ago were split into many different rooms is that the number of rooms was a primary factor in the selling price of a home.

House Thinking sounds like an excellent contribution to the overall dialogue about how we should organize our lives in this modern world.

Crunchy Conservatives

I was listening to an interview with a Rod Dreher who is pushing a book called Crunchy Cons.

As an eco-jabbering meadow muffin, I am extremely happy to anyone talking up the imporantance of conserving resources and protecting the environment.

During the interview and in doing research on the web on Dreher, I keep coming across people suggesting that conservative conservationists is something new.

The truth is that, if we teleported back a half century, we would find that for much of US history the conservatives were the conservationists. The liberal movement kept demanding to put resources into production, while the conservatives kept being the fuddy-duddies.

The modern politically active conservation movement was born by Conservatives fighting big government projects like the TVA, Lake Powell and the like.

The sixties and seventies saw the transformation of the enviroment from something to be conserved to something that we should worship. The liberals hijacked conservation with the message that big government could save the environment.

I am an ecojabbering meadow muffin who puts preservation of remaining wilderness at the very top of the social agenda. I see the need to preserve our resources as the primary social priority. This need, however, is apolitical. Both Republicans and Democrats should be conservationists. For that matter, I know a very large number of people in the conservation community. Their beliefs pretty much span the political spectrum, but unite in the need to conserve.

While the Green Party likes to pretend that they are the exclusive guardians of the environment, most conservationists welcome all conservationists regardless of political leaning.

I think it is great that people read Rod Dreher's book. I simply wish to counter the impication that crunchy conservatism is new. The idea is not new. Just as the Republican Party used to be the party for black rights, the republican party used to be the party of the conservationists. The Democrats were skillful in stealing both issues.

I think the Democratic environmentalists are great. I love the hard effort they throw into the issue. My regret with the Green movement is that too many people in the green movement have the false belief that they are exclusive in their environmental leanings.

Nothing would please me more than seeing people united on the need for conservation.

My observation is that the people who work to preserve the environment see through the political debate and correctly perceive that conservation is not exclusively owned by one political party.

BTW, my favorite preservation group is the Nature Conservancy which works to buy easements for conserving land. I am less enthralled with political activists who see socialization as the only path to preservation.

Dead Dry

Sarah Andrew's new work Dead Dry is a delightful read. This continuation of the Em Hansen murder mystery series finds our forensic geologist looking into the politics of suburban sprawl. A corpse at the Point of the Mountain in the Salt Lake Valley winds its way back to the suburban sprawl taking over Castle Rock, Colorado.

It is a well written mystery that explores the human side of the water crisis facing the west. The politics of sprawl is extremely ugly. Real Estate development is the primary industry in much of Utah and Colorado. What this economy is wanting to do is to expand until we exhaust our resources and the economy implodes. It is still the same boom and bust mantality that dotted the west with ghost towns a hundred years ago ... except the ruins from this generation will be a toxic wasteland ... and not the quaint tourist destinations of old ghost towns.

Anyhow, the new Em Hansen mystery is a great read.

Year Six is a Winner

I was supposed to be doing other things. But, I decided to read Rowling's Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince instead.

It was definitely a thrill ride. Unlike the previous novels, this works leaves a large number of issues to be resolved in the final year.

I understand that Ms. Rowlings originally intended the work to be a seven part series. I hope that she does not sell out and that she concludes the series as orginally planned. I understand that Rowlings is now the richest writer ever. She has all the money she will ever need. I will be greatly saddened if she sells the integrity of her series for more.

Skeleton Man

I just finished reading the new Hillerman, Skeleton Man. The Amazon Reviewers really panned the story giving it just 3 stars. I actually found the work to be quite enjoyable.

This new work brought us into the inner gorge of the Grand Canyon where the Havasupai people live. To solve the mystery, we must first uncover the hidden treasure of the Masaw (Skeleton Man).

Just the mere fact that this story brought us into the deep gorges of the Grand Canyon made this work a delight. This is a thumbnail gallery of Pictures from the Grand Canyon. The confluence of the Little Colorado and the Grand Canyon really is a magical place.

Connie is in town. She is going on a book tour for "Walking Without Footprints." Her first stop is Grand Junction of all places. She will then head through Denver then to points east.

When paying off my Discover bill I was pleased to see the company finally has a no-paper option. That gets rids my life of another piece of scrappy paper. While at I-Link, I argued unsuccessfully for the company to move to totally electronic billing and save postage. Why waste the earth printing paper things that we are going to toss out?