Tag: reflections

I saw Lewis Lapham give a talk a couple months ago at the Boston Athenaeum on new media, the Internet, and civic discourse. My one sentence summary:

The problem with giving everyone the ability to raise their voices online is that it makes people less likely to raise their voices, or their fists, in the streets.

Given it’s single letter name — and a common letter both in general and in statistics where it often represents correlation — searching for documentation on R on the web is difficult enough that folks have put together a custom search engine, RSeek. I’ve been doing quite a bit of R in the last year and can testify that RSeek is indispensable.

That said, using a custom search engine seems like a funny way of solving an problem that could be easily avoided. RSeek is sort of like the flessenlikker of search engines.

I got an email from my friend Mary Lou Jepson of OLPC and Pixel Qi. Turns out, she was in line for the red carpet at the Time 100 awards and was chatting to my friend moot of 4chan. Both were singled out as among the world’s 100 most influential people this year. As they chatted, they realized that they both knew me. They chatted about me as Whoopi Goldberg, Cornell West, Kate Hudson, Barbara Walters and others walked by.

I feel like in in a weird, very indirect way, I’ve made it.

When he was my adviser at the MIT Media Lab, I used to feel bad that I had trouble spelling Chris Csikszentmihályi’s name. As this screenshot from Chris’ Dopplr page shows, I am apparently in good company.

I had an existential experience in my local drug store last night while pondering this sign.

What does it mean for pain to be truly external to the person feeling it? Have I ever felt external pain? Is external pain merely another term for empathy? What might products to help with empathy entail? Would my local drug store stock them?

I recently ate a bag of potato chips made by FoodShouldTasteGood, Inc.. Their motto (as printed on that bag under their name) was, "It’s our name. It’s our brand. It’s our motto." Now, either the antecedents for those three it’s are different — which seems implausible — or their motto is lying in its final sentence. It’s all very complicated.

Seth Schoen reminded me of a somewhat similar issue with the United States’ national anthem, The Star Spangled Banner. The final stanza includes the line, "And this be our motto—’In God is our trust.’" This is not and has never been the U.S. motto. In fact, the U.S. had no motto at all until 1956 when "In God We Trust" — which is very similar, but not quite the same — became official.

It seems that nobody is quite sure where "In God We Trust" came from but there is some speculation that it originated in the anthem itself. Presumably, it became the motto because lawmakers thought it sounded good in the song and not because the U.S. government failed while trying to "correct" the embarrassing incorrect line in its anthem.

This bottle was found in Mika’s biosafety level 2 laboratory.

To address any confusion, isoamyl alcohol is not drinking alcohol and this bottle was bought for use in a scientific lab from a scientific lab supply company. Explanations are welcome.

At Kinokuyina in New York, I noticed that Playboy was sorted into the "Men’s Fashion" section of the magazine rack.

Funny. I wasn’t under the impression that Playboy’s primary selling points included either either men or clothing.

The following list is merely a small selection of scholarly articles listed in the ISI Web of Knowledge with "invisible hand" in their title:

• Beyond the Reach of the Invisible Hand
• The Real Invisible Hand: Presidential Appointees in the Administration of George W. Bush
• The Invisible Hand of God, Visible in the History of Chemotherapy
• Does the Latex Glove Fit the Invisible Hand? Application of Market Ideology to the Doctor/Patient Relationship.
• One-Armed Economists and the Invisible Hand.
• Subjective Image of Invisible Hand Coded By Monkey Intraparietal Neurons
• Exploitation – The Invisible Hand Guided By a Blind Eye: Confronting a Flaw in Economic Theory
• The Invisible Hand: Supernatural Agency in Political Economy and the Gothic Novel
• The ‘Invisible Man’ and the Invisible Hand – H.G. Wells’s Critique of Capitalism
• The Dilemmas of Laissez-Faire Population Policy in Capitalist Society: When the Invisible Hand Controls Reproduction.
• Hong Kong Government Policy and Information Technology Innovation: The Invisible Hand, the Helping Hand, and the Hand-Over to China
• Helping Russian Students See the Invisible Hand.
• Hailing with an Invisible Hand: A ‘Cosy’ Political Dispute Amid the Rise of Neoliberal Politics in Modern Ireland
• Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand Is Unstable: Physics and Dynamics Reasoning Applied to Economic Theorizing
• Offering an Invisible Hand: the Rise of the Personal Choice Model for Rationing Public Benefits
• From the Invisible Handshake to the Invisible Hand? How Import Competition Changes the Employment Relationship
• Invisible Hand Effect in an Evolutionary Minority Game Model
• Did the Invisible Hand Rock the Cradle?
• Internet: The Invisible Hand of Deliberation
• The Invisible Hand Has Already Wreaked Much Havoc – About Adam Smith
• Gaussen’s Invisible Hand: The University Mechanics and Machine Inspector Moritz Meyerstein: An Instrument Maker in the 19th Century.
• "The Invisible Hand" of the Market or "The Ever-Present Hand" of Management (On New Discussions and Methods in the Field of Economic History)
• Statin Utilisation – Recognising the Role of the Invisible Hand
• The Universe’s Invisible Hand.
• How Did the Invisible Hand Handle Industrial Waste? By-Product Development Before the Modern Environmental Era
• When Iron Fist, Visible Hand, and Invisible Hand Meet: Firm-Level Effects of Varying Institutional Environments in China
• Behavioural Genetics: Evolutionary Fingerprint of the ‘Invisible Hand’
• The Hunting of Forbidden Books. Censored Books, Persecuted Books, the Story Written By the Invisible Hand
• Identification of Pareto-Improving Policies: Information as the Real Invisible Hand
• The Conspiracy of the Invisible Hand: Anonymous Market Mechanisms and Dark Powers
• The Other Invisible Hand, Delivering Public Services Through Choice
• Reviving the Invisible Hand: the Case for Classical Liberalism in the Twenty-First Century
• Plant Science – The "Invisible Hand" of Floral Chemistry
• Suppressive Effect of Multimodal Surface Representation on Ocular Smooth Pursuit of Invisible Hand
• The Visible Versus the Invisible Hand – A Tension Inherent in Modern Economies
• The Invisible Hand and the Grabbing Hand
• A Close Eye on the Invisible Hand
• The Contracts of Credit in a Long Term Relationship From the Invisible Hand to the Handshake
• Chile’s New Entrepreneurs and the "Economic Miracle": The Invisible Hand or a Hand From the State?
• The Invisible Hand or Hands Across the Water, American Consultants and Irish Economic-Policy
• How Would the Invisible Hand Handle Money
• A Helping Hand for the Invisible Hand
• Measuring the Speed of the Invisible Hand – The Macroeconomic Costs of Price Rigidity
• The Invisible Hand Turns Green – Using Economic Instruments to Conserve the Environment
• The Invisible Hand Made Visible, the ‘Birth-Mark’
• Trembling Invisible Hand Equilibrium
• Guiding the Invisible Hand – Economic Liberalism and the State in Latin-American History
• The ‘Invisible Hand Meets the Dead Hand High Above Washington D.C.’
• From the Invisible Hand to the Gladhand – Understanding a Careerist Orientation to Work
• Public-Sector Reform – Not So Invisible Hand
• Darwin and Paley Meet the Invisible Hand
• Economics as Ideology – On Making the Invisible Hand Invisible
• The Invisible Hand – Poetics and Narration of Verga, the Novelist
• Invisible Hand, Invisible Death
• The Invisible Hand Strikes Back – Motor Insurance and the Erosion of Organized Competition in General Insurance, 1920-38
• The Creeping Invisible Hand – Entrepreneurial Librarianship
• The Speed of the Invisible Hand
• From the Invisible Hand to Visible Feet – Anthropological Studies of Migration and Development
• Invisible Hand, the Marijuana Business
• The Invisible Hand in San Francisco.
• The Invisible Hand That Feeds the Cults – Messianic Capitalism
• Can an Invisible Hand Palpate the Carotid Pulse
• Invisible Hand or Fatherly Hand – Problems of Paternalism in the New Perspective on Health
• Palm-Reading the Invisible Hand – A Critical-Examination of Pro-Competitive Reform Proposals
• The Market as Messiah: The Invisible Hand Strikes Again.
• Federal Legislation and Investment Policy – Far-From-Invisible Hand of Congress and Treasury
• Shaking Hands with Invisible Hand – Transitional Strategies for Global Social-Change – Questions and Issues
• Invisible Hand and Clenched Fist – Is There a Safe Way to Picket Under First Amendment
• Institutional Change and Quasi-Invisible Hand

And, finally:

• What’s Wrong with Invisible-Hand Explanations?

When my friends Karen and Annina were confronted with an offensive sticker on the laptop of someone working at our lab, they organized a very constructive and effective intervention.

I was so impressed that I made a short illustrated write-up of the story on my wiki.