CONTEMPLATIONS on child-like faith in government from Q and O.
Some of my summer reading (e.g., David Warsh’s Knowledge and the Wealth Of Nations
Archive for July, 2007
LEADERS of the new Virginia Tech Librescu Chabad House named. More information about the House here, and about Chabad here.
LIKE WATERSHIP DOWN, but edgier: Life without Billy
A GOOD CAUSE: Helping out with the Roanoke Rescue Mission.
In the New River Valley, don’t forget Volunteer NRV, a hub for local volunteer opportunities.
A BASICALLY POSITIVE Citizens Internet tech support story.
Citizens’ wireless broadband service certainly sounds interesting, but I haven’t yet run into anybody who can give me a first-hand account of how well it works.
READING FOR FUN: Thoughts on Harry Potter as an anomaly. (Earlier blurb here.)
GOOD NEWS on Virginia’s litigation climate, by way of SW Virginia Law Blog. The state ranks second, behind only Nebraska.
The profiles indicate that there are vast differences in liability climates from state to state—differences that should contribute to strategic decisions about where to do business. This should also stimulate business leaders to demand that state officials are held to task for allowing their states to become hostile legal environments, while at the same time courting business through economic development programs.
Our neighbors across the border in West Virginia rank last, matching their recent ranking in broader surveys of best places to do business. The Charleston Gazette reports that some, however, remain defiantly optimistic. Good for them.
In a post-industrial world it is only going to get easier for companies to pick up and move, so vigilence is required.
THE DUCK POND is returning to normal following the search earlier this month.
JOSEPH SCHUMPETER, in his 1949 History of Economic Thought, famously said of the term “liberalism” that it was “a supreme, if unintended, compliment that the enemies of the system of private enterprise have thought it wise to appropriate its label”.
This sort of language polution has far-reaching consequences, often obscuring the original concept. Those who still wish to reference the old meaning must either qualify the use of the hijacked term, or invent new terms to try to keep the old idea from being driven from the field of public discourse. The terms “libertarian” and “classical liberal” are examples of such artificial constructs. Neither quite captures the concept that would have been obvious to a reader in, say, America in the 1920’s. That the original term, or its cousins in other languages, lives on in less damaged form in other parts of the world only confuses matters further.
Catching up on the past week’s blog reading, one can find evidence of a similar assault on the word “peace”. Garnering the most attention, we have a Nobel “Peace” Prize winner fantasizing about killing a sitting US president. We also have “peaceniks” shooting Iraq vets, and symbols of Palestinian terrorism being marketed as “peace scarves”. (To be fair, the shooting incident may yet prove to simply have been the work of a random nutcase.) Next thing you know, organizers of “peace” rallies will be hawking t-shirts featuring bloodthirsty thugs. Oh, wait, nevermind. None of this is really new, of course, it just struck me as odd to see a string of examples within a short period of time.
Mahalanobis had a good post on the Nobel Prize winner’s outburst, and the pervasiveness of this world-view. Key point:
Evil isn’t Snidely Whiplash or the Legion of Doom who explicitly state an intention to hurt people (and are comic characters). It’s people with really good intentions operating under extreme confidence against other people’s will, creating a greater good such as the no-Bush world, or rule ‘by the people’.
It’s good to know what evil really is: good intentions, enthusiastically applied, on a bad theory.
Of course, this sort of analysis only works as long as concepts like “good”, “bad”, and “evil” can still be meaningfully expressed.
YIKES. Speaking of highway-related bad ideas:
A North Carolina man who was clocked doing 160 miles per hour on a motorcycle on Interstate 81 has been sentenced to one year in jail. (more…)
TAKING A BAD IDEA and making it worse. One wonders if anybody thought through the perverse incentives created by making traffic infractions this “lucrative”.
LIVEBLOGGING AG McDonnell’s Q&A at the Bloggers United conference.
BLACKSBURG’S LUNA TECHNOLOGIES wins R&D award:
Luna’s OBR has been recognized because it offers unmatched diagnostic capabilities for fiber optic networks and systems. The OBR gives end users a very high resolution view that is similar to an “X-Ray†into the inner workings of a fiber optic network. The OBR also has a feature that allows users to turn standard optical fiber into a continuous thermometer that could be used in a variety of applications including power generation, civil structure monitoring and industrial process control.
Luna Innovations (Luna Technologies‘ parent) is involved in lots of nifty projects, including allergy treatments based on nanotechnology.
SCHOLARSHIP IN HONOR OF LIVIU LIBRESCU announced:
The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum will grant a onetime $18,000 scholarship in memory of the survivor who died protecting students during the Virginia Tech massacre.
The scholarship in memory of Liviu Librescu, a Romanian-born Israeli citizen who taught at Virginia Tech, will be announced during next week’s “Transfer of Testimony” ceremony, an annual event that allocates scholarships to ten high school students from across the United States based on their essays on the Holocaust.
WHERE THE WOMEN ARE. Note the small red blob on Roanoke. A more detailed map here reveals that Montgomery County fares less well. (Not a surprise to alums of VT Engineering.)
There’s a lot of other interesting stuff on the strange maps site, including these maps that link states to countries with similar characteristics.