ekzept

What makes places to live attractive? Why does someone choose to live one place or another? And why is the Wah Effect so creatively potent?

It certainly seems to matter a lot where you live. These anecdotal reports raise, of course, the possibility of fallacy even on the philosophical level, as concerns Taleb and others. There are four broad categories of purpose, reason to live somewhere:

1. reasons of constraint
2. reasons of opportunity
3. reasons of affection
4. reasons of well-being

Reasons of constraint occur when your place of residence is limited by statute, or operational legalisms, often prohibitions. Race and religious biases enshrined in law are examples. Prohibitions against immigration are another.

Reasons of opportunity are the pushes and pulls of jobs and financial circumstance, moving overseas to take a more lucrative job, or maintaining two wildly separate holdholds in a relationship because each partner has their own career to pursue, and this is deemed best for them separately and together.

Reasons of affection are simply wanting to live places in order to be close to those we love, whether significant others or communities with which we have emotional bonds.

Reasons of well-being are motives which make some locales more attractive because they are comparatively safe, whether that marginal safety is actual or not.

I'll drop constraint and well-being from consideration, concentrating on the tradeoffs between opportunity and affection.

While materials and things enable, empower, and further, they can also constrain. If lack of opportunity pushes people to violate reasons of constraint or reasons of well-being, there isn't enough opportunity, and this can be bad. If opportunity compromises affection, however, there is a serious risk of ending as Don Quioxte observed, wondering on your deathbed why you had lived. This is the theme of the song "Lyin' Eyes" by The Eagles.

So says the rational analysis. I prefer another.

The minor biblical figure Naaman took wagonloads of soil with him, in gratitude for his apparent cure from leprosy by the god of Israel. Naaman felt he needed the soil of the Land in order to worship this god properly. In short, he used his power, wealth, and influence to bring place with him, or an approximation of it. I would prefer to think that we have more insight and wisdom than Naaman. Whether it is a J.K.Rowling or a Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in a Silicon Valley garage, those passionate in and with creativity can find ways of transforming their situations into greatness. It's not always possible, and it doesn't always work, but the wah-wah pedal can transform a good performance into a heart-wrenching great one, a singularity of the spirit.

And the Wah Effect is not that special, an accidental distortion in frequency. Yet masters to use it create rivotting emotion out of the expected, almost out of nothing.

Every place has its wah-wah pedal. And Naaman was just wrong.

Song, Feelin' Stronger Every Day by Chicago (8 MB MP3). Only some of the lyrics apply, only the happy pro-coupling ones. Music's great, though.

Does anyone else find it deeply disturbing that, according to a story on NPR News today, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops managed to get Pelosi to (effectively) agree to an anti-abortion plank in the recent health care bill passed by the House of Representatives? Or that this organiozation, the Catholic Church, entrenched in privilege, power, and shielded from taxes, wealthy in property, can nonetheless use the power of pulpit to advance its own narrowly-defined non-universal causes?
(posted by cellphone at laundromat)

Early a wonderful, vibrant, creative, love-filled Friday morning, 23^rd October 2009, by the Charles River, near Harvard.

There's a long discussion about the Kullback-Leibler divergence and its relationship to the Akaike information criterion available, one to which I contributed. This turned rather philosophical, which I don't think was strictly necessary, or important.

I've read several articles blaming the falling dollar and the rising price of gold upon market response to excessive government spending over the long term, often highlighting the health care reforms being avidly debated in Congress and among the citizenry. I heard something like that from a commentator on CNBC, too, on a recent flight. It makes no sense.

While there is a plausible mechanism and model that says excessive government spending raises in the minds of investors the possibility of government default years down the road, if that were true, you would expect to see interest on government debts ticking up, because investors holding it would be demanding higher prices at auctions to incur that additional risk. There is no evidence of that. It is lamentable that these people make these comments when they really ought to know better. I heard a similar thing on CNBC when the recent Nobel awards in economics were announced. The announcer presented a p-baked version of Ostrom's work (p<<1), heavily biased with an anti-government regulatory slant. That's a misrepresentation of Ostrom's work. Sure, Ostrom argues government regulation isn't necessary, but large corporations aren't either, at least in certain markets, and corporate interference in these markets -- such as the Internet -- is just as bad as government interference.

Back to the dollar and gold, the reason the dollar is going down is because, well, interest rates and projected corporate earnings are low, and people are putting monies in other "banks" which promise higher inflation-adjusted rates. (Our inflation rate remains low, too.) As far as gold goes, the monetary system of old is rearranging itself, and there is substantial pressure on commodities. I think people are piling into gold because its a safe midpoint place to stash cash while things sort out. There are also speculators.

The rise in price of gold was forseeable, even a few years ago, simply China's ascendency and invoking a notion of continuity in people's perceptions of nations' influence and control.