Odysseus The Jerk

I just finished reading the Iliad and the Odyssey.  I've been reading them in small chunks during lunch at work.  The single most surprising thing, given my prior knowledge of the two works from high school, was just how much of a jerk Odysseus was.  This is all going from memory, so I've probably forgotten…

Logical Tautologies

William Briggs has a great post about the usefulness of logical tautologies (as opposed to grammatical tautologies, which aren't really useful).  Being able to enumerate your assumptions and understand which points are pertinent to a logical argument and which are entirely orthogonal is a vital part of putting together a quality argument. Also important is…

Go to www.firejoemorgan.com. Right now. DO IT!

Here's a sample of FJM, a brilliant site that totally rips on people for being idiots about baseball, even though they are highly paid to be not an idiot about baseball. Ryan (Atl): Hey Joe, I have been saying this for a month now and nobody has listened to me. The A's will win the…

Book Ordered

I decided to order a copy of James Q. Wilson's Bureaucracy.  It is a wonderfully insightful book written by a wonderfully insightful scholar and goes a long way toward understanding bureaucracy in its actual form.  I think that Wilson is a bit too generous toward bureaucrats at times (when he says that few people actually…