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Kevin Roose, an evil humanist senior from Brown University, transferred to uber religious Liberty University for one semester lin 2007. He wanted to experience another culture and wrote a book about his experiences: The Unlikely Disciple: A Sinner’s Semester at America’s Holiest University

No, he didn’t become converted and fortunately for humanity, was not burned at the stake for publishing his story.

Salon recently posted an excerpt and based on its vivid lucidity it’s hard to imagine that this was written by a college student.

The excerpt is about an evangelical mission trip during Spring Break that unsurprisingly turns out to be a complete waste of time for everyone involved, that is if you do not believe hell exists.

Having several friends and family members that hold similar views to those taught at Liberty University and whom practice cold-turkey evangelism, I think Roose paints a pretty accurate picture of their sincerity and determination.

Here is his frequently updated blog and here are other excerpts: 1 2 3

Via Pharyngula

Several weeks ago serial entrepreneur Jason Calcanis put together a list of do’s and don’ts for starting up a company. Several of his points set off a huge firestorm in the echo chamber that is the blogosphere.

One of the followups that I did find of interest was a note from Robert Scoble who suggested that every entrepreneur should read: “The No Asshole Rule.”

While on the surface that seems like a no brainer it turns out that at least one guy has made bank by writing a treatise debunking this golden rule. For instance, see the recent FBN interview with Martin Kihn, author of: Asshole – How I Got Rich and Happy by not Giving a Damn About Anyone Else.

If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em… right?

I wonder if there is any kind of common advice guidance counselors give to kids that want to write tomes — the really thick books that everyone references but no one reads.

Case in point, economist Guido Hülsmann recently had his 1000 page masterpiece published this month. It covers the life and times of Ludwig von Mises, an economist whose wiki entry hardly does him justice.

Incidentally enough, I met Hülsmann in the summer of 2004, the dog days of August to be exact. I was attending an economics seminar in the quite countryside of Auburn, Alabama.

The first real encounter actually involved me giving him a reverse bearhug, preventing him from running away. While I struggled to subdue the energetic German, several other economists-in-training grabbed one of those orange water coolers that dot the sidelines of sporting events and doused him with a cold shower (Daniel D’Amico of GMU was another one of the culprits).

That’s certainly one way to become acquainted.

Later that evening I bumped into him at a local bar whereupon he hid any visible signs of animosity and shared stories over the finest imported beers (Heineken I think). A friend of mine that works at the parent Institute hosting the seminar mentioned that Hülsmann had just capped off the finishing touches on the first real biography of Mises. So, quite naturally I asked Hülsmann what it was like tackling such a monumental task.

He looked at me and said he was relieved it was over, due to the arduous work involved.

You see, while he his research activities had been funded by various donors, he was a one-man army tackling a intercontinental subject matter that most contemporaries would have several other researchers assisting with. In fact, if you check out the acknowledgment section of the book, you will see the numerous experts that had to be contacted throughout the globe, to effectively perform this exhaustive and original exposition. And for the most part, he did it alone.

Did I mention that there were only two people really qualified for the job? (You basically had to be a professional economist fluent in the tongues of Mises, not the least of which is German). So it was either him or Hans Hoppe and Hoppe was very busy with other projects.

Which brings me to a friend of mine, B.K. Marcus, who is acknowledged for his services in Hülsmann’s opus.

About a year later, around the same time I was writing my first piece on the FCC, I was introduced to a polymath, a genuine autodidact through attorney Stephan Kinsella. It turns out that this fellow traveler was in the middle of proof reading and editing Hülsmann’s tome — a full-time job in and of itself.

Anyways, over the following weeks and months we exchanged messages over IM, some of which pertained to the laborious task at hand. He mentioned that there were various pieces of information that unfortunately stood the test of time. For instance, in describing the collegiate culture Mises grew up in, Hülsmann notes:

Student life was generally organized through fraternities, which tended to segregate based on place of origin. This provided newcomers to the capital city with a network of their countrymen for mutual support; it also introduced them to established former members who could later be helpful in finding suitable employment. But the fraternities often degenerated into associations dedicated to excessive collective alcohol consumption, and tended to glorify violence and a militaristic lifestyle, with variants of a half-baked nationalistic ideology. (p. 65)

And based on my own first-hand experience with modern fraternities, these observations do not seem to have faded over the past century.

A mobius strip

In many ways, the debut of the book has completed a circle started three years ago. At that time I was juggling two different graduate fields, neither of which truly captivated me. One I finished, the other I put on hold.

However, I also befriended a number of the students and kept in touch with several of them, including four others who were the same age as me. Two of them are now finishing PhDs in economics (one at U of West Virginia, the other at GMU), one is getting a PhD in political science at U of Colorado at Boulder and the other is finishing up a PhD in history at UC Riverside. And all of them are passionate about their concentrations (three of them are even partial towards the Austrian School).

So, should someone call Vegas to find out the odds on one of them writing a tome, or has the interweb ended the age of really thick books?

[Note: Picture #1 takes place just after Hülsmann got soaked. #2, Hülsmann is sitting to my left as is Andrew Neumann who is at the U of West Virginia. The guy in front of me is David Veksler, webmaster of Mises.org and fellow Aggie. #3 was just an excuse to make me look popular]

See also:
Mises University: Reduxed and Remixed
Breaking Bad Habits A Century Later
The Last Knight of Liberalism (PDF)

I know I am probably not the first or last person to make this observation, but love her or hate her, JK Rowling has done one helluva job increasing the English literacy rate throughout much of the industrialized world.

While I can’t give you any hard numbers for the East Asian region (aside from the 11 million as a whole for the latest installment) nearly all of my students bought and devoured the newest book within a week of its commercial availability.

Who cares, right? Well, it has not been translated into Korean yet and as much as I would like to brag about how good their instructors are (we do kick ass), very few are fluent in English.

Yet, whatever linguistic hurdles they face throughout Rowling’s magical hocus-pocus prose, they are every bit the bonified page turner as their Western counterparts.

Paper cuts

During the summer of 2000 I briefly worked as a clerk at a large bookstore chain called Walden Books (the parent company is Borders).

At the time I didn’t think much of it, but my manager – the definition of bibliophile – waxed on and on about how Rowling had single handedly created a generation of children who actually enjoyed reading.

While it may be too early to conduct longitudinal studies on the matter at hand, it does appear that fans enjoy it enough to risk prison time to manually translate it: French police recently arrested a 16-year-old schoolboy for posting his own translation online.

One last note: I wonder as to the kind of stance anti-globalists would have on the issue of cultural education in the form of fictional literature. Or is this somehow another example of Western culture being foisted upon the developing world?

While I may have been critical of his less-than-realistic economic principles found in “Accelerando,” sci-fi author Charles Stross has written a couple of interesting essays which I find myself partial to.

At the beginning of the year Stross suggested that no matter how you spin “global warming,” nerds will figure out and implement the solution for it.

In some ways, Stross touches on the same wavelength enunciated by Ethernet pioneer, Bob Metcalfe. In a recent speech at an energy symposium over in Boston, Metcalfe believed the two sides of the issue are not alarmist versus denier, but rather alarmist/denier versus techies. And I would agree.

I am not entirely worried either way simply because I believe that nerds will triumph once more. And I rationalize this non-traditional mindset with the same prescriptions Metcalfe suggested: free-markets that will foster innovations and inventions faster and more effectively than any bureaucratized top-down approach mandated by the State.

And while Stross does not specifically advocate free-markets, he does not think government regulations or tampering will amount to nothing more than additional headaches.

One remedy he advocates is using bigger jumbo-jets to transport goods and peoples, because they are much more efficient than either commuter flights and sea-going passenger vessels.

Oddly enough, today Airbus held a press conference in which it stated that their new jumbo jet (the A380) will save the earth, because it is essentially more efficient and less polluting than alternative solutions.

So ignoring climate changes wrought by cow flatulence, lack of private property, 5-day forecasts gone awry, or even politics, I think that just as Silicon Valley continues to reshape the medical industry (for the better), so too could a gaggle of geeks successfully descend upon this conundrum.

Up and atom

In his most recent essay, Stross details a realistic look at human spaceflight (as found in literature, movies, etc.). After meticulous research and using spot-on assumptions, his findings are quite grim (i.e., it is a waste of bling).

And he is hardly alone.

Back in 2002, I came away from my senior seminar (“History of the NASA”) with a similar conclusion: that it is unnecessary to spend the resources to send humans into space when unmanned, autonomous robots can carry out the same tasks.

It is a fruitless endeavor that is perhaps best punctuated (once again) by the $100 billion money pit known as the ISS. Its sole long-term contribution is that it gives medical doctors a controlled clinical study on bone loss due to a “microgravity” environment.

And based on this timeless quote, Stross and I are in good company:

Some of NASA’s critics say closing down the space station’s science program wouldn’t be such a bad thing. “There is no meaningful research on the ISS to shut down,” said University of Maryland physicist Robert Park.

Perhaps this discussion will lead to a grassroots endeavor to develop self-replicating von Neumann probes. After all, unless you want to spend 10 billion years to survey a mere 4% of the galaxy, what safer and cheaper method is there to trudge through the cosmos? It worked for Vader…

If you haven’t had a chance to read it, or just want an easy-to-access copy, here is a pdf Ray’s magnum opus.

The topic came up at a late dinner with David the other day; we were explaining the potential computational power within an ordinary rock to his girlfriend.

I’m sure most other women would have certainly appreciated that conversation.

Also, if you have any kind of advanced mathematical background, you may enjoy the short academic paper Kurzweil cites in his section on the limits of computation and reversible computing: Universal Limits on Computation.

See also Seth Lloyd: 1 2 3

This past September I worked with Isaac Bergman on a book review of Accelerando.

If you recall, I posted some choice quotes from the book that I thought were highly creative and very original.

And despite my qualms with how it handles human action, I still think the book presented some very innovative, cutting-edge thinking.

The book review was published this past Friday over at Mises.org and we have received a number of responses, including one indirectly from Charles Stross, author of the book.

From the Extropy.org mailing list, Stross states:

I couldn’t care less. Being denounced as a “second-hander intellectual mountebank” makes it fairly clear where the author of the hatchet job is coming from.

Why should I waste my time on him?

This reminded me of a couple quotes. The first is the D&D playing comic book store owner from The Simpsons, whose sarcastic rebuttals followed the philosophically deep form: “Worst. Review. Ever.”

It also reminded me of a pompous Ayn Rand, who pretty much took the cake in her undiplomatic handling of critics, likening them to lice, vermin, and cockroaches.

Defending the undefendable

Now, why did we even write the article?

Simply put, for the same reasons why economists Peter Klein and Robert Hanson have problems with how economics is treated by science fiction authors.

Because in many cases they are treated as an afterthought.

In some ways, it is the same problem that plagues artificial economies in games such as World of Warcraft and Everquest.

These developers – for whatever reason – did not take inflation (e.g. Mudflation) into account when pumping the marketplace full of fat loot… and then complain when enterprising individuals build a lucrative aftermarket that rationally calculates the value of both the widget and fiat currency (it is also the same issue that entertainment firms deal with on a daily basis in terms of scalpers and even “legal” aftermarkets such as Ticketmaster. See “Diary of a Scalper” from the latest edition of Wired as well as variable pricing in general).

The “second-hander” comment simply means that in terms of economics, the author is intellectually dependent on someone else. While this may have been harsh, I think this is fairly clear throughout the book that Stross did not have these portions of the book peer-reviewed by independent parties.

In fact, on nearly every page he shows his own mastering of a plethora of technological concepts, however I believe it would behoove him to have consulted an economist of some kind before publishing it. After all, he accepted typo corrections via a web forum and he could have used the same method for economics saliency.

As far as a hatchet job, I think that Isaac and I were not only professional, but also thorough. Besides, when is something a hatchet job? Only when it criticizes the book?

We tried to cite cogent references that illustrate our qualms (for the record, our original review was 50% longer and truth be told, we had 4-5x as many quotes we wanted to dissect than our editor cut) — and comparatively speaking, I doubt he would have received the same courtesy from The New York Times review editor or even Salon.

So in summation: cool science and technology but a little rough around the edges in terms of realistic social interaction. And in the future, I hope that authors continue to add this kind of cultural complexity to the mix.

More responses to our critique: 1 2 3

Today I had the fortunate chance of reading Mark Twain’s classic “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.”

Superficially you may be thinking that this is a stereotypical children’s novel found in junior high schools, but in reality Twain deals with numerous political affairs including republicanism, noble classes, involuntary servitude and a host of other issues.

While I am not a huge fan of his other two well-known novel’s, this one not only made me laugh, but got me thinking.

In a nutshell, it is a simple time travel story. Interestingly enough though, it is written in 1889, prior to the publication of many other scifi classics that would later dominate that genre (including “The Time Machine” by Wells).

As the reader you basically follow the life and times of a central character, Hank Morgan, who so happens to be a Jack-of-all-trades. While living a comfortable bachelor lifestyle, his loud mouth literally knocked him from his seemingly modern abode in Connecticut (during 1878) back into the early 500s of feudal England, and more precisely: the legendary land of Camelot.

And while Twain’s description of what life may or may not have been like in these Hobbesian times is brow-raising, one thing above all piqued my interest: the main characters ability to turn everyday engineering into theatrical magic.

For instance, on one occasion Hank Morgan is about to be offed by one of the knights of the round table, when he calls upon a curse of sorts, to black out the sun. Fortunately for him, he remembered the day of the year in which a solar eclipse would take place and warned the populace that they would face his wrath if they pursued in terminating his life.

And much later, he used a lightning rod during a storm to ignite some gun powder. Or in other words, he used simple parlor tricks to show off his “omnipotent” power.

What Twain illustrated time and again was Robert Heinlein’s adage: “One man’s magic is another man’s engineering, supernatural is null word.” In other words: because of the mindnumbing years of superstitious training the hoi polloi undergo throughout their life, they rarely questioned the underlying reason or logic behind why phenomena occur. Thus, empowering villains, scoundrels, and do-gooders such as Morgan.

In many ways, this novel is a polemical case against the Catholic Church, which is a named target throughout much of the storyline. In addition, many political themes are discussed and we can even characterize the Morgan through his own words: an enlightened despot.

You see, his internal technocrat got the best of him. He fell victim to the classic “I know what is best” syndrome, by trying to invent subjectively “better” governmental institutions to regulate and manage industries. The first of which was the almighty patent office, followed closely by a newspaper, school system, and many others.

In fact, he even created several military academies and called forth for the raising of permanent standing armies — all of which was funded through a yet “more efficient” tax system. And to the chagrin of Austrian’s everywhere, he created fiat monies by which he was able to debase and inflate the existing “hard” money system.

So, while the story genre is colorful and inventive and most certainly ahead of its time, the characters modus operandi, their mechanical means to an end, were simply hackneyed rehashings of statism in its socialistic form.

Note: Twain’s rich description of the relatively dreary living conditions that every person endured, from king to pauper, reminded me of a speech from Don Boudreaux: “Cleansed by Capitalism.” Bug him sometime to see if he will put that online.

[Nazi colonel Vogel is torturing Henry to get answers]
Colonel Vogel: Tell me about this miserable little diary of yours. The book is useless and yet you come all the way back to Berlin to get it. Why?
[He slaps Henry in the face with his glove]
Colonel Vogel: Why?
[He slaps him again]
Colonel Vogel: What are you hiding?
[He slaps him again]
Colonel Vogel: What does the diary tell you that it doesn’t tell us?
[He tries to slap him again until Henry grabs ahold of his hand]
Professor Henry Jones: It tells me that goose-stepping morons like yourself should try reading books instead of burning them.

The above quote comes from the film classic, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

To commemorate Banned Book Week (in 2 weeks), Google put together a compilation of the most commonly challenged and/or banned books.

Reminds me of the Mark Twain quote, “The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them.”

As a side note, economist Israel M. Kirzner has said that the reason he chose Ludwig von Mises as his dissertation chair is in part, because Mises had more books in his office relative to his peers.

It might be two years old but the Popular Science overview on the state of hard science fiction is worth a quick read, if nothing other than to have a better idea what Accelerando is about (see my small review of it).

Interestingly enough, the Panulirus interruptus (California spiny lobster) mentioned on the last page, had an interesting role in the story. Apparently it was the first animal to have part of its brain (all 14 neurons in its gastric tract) simulated electronically. In fact, there has been quite a bit of research on them, as shown by the amount of peer-reviewed papers published (more here).

I wonder when the brain of a Rattus norvegicus (lab rat) will be completely simulated; will we learn a lot more about cheese and their true feelings about mazes?

See also Charles Stross’s unorthodox use of the intarweb for correcting typos in Accelerando.