I have an embarassing number of unfinished Substacks, and this last week of math teaching is pretty busy, so I thought I’d disclose my draft titles. These are in varying degrees of completion. First, here is a list of Substacks I am definitely going to finish and publish before the end of the summer:
The federal prosecutor, the college administrator, the Big Lie, and the Bad Manhattan
The Washington Post and incitement to murder
Game theory’s method: No-fat modelling, MIT-style theory, exemplifying models…
Why it may be possible to prove the non-existence of God, but not the existence
“Help me, Lord, to sleep tonight”
The harm from nonsystematic risk
My plan is to publish at a rate of about once a week. What I’d like from you, gentle reader, is input on which of the topics below sound interesting to you. Specifically, it would be great if in the comment section you would list one title you like and one you don’t like. You can list a couple more of each if you want, but a quick comment like that would be useful.
Of course, these titles are just titles, short descriptions that often are intentionally mysterious, tantalizing, and even misleading as to what the essays are about. But do let me know what you think.
And in those days every man did what was right in his own eyes
(-1)^2.2 = -1
A new way to teach mean, median, mode using Python
Are women ruining academia?
Jeff Sagarin teaches the 7th graders the Pythagorean Theorem of Baseball-- with an asterisk
The multi-tary judiciary
Asimov’s Election Day done seriously: The 1,000-voter survey scheme
An old man’s stories: The sociology rejection letter
St. Paul’s cancelling in Jerusalem
Church discipline
Use the King James Version and an interlinear bible
An old man’s stories: the suppressed business school open letter condemning me signed by 400 of my colleagues
Pastor Tim Keller’s wrong-headedness on history and Christian errors
George Floyd’s duplicate previous arrest and drug ingestion
It’s Constantinople, not Instanbul
Why legalizing drugs is bad
A response to a good article arguing that men can become women
The duty to warn
An old man’s stories: Beggars and bums
The incompetent response of the Pentagon to the Ukraine leaks
In defense of professor who want to kill people
Salutations and valedictions
Abrielle’s poems: I
Abrielle’s poems: II
Using the N-word
How men and women think differently: WW I vs. stomach aches; and a new theory of the thirty-year bond
Con law
The Silicon Valley Bank bankruptcy: the bailout was scandalous and the bank fundamentally unsound
Hexagrams and Faust
Regulating Big-Tech censorship
How many Roman Catholic priests were pedophiles?
Politician’s intervening in government agency decisions is good, not bad
An old man’s stories: homeschooling Ben and Lily
And old man’s stories: getting the faculty senate to vote for a resolution supporting the troops in Iraq
Liberal antonym lying slang (LALS): A variant on the Big Lie.
Loyalty oaths and diversity statements
Criminalizing crypto: How to do it
Why “The Little Drummer Boy” should be killed by Christians
Untenured “faculty”
Government and covid
Effective altruism-- that is, my advice for being effective
Subjugation, not segregation: Uniformity, not diversity
An old man’s stories: Amicus briefs
What kind of jokes to ladies like?
Wokies don’t read: They just attack or like
Why I hate consensus
How to do Zoom seminar in academia
An old man’s stories: The Linda Greenhouse tea at Emeritus House
Peter’s arrest, part II
A 1st century example of diversity, inclusion, and reorganization
How do you spell mnemonic?
Dirtylanguage
An old man’s stories: The Yale Political Union in the 1970’s
Bad arguments against free speech
How political philosophers should design the ideal: Think of yourself, and Oxford
How to destroy the universities
Twitter, FTX, *and Bird, part 2: FTX
The most basic economics thinking: looking ahead, budget constraints, opportunity cost, and maximization
Tax rates on rich and poor
Why I retired from Indiana University
Segregation vs. divorce
Biden and blackmail
Popper’s paradox of tolerance: Don’t cast your pearls before swin
An old man’s stories: Miss Leppert and Mr. Dirks at Uni High in the 70’s
An old man’s stories: Getting tenure narrowly and getting full easily
An old man’s stories: Children’s stories
Personality traits: The Big Five and the Myers-Briggs Four
That’s the list. Now go to the comments section and let me know what you think.
All of the Old Man's Stories--the letter of condemnation in particular, Con Law, homeschooling, Hexagram and Faust. The last first. Anything frankly.
MAYBE: Con law. It depends on the focus really. I'm a skeptic of written constitutions. They appear to be accomplices of populist rabble rousing, Capitalism, Inc., democracy, and Genesis 49:8-12. Perhaps you could write about a particular con, esp. its most important establishment clause. Notice that Article VII pretends to tell the reader all about "Ratification" and "Establishment" before both [drum roll, please] ratification and establishment. After any establishment, assuming that it's possible, Art VII would be superfluous. So there's no justifcation for having incuded it. The relevant source of law needs to be outside the holiest constitution in populist history.
The "Militia" amendment, too, is great fun to think about. I suspect that it could be used as a license for a sweeping reorg of the USA's militia system on the pretext of fighting "white supremacy". After all, the right to the centrally controlled militia mentioned in Art. I and Art. II shall not be infringed, esp. when doing dirty work for the "free State", i.e. the ruling class.
It so happens that the USA has millions of new, low status inhabitants with mediocre prospects. And are not males overrepresented among the flood of migrants? Some of these—and many citizens—coud be recruited to fight the fictitious "white supremacy". So in practice this militia reorg would produce death squads. Any such plans, however, could be subverted with an amendment to cancel the militia clauses of Art. I & II. White gun nuts would resist this furiously, of course, which is one reason that I find the Militia amendment so amusing.
NAH: The duty to warn. There is none if you're not an outlaw and not contemplating a criminal act about which it would be helpful to have a warning. I doubt that you hold this view.
NAH: Are women ruining academia? Ruination is accomplished fact, I think. At some schools, like the one at which I earned an econ deg., it was very far advanced 30 yrs ago. Silly, effete men helped to do it.
YEAH: St. Paul’s cancelling in Jerusalem. It's not clear that he was ever a Trinitarian, and I'd not be the least bit surprised to learn that Saul's conversion was a hoax cooked up in advance with other Pharisees. Their chauvinism and malevolence are well known. So which is the more plausible explanation of his career? Was Saul truthful, or did he wage war against SPQR by subterfuge, as alleged in the article "Commissary to the Gentiles" by Maurice Eli Ravage? The subtitle of the article, published long ago, is "The First to See the Possibilities of War by Propaganda".
Other topic: The alleged necessity of a creative deity. Suppose that the "Creator" (Decl. of Indep.) is real and necessary. In other words, it must be. Well, this is a way of affirming a law of existence which no willpower can override, just as no willpower can override the proof of irrationaity of √2. Therefore the god of Islam is imaginary, for "allahu akbar" (god is greater) asserts that the Creator's willpower is paramount. Moe's god, if it were real, could annihilate itself. This extreme fetish for willpower is interesting since "our democracy" and all other totalitarian regimes adhere to the same principle, more or less.