Chinese Language Notes 001

Today, we have four characters:
丿
piě (also) – Left radical. This is only a radical or part of a character and does not appear by itself.
人
rén (also) – man; person; people.
丨
gǔn (also) – number one; line; down stroke radical. As a radical, this is only part of a character and does not appear by itself.
亻
rén (also) [...]

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Capitalism and Socialism in 3 Minutes.

This morning (the day after elections in the U.S.), on the way out the door to catch the bus to school, my oldest asked me, “What is Capitalism?”, and she asked me how it was different from Socialism.
Capitalism
Let’s imagine I have an orange and you have an apple. You want to trade, but I like [...]

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The Wall Street Journal, October 22, 2008

California Housing Market
Remember that we earlier mentioned that California is a leading indicator for the national financial crisis. The number of home sales in California are up fivefold from this time last year while the sales dollar volume is up 65% in September versus the same month last year.
This is mostly on the back of [...]

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Health Care

Speaking as someone in the U.S., I’ve yet to hear of a health care plan from any political quarter which addresses the following three realities:

How many standards of care do we permit? One.
Will we deny life-saving drugs or procedures to someone dying on the hospital steps? No.
As medicine progresses, there is no limit to how [...]

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Structure of a Spring

I’m also trying to understand this $700 billion bailout thing, what has brought us to this point, what they are proposing, and what might happen now. I’ll organize it as:

Building the spring,
Winding the spring,
Triggering the spring to release,
Adding to the spring’s release, and
The harm.

Building the Spring
Freddie and Fannie were formed about a hundred years ago [...]

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Undergraduate Modeling

In the 1980’s, while I was working on a Electrical Engineering degree, our Electromagnetics Professor gave us a week-long project: to model some electromagnetic properties of Earth’s atmosphere . Electromagnetics is not an easy class, and more than most EE classes, it depends on mastery of the math, but this was a simple enough model [...]

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Oil

The price of oil continues to fall (now $113.09). The West Coast is now the only part of the country paying more than $4.00 per gallon for regular gasoline.
On the way up and on the way down, there has been no shortage of hair-brained as well as informed-but-conflicting opinions about the reasons. Today, John Tamny [...]

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Summer Shuffle Revisted

The gang made it back late yesterday afternoon with enough time to unpack and repack to fly out early this morning for two weeks with the grandparents. I ran out of arms.
I’m certain now that any indiscretions I may have committed as a youth have been forgiven and forgotten by my parents for the chance [...]

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Policy not Politics

Life is so much more than who is sitting in a chair in a room in Washington, D.C.
Also, posts about what McCain or Obama did or didn’t do today have a short shelf-life, but still end up driving about half the people away in disappointed anger and leaving the remaining half reading in rightegous angst.
Caught [...]

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The Name, Brazil

The name is not related to any South American country, and this Brazil is not Brazilian and does not speak Portuguese.
The staff on an old game (long closed) picked dystopian movie names, and this Brazil seized upon the Terry Gilliam movie, Brazil. The movie seemed appropriate because the main character leads a happy disaffected life [...]

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