donald appleman / cerl

The following events all occurred on March 12, 1974 --

* Donna Gail Manson, 19, disappeared from the campus of Evergreen State College, the second of "Son of Sam" Ted Bundy's 28 murder victims.

* John Lennon got into a tiff with a photographer at The Troubador in LA.

* Goldie Hawn was filming "Shampoo".

* Lt. William Calley was freed on bail pending an appeal of his convictions for murdering Vietnamese civilians at My Lai 6 years earlier.

* Paul & Susan Newman were spotted in Beverly Hills at Dan Tana's.

* NASA's Mars 6 spacecraft reached Mars where a descent module broadcast the first data returned from the atmosphere of Mars, for 224 seconds, before crashing into the surface.

* My first PLATO signon, donald appleman/cerl was created for me by Bill Golden.

Competition Of Ideas

The problem of freedom in America is that of maintaining a competition of ideas, and you do not achieve that by silencing one brand of idea.

-- Max Lerner (1902-1992), American journalist and educator

Public Opinion

Public opinion, or what passes for public opinion, is not invariably a moderating force in the jungle of politics. ... I also suspect that what purports to be public opinion in most countries that consider themselves to have popular government is often not really the consensus of the feelings of the mass of the people at all, but rather the expression of the interests of special highly vocal minorities -- politicians, commentators, and publicity-seekers of all sorts: people who live by their ability to draw attention to themselves and die, like fish out of water, if they are compelled to remain silent.

-- George F. Kennan (16 February 1904 - 17 March 2005) American advisor, diplomat, political scientist, and historian

Loyal Opposition

I'm the, as I said, loyal opposition. And both words, I think, are operative.

-- Senator John McCain (R-AZ), New York Times, 7 March 2009

Defense

The media should be the first line of defense against charlatans and con artists. Instead, they are the conduit for every claim that activists dream up.

-- Terence Corcoran

Captain Asphalt

I'm Captain Asphalt.

-- Timothy J. Gilchrist, newly appointed stimulus czar for New York State, NY Times, 5 March 2009

Money Talks

That money talks
  I'll not deny,
I heard it once:
  It said, "Goodbye."

-- Richard Armour (1906-1988), American poet and author

Anthropologist

Every intelligent child is an amateur anthropologist. The first thing such a child notices is that adults don't make sense.

-- John Leonard (1939-02-25 - 2008-11-05), American literary, TV, film and cultural critic, "Books of the Times", The New York Times, 23 September 1982

True Value

Your true value depends entirely on what you are compared with.

-- Bob Wells, American editor for Windows and .NET Magazine

Save The Earth?

Myth: we have to save the earth. Frankly, the earth doesn't need to be saved. Nature doesn't give a hoot if human beings are here or not. The planet has survived cataclysmic and catastrophic changes for millions upon millions of years. Over that time, it is widely believed, 99 percent of all species have come and gone while the planet has remained. Saving the environment is really about saving our environment - making it safe for ourselves, our children, and the world as we know it. If more people saw the issue as one of saving themselves, we would probably see increased motivation and commitment to actually do so.

-- Robert M. Lilienfeld (1953-), management consultant and author, and William L. Rathje (1945-), archaeologist and author

Weekend Planning

Weekend planning is a prime time to apply the Deathbed Priority Test: On your deathbed, will you wish you'd spent more prime weekend hours grocery shopping or walking in the woods with your kids?

-- Louise Lague, psychoblogger

Relish The Joys

There is nothing like a cancer bout to make one relish the joys of being alive.

-- Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, on her return to the bench following cancer treatment, 23 February 2009

Panic

This is a panic in the way of the fine 19th-century panics, where we all run around like headless chickens.

-- R. Jeremy Grantham, chairman of a Boston investment firm, New York Times, 25 October 2008

Irrational

The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.

-- John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946), British economist, quoted in The Politics of Public Fund Investing: How to Modify Wall Street to Fit Main Street (2006) by Ben Finkelstein

Nationalize

It may be necessary to temporarily nationalize some banks in order to facilitate a swift and orderly restructuring. I understand that once in a hundred years this is what you do.

-- Former Fed Chair Alan Greenspan, Financial Times, February 2009

Bad Apples

To date, the banks have stuck their heads in the sand and demanded that they be paid the price of good apples for bad apples.

-- Lynn E. Turner, former chief accountant for the Securities and Exchange Commission, on setting a value on assets the United States might buy in its banking rescue plan, New York Times, 2 February 2009

Natural Proclivity

The natural proclivity of democratic governments is to pursue public policies which concentrate benefits on the well-organized and well-informed, and disperse the costs on the unorganized and ill-informed.

-- Peter Boettke (1960-), American economist

Dawes SST-Al

OK, it's been 10 years since the last time I bought a bicycle. So, this year I spent a sliver of my tax refund on a new fixed-gear bike.

You can see marketing pics here --

    http://www.bikesdirect.com/products/dawes/sst_al.htm

I've never owned a fixed-gear before, so this should be an interesting experiment. Although I only ordered it on Friday, with a promise of delivery within 5-7 shipping days, UPS brought it to my office this morning at 9:30am; that's about 2 shipping days, tops, with the holiday.

Now I just need to assemble it and ride it.

Honesty In Government

We will have to try things we've never tried before. We will make mistakes.

-- Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner, outlining a sweeping overhaul and expansion of the bank rescue program, New York Times, 11 February 2009

Pages For All Ages

Wherever in the world the little room of literature has been closed, sooner or later the walls have come tumbling down.

-- Salman Rushdie, From The Quotable Book Lover (Lyons Press), Quote-of-the-Day on the website of Pages For All Ages bookstore, where today begins a liquidation sale after over 20 years in business

Too Profound

I feel most deeply that this whole question of Creation is too profound for human intellect. A dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton! Let each man hope and believe what he can.

-- Charles Robert Darwin (12 February 1809 - 19 April 1882), British naturalist, London Illustrated News, 21 April 1862

Settle The Quarrel

These capitalists generally act harmoniously and in concert to fleece the people, and now that they have got into a quarrel with themselves, we are called upon to appropriate the people's money to settle the quarrel.

-- Abraham Lincoln (12 February 1809 - 15 April 1865), 16th President of the United States, speech to Illinois legislature, January 1837

Not Units But Fractions

Most men are individuals no longer so far as their business, its activities, or its moralities are concerned. They are not units but fractions; with their individuality and independence of choice in matters of business they have lost all their individual choice within the field of morals.

-- Dr. Thomas Woodrow Wilson (12/28/1856 - 2/3/1924), 28th President of the United States, annual address, American Bar Association, Chattanooga (31 August 1910)

Renewal

I do not believe in a fate that will fall on us no matter what we do. I do believe in a fate that will fall on us if we do nothing. So, with all the creative energy at our command, let us begin an era of national renewal. Let us renew our determination, our courage, and our strength. And let us renew our faith and our hope. We have every right to dream heroic dreams. Those who say that we're in a time when there are no heroes, they just don't know where to look.

-- President Ronald Reagan, 1st inaugural address, 20 January 1981

Crisis

You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.

-- Rahm Emanuel, President Obama's Chief of Staff, Wall Street Journal's CEO Council, November 2008

Like It Or Not

Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not.

-- Thomas Huxley (1825-1895), British Biologist, Educator

Modern Conservative

The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.

-- John Kenneth Galbraith, economist (1908-2006)

Feather Duster

You want to know my philosophy? One day a peacock. The next day a feather duster.

-- Pat Quinn, newly-installed governor of Illinois, on his turn in the spotlight, New York Times, 31 January 2009

Tooth Fairy

The Tooth Fairy has found me!

--

The Tooth Fairy Project would like your help with an important scientific study.

In the 1960s, your parents gave one (or more) of your baby teeth to Washington University in St. Louis to study atomic bomb test fallout. Of the 300,000 study teeth from people your age, 85,000 were never used -- including yours!

Each tooth is in a small envelope, attached to a card with your name, birth date, and other helpful information that your parents provided when you were a small boy.

Our research group found your current address in the white pages. You and 4,000 other St. Louis-area male tooth donors your age are receiving this letter. Your answers to the survey below will help us understand if bomb fallout raised risk of cancer.

1. Are you Donald Appleman, born May, 1959, son of Herbert S. Appleman?

-- From a letter recently received by yours truly, from the Tooth Fairy Project

Conflicting Versions

When there are two conflicting versions of the story, the wise course is to believe the one in which people appear at their worst.

-- H. Allen Smith (12/19/1907-2/24/1976), American journalist and humorist

Pure Communism

The sun is pure communism everywhere except in cities, where it's private property.

-- Malcom De Chazal (1902-1981), writer and painter

You Bastard!

Of course, I understand we're all different. But I can't work out where you're coming from. You probably have your reason for doing what you're doing, and in some parallel universe you might be right. I'm a very liberal person, accustomed to seeing other peoples' viewpoints, and that makes it all the more strange that I can't see yours. What sort of character are you? I just can't make any sense of what you're doing. I can't imagine what sort of story you think you're living out. Don't get me wrong, I realize you might just be very stupid -- but that stupid? As it happens, I'm one of the good guys. We defeat the bad guys; that's how we know we're the good guys. If that hurts, then so be it; you've brought it on yourself. You've forced me into seeing you in a way that I don't really approve of, and that makes me even more angry. You Bastard!

-- Professor David Sims, Cass Business School, London, UK, acceptance speech for the Ig Nobel for Literature, for his paper "You Bastard: A Narrative Exploration of the Experience of Indignation within Organizations"

Debtor Mentality

Part of the debtor mentality is a constant, frantically suppressed undercurrent of terror. We have one of the highest debt-to-income ratios in the world, and apparently most of us are two paychecks from the street. Those in power -- governments, employers -- exploit this, to great effect. Frightened people are obedient -- not just physically, but intellectually and emotionally. If your employer tells you to work overtime, and you know that refusing could jeopardize everything you have, then not only do you work the overtime, but you convince yourself that you're doing it voluntarily, out of loyalty to the company; because the alternative is to acknowledge that you are living in terror. Before you know it, you've persuaded yourself that you have a profound emotional attachment to some vast multinational corporation: you've indentured not just your working hours, but your entire thought process. The only people who are capable of either unfettered action or unfettered thought are those who -- either because they're heroically brave, or because they're insane, or because they know themselves to be safe -- are free from fear.

-- Tana French in "The Likeness", a novel set in Ireland, cited in Bruce Schneier's blog, 15 January 2009

Power Versus Knowledge

We got into this crisis because power was overly concentrated relative to knowledge. What has been going on for the past several months is more consolidation of power. This is bound to make things worse. Just as Nixon's bureaucrats did not have the knowledge to go along with the power they took when they instituted wage and price controls, the Fed and the Treasury cannot possibly have knowledge that is proportional to the power they currently exercise in financial markets.

-- Arnold Kling, The Political Economy of the Bailout, econlog.econlib.org, 15 October 2008

Standup Economist

Paul Solman: An economist comedian, who better to analyze our plight, at the micro level, individual consumers, and at the macro, the economy as a whole? Yoram Bauman asked us to feed him the following straight line.

If the U.S. economy were an animal, what animal would it be?

Yoram Bauman: I would have -- I would have to go with a hamster right now. And it's a hamster that's been running around its cage, you know, for maybe seven years. And it's tired. So, as a microeconomist, I look at it, and I think that the hamster needs some rest. Macroeconomists look at the hamster and think that the hamster needs some methamphetamines.

And I'm sure that they're right. But, after two years, it's going to be one ugly hamster. I mean, it's going to have rotten teeth. It's going to have like bloodshot eyes. It's going to be scratching itself all the time. You know, there's going to be a price to pay.

-- Yoram Bauman, Ph.D., the "Standup Economist", PBS NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, 14 January 2009

Obama Inauguration Speech

As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals. Our Founding Fathers, faced with perils we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man, a charter expanded by the blood of generations. Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience's sake. ... Recall that earlier generations faced down fascism and communism not just with missiles and tanks, but with the sturdy alliances and enduring convictions. They understood that our power alone cannot protect us, nor does it entitle us to do as we please. Instead, they knew that our power grows through its prudent use. Our security emanates from the justness of our cause; the force of our example; the tempering qualities of humility and restraint.

For we know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness. We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus - and nonbelievers. We are shaped by every language and culture, drawn from every end of this Earth; and because we have tasted the bitter swill of civil war and segregation, and emerged from that dark chapter stronger and more united, we cannot help but believe that the old hatreds shall someday pass; that the lines of tribe shall soon dissolve; that as the world grows smaller, our common humanity shall reveal itself; and that America must play its role in ushering in a new era of peace.

-- President Barack Obama, inauguration speech excerpts, 20 January 2009

A Boat!

My daughter said, "Daddy, the plane turned into a boat."

-- Martin Sosa, who was with his family on the US Airways flight that ditched in the Hudson River, New York Times, 17 January 2009

Begin

A teacher says, "Take out your pencils. Begin."

-- From the poem recited by Elizabeth Alexander, poet, essayist, playwright, and teacher, at the inauguration of Barack Hussein Obama II as the 44th President of the United States

Concerned

I'm concerned about justice. I'm concerned about brotherhood. I'm concerned about truth. And when one is concerned about these, he can never advocate violence. For through violence you may murder a murderer but you can't murder murder. Through violence you may murder a liar but you can't establish truth. Through violence you may murder a hater, but you can't murder hate. Darkness cannot put out darkness. Only light can do that.

-- Martin Luther King, Jr. (15 January 1929 - 4 April 1968), African American clergyman, civil rights activist, and Nobel laureate, address to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, 16 August 1967

Peaceful Ends And Means

And the leaders of the world today talk eloquently about peace. Every time we drop our bombs in North Vietnam, President Johnson talks eloquently about peace.

What is the problem?

They are talking about peace as a distant goal, as an end we seek, but one day we must come to see that peace is not merely a distant goal we seek, but that it is a means by which we arrive at that goal.

We must pursue peaceful ends through peaceful means.

All of this is saying that, in the final analysis, means and ends must cohere because the end is preexistent in the means, and ultimately destructive means cannot bring about constructive ends.

-- Martin Luther King, Jr. (15 January 1929 - 4 April 1968), African American clergyman, civil rights activist, and Nobel laureate, Christmas Sermon, Sunday, 24 December 1967

Take The First Step

Take the first step in faith. You don't have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step.

-- Martin Luther King, Jr. (15 January 1929 - 4 April 1968), African American clergyman, civil rights activist, and Nobel laureate

Something That He Will Die For

I submit to you that if a man has not discovered something that he will die for, he isn't fit to live.

-- Martin Luther King, Jr. (15 January 1929 - 4 April 1968), African American clergyman, civil rights activist, and Nobel laureate, speech in Detroit, Michigan, 23 June 1963

Apple Tree

Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.

-- Martin Luther King, Jr. (15 January 1929 - 4 April 1968), African American clergyman, civil rights activist, and Nobel laureate

Mea Culpa -- I've since had my attribution corrected from the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to simply Martin Luther.

Transmission Shot

When buying a used car, punch the buttons on the radio. If all the stations are rock and roll, there's a good chance the transmission is shot.

-- Larry Lujack (6 June 1940-), Chicago-area top-40 music radio disc jockey

Train Wreck

This thing started when people with no money and lots of debt, having little or no way of paying back money, were given loans so others could profit. Now we have businesses with no money and lots of debt, having little or no way of paying the money back, asking for loans so a few can profit. Maybe I'm being too simplistic but is seems like a train wreck in slow motion.

-- JimPh [lightly edited for readability], The Dilbert Blog comments, 12 December 2008

Profound Disappointment

If they adopt the Bush administration position, or some version of it, it is going to be a moment of profound disappointment for everyone in the legal community and Americans generally who believe that the Bush administration has tried to turn the presidency into a monarchy.

-- Brandt Goldstein, professor, New York Law School, on the Obama administration's stance on detainees, New York Times, 3 January 2009

2008 Mileage

For the year 2008, driving my 1999 Saturn which now has >189,000 miles, with past years' stats for comparison:

                  2008        2007        2006          2008 delta  % delta
Total miles     : 24,346      25,847      25,111          -1501     - 5.8%
Total cost      : $2,188.79   $2,231.76   $1,942.72       -$42.97   - 1.9%
Total gallons   : 686.27      812.14      776.47          -125.87   -15.4%
Avg gallons/day : 1.875       2.225       2.127           -0.350    -15.7%
Avg days/fillup : 5.3         4.7         4.9             +0.6      +12.7%
Avg miles/day   : 66.52       70.81       68.80           -4.29     - 6.0%
Avg cost/day    : $5.92       $6.00       $5.27           -$0.08    - 1.3%
Avg cost/gal    : $3.14       $2.75       $2.50           +$0.39    +14.1%
Avg miles/gal   : 35.48       32.24       32.77           +3.24     +10.0%

Last year when comparing stats, I resigned myself to losing a chunk of mpg each year as the car ages. However, this year two changes came into play: first, in March I replaced my clutch, and mpg appeared to immediately jump about 5%. Second, the price of gas became ridiculous; I replaced my already fairly sedate driving habits with new ones, and mpg again appeared to immediately jump about 5%.

Waste Your Money

Waste your money and you're only out of money, but waste your time and you've lost a part of your life.

-- Michael LeBoeuf, Ph.D., business author, lecturer, and former management professor

Fixed Income

Time is a fixed income and, as with any income, the real problem facing most of us is how to live successfully within our daily allotment.

-- Margaret B. Johnstone

Life Was About To Begin

For a long time it had seemed to me that life was about to begin -- real life. But there was always some obstacle in the way, something to be gotten through first, some unfinished business, time still to be served, a debt to be paid. Then life would begin. At last it dawned on me that these obstacles WERE my life.

-- Father Alfred D'Souza