Sunday, February 26, 2012

Education in America: at least two cheers

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The greatest strength in the American system of education is that there is no system.  The pluralism of our society allows choices, options...
Sunday, February 19, 2012

There Really are "Civil" Engineers

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The Austin chapter of the American Society of Civil Engineers partnered with the Greater Austin Contractors and Engineers Association to br...
2 comments:

Austin at Night

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Downtown Austin is party central.  The police cordon off streets for the convenience of people walking among bars, restaurants, clubs, and h...
Sunday, February 12, 2012

Valentine's Day: Love and Money

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"Tell me what a man finds sexually attractive and I will tell you his entire philosophy on life. Show me the woman he sleeps with and I...
Friday, February 10, 2012

Republican Rebels

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The first tyrants were rebels: self-made men on the rise in the archaic Greek world 700-500 BCE.   They replaced kings just as the parallel...
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Friday, February 3, 2012

An Objective Foundation for Government

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Ayn Rand’s famous essay “The Nature of Government” in The Virtue of Selfishness seems to appeal to almost everyone, right and left.   Whet...
1 comment:
Friday, January 27, 2012

Teaching Ethics to Student Engineers

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Ayn Rand observed that for most people, “integrity” is not putting your hand in your neighbor’s pocket, when, in truth, integrity is having ...
Sunday, January 22, 2012

Choose Your Virtues

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Virtue is contextual. It is easy to claim that honesty is the best policy.  That would contradict the fact that no dress ever made any woman...
Tuesday, January 17, 2012

LIBERTARIANS AND RACISM

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Ayn Rand's essay on “Racism” in The Virtue of Selfishness was unequivocal: racism is the crudest form of collectivism.  Anyone who ...
Sunday, January 8, 2012

Most Popular Necessary Facts

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According to the Stats provided by Google, these were the most popular pages in 2011. Firefly: Fact and Value Aboard "Serenity"- J...
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Friday, January 6, 2012

What (if Anything) Did Dorothy Learn?

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One of our favorite morality plays ends with a vacuous non-sequitur. At the end of the 1939 movie version of The Wizard of Oz , Glinda the...
5 comments:
Tuesday, January 3, 2012

The Origin of ... (What?)

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Fertile hybrids demonstrate the limitations of strict Darwinian taxonomy.  According to the easy definitions, a species is a genetically dis...
Wednesday, December 28, 2011

Debt: the seed of civilization

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In these days of anti-capitalist protest, it is important to know that keeping track of debts led to the inventions of counting and writing,...
4 comments: