Jean-Yves Beigbeider phoned from Philadelphia last evening and I met him at the Newark Airport. We drove to NYC for lunch. He is helping design resorts on Nevis, and on an island one hour from Athens. He is also helping to plan a housing development in Senegal. He was to fly back to Paris at 7. I am always happy with Jean. He is a gay dog, competent, with wide interests in art, racing, anything and everything, and is a romantic. We are a few months apart in age. Jessie, who had resigned her job in Maine with the irascible Mrs. Ana Eno, lunched with us and Cathy joined us for tea. I returned home just in time to greet Jill and the boys, fresh from the Outer Banks. Jill looked beautiful, her figure in fine trim, her hair and skin sundry reds and tans, and in good spirits.
Hoppe-Seyler, the suspicious editor of the Journal of Med. Chem (1860's) helped some discoveries along, blocked others.
Helped Nuclein --- nuclein comparisons
Blocked Hematin in non-blood tissues
Is there any way of balancing his contribution to science?
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Salmon do not eat during their swim upriver to spawn. They lose musculature and grow more sperm. Cf. Castro's theory that hungry populations breed more rapidly (are sexually more active, too, I think he said).
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What are the patterns or types of accretion of learning in history of science = e. g.
Big leaps
One man's series
Confetti burst tossed by many hands
Many focusing on a specific area.
Etc.
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Since its original discovery in 1894, the intracellular elemental structure called mitochondrion has borne no less than 50 different names, each given it by a cytologist each of whom claimed it as a novel discovery of his own.
(Ernest Borek, The Code of Life)
So much that is important will not be believed, not by ordinary people nor by the elites: e. g.:
x The Aswan Dam should not have been built, since some pipes would have carried the water just as well.
x The single executive decision is not per se rational. I. e., the fact that a solution of a problem is conceivable does not mean that the decision is ready to be handed to a single executive who will accept it as his own and promulgate it. In this basic sense, the science of administration is terribly retarded. It lacks a true sociology and social psychology of the kinds of decisions executives do make.
Use the model of the barren land and show how far such a people can go in achieving high standards of living in a given time period:
t assumptions: Goats heat of sun
grass illiteracy
"Hypodemia" maize * * * * *
rice traditionalism
water popular arts and crafts
a few people
can imitate
simple techniques
smattering of Western visions (illusions)
many children (high birth rate)
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On Ruling a Poor and Small Country
1. Relations with other countries -- Big
-- Small
-- Neighbors
2. Popular relations
3. The military
4. Press and Education
5. Economy
The sources of bigoted behavior have been diligently searched, with a lamentable lack of success. Racism, prejudice, stereotypes, bigotry are the words applied to innumerable researches. The "findings" seem always suspect to me. They discover authoritarianism, mal-education of a formal kind, principles of government, historical inevitability, class feelings, xenophobia, etc.
By contrast, I recur to common sense, almost an absurd idea, more and more. The world is divided into men of good will and others. Les hommes de bonne volonté can have stereotypes, prejudices, histories galore, but, whenever confronted by a human being, look at him benignly. Nothing more. And nothing less. We can operationally define our good-will man and check him off against the settings and activities of the world, and, I think, he will emerge as the celebrated hunted one.
Organizations in animals and institutions are complex as they achieve multiple and conflicting functions (goals) and usually "clumsy", "inefficient" for same reason.
Cf. totalitarianism vs. democracy
anatomy of bird (intestine and rectum short and neat) whereas
omnivorous man has long, convoluted and complex ones.
Organization (administrative)
1. Simple when motives are simple, e. g. to build an earthen dam
2. Complex when motives are complex, e. g. to educate people.
Accusations of "inefficiency" leveled against a political movement or a legislature or church group work are often measuring the activities against a scale devised for single-minded or by simple-minded people.
One result of carrying such "findings" of "inefficiency" into "reforms", is to make the operations single-minded or simple-minded, i. e. changes the men into birds.
The sociology of knowledge is like the psychoanalysis of individuals. It extracts the unconscious elements of social behavior and explains conscious behavior in their terms.
At this time it still lacks clarity, coherence, and especially method as a discipline.
The kinds of study that relate to it are:
1. That which is called "sociology of knowledge".
2. Analysis of myth.
3. The study of "racial unconscious".
4. Argumentation ad personam in the study of leadership including psychoanalytic study.
5. Philosophical analysis of such problems as "realism", "myth", "history of ideas".
6. Study of history of science and invention.
At this point, much is known of the little pieces, garnered from e. g. psychological studies of persons. Lacking is medio-level and macro-level theory from the standpoint of "what forces drive the thought of societies and groups?
NEW NAME FOR FIELD:
The collective as vs. individual goods that economists have worried about for a century and a half raise a jungle of semantic and theoretical problems. The solution lies in some formulation X that will differ from all the other ways of conceptualizing public-goods. For example, think of all things and services as property. Think of property as a bundle of rights. Think then of property rights as always the liberty of A to change p and that A's ability to change A (A --- p) will relate to B's and N's ability to change p. Think of public and private p as the same, except that most of the time there is a significant difference when A, B ... N behave to pG and pnon-G in that the pG is sanctioned behavior. "Whatever is not required, is forbidden." In the creation of pG there is also more sanctioned behavior.
She gobble his clichés like a hungry turkey.
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Ungirded of the armor of sleep
He shivered and was weak.
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Carl's solution to the problem of wearing dirty socks is to squirt pine-scent into them.
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Gay is a meander
acting overpasses
The straightest route is sadness.
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You cannot get around a garbage truck with a happy thought.
[page missing] in the same breath explaining the threats posed by the centralized Hapsburg power. One notes, even during the recital of inconveniences, that the separated little countries are by no means retarded economically, politically, and culturally. The drive towards "progress" and "the better life" runs beneath the political historical facade that dwells on the activity of kings and generals. Rates of change are important, of course. She says the poor organization was a cause of economic decline. But the organization had not changed greatly in centuries. There was a decline of trade, in which trend Italy reckoned as well -- which leads us to economic, social, then political unrest and possibly war. All of which is too complicated and little known to me, who has never studied the 17th century in Central Europe.
