First Blog

Immigration and Education Paradox The President has recently promoted a new immigration law.  English speaking and needed skills take priority.  You may agree or disagree.  But the pundits, always that crowd, have expanded the argument further – to education and immigration. They say we are educating foreign nationals to have highly technical skills.  Then, by law, they are required to return home.  However, the USA is not producing a sufficient number of technical USA citizen grads to satisfy job openings. It need many, many more.  The current push is to let foreign grads stay.  Let them stay - they say. Let’s allow those well trained, educated, and able students to take jobs right here.  Does this sound reasonable? Absolutely!  No brainer, huh?  Not quite .  By the requirement of law, the students to return home, the US has created a truly inexpensive and successful foreign policy program.  Those educated student...

The talking points nation.   We are faced with a huge population whose knowledge base, whose opinions, and whose operational guidelines are contained within a few sheets of talking points . Information is exchanged via talking points, and knowledge is conceived through talking points.   Sure, there is the talking points exchange from time to time, wherein some points are replaced by others, but the total number is conserved.   It is akin to the Malthusian, wherein when the number of talking points exceeds capacity to absorb there results a diminution and constriction of the whole.   Definitely not gestalt.  This may, under the most generous interpretation, be a consequence of modern information overload, dissembled national viewpoints, or highly crafted antipodal positions.   With less generosity it may be more simply disinterest, preoccupation, or depth of understanding, all as promoted by our schools. Political demagoguery is paramount in the...

We are a nation of heaps.  We live in heaps.  We respond only to issues when they become heaps - and then rarely.  So, what’s a heap? The heap paradox comes from rather vague predicates.  You’ve often heard of a heap of sand or a heap of trouble.  What this means is roughly we cannot distinguish individuals (such as grains of sand from a pile) from the others.  In fact, it is more complicated.  The ancient interpretation of this paradox (also called the sorites paradox ) is to resolve the question as to when, by removal of individual grains of sand, it is no longer a heap?  In this note, we look at heaps from the reverse perspective.  For example, when we add grains of sand to a collection, when does the collection cease being a collection and becomes a heap?  Of course, this paradox has no real resolution, but the word “heap” does seem to apply to many issues of the day. The (reverse) heap paradox is a key ...