Faith + Reason = Truth

Have you ever heard of Project Gutenberg or the Net Library (www.netlibrary.com)?  Gutenberg is a massive effort to digitize the world's books and grant free access to them.  That's how I found the work I am going to reference in this post about the Library at Alexandria, a vast, ancient repository of the known and available works of writing that was established around 2300 years ago.  Fire and possibly earthquake/flooding destroyed many of its holdings on multiple occasions, which would be a primary reason to digitize and store all of our knows works on something other than paper, right?  Well, that's fine, as long as they are ALSO kept on paper, or stone, or metal, or other medium that does not require a device to know the contents of the work.  When we all destroy civilization as we know it, or when it happens via natural calamity (come on, you KNOW it's going to happen someday, just as it has on countless other occasions), what good will it do for a developing civilization thousands of years from now to discover a CD, or a PC, or an eBook reader from Sony?  None at all, because they won't be able to get to the stored content.  Paper, on the other hand, is instantly accessible without additional tools or technology:  just pick it up and start reading (or translating) with you naked eyeballs!  So keep multiple copies, spread across multiple locations around the world, so the next civilizations won't COMPLETELY be starting from scratch with re-inventing various wheels and re-discovering physical laws and technologies in the future.

In doing a little research on the Library at Alexandria with netlibrary.com, I came across something.  It's titled Alexandria and Her Schools, by Charles Kingsley, and has the note "These Lectures were delivered at the Philosophical Institution, Edinburgh, in February, 1854, at the commencement of the Crimean War." The DRM protection for these free, online versions of texts has prevented me from copying and pasting; all I can do is read on the screen or print out, page by page.  So I have typed in an excerpt from Kingsley's Preface as an example of the lost art of literary and scholarly humility, or at least lost in comparison to today's writers.  Not sure if this is an old British thing or what (G.K. Chesterton apologizes profusely for his lowly, pitiful output in the introductions of his works), but I find it amusing and gratifying to see such capable human beings being so keenly aware of their own  insignificance and smallness, while simultaneously being well aware of the greatness of their surroundings and the big picture.  If you can get access to it through Net Library or Project Gutenberg, read it (at least the Preface) in its entirety for some very relevant commentary from the perspective of a British scholar at the height of the Empire, touching on the history of the Empire, religious themes, subjecting others to foreign rule, the "hated" Turk, and all manner of other topics.  Here's the excerpt from the Preface:

I should not have presumed to choose for any lectures of mine a subject as that which I have tried to treat in this book. The subject was chosen by the Institution where the lectures were delivered. Still less should I have presumed to print them of my own accord, knowing how fragmentary and crude they are. They were printed at the special request of my audience. Least of all, perhaps, ought I to have presumed to publish them, as I have done, at Cambridge, where any inaccuracy or sciolism (and that such defects exist in these pages, I cannot but fear) would be instantly detected, and severely censured: but nevertheless, it seemed to me that Cambridge was the fittest place in which they could see the light, because to Cambridge I mainly owe what little right method or sound thought may be found in them, or indeed, in anything which I have ever written. In the heyday of youthful greediness and ambition, when the mind, dazzled by the vastness and variety of the universe, must needs know everything, or rather know about everything, at once and on the spot, too many are apt, as I have been in past years, to complain of Cambridge studies as too dry and narrow: but as time teaches the student, year by year, what is really required for an understanding of the objects with which he meets, he begins to find that his University, in as far as he has really received her teaching into himself, has given him, in her criticism, her mathematics, above all, in Plato, something which all the popular knowledge, the lectures and institutions of the day, and even good books themselves, cannot give, a boon more precious than learning; namely, the art of learning. That instead of casting into his lazy lap treasures which he would not have known how to use, she has taught him to mine for them himself; and has by her wise refusal to gratify his intellectual greediness, excited his hunger, only that he may be the stronger to hunt and till for his own subsistence; and thus, the deeper he drinks, in after years, at fountains wisely forbidden to him while he was a Cambridge student, and sees his old companions growing up into sound-headed and sound-hearted practical men, liberal and expansive, and yet with a firm standing-ground for thought and action, he learns to complain less and less of Cambridge studies, and more and more of that conceit and haste of his own, which kept him from reaping the full advantage of her training.

A great 2-part article about the math freaks behind much of Wall Street's automated trading (and the summer meltdown they caused) can be found in MIT's Technology Review magazine (Part I, Part II).  The feature is called The Blow-Up, and I hope the links from TR's email newsletter work here.  Some of the smartest math minds in the world have been analyzing the mathematics and patterns behind financial markets, attempting to crack their codes and exploit them for maximum gain.  No news there, and nothing wrong with that - well, almost nothing.  The thing is, the systems that they are creating are so complex and far-reaching, resulting in unforeseen and unintended "linkages" and consequences on a scale beyond any of their comprehension, that I am reminded of Rome's employment of various barbarian tribes for the purposes of dealing with situations that they themselves were no longer capable of dealing with, while using methods and techniques that the Romans themselves didn't fully grasp or comprehend.  The mentality was "as long as the job's getting done, we don't care how, and we really don't mind all that much if we don't understand exactly how the job is accomplished."
As we all know, this ended...badly, shall we say, for the Romans.  Events continued to spiral out of their control, and eventually out of the control of the very barbarians who were entrusted with the security of the empire.  They had created a monster in pursuit of more, more, and still more, and the monster devoured them.  As far as I can tell, Wall Street has been doing the same thing for a couple of decades now.  Computers were enlisted to get a handle on things, along with computer programmers; then, some real wizards were brought in to get an edge, touching off an arms race; then everyone had armies of wizards, and they started going for even more fantastic minds and ideas (or schemes, if you will), and now, when asked about their techniques of using math and only math to evaluate investment decisions for hedge funds, these wizards are saying things like "If you think you can find out what you need to know by going to see the management of a company, then I have nothing to say to you."
Here's the bottom line.  Only the smartest of the smart can figure out what these quants have figured out.  And they are likely to only understand what they have personally figured out, rather than being able to understand what every other smart person has modeled and programmed.  They are using math and only math to base their investing decisions on, so business management and product design and other non-numerical data factors are not brought into consideration, apart from how they impact financial operating results (which is, admittedly, very relevant to why they look at the numbers they look at).  And let's not forget about the mind-boggling leverage that they are employing through derivative creation and manipulation.  This results in higher than expected returns when they get it right; it also results in larger and faster than expected tumbles in the markets when "outliers" inevitably manifest themselves.
The largest, ugliest, most damaging and even dangerous market calamities over the past 20 years have been caused and/or exacerbated by automated computer trading, and on that point there can be no disagreement.  All in the name of bigger and faster returns, nothing more.  This fact needs to be recognized and dealt with, taking measures such as increasing margin requirements for computer-based trading (or eliminating margin trading altogether for these billion-dollar systems), before the Goths known as "quants" ravage the empire beyond all repair, largely to satisfy intellectual arrogance evidenced by their failure to acknowledge that they do not and cannot know all of the implications and ramifications of the all-powerful trading systems that they construct and unleash up the financial world on a daily basis.  Their very invention and use of the word "outlier" implies their true feelings, which are that it's the fault of something that "shouldn't happen," or a "hundred year event," or systemic problems being termed "cascading failures" when out-of-control chain reactions like those feared by the first nuclear physicists take place- all to give the impression that they know exactly what should and will happen at all times and in all scenarios, when in fact, what they SHOULD be saying is "we have no idea about what this might affect, how catastrophic the results will be, or how soon they will occur; all we know for sure is that this isn't the first screw up nor the last, it's bad but it can be much worse, and if you give us enough time and resources, eventually we'll blow this whole thing up beyond anyone's recognition.  But hey, we'll sure be living the life until that nasty day, won't we?"

Downtown Dallas has a small, very well-hidden plaza area called Thanksgiving Square.  This thing SERIOUSLY blurs the line between church and state - ok, it downright erases it.  Long story short:  it needs to be updated by a Proclamation of Thanksgiving by President George W. Bush.  The "Proclamation Wall" currently has just two of these:  the very first one, by George Washington, and one from President George Herbert Walker Bush in 1991 (I'm guessing that's when the Square was dedicated, but I'm not certain).  The wall has a history of Thanksgiving in America dating back to the Pilgrims, going through the American Revolution (the first official act of the soon to be declared independent U.S. of A. by the delegates of the First Continental Congress was to give thanks to God, after much spirited debate about the subject), and on up through to present times.
The wall boldly states that it will contain proclamations from future presidents IN GOOD TIMES AND IN BAD, yet 1789 and 1991 are the only such proclamations to date.  Apparently President Clinton's two terms didn't produce one, nor have either of this President Bush's.  The timing right now would be perfect:  George W. could join his dad on the wall; he is a deeply religious President who has no trouble merging the goals of church and state in certain instances (nor do I for that matter, as this country was founded on the rights of all to worship as they so choose and Presidents should not be excluded from this right); he is a Texan and it makes sense to have this in Dallas; this would be his last Thanksgiving in office before a new President-elect is upon us; while the first Bush and Washington were proclaiming in relatively "good" times, this would be an ideal opportunity for our nation to give thanks to God even during the darker days of our young people dying in a far away war, thanks that our nation is still what it always has been, which is a shining example of freedom and liberty for all nations to follow, as well as a defender of freedom for those unable to defend themselves.
And no, I didn't have a giant Stars and Stripes hanging behind me as I wrote this while "My Eyes Have Seen the Glory" played in the background (although that would have been really cool).

This may not be much of a jolt to those who have actually read some or all of the New Testament of the Bible in context (i.e., entire books of it from start to finish rather than jumping around from chapter to chapter or verse to verse to extract quotes that can then be used out of context to bolster one's case in just about any matter), but from what I've read so far in the 1st 2 1/2 gospels (Matthew, Mark, and part of Luke), what seemed to really be under Christ's skin more than anything else was mankind's religious constructs.  Particularly the Jews, which he and all of his Apostles were.  He railed against what transpired in the synagogues, He criticized the rules against eating certain foods, He addressed with contempt the strict adherence to practices such as washing before meals.  In a nutshell, the thing that troubled Him the most deeply was that mankind had become so caught up in the rules and regulations of "religion" as set up by mankind that they had lost sight of the only things that mattered, which were having one and only one God and loving/treating everyone else as you would be loved and treated.  If people would just follow those two guidelines in all that they did, things would be great and we'd all get along while on earth and then enjoy eternal bliss when that day comes.

Makes me wonder about my Catholicism, but I'll get into that later today or tomorrow.