Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-02-08

Ephemera (i.e. Tumblr posts)

• Do not be concerned when without official position, be concerned with where a stand is established. Do not be concerned when not appreciated, seek what can be appreciated.

  Confucius, The Lun Yu, Verse 4.14

  02/22/10

• THE OBJECT OF THE AUTHOR in the following pages has been to collect the most remarkable instances of those moral epidemics which have been excited, sometimes by one cause and sometimes by another, and to show how easily the masses have been led astray, and how imitative and gregarious men are, even in their infatuations and crimes.

  Charles Mackay, Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of the Crowds

  02/16/10

• And just as Newton described how physical forces deflect an object from its straight path, so Quételet sought laws of human behavior describing how social forces transform the characteristics of society. For example, Quételet thought that vast inequalities of wealth and great fluctuations in prices were responsible for crime and social unrest and that a steady level of crime represented a state of equilibrium, which would change with changes in the underlying causes. A vivid example of such a change in social equilibrium occurred in the months after the attacks of September 11, 2001, when travelers, afraid to take airplanes, suddenly switched to cars. Their fear translated into about 1,000 more highway fatalities in that period than in the same period the year before - hidden casualties of the September 11 attack.

  Leonard Mlodinow, The Drunkard’s Walk, p. 158

  01/15/10

• Each, according to his own inclination follows his own purpose, often in opposition to others; yet each individual and people, as if following some guiding thread, go toward a natural but to each of them unknown goal; all work toward furthering it, even if they would set little store by it if they did know it.

  Immanuel Kant, quoted in Theodore Porter, The Rise of Statistical Thinking: 1820-1900, p. 51

  01/12/10

• One should not appraise human action on the basis of its results.

  Jakob Bernoulli, quoted in L. E. Maistrov, Probability Theory: A Historical Sketch, trans. Samuel Kotz, p. 68

  01/09/10