People From Illinois

"Dioxin is the outcome of the operations of markets. Does this mean that having dioxin in the environment is efficient?"

"The First Welfare Theorem holds only if all consumers and firms are price takers. If some individuals or firms are price makers (they have the power to affect prices), then the allocation of resources will generally be inefficient."

"A social welfare function is simply a statement of how society's well-being relates to the well- being of its members."

"It may be worthwhile to spend a few million dollars to determine the efficacy of program that would involve spending billions of dollars."

"Only empirical work - analysis based on observation and experience as opposed to theory - can answer the question of how labor force behavior is affected by changes in the tax system. Even intense armchair speculation on this matter must be regarded with considerable skepticism."

"In this country, the number of individuals on the government payroll certainly underestimates the importance of government."

"Peoples views on how the government should conduct its financial operations are heavily influenced by their political philosophies."

""My fight comes up May 27 ... I'm not going to worry about Georges until after that." - Talking about his upcoming title fight with Georges St-Pierre."

""GSP actually looked worse in this fight than I’ve ever seen him before. I really feel like Georges fights not to lose, he just doesn’t fight to win anymore." - His thoughts about the GSP/Shields bout."

"One thing I will say is Joe Rogan’s commentary was a little off during the fight. The ground game was pretty even in my book with Shields doing a little more controlling. Kampmann escaped to his feet several times and Kampmann had more submission attempts than Shields had, but listening to Rogan, you would have thought Shield had submitted him the first ten seconds of being on the ground. I really think the UFC could use a third man doing the broadcast, that has some experience inside the octagon. I don’t disagree with everything Rogan says, but there are a lot of things he says that I just laugh at."

"When you lose, say little... When you win, say less."

"The promise of technology is to remove the division between culture and nature. Whatever part of nature that is left over as an independent force is covered by the technological bluff, which refers it to the agenda of the future and disguises the deficiencies of the present."

"The media is the thought-form of the technological society, and it finds nothing it does to be laughable, a sure sign that it is not human."

"Technological consciousness takes itself dead seriously; it has no sense of humor. The fool can play no role in it, for there is no other realm that is can see beyond itself to which the fool can point. Consciousness in the throes of desire cannot tolerate laughter any more than criticism of laughter can be tolerated in a moment of sexual lust."

"The self as master is born in the realization that nature can be commanded. Real mastery requires a means. The self develops technique—the idea of work put into the hands of another agency held in bondage to the self."

"Contemporary philosophy illustrates Hegel’s dictum that philosophy is its own time apprehended in thought, for in our age philosophy yields to the objectifying technical impulse and loses its ancient task of pursuing the Socratic ideal of the wisdom of the examined life."

"The Book of Job is advice on how to live in terms of the absolute power of nature. Leviathan is advice on how to live in terms of the absolute power of the state."

"No new choices are introduced by raising the specter of disaster. These become opportunities for swearing new allegiance to technology. The solution is to discover new technologies that will correct and modify the harm either potentially or already caused by present technologies."

"Ever since Comte first set the agenda of social science, his megalomania lingers on in sociology, political science, and other disciplines."

"'Canadian society' or the 'Canadian nation' cannot decide anything, because no one is in charge."

"Thomas Flanagan: Well I'm feeling pretty manly today..."

"Evan Solomon: Just for the record that's pretty harsh stuff.."

"Well I think Assange should be assassinated actually. I think Obama should put out a contract and maybe use a drone or something. There's no good coming of this..."

"I prize every candle in the darkness of the universe, even if it is not a supernova of blinding illumination."

"Like all of mathematics, game theory is a tautology whose conclusions are true because they are contained in the premises."

"Public opinion can become polarized into a bimodal distribution with only a few people in the centre and many more lying toward the extremes. But under such circumstances, democracy will probably break down into civil war, and spatial models of party competition will be irrelevant until order is restored."

"Finally, it should also be noted that the very existence of a bicameral legislature is itself another defence of the status quo."

"In its Morgentaler decision of January 1988, the Supreme Court of Canada struck down the centrepiece of Canada's abortion law, section 251 of the Criminal Code. The court held that it conflicted with section 7 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which guarantees the 'security of the person'. This ruling radically changed the legal status quo; it was as if Parliament had repealed that section of the Criminal Code without passing a replacement amendment."

"There is no iron law here, but there is clearly some tendency for larger-than-necessary coalitions to disintegrate."

"The foot, the pound, and the pint are all close to the size of many things used in daily life. In contrast, the metre, the kilogram, and the litre are all rather large, and the centimetre, the gram, and the millilitre rather small, for many practical uses."

"For the foreseeable future, Canada will have to be functionally bimetric, as well as a bilingual, country."

"But if politics is an art, it is not like sculpture or painting, where one side acts and the other is passive material. It is more like drama without a script, or dance without choreography - in other words, improvisation. Either player may surprise us again with a new move."

"I want to illustrate the concept of a solution in mixed strategies with a concrete example using real-world data, but I have not been able to find an appropriate one from Canadian politics."

"It is electromagnetism (EM) in all its many forms that has been so basic, that haunts us and guides us."

"Discoveries in physics are made when the time for making them is ripe, and not before."

"Of course, if electrons were waves there would be no difficulty. We think we understand the regular reflection of light and of x-rays--and we should understand the reflec- tion of electrons as well if electrons were only waves instead of particles. This observation though true does not seem a particularly valuable one. It is rather as if one were to see a rabbit climbing a tree, and were to say, "Well, that is rather a strange thing for a rabbit to be doing, but after all there is really nothing to get excited about. Cats climb trees --so that, if the rabbit were only a cat, we would understand its behavior perfectly." Of course, the explanation might be that what we took to be a rabbit was not a rabbit at all, but was actually a cat. Is it possible that we are mistaken about electrons? Is it possible that we have been wrong all this time in supposing that they are particles, and that actually they are waves? Well, 1 do not need to enumerate to you the many reasons we have for believing--I may say for knowing--that electrons are actually particles."

"Resolution of conflict, easing of stress must come from the penetration into many groups of wide and common interests which, by a process of dilution, will weaken other groups often artificially maintained. It is of considerable importance, then, to look for large groups of individuals bound together not by temporal ties of tradition or political artificiality, but by tested ties of common interest so world-wide, indeed so universal, as to be recognized by any individual."

"But the homosexual and abortion lobbies are evil twins with the same agenda. Both want the freedom to commit illicit sex without physical or moral consequences."

"Commencement speakers have a good deal in common with grandfather clocks: Standing usually some six feet tall, typically ponderous in construction, more traditional than functional, their distinction is largely their noisy communication of essentially commonplace information. - Commencement address at University of Iowa."

"The definition of random in terms of a physical operation is notoriously without effect on the mathematical operations of statistical theory because so far as these mathematical operations are concerned random is purely and simply an undefined term. The formal and abstract mathematical theory has an independent and sometimes lonely existence of its own. But when an undefined mathematical term such as random is given a definite operational meaning in physical terms, it takes on empirical and practical significance. Every mathematical theorem involving this mathematically undefined concept can then be given the following predictive form: If you do so and so, then such and such will happen."

"The California Institute of Technology (CalTech) rose to prominence when Robert A. Millikan was called to Pasadena in 1921 as new university president. Millikan was known for his far-reaching ambitions both as a physicist and as a science manager. He put CalTech on the map as a top university by inviting the world's most renowned scientists for guest lectures and by hiring internationally distinguished scientists to new chairs. With theoretical physicist Paul Epstein, a pupil of Sommerfeld's, Millikan brought modern atomic physics to CalTech in the early 1920s, and with Kármán, he pursued the same strategy a few years later in order to lure the best available aerodynamicist from Europe to Pasadena."

"In 1832 the English astronomer Airy, in making a report to the British Association on the state of astronomical science throughout the world, remarked that he was unable to say anything about America astronomy because, so far as he knew, no public observatory existed in the United States. It was in the 1840's that the Cincinnati Observatory, the Naval Observatory in Washington, and the Harvard College Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, were founded—the three pioneer institutions in a development that has continued with increasing acceleration ever since."

"Cosmic rays"

"Since the origin of the "penetrating rays" was still uncertain, Dr. Russell Otis and myself in the summer of 1923 went to the top of Pike's Peak for the sake of making absorption experiments upon these radiation at the highest altitude to which we could carry large quantities of absorbing materials. For if the rays were not of cosmic origin they did not need to be more penetrating than are the gamma rays from radioactive materials, while if they were of cosmic origin the sounding balloon experiments of Bowen and myself had shown that they must be very much harder (more penetrating) than anybody had thus far assumed. What was needed was absorption experiments to determine just what sort of rays they actually were."

"Science walks forward on two feet, namely theory and experiment."

"Both pure and applied science have gradually pushed further and further the requirements for accuracy and precision. However, applied science, particularly in the mass production of interchangeable parts, is even more exacting than pure science in certain matters of accuracy and precision."

"Every sentence in order to have definite scientific meaning must be practically or at least theoretically verifiable as either true or false upon the basis of experimental measurements either practically or theoretically obtainable by carrying out a definite and previously specified operation in the future. The meaning of such a sentence is the method of its verification."

"Rule 2. Any summary of a distribution of numbers in terms of symmetric functions should not give an objective degree of belief in any one of the inferences or predictions to be made therefrom that would cause human action significantly different from what this action would be if the original distributions had been taken as evidence."

"Rule 1. Original data should be presented in a way that will preserve the evidence in the original data for all the predictions assumed to be useful."

"Based upon evidence such as already presented, it appears feasible to set up criteria by which to determine when assignable causes of variation in quality have been eliminated so that the product may then be considered to be controlled within limits. This state of control appears to be, in general, a kind of limit to which we may expect to go economically in finding and removing causes of variability without changing a major portion of the manufacturing process as, for example, would be involved in the substitution of new materials or designs."