Ye Olde Jonathan Birge
Its days are numbered...
  • Best articles
  • Things to do on Earth
  • Things to do in Boston

Fifteen things I know about God

By Jonathan On July 23, 2008 ·

I’m not a big fan of people who try to argue you into believing in God. Despite a long history of really tortured attempts at a so-called ontological argument for God, which usually involve some sort of lame circular logic along the lines of “something perfect wouldn’t fail to exist, so God must exist,” [...]

Continue Reading →

Maybe “moral hazard” should be taken more literally

By Jonathan On July 22, 2008 ·

In this whole mortgage mess, the phrase “moral hazard” comes up an awful lot. When capitalism gets out of line, I think it’s always tempting for capitalists to look at incentives, say they reward bad behavior, and then focus thereafter on the incentives as the problem. But aren’t there always incentives for bad behavior? Isn’t that [...]

Continue Reading →

Fairness versus justice

By Jonathan On May 31, 2008 ·

For a group that is so focused fairness and justice, Democratic leaders seem to have a really shaky understanding of at least one of them. From watching their tortured machinations in trying to handle the Florida and Michigan primaries, the nation is learning a lot about the way Democratic politicians think, and might help explain [...]

Continue Reading →

How modern art can be so horrid

By Jonathan On November 30, 2007 ·

I think the basis of the decline of visceral appeal in modern art of all types is the intellectuallization of something that can not, and should not, be treated as such. By replacing the true but inarticulable beauty of real art with the falsely eloquent self-referential theories of academic art, they broke it free from its only real basis: human reaction.

Continue Reading →
  • Note

    This is my old site, preserved only to keep links from breaking. The new one is at www.jonbirge.net. Everything here is also over there, plus new stuff.
  • Blogs

    • New Site
  • Links

    • My work page at MIT
  • Tags

    757 amp apple automatic updates baby bad touch best beware Boston Clinton Clinton cockpit delegates Democrats f-sharp flightdeck google Harmon Kardon healthcare humor interesting interference investing iphone libertarians linux marketing math Microsoft MIT not funny Obama oil Photography programming race rant receiver RF Stata statistics superdelegates Vista weird Windows
  • Categories

    • Aviation
    • Economics
    • HowTo
    • Music
    • Philosophy
    • Politics
    • Random
    • Reviews
    • Science
    • Technology
    • WordPress
  • Control

    • Log in
    • Entries RSS
    • Comments RSS
    • WordPress.org

Ye Olde Jonathan Birge

Pages

  • What is this mess?
  • Things to do in Boston
  • Things to do on Earth

The Latest

  • New location
    Given my departure from MIT, and the inevitable day when birge@mit.edu ceases […]

More

Thanks for dropping by! Feel free to join the discussion by leaving comments, and stay updated by subscribing to the RSS feed.
© 2011 Jonathan Birge
Platform by PageLines