Andy Long at NKU

Welcome back, Barack Obama! Let's continue repairing all the damage done by the Cheney/Bush A-team. We will continue to rely on you to rule by reason and the science as we know it. "For American scientists, life in the gulag ended November 4, 2008, with the election of President Barack Obama." Jeff Goodell, in How to Cool the Planet
Close Guantanamo. End America's sad experiment with torture. "U.S. Practiced Torture After 9/11, Nonpartisan Review Concludes" (NYTimes, 4/16/2013)	End Mountaintop Removal. KY Sen. Rand Paul thinks it "enhances the land." Appalachia Rising	End the "Global Gag Rule." (DONE! 2009) Restart our efforts to help with family planning world-wide, and so reduce the world's population.	Watch 131 Years of Global Warming in 26 Seconds (the original NASA link).
With all this talk about the economy, and the "fiscal cliff",
Eastern Kentucky, in its natural endowments of timber and minerals, is the wealthiest region of our state, and it has now experienced more than a century of intense corporate "free enterprise," with the result that it is more impoverished and has suffered more ecological damage than any other region. The worst inflictor of poverty and ecological damage has been the coal industry, which has taken from the region a wealth probably incalculable, and has imposed the highest and most burdening "costs of production" upon the land and the people. Wendell Berry: from Not a Vision of Our Future, But of Ourselves

The world is full of mysteries, and I love mysteries. Freeman J. Dyson Sometimes I think we're alone in the universe, and sometimes I think we're not. In either case the idea is quite staggering. Arthur C. Clarke I'm now a little more alone: My dad's obituary and other links.

Home Address: Anna, Tchapo, and I - and Thad, and now Rosemanie! Kpandja too... and the extended gang 495 Rossford Ave. Ft. Thomas, KY 41075-1264 Planet Earth phone: 859-781-3916 Work Address: 443 MEP -- Math, Ed, Psych Department of Mathematics and Statistics Northern Kentucky University Nunn Drive Highland Heights, KY 41099-1700 Phone: 859-572-5794 Fax: 859-572-6097 email: longa@nku.edu cv schedule Campus Map

(when I had hair, 9/64) weatherspark... air quality

Joseph Louis Lagrange (1736-1813):

When Lavoisier was executed during the French Revolution, he said: "It took them but a moment to lay low that head; yet a hundred years will not suffice perhaps to produce its like again." Lectures on elementary mathematics (1901)

Chris Smithers:

"Evolution isn't something you believe in: evolution is either something you know about or you don't."

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr:

"Taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society."

Noam Chomsky:

"Citizens of the democratic societies should undertake a course of intellectual self-defense to protect themselves from manipulation and control, and to lay the basis for meaningful democracy." [Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies, South End Press, 1989, 422 pp.]

Abraham Lincoln (quoted in the Washington Spectator, 25, #8, 1999):

"[The Civil War] has indeed been a trying hour for the Republic, but I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed." [Maybe Mr. Lincoln can entice you to read Corporate Predators.]

Helen Keller (1880 - 1968)

Life is either a daring adventure or nothing. Security does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than exposure.

Attention:

"...the strongest predictor of earnings nine years after graduation from high school is the number of mathematics courses taken (after having taken into account demographic factors) (NCTM, 1992, 3)." (source, and a a local copy)

William Shakespeare (from As You Like It):

"All the world's a stage,
And the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts...."

Theodosius Dobzanski (from Mankind Evolving, p. xii):

"Any scientist worthy of his salt labors to bring about the obsolescence of his own work."

W. Somerset Maugham:

"It is a great nuisance that knowledge can only be obtained by hard work."

Martin Luther King, Jr.:

"Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness. This is the judgment. Life's most persistent and urgent question is, What are you doing for others?"

Albert Einstein

"Never memorize what you can look up in books." (I heard it, then looked it up and found it quoted on a Library of Congress website -- figured that was good enough.)

Henry Kissinger

"Nobody will ever win the battle of the sexes; there's just too much fraternizing with the enemy."

Alexander Tyler: (source -- suspicions about authenticity)

A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves money from the public treasure. From that moment on the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most money from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy followed by a dictatorship.

The average age of the world's great civilizations has been two hundred years. These nations have progressed through the following sequence: from bondage to spiritual faith, from spiritual faith to great courage, from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness, from selfishness to complacency from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependency, from dependency back to bondage.

Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919), 26th US President:

"A man who has never gone to school may steal from a freight car; but if he has a university education, he may steal the whole railroad."

Donald Myers (my Ph.D. advisor):

"If you are happy where you are I don't blame you for staying: sometimes the bigger pond turns out to be filled with hot water."

Thomas Friedman (New York Times, May 4, 2008)

We are not as powerful as we used to be because over the past three decades, the Asian values of our parents generation -- work hard, study, save, invest, live within your means -- have given way to subprime values: "You can have the American dream -- a house -- with no money down and no payments for two years."

Aldo Leopold:

Only the mountain has lived long enough to listen objectively to to the howl of a wolf. (source)

Paracelsus, sometimes called the father of toxicology, wrote:

German: Alle Ding' sind Gift, und nichts ohn' Gift; allein die Dosis macht, da ein Ding kein Gift ist.

"All things are poison, and nothing is without poison; only the dose permits something not to be poisonous."

Or, more commonly,

"The dose makes the poison."

That is to say, substances considered toxic are harmless in small doses, and conversely an ordinarily harmless substance can be deadly if over-consumed.

Nancy Newhall (quoted in John McPhee's Encounters with the Archdruid, 1971)

The wilderness holds answers to questions man has not yet learned to ask. Math quotations
More quotations

---

Notes and Quotes:

• "The vice president and I have a disagreement about the use of troops. He believes in nation-building. I would be very careful about using our troops as nation builders." (George Bush, Campaign 2000: Vice President Gore and Governor Bush participate in debate, Boston, Massachusetts, October 3, 2000)

• 'But then there was the delightful promise of what American success in Iraq could achieve. "Extremists in the region would have to rethink their strategy of jihad," Cheney said. "Moderates throughout the region would take heart, and our ability to advance the Israeli-Palestinian peace process would be enhanced."

  Today, with Israeli troops battling on their northern and southern borders, with Iran ignoring calls for negotiations on nuclear weapons, with Baghdad in flames and with many of Iraq's moderates living in fear, those Cheney sentences stand as the most telling indictment of the administration's failures.

  If Israelis and Palestinians were closer to peace, if Iraqi democracy showed signs of stability -- these might justify a war fought in part on the basis of false premises.' (Washington Post)

  Here's George Bush on the campaign trail in 2004 (cited in the Washington Spectator, 6/1/2006): "A free Iraq will be an ally in the war on terror. And that's essential. A free Iraq will set a powerful example in the part of the world that is desperate for freedom. A free Iraq will help secure Israel. A free Iraq will enforce the hopes and aspirations of the reformers in places like Iran. A free Iraq is essential for the security of this country."

• A story (from October 28th, 2012):
  A suicide bomber drove into a Catholic church in Nigeria, killing and wounding scores. In retaliation, christians took to the streets with machetes, and killed two passing muslims.

• Math:
  1. Real problems;
  2. Real tools.
  3. Put them together, and
  4. Get solutions.

• A story: the same people who brought you Fox New's 2012 election predictions have been bringing you coverage of climate change....

• Justice is blind; so should compassion be.

• Dear World,

  The United States of America, your quality supplier of ideals of liberty and democracy since 1776, would like to apologize for its 2001-2008 service outage. The technical fault that led to this eight-year service interruption has been located, and the parts responsible for it were replaced Tuesday night, November 4th, 2008.

  Early tests of the newly-installed equipment indicate that it is functioning correctly, and we expect it to be fully functional by mid-January. We apologize for any inconvenience caused by the outage, and we look forward to resuming full service --- and hopefully even to improving it in the years to come.

  Thank you for your patience and understanding,

  The USA

Website maintained by Andy Long. Comments appreciated.