Goethe on Europe/Germany

Goethe said in his conversation with Eckermann:

"I do not fear that Germany will not be united; our excellent streets and future railroads will do their own. Germany is united in her patriotism and opposition to external enemies. She is united, because the German Taler and Groschen have the same value throughout the entire Empire, and because my suitcase can pass through all thirty-six states without being opened. It is united, because the municipal travel documents of a resident of Weimar are accepted everywhere on a par with the passports of the citizens of her mighty foreign neighbors. With regard to the German states, there is no longer any talk of domestic and foreign lands. Further, Germany is united in the areas of weights and measures, trade and migration, and a hundred similar things which I neither can nor wish to mention."

The Alchian Approach

This is how Susan Woodward described the famous economist Armen Alchian:

Hirshleifer approached price theory as pure
geometry. You lay out the axioms, you state the
postulates, then you prove the theorems and the
lemmas and the converses and give the students some
real world problems to apply them to. And you never
introduce a new idea, especially a hard idea like rent,
without having thoroughly laid the groundwork for
it before you do that. Whereas the Alchian approach
is “Oh, here’s an idea. Let’s walk around the idea
and see what it looks like from all of its sides. Let’s
tip it over and see what’s under it and what kind of
noise it makes when you turn it over. Let’s light a
fire under it and just see what happens. Drop it ten
stories.”

Talking fast

L.S.,

As it turns out, I really don't talk all that fast:

Waterpolo 30 December 2006

I was there!!!

In case you were wondering, this is Hilary Duff in Plovdiv, at the world famous theatre...