Abolish High School!

Rethinking the Articles of Confederation, by Scott Trask

The American confederation was destined to become a free-trade area, even without a consolidated union. Hamilton, in Federalist No. 12, all but admitted, and complained, that such would be the case. He worried that the multiplicity of state jurisdictions would keep tariffs too low and variable for the raising of sufficient revenue or the provision of industrial promotion.

The relative situation of these States; the number of rivers with which they are intersected, and of bays that wash their shores; the facility of communication in every direction; the affinity of language and manners; the familiar habits of intercourse – all these are circumstances that would conspire to render an illicit trade between them a matter of little difficulty and would insure frequent evasions of the commercial regulations of each other. The separate States or confederacies would be necessitated by mutual jealousy to avoid the temptations to that kind of trade by the lowness of their duties.

I wonder: Minbar, name of a planet in Babylon 5, could be Elvish for ‘first home’.

Carl Worden writes in Sierra Times:

Now pinch yourself and review this astonishing turn of events: A highly trained and educated federal prosecutor in Memphis was unable to convince 12 American citizens that Vernice Kuglin was required to pay federal income taxes. He was clearly unable to produce a single section of the Tax Code to that end, and the jury was unanimous in clearing Kuglin of all charges against her. If the foregoing was not so, Kuglin would have been convicted.

I remain puzzled. ( . . more . . )

The Pythagoreans, legend has it, saw each of the regular solids as a symbol of one of the elements: tetrahedron fire, octahedron air, icosahedron water, cube earth — leaving the dodecahedron to stand for the universe, or quintessence, or spirit. It’s rather a pity that they weren’t so named, pyromorph, aeromorph, hydromorph, geomorph, cosmomorph; the nomenclature of the other uniform polytopes (particularly those of four dimensions) would be somewhat cleaner.

2004 Oct 04: It is a charming coincidence that the cosmos was briefly suspected of being cosmomorphic.

Honda Prelude; Hyundai Sonata; what other cars have musical names?

Can you speak Buffy?

Now the witty diction of Buffy the Vampire Slayer has been accorded the academic respect that it deserves in Professor Michael Adams’s Slayer Slang (Oxford University Press). Under headings such as ‘The Attraction of Prefixes’ and ‘Folk Etymologies’, Adams, a historian of lexicography, admiringly picks apart the language of the show. He also provides a densely annotated glossary of its peculiar words and phrases.

(Grauniad; passed along on Anarchysf by Mal Function)