prior probability

On this day (October 2) in 1789, President George Washington sent copies of 12 newly-proposed constitutional amendments to the legislatures of the States for their ratification. (The Congress had approved these first 12 amendments on September 28, 1789.) Only the last ten of these amendments, however, which are now known as the “Bill of Rights”, were ratified by the requisite number of States. One of the two unratified amendments is reprinted below:

“After the first enumeration required by the first article of the Constitution, there shall be one Representative for every thirty thousand, until the number shall amount to one hundred, after which the proportion shall be so regulated by Congress, that there shall be not less than one hundred Representatives, nor less than one Representative for every forty thousand persons, until the number of Representatives shall amount to two hundred; after which the proportion shall be so regulated by Congress, that there shall not be less than two hundred Representatives, nor more than one Representative for every fifty thousand persons.“

Had this amendment been ratified, we could have had more than 6,000 representatives today, compared to the 435 we currently have! (More details about this unratified amendment are available here.)

In conjunction with the Eighteenth-Century Scottish Studies Society, the Institute for the Study of Scottish Philosophy, and the International Adam …

Call for Papers: Smith, Ferguson, and Witherspoon @ 300, St Andrews, 18-21 July, 2023

The full tongue-in-cheek story is available here. Alternative title, with apologies to Tyler Cowen: “Small steps toward a much better world“?!

Hurricanes can be destructive and dangerous, so why not name these storms after unpopular or disgraced or failed politicians like the ones pictured below? Alas, that wouldn’t be fair to the hurricanes! (The MWO is the body that assigns names to tropical storms and hurricanes.)

On this day (September 28) in 1850, President Millard Filmore signed the 1851 naval appropriations bill, which abolished flogging as a form of punishment in the US Navy. Here, however, is a defense of flogging. See also this short essay on “flogging at sea“.

That is the title of this City Journal obituary of the North American philosopher and logician Saul A. Kripke, who died earlier this month at the age of 81 and whose most influential work were his 1970 lectures on “Naming and Necessity” (published in 1980 and available here). Among other things, I learned that the great Kripke (like H. L. A. Hart, another intellectual giant of the 20th century) never earned a doctorate.

Alternative title: love in outer space

I am following the development a new tropical storm in the Caribbean very closely. (This storm is expected to make landfall somewhere on the Florida peninsula next week.) What if, instead of taking the average of all the weather models to predict the trajectory of a tropical storm, the National Weather Service assigned a probability value to each of the possible trajectories based on the past performance of each model?

I nominate John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme.” (P.S.: Here is the full album.)

Although neither Tyler Cowen nor I have ever been to the island of Martha’s Vineyard (or what I prefer to call “NIMBY Island“), I found his take on “The Martha’s Vineyard saga” to be well worth reading.