An international production of Thomas Mann’s 20th century classic about the first world war, Der Zauberberg (1982).
Der Zauberberg (1982)
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Author Archives: remkohdev
Run: 5k – NYSC – 36th st @Madison
Duration: 26:45:00 minutes
Distance: 3.11 miles; 5.00 km
Speed: 8.36 minutes/mile
Run: 5k – NYSC – 36th st @Madison
Duration: 26:45:00 minutes
Distance: 3.11 miles; 5.00 km
Speed: 8.36 minutes/mile
Run: 5k – NYSC – 36th st @Madison
Duration: 27:40:00 minutes
Distance: 3.11 miles; 5.00 km
Speed: 8.53 minutes/mile
Run: 20mins – NYSC – 36th st @Madison
Duration: 20:00:00 minutes
Distance: 2.07 miles; 3.33 km
Speed: 9:39 minutes/mile
The Diaries of Arnon Grunberg (14)
Arnon started walking. He walked into the dark night and the bloated circle of colored lights. He was alone, but he barely noticed that he was while he kept on walking. It could have been snowing, or it might have been drizzling, or perhaps it was a clear winter night, he didn’t remember. He did remember the blackness of the evening, the coat of dimness that isolated him and embraced him in one present gesture, and the brightness of the sparkles around him that amazed him. His eyes were drawn in all directions, drops of rain stirring a puddle of mud, and never lingered at one spot for more than a second. He couldn’t form any prolonged ideas but only short impulses of thoughts. This state of mind itself fascinated him. It was not his nature to be caught up in such a stream of consciousness that constantly renewed itself. Arnon was more used to his own thoughts prolonging themselves and separating him from the distancing reality that surrounded him. The relation between Arnon and the world was vaguely undefined, absent perhaps in the eyes of some, at least not in a constant form that let itself be renewed easily. In what form the relation with the outside world existed then? Arnon thought of the world as a friendly enemy, a benign poison dripping into the hollow bowl of his soul until one day it would spill over and he no longer was himself. He kept on walking, alone, into the night.
Divine Mathematics: George Cantor and Infinity
In Dangerous Knowledge – BBC, Georg Cantor’s Continuum Hypothesis and Georg Cantor‘s life is described. Cantor was obsessed with the problem of infinity. Cantor reminds me Pythagoras, who founded a religious school of Pythagoreans who searched the divine truth by revealing the mathematical formulas that described nature.
Boltzmann defined a breakthrough in the field of probability, which is crucial for the theory of entropy and chaos.
Run: 20mins – NYSC – 36th st @Madison
Duration: 20:00:00 minutes
Distance: 2.25 miles; 3.62 km
Speed: 8:53 minutes/mile
Run: 30mins – NYSC – 36th st @Madison
Duration: 30:00:00 minutes
Distance: 3.00 miles; 4.83 km
Speed: 10.00 minutes/mile
New Socialism – On Class and Intergenerational Mobility
Class is central to the Marxist view on history but seems to have lost the focus of many socialist and social-democratic policies. Revisionism and liberal fiscal theories dominate even the views of traditional socialist parties, whose policies are often reduced to limiting income disparity and preserving public services.
Class cuts across generations stifling individuals with the inheritance of ownership of capital. The origin of the class conflict of capital interest is the loss of the means of subsistence by the working class and the subsequent accumulation of capital by capitalists. Even in our time, the income gap continuous to grow and the accumulation of capital continues to rise. This law of capitalism resists most efforts to level distribution of capital in revisionist socialist countries. Old Socialism reacts to this inequality by attempts to disown property owners and nationalize wealth, and considered class over individual. Since private property lies at the root of the class conflict between those with and those without, those with should be disowned in order to create a new society where capital ownership is socialized. New Socialism considers class and group identity only as an attribute of the individual, not as an independent entity.
Central to the new socialist debate on class is the intergenerational mobility or persistence of wages. Capitalism despite its promise of individual liberty, traps the individual in their class and intergenerational mobility is the lowest in those societies where capitalism has progressed furthest, in the US (defying the American Dream) and the UK. Many of the public services policies are not aimed to liberate the individual from this capitalist class trap, but only to sooth the disparity stemming from it by lowering access to basic education and healthcare. Revisionism has suffocated the aspiration of the traditional working class to free themselves from the class funnel.
Links:
NYTimes – Class Matters: An Overview
A Family Affair: Intergenerational Social Mobility across OECD countries
The Lancet – Child Development in Developing Countries