tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-261056672011-07-28T05:03:48.435-07:00Jeff Borowitzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09254590873814339579noreply@blogger.comBlogger321100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26105667.post-56133325021203293522008-03-24T16:53:00.000-07:002008-03-24T16:54:43.209-07:00

The issue of money and its influence in politics seems like it has an easy but overlooked solution. I propose to fund all national elections publicly, through both the primary and the national election. The national elections in 2004 cost $4 billion, but that cost could go up this year. With the average congressional election costing on the order of $1 million for the winner, the total cost

Jeff Borowitzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09254590873814339579noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26105667.post-22858439103186522662007-12-10T14:34:00.000-08:002007-12-10T14:38:46.230-08:00

Tax deductions for mortgages are $80 billion per year. Since this is almost as much as federal transportation spending, and more than any other line item on Wikipedia's budget page except defense and social programs, this is a whole lot of money. It also doesn't count things like having Fanny May, mortgage debt relief, etc, as mentioned in Clive Crook's article. Aside from all of the public

Jeff Borowitzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09254590873814339579noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26105667.post-46051995469713820742007-08-28T19:35:00.000-07:002007-12-10T14:38:15.782-08:00

It's sure been a while... ...since I've written anything. I really mean to do a better job, but I've been busy moving in and whatnot, and also distracted. In any case, I'm currently reading William Manchester's A World Lit Only By Fire. My dad commented that this was a really interesting history, and would disabuse anyone of the idea that religion (Christianity in particular) did more good

Jeff Borowitzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09254590873814339579noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26105667.post-55664593156277355372007-02-21T19:36:00.000-08:002007-02-21T19:37:41.997-08:00

Last night the Internet went out at our house. It was really a funny thing to see. I was sitting in Kurt's room and talking to him at the time, when Craig Rothman ran by and asked Kurt if his Internet was working. When Kurt found that his Internet was broken too, Rothman went down to the basement to check on the router and whatnot. Within another minute or so, people started coming out of

Jeff Borowitzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09254590873814339579noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26105667.post-1171909609450918472007-02-19T10:26:00.000-08:002007-02-19T10:27:48.670-08:00

I recently read this article in The Economist about private equity. Private Equity is a really interesting thing. I think it represents a big change for the better in the way that capitalism works. In the "free markets" that are discussed in introductory economics courses and form the basis of economics as it is discussed in the public sphere, a very important idea is that companies can fail.

Jeff Borowitzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09254590873814339579noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26105667.post-1171327745354432272007-02-12T16:49:00.000-08:002007-02-12T19:13:45.270-08:00

For this article, I really wanted to write about the bomb scare thing with the Mooninites in Boston. I tried and I tried but I was unable to really come up with anything coherent. Basically I don't really understand the entire subject of how our national security system should work or how people should feel about it. Instead of this, I think I'm going to write about something a little economic

Jeff Borowitzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09254590873814339579noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26105667.post-1170103719311858112007-01-29T12:48:00.000-08:002007-02-12T19:14:18.793-08:00

One thing that I've been pretty weak on recently is my intellectual honesty. I think it might have to do with the fact that I'm not a physicist anymore. I remember one of the things that I really liked about physics was the way that physicists talked about things. They were very good at distinguishing between things that can be known and things that can't. They were also very good at

Jeff Borowitzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09254590873814339579noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26105667.post-1169406587227044222007-01-21T11:09:00.000-08:002007-02-12T19:15:15.346-08:00

I wrote this article a couple of nights ago when I couldn't sleep very well. Recently I've been thinking about things differently than in my past. Basically I've realized (quite rationally) that people at MIT work way too hard, and I've started working less hard in response. This would be fine, except for my working less hard has degenerated into more general laziness and apathy, which might

Jeff Borowitzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09254590873814339579noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26105667.post-1167791283443629852007-01-02T18:28:00.000-08:002007-02-12T19:16:28.970-08:00

I'm writing another article! That's two in a day! Happy New Years...Anyway, I'm readying "Junk Mail" by a British author Will Self. He uses lots of words that I don't know, and also talks about a fair number of British and other literary figures that I don't know. This happens to the point that in order to really read his book, I really need to sit online next to Wikipedia and dictionary sites

Jeff Borowitzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09254590873814339579noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26105667.post-1167781463967531152007-01-02T15:44:00.000-08:002007-02-12T19:17:27.636-08:00

One of my resolutions for this year is to actually write in my blog. I am hereby resolving to write once a week. Given that it takes time to write about things in a semi-coherent fashion, and given that I am not going to allocate my time in a significantly different fashion from last year, my articles will get crappier. I apologize to those couple of you who actually read these articles...

Jeff Borowitzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09254590873814339579noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26105667.post-1159932872901493982006-10-03T20:34:00.000-07:002006-10-04T21:33:31.316-07:00

In my 21L.001 class today we were discussing Thucydides, who was one of the first historians. My professor asked a question which struck me as important and profound: he asked that if fiction describes absolute truths that could have happened and history simply is the things that did happen, what is the purpose of history? That is, how can a history which reports the way that things actually

Jeff Borowitzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09254590873814339579noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26105667.post-1154958604247064662006-08-07T06:01:00.000-07:002006-08-07T06:50:04.923-07:00

I had a thought this morning while reading this article about Joseph Leiberman's stance on Iraq. Basically the upshot of my idea is that we have too much Democracy these days. That is, our Democracy is too influenced by the people. Here is why I think these things: the war in Iraq has been a reasonably big mistake. However, it was started with overwhelming approval and public support. At the

Jeff Borowitzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09254590873814339579noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26105667.post-1150668374031978772006-06-18T15:00:00.000-07:002006-06-18T15:06:14.036-07:00

Here are some pictures of the room that Mariel and I are living in for the summer. It's a huge leap forward in terms of cleanliness and classiness, at least for me. There have been basically three things which all came together and resulted in this great room.First, Mariel and I are sharing it between only the two of us. In the past Mariel and I had shared the space of a single person in a

Jeff Borowitzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09254590873814339579noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26105667.post-1150668012029493692006-06-18T14:56:00.000-07:002006-06-18T15:00:12.083-07:00

Government is a really interesting thing.  Democracy is particularly interesting.  I think the parts of it that I find the most interesting tend to be somewhat conspiratorial, like something Noam Chomsky might think up, about how much influence people actually have on what governments do.  The thing that made me think about this is reading stuff online about Yucca Mountain.  I have a thing where

Jeff Borowitzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09254590873814339579noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26105667.post-1150341432944192692006-06-14T20:13:00.000-07:002006-06-14T20:17:13.006-07:00

So I think somewhere along the line I forgot how awesome physics is. I also stopped writing in my blog after the flurry of writing that I did on the cruise. In any case, I've started working on my UROP which will become my thesis. I really love it. It's reasonably relaxing and its really interesting. Hopefully I will write about the UROP soon, but right now I really want to write about

Jeff Borowitzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09254590873814339579noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26105667.post-1149375720868579842006-06-03T15:58:00.000-07:002006-06-03T16:02:00.876-07:00

Since I was away from the internet on the cruise (7 days and 6 nights, holy shit!) I have written a lot of things but been able to post them. The previous 4ish entries deal with the cruise and have lots of pictures in them. If everything seems random and thrown together and it seems incredible that I wrote like 8 pages in the span of 10 minutes, that should explain it. The thoughts that I take

Jeff Borowitzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09254590873814339579noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26105667.post-1149375406524488092006-06-03T15:54:00.000-07:002006-06-03T15:56:46.533-07:00

After leaving Nassau we went to Norwegian Cruise Line's private island, Great Stirrup Cay. I thought it would be sort of stupid: a way for the cruise line to take more of our money. After the fact I think it was a great place to stop. To the extent that we wanted to have nice, relaxed, tropical beach time, this island was the best we had. Cocoa Beach was definitely an Atlantic beach – it looked

Jeff Borowitzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09254590873814339579noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26105667.post-1149375152686284532006-06-03T15:49:00.000-07:002006-06-03T15:52:32.693-07:00

We stopped in the Bahamas today. It was still hot, but oh well. We walked around downtown Nassau for a bit, and then took a cab to a public beach. In Nassau, we did a bit of shopping. In particular I got some rum. It was really very very cheap, so I got some for Matt Herman and Craig, and then I also got some for Dave. I was going to get him a really nice bottle of Cruzan, but that looked like

Jeff Borowitzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09254590873814339579noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26105667.post-1149374895276825632006-06-03T15:47:00.000-07:002006-06-03T15:48:15.283-07:00

5-31-06It's now Wednesday of my cruise. Internet is expensive and would be a pretty big distraction so I don't have it. Because I have no Internet, I'm making a bunch of posts all at once. In any case, one thing that I noticed about on this cruise is how much I'm like my dad. One way that I noticed it was that I tend to get stressed out about schedule-related things. We left Boston about 2

Jeff Borowitzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09254590873814339579noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26105667.post-1148427412045570142006-05-23T16:26:00.000-07:002006-05-24T08:53:01.386-07:00

I finished my exams Monday afternoon, and I'm really happy now. After exams I got a lot of random things done that I'd been meaning to do for a long time. For example: I cancelled the credit cards that I don't use and got a free credit report, and found out that my credit report is "excellent". Today I went in to my UROP for the first time. It was really interesting and encouraging. I learned

Jeff Borowitzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09254590873814339579noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26105667.post-1147933535316684522006-05-17T23:18:00.000-07:002006-05-18T08:28:02.786-07:00

I just finished writing my paper for 21H.411, and you can find it here. I definitely worked way harder on it than Mariel did, but I'm not sure that it was actually so good that it was worth working so hard. I'm pretty happy to be done with it right now, in any case. I sort of feel like school is over, which is interesting, because in some meaningful ways it isn't. I'm going to stay up late (

Jeff Borowitzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09254590873814339579noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26105667.post-1147710422085315032006-05-15T09:25:00.000-07:002006-05-15T09:27:02.090-07:00

When I was looking through the pictures of the formal, I thought this one was pretty good, since it has Katie, Matt, Mariel, and me. 

Jeff Borowitzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09254590873814339579noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26105667.post-1147625247167951132006-05-14T09:39:00.000-07:002006-05-14T09:47:27.176-07:00

We had our house formal at the aquarium last night. It was incredible. We had the entire acquarium to ourselves (about 60 of us, altogether) for about 4 hours. Before and after dinner people just wandered around together and looked at the fish. Also, the dinner was really good. I had salmon (hahaha) with some sort of creamy wasabi sauce that was really good. I think the real miracle here

Jeff Borowitzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09254590873814339579noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26105667.post-1147143518937049842006-05-08T19:34:00.000-07:002006-05-12T08:31:06.300-07:00

I had my last Junior Lab presentation today. It was pretty crappy, but what else could have happened. My main measurement was off by an order of magnitude, and the professor sure didn't like that. The thing about that is there isn't really too much I could do about it. Luckily I don't care too much either.I'm pretty sure I don't have very much to do for the rest of the term. This is really

Jeff Borowitzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09254590873814339579noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26105667.post-1146426276615586412006-04-30T12:24:00.000-07:002006-05-08T20:40:58.866-07:00

I've realized something pretty recently about how computers will change human lives. They will do this by increasing by a huge factor the "primary source" material related to my life. A lot of my correspondance and actions will be saved on my computer. When I'm 30, I'll have digital copies of every paper or article that I've written, plus various other media such as my dance from llast week.

Jeff Borowitzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09254590873814339579noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26105667.post-1146418046401678802006-04-30T10:19:00.000-07:002006-05-02T11:00:03.150-07:00

Last night I was in Lip Sync, a charity dance competition at MIT. We danced to "La Vie Boheme" from rent. Janet did the choreography, and there were 17 of us in the dance. It was a lot of fun and a really good experience. I've never danced before, or even performed too much, so dancing in front of about 1,000 of my peers was pretty exciting. The video can be seen on Google Video here.

Jeff Borowitzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09254590873814339579noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26105667.post-1145745509791160262006-04-22T15:02:00.000-07:002006-04-22T15:38:29.836-07:00

So yesterday was one of the best days that I could possibly have had. This is all the more true because I spent 4 hours in lab. I had "lunch" with Noam Chomsky, with Mariel, Neera, and Ross. Mariel organized the lunch by just emailing him, which was pretty amazing.Noam Chomsky is unbelievably interesting to listen to. He also commands a lot of respect in a quiet, knowledgable sort of way. I

Jeff Borowitzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09254590873814339579noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26105667.post-1145393757522553702006-04-18T13:42:00.000-07:002006-04-18T13:55:57.586-07:00

So I just finished my rough draft of my 8.06 paper. It's here. Writing it was pretty enjoyable, though it was slow at times. I felt like a real physicist, except for instead of doing physics I just surveyed the literature. Surveying the literature made me very happy to have the internet. For resources I used between 20 and 30 physics papers. If I couldn't find them all online, I would have

Jeff Borowitzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09254590873814339579noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26105667.post-1145249161500424352006-04-16T21:32:00.000-07:002006-04-16T21:46:01.510-07:00

One thing that I've been realizing a lot recently is that I suck at estimating how much work I have. I have to write my 8.06 paper and do some serious work on my 21H.411 paper. Depending on my mood, I'm either way overworked or have hardly anything to do. One would expect that my ability to estimate how much work I have would be better after almost 3 years of MIT. Oh well. I think that what

Jeff Borowitzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09254590873814339579noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26105667.post-1145248326705528112006-04-16T21:22:00.000-07:002006-04-16T21:32:06.713-07:00

Today, I went to Craig's house for Easter. It was pretty fun and relaxing. Craig's little cousin was hilarious. I'll think of her name. She really seemed to hate Craig. Whenever she saw him she'd run after him and start hitting him. She and another little cousin (a boy) got into one of those classic kid shouting matches. She said "boys are stupid" and he said "girls are stupid." These

Jeff Borowitzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09254590873814339579noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26105667.post-1145111835672691732006-04-15T07:28:00.000-07:002006-04-15T07:39:09.576-07:00

I went with Dave, my dad, Uncle Mike, and Dan and Madeleine to see Chick Corea last night at the Blue Note in the Village. Chick Corea played a lot on this electric organ thing, which was really cool. I'd never heard the organ played like that before. It was a pretty good show, but it also made me realize how little I know about art and culture altogether. Dan and Madeleine are in the jazz

Jeff Borowitzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09254590873814339579noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26105667.post-1145025741787653232006-04-14T07:41:00.000-07:002006-04-14T07:42:21.796-07:00

So I've now started a blog. Now that that's over with, we'll see whether I can continue to write in it with any sort of regularity or not.

Jeff Borowitzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09254590873814339579noreply@blogger.com0