Pleasant, useful, accurate

That's what I'm looking for in trigonometry!

From down under via daoistraver:

"Professor Wildberger says that distance is not the best way to measure the separation of two points and an angle is not the best way to measure the separation of two lines.

"'It's not the concept that leads to a mathematics that is the most pleasant and the most useful and the most accurate,' he said."

Looking at Lew

Stuck in my writing for the moment I wander over to Lew Rockwell to see what's up, and find quite a few things of interest.

"So, four years later, how is PNAC is doing?," Jim Lobe asks.
"The short answer is not so well."
Your keyboard to God's screen!

And Nawlins reminds Joseph Sobran of Michael Oakeshott.

We should all be reminded of MO more often, as I was by the Raimundo speech I posted a link to the other day, if only because he gave it at a campus I visited in the company of other Oakeshottians, including Sobran's biographer friend, and the conservative theorist I quoted earlier.

Finally, Murray Rothbard (eternal memory!) excoriates the conservatives -- back in 1969 -- for being conned by the neocons -- starting back in the '50s: "For years you have taken your political advice and much of your line from assorted "exes": ex-Communists, ex-Trots, ex-Maoists, ex-fellow-travellers. I have never been any of these. I grew up a right-winger, and became more intensely a libertarian rightist as I grew older. How come I am an exile from the Right-wing, while the conservative movement is being run by a gaggle of ex-Communists and monarchists? What kind of a conservative movement is this? This kind: one that you have no business being in."

Personally, I find MR's references to "monarchists" offensive; he seems to mean Catholic Fascists. Real monarchists have been some of the best friends liberty ever had. Including Burke, whom MR has obviously not read with any understanding. On the other hand, I have no profound understanding of economics.