Here are a few newspaper and magazine clippings from my efforts in Slovenia in 1990-91 to get a worker-ownership privatization law drafted and passed.
Mac Lane, Bourbaki, and Adjoints Redux
June 16, 2015 by
Saunders Mac Lane famously said that Bourbaki (in the person of Pierre Samuel) “just missed” developing the notion of an adjunction in 1948 a decade before Daniel Kan. When adjoints are defined using heteromorphisms or chimera morphisms (first done by Bodo Pareigis in 1970), then indeed Samuel was only a now-simple dualization away from defining adjoints. Since the heteromorphic treatment allows adjunctions to be factored into two, in general, independent universal mapping properties (UMPs), we also pose the question as to whether adjunctions or UMPs should be considered as category theory’s most important concept. It seems Mac Lane and most orthodox category theorists would say adjunctions but Grothendieck among others would say UMPs stated using representable functors.
On Adjoint and Brain Functors
June 16, 2015 by
We give a heterodox treatment of adjoints using heteromorphisms (object-to-object morphisms between objects of different categories) that parses an adjunction into two separate parts (left and right representations of heteromorphisms). Then these separate parts can be recombined in a new way to define a cognate concept, the brain functor, to abstractly model the functions of perception and action of a brain. This is a preprint of the paper coming out in Axiomathes.
Classical Liberalism and the Firm
March 24, 2015 by
This is a scan of my chapter in the new book: Commerce and Community: Ecologies of Social Cooperation, edited by Robert F. Garnett, Paul Lewis, and Lenore T. Ealy. London: Routledge, 2015.
On the Renting of Persons: The Neo-Abolitionist Case Against Today’s Peculiar Institution
March 24, 2015 by
To answer the “best case” voluntary-contractarian arguments for slavery and autocracy, the democratic and antislavery movements forged arguments not simply in favor of consent but arguments that voluntary contracts to legally alienate aspects of personhood were invalid “even with consent”—which made the underlying rights inherently inalienable. Once understood, those arguments have the perhaps “unintended consequence” of ruling out today’s self-rental contract, the employer-employee contract.
Talks and Publications in 2014
January 29, 2015 by
This is my 2014 yearly update on talks and publications (snarky emails and FB comments not included).
Why Delayed Choice Experiments do Not imply Retrocausality
January 23, 2015 by
This is the on-line first version (unpaginated) of my first publication in quantum mechanics. It shows how delayed-choice experiments should be interpreted so they do not imply retrocausality.
The Neo-Abolitionist Case Against Renting People
January 17, 2015 by
The talk presents the arguments from inalienable rights theory in a neo-abolitionist framework as making the case against the renting of people, i.e., against the employment relation–echoing the abolitionist case against the owning of people.
American Revolution Applied to Corporations
January 17, 2015 by
The basic idea of the talk was to take the fundamental principles of the American Revolution and apply them to the economic sphere.
Double-entry Bookkeeping: The Mathematical Treatment
November 20, 2014 by
This publication represents success in a long struggle, stretching over three decades, to get the mathematical treatment of double-entry bookkeeping published in an accounting journal.