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Apr 6

1. Reading a review in Commentary of George Gilder's The Spirit of
Enterprise by Tod Lindberg reminded me  of the following points and
questions.

	a. creativity.  It would be worthwhile to return to the
study of easy creativity.

	b. Is there a connection between creativity and higher order
unification?

	c. The emphasis in "scientific management" on "decision making"
almost always carries with it the assumption that the alternatives
are well-known and the problem is to decide among them.  Unfortunately,
this is all today's mathematical methods are capable of dealing with.
Some of the complaints about business schools are perhaps related to
their emphasis on this point of view.  Gilder's point, with which
Lindberg agrees, can be taken as asserting that this is false.
Real success comes from creating new alternatives.

	d. Lindberg emphasizes breaking with the past.  For all my
new ideas, I have been unwilling to abandon the comfort of the
professorship to stake everything on any one idea.  For me this
is rational, but it is probably the reason why Hurd and I did
not succeed in selling our mail terminal idea.  The people we
tried to sell it to recognized a lack of personal commitment to it.
Oh well.

May 20

Cartoon: two economists dying in the desert.
"When the price reaches the market clearing level, there will be water".

Is there a connection between the postponement heuristic as applied
to map coloring and block stacking problems?

In classical OR planning and scheduling the activities are given as
part of the problem; they have only to be scheduled.  In AI planning,
activities are described as having preconditions, and there are
goals.  The planning system must determine what activities will 
reallize the goals and subgoals.  Combining the two suggest determining
the activities first and then their schedule.