Simulation of a two part pendulum

Tom Shannon The painter and the pendulum

The pendulum swings from optimism to pessimism and then back again.

So the evolution of this I gather this isn't your first pendulum.

People make simulations, so if you want to understand how a pendulum works,

You're using your built in dynamics, the physics of your body, just like a pendulum.

I slam the door behind me, climb up, go past this place where I see a pendulum ticking.

But with the pendulum, it allows me to manifest these invisible forces that are holding the magnets up.

And then you can go and modify things on the side to see how different variables affect the pendulum.

Each of these beautiful paintings, are they images in and of themselves, or are they records of a physical event called the pendulum approaching the canvas?

The swinging pendulum of momentum is a completely invented sporting concept but one that players truly believe in, and never more so than at competitions like these.

This is one reason why so many people have felt estranged from their political leaders. But it would be unfortunate indeed, dangerous if the pendulum now swung back to old fashioned nationalism.

Like the peoples of other United Nations Members who have fought for their freedom, thousands of Nicaraguans have died for it, victims of a perverse pendulum that swung from authoritarianism to totalitarianism.

In his study of truth telling in ancient Greece, the philosopher Michel Foucault pointed out that the act of truth telling cannot be reduced to citizens learning something that they did not know before. Paradoxically, truth in politics is something that everybody knows, but that few dare to express.

The thinking behind the 1990 s approach to monetary policy is still fundamentally valid, but it requires institutional strengthening. It would be better to stop the twentieth century ideological pendulum and return to some older precepts.

As one of the architects of policy after the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, I know the controversy, anguish, and cost of the decisions taken. I understand why the pendulum has swung so heavily the other way.

One view is that Russian politics is like a pendulum. It had swung too far in the direction of chaos under Yeltsin, and has now swung too far in the direction of order and state control under Putin.

Yet today the pendulum has arguably swung too far in the opposite direction. Perhaps scholars who argue that Islamic financial systems prohibition on interest generates massive inefficiencies ought to be looking at these systems for positive ideas that Western policymakers might adopt.

But such charges are partisan political rhetoric, with little basis in rigorous policy analysis. It is more accurate to see the current mood as a swing of the US foreign policy pendulum between what Columbia University s Stephen Sestanovich has called maximalist policies and retrenchment policies.

The past three years have seen much less progress on freeing up world trade than almost any free trade advocate would have hoped. Unless the swing of the pendulum in the US can be stopped, the rest of this decade will be as bad.

The root cause of the current global crisis was intellectual hubris in the form of the blind belief that markets would always resolve their own problems and contradictions. Thirty years after the Reagan Thatcher revolution, the ideological pendulum has begun to swing in the opposite direction.

What we can and do claim proudly is that, in the first half century of their existence, United Nations Blue Helmets have saved tens of thousands of lives. In recent times the pendulum may appear to have swung away from the support of United Nations peacekeeping.

American workers and voters are more anxious about job security and more willing to blame anything for job insecurity because they have seen the most profound deterioration in labor market conditions in the memory of anyone younger than eighty five. That slack labor market is powering this swing of the protectionist pendulum.

Yet a resulting general swing back of the pendulum of economic policy must be prevented. A strategy relying on two pillars, linking social and economic policies, should achieve that purpose. On one hand, protectionism above all in developed countries has to be prevented and the pursuit of sound macroeconomic policies has to be actively supported.

As the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development reports, of the 2,156 changes that took place between 1991 and 2004, 93 were in the direction of creating a more hospitable environment for TNC s. But there is a real danger that the pendulum is beginning to swing back, leading to a reversal of that liberalization process.

In moments of extreme fear, the pendulum of attitudes swings toward the security end of that spectrum. Abraham Lincoln suspended the right of habeas corpus the principle that detainees are entitled to challenge their detention in a court of law during the Civil War, and Franklin Roosevelt interned Japanese American citizens during the early days of World War II.

During the two decades prior to the financial crisis, most people including most politicians assumed that the market was supreme. Now the intellectual pendulum may be swinging back to the belief that state action can mop up markets messes just as veneration of the state in the 1930 s followed market worship in the 1920 s.

In the decade after September 11, 2001, the pendulum of public sentiment swung too far to the security pole but it has begun to swing back in the absence of major new terrorist attacks. A recent ABC News Washington Post poll showed that 39 of Americans now say that protecting privacy is more important than investigating terrorist threats, up from only 18 in 2002.

We need to pursue these relevant Utopias and I believe the programme proposed by the 28 countries should be considered in the light of the present international context, but also within the expanding horizon of an international disarmament agenda which is intended to have a decisive impact on the status quo and advance even further the swing of the pendulum in the global security system.