131.9 cents per litre is somewhere between surf rats and shipsterns
Some things this week:
Why’s Camping for quickie site
Git creative at github for quickie versioning
duplicity for quickie encrypted backups to S3
stackoverflow for quickie answers
Media Plugin for quickie embedding
hadoop for quickie figure-outing.
The minute waltz, non-prime and 120-harmonic-reversed are worth listening to for a few hours on end.
“The system of banking [is] a blot left in all our Constitutions, which, if not covered, will end in their destruction…
I sincerely believe that banking institutions are more dangerous than standing armies; and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity… is but swindling futurity on a large scale.”
Thomas Jefferson, it should be noted, died deeply in debt. He contracted to sell landholdings before the Revolutionary War - but the payments he received were given in paper money after the war, which due to hyperinflation (itself caused by massive issuance of debt by the Continental Congress), were worth nothing. Any similarity to events past or present is purely coincidental.
says a long time Wall St. trader. If only it were so. Richard Fuld, the CEO of Lehman for the last 14 years, has had to suffer such indignities as cashing only a $40million paycheck, and seeing his Florida home lose about $4million in value during this housing crisis. Did he even notice this change fall out of his pocket? Not likely. In an ideal world, nobody would give these guys any more money, as their own personal risk is essentially nil - they can simply shrug and go back to eating exotic food and complaining about the help. Meanwhile, will we continue trusting our life savings to them? it looks less and less likely that the patchwork plumbing (based on fragile absurdities like Fractional Reserve, and Bretton Woods II) will hold together long enough for us to ever get it back.
If physicists don’t find the God Particle, create Dark Matter, reveal the nth dimension, or develop the Theory of Everything, at least the Large Hadron Collider will have resulted in the lyric “the LHC accelerates the protons and lead / and the things that it discovers will rock you in the head“. That definitely furthers human advancement - rumor has it there is a Neutrino Detector in Antartica called Ice Cube that will soon create its own rap and video, with penguins instead of fly girls.
A French team of mathemeticians and computer artists has just released a documentary that attempts to help us mere math-mortals transcend the three-dimensional space we are trapped in, and visualize regular polyhedra in 4 dimensions just as a Escher tile-lizard might visualize our 3-D world. The two hours worth of videos are very well done, and also touch on fractals, the Juliet Set, complex numbers and topology. This correspondent was only able to catch a tiny glimpse of 4-space, but it was stunning. It looks like an exquisite world, maybe even more beautiful than ours.
And speaking of totalitarian police states, it has come to my attention that Jack Grimes, indefatigable leader of the United Fascist Union, and 2008 candidate for US president, who wants to re-make America in the model of Mussolini’s Italy, with mandatory worship of the Roman Pantheon, is from my home town. Yet another reason to be proud.
Speaking of security - unfortunately the Playmobil Security Checkpoint is out of stock. This toy would really help any young thought-criminal become habituated to the pervasive “security apparatus” they will be growing up under the all-seeing eye of. But while the children in the overseas toy factories ramp up production of this item, you can always use the black helicopter and the police roadblock to teach budding DHS Stormtroopers how to detain miscreant Safe Crackers and take their DNA samples before throwing them in the Enemy Combatant Detention Center where they will never be heard from again.