Frank has been fascinated with large numbers lately, especially googol. A googol is larger than the number of particles in the known universe. He keeps asking me questions about that. “are there a googol ants in the world? nope. are there a googol pieces of sand? nope. are there a googol stars? nope.
“There are”, I told him, “more than a googol chess games.”
After contemplating this, he says,
“I’d like to try some of those other kinds of chess”
I predict that what is happening in the U.S. economy is akin to shedding weight, the slimming-down process of a lean, mean, fighting machine.
Furthermore, I predict a rapid recovery, next year in 2009. Yes, oil is high–so what? This is an opportunity to make money in oil, so let’s make some money in oil. Energy troubles and the high costs associated with higher oil prices–BUNK! We will adapt–and faster than the egg-heads think. Why? Because this is America, and Americans think big. That’s who we are. It’s what Bernstein forgets: We built-up Europe from rubble and ash–and we’re not finished building-up, because we love freedom.
Don’t separate economics from the realm of absolute moral valuations. Yeah, we tripped and skinned our knees, but we’ll get up and climb higher, because that is who we are. AND WE WILL SUCCEED.
Freedom is on the march in the world.
God bless America, and God bless the civilization of the American peoples–rock of the global age.
It would be easy to make fun of this person, assuming he’s serious. It would be more honest to report that I hear this sentiment voiced by everyone from prius-driving progressives to Escalade driving maniacs. Everyone thinks we will just zen this thing at the last minute. If so, we are sure saving the “21st century technology” fix-it card for the very last minute.
on the other hand,
There’s an eerie vibe out there that things are seriously out-of-whack. We’re on the edge of something. We’re at the entrance of a dark passage where some of the ceremonies of daily life meet resistance. You go to the WalMart and five of your six credit cards are refused. Uh oh. It begins to dawn on you that you’re spending a quarter of your take-home pay filling up the gas-tank every week. There’s no dial tone when you pick up the telephone. How could all the supermarkets in town be out of rice? The local hospital just declared bankruptcy. The neighbors down the street auctioned off all their furniture in the driveway last week
I like the first guy’s outlook better too.
Cub foods has a deal to encourage you to spend the stimulus checks on grocery gift cards: Spend $300.00, get $30
Ice lingered in the shadows on the trail this morning. I will enjoy the cool weather as long as it lasts.
I was in Southern CA for my cousin’s wedding. It was a beautiful event and really great to spend time with family.
I rented a mountain bike and rode into the hills. A mysterious record heat wave boils brains the hills bust guts. I rode about 200 yards and flushed, parched, and sunburned, I started imagining search and rescue teams hauling my bleached bones out of a canyon in a few days.
Once I got to the top of the ridge, I descended past running birds, lizards, and bunnies…. and dozens of palaces under construction.
I’ve never ridden a full suspension bike before and while I liked going over obstacles on the downhills, the uphills were trouble. I could not stand up and haul on the handlebars because the bike wiggled too much.
Don’t worry about LA and the coming global shitstorm. Things are fine here. people still hose off their driveways and drive up and down 40 degree inclines for their bottled water and beef.
I took a break from bicycling today because of an incident with an F350. If I’m getting that hot-headed, I need to take a break.
I don’t have a linear explanation. Lets just say that hearing huge pickups rev their engine to indicate that I should get out of the way is about the equivalent of being spit on, so lets say I reacted as if I was spit on. Lets also say I’ll be using a different route home for a while… and wearing a fake mustache. and celebrating the price of gas. Oh yeah. Eat it America.
It was kind of a drag getting two flats on yesterday’s Hiwawatha ride, but the nice thing was the speed with which the tire irons, pumps and spare tubes came out once someone yelled “FLAT!”. It was like a western, except with bike tools instead of pistols. I haven’t seen people pull stuff out of pockets that fast since I was in a Java class and the svelte instructor said, “Which one of you geeks has a Leatherman so I can cut the shrink wrap off of these manuals?”
Luckily, one of the stops we made was at the Cars R Coffins bike cafe on Lyndale. He sells coffee and bikes and, I’m told, is THE regional expert on bicycle suspensions. I bought myself a new tire there. The old one was full of cuts and embedded bits.
The bathroom there has the best decoration ever: an x-ray viewer complete with films of the proprietor’s fractured limbs.
That flat fixing method I’ve been using since 3rd grade? Amazingly slow when people are watching… Time to work on that. The plan of deciding not to get a flat and therefore not needing tools and spare tube? Only works with the expensive, flat resistant Continentals I have on my other bike.
It sure is windy. I joined the Saint Anthony Park neighborhood weekly bike ride tonight. One other guy, the ride leader, showed up. He was quite an athletic young man. We rode straight into the wind for almost an hour and then turned around and rode back. It feels marvelous to be on skinny tires again, but think I crippled myself. My lower back and butt were on fire. Sitting here, I can hear my knees gurgling as they fill up with fluid.
It is good to ride with someone who will drive you to ride faster than you would alone. I should be all healed up by next week.
in 1978 I was riding my bike to the Hole in the Wall record store next to LiL’ Peach to buy Beach Boys records, but in Atlanta….
That is going on my list of favorite cover songs.
thanks to the crew at Hex message for pointing these out.
I like this one a lot too:
I used to disregard Michelle Bachmann, but now I see she might secretly be a situationist comedienne:
“They point the finger of blame at you — you drive too much, you drive the wrong kind of car, you use the wrong kind of light bulb,” she said. “What America needs is a $2 gallon of gasoline.”
One of my favorite quotes ever:
“The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum - even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.”
Today, reviewing a list of his quotes and things people say about him, I see that he is an easy and popular target of people who earn their living ranting and raving about subjects safely within the spectrum of acceptable opinion. Right or wrong, he forces people to evaluate ideas they don’t even want to think about and he says these things without regard for his reputation. That is why I appreciate him.
I also liked this praise from an unlikely source:
“It’s a real shame that only Mr. Chomsky’s tedious harangues against America get any attention. His body of work deserves more serious treatment. The interesting yet overlooked aspects of his political philosophy cannot easily fit into the left-right dichotomy. What makes Mr. Chomsky unique is that his criticism of the capitalist economic order takes its point of departure from the classical liberal thinkers of the Enlightenment. His heroes are not Lenin and Marx but Adam Smith and Wilhelm von Humboldt. He argues that the free market envisaged by these thinkers has never materialized in the world and that what we have gotten instead is a collusion of the state with private interests. Moreover he has repeatedly stressed that the attacks on democracy and the market by the big multinationals go hand in hand. The rich, he claims, echoing Adam Smith, are too keen to preach the benefits of market discipline to the poor while they reserve for themselves the right to be bailed out by the state whenever the going gets rough. As he puts it: “The free market is socialism for the rich. Markets for the poor and state protection for the rich.” He has spoken positively about the work of Peruvian liberal economist Hernando De Soto who sees the problem of poverty in the Third World as being related to the fact that the poor usually lack clearly defined property rights.” –Wall Street Journal, November 4, 2005
I think this quote also rings eerily true. It violates the rule of “don’t look for conspiracy when incompetence explains everything so well”, but it if I was an energy company with a choice between costly exploration and a friendly government handing me proven reserves that used to be under contract to France and China, yeah, I can see it.
“To gain control over this resource, and have probably military bases there, is a tremendous achievement for world control. You read counter-arguments to this, and they’re worth looking at. So it’s argued that it can’t be true, because the costs of reconstruction are gonna be greater than the profits that will be made. Well, maybe that’s true, maybe it isn’t, but it’s totally irrelevant. And the reason is because the costs of reconstruction are gonna be paid by the taxpayer, by you, and the profits are gonna go right into the pockets of the energy corporations. So yeah, it doesn’t matter how they balance out, it’s just another taxpayer subsidy to the rich.”
It is fun to watch how plastic truth can be when I read these quotes by him and then read his detractors at the bottom of the page.
The past two mornings, the same goose has attacked me as I ride by, yesterday attacking me from the side and beating his wings against me, this morning sneaking up silently from behind and crashing into my helmet. I always scream like a chimp when it happens.
When an animal gets this aggressive, my first thought is that it is going to wear itself out and die. Animals, especially in early spring, don’t have all this excess energy to spend against perceived threats.
I was asked today if I still needed a screen I had established a few months ago on a Linux server. It had my editing session open with my cursor still blinking in the same place I left it. I knew that screen kept your work alive independent of your connection to a remote box, but it didn’t fully register that the sessions are “forever”.
“Screen” is a gnu utility that many Linux users are enjoying quietly. It is great for working remotely because it lets you quit or be disconnected from your remote session without losing your working environment.
Neat things about “screen”
Just as an example, when logging in remotely to some work, there are like 8 steps to get to exactly where I need to be. When I know I’m going to have to login again soon, I keep a screen alive, and “getting there” is reduced to one command.
Late Saturday afternoon, after chugging 20 ounces of a beer called 110th element, the doorbell rang and I suddenly found myself over-confidently re-arranging vehicles for a huge delivery truck. Afterwards, I noticed hair hanging out of my tailpipe. I pulled about 20 feet of the thick dark stuff out. I was having trouble believing what I was seeing. I thought it must be one of the following:
1. The intense hops of Element 110 caused me to hallucinate. This was the first hallucination I’ve ever had that left an artifact that other people could see.
2. Damn kids pulled the old insanely-long-hair-up-the-pipe trick on me.
3. the inside of my car is made of hair.
It turns out that #3 is correct. Hondas use a muffler baffled with this substance and it often comes out when the muffler goes.
Spent a couple of hours tonight helping setup the TCGIS garage sale. Check it out on Craig’s List. There are some good things there: A ladder, some tools. a baby jogger. some good computer books. Ok. The computer books were donated by me and I displayed them prominently on the rack so that the first people at the sale would spot them from across the room and go, “wow. look at the book selection on TCGIS”.
Spotted also was the ubiquitous pine-cone wreath and the inevitable white shirt with burnt-orange stain around collar. But mostly there are some nice things. Lots of jeans for adults.
Frank was there with me. He was amazed to see so many exact duplicates of things we had at home. He walked up to a strange mechanical device and asked what it was. I showed him how to load paper into it and press the buttons to make thin metal hammers zip out and smack a faded dry ribbon into the paper and leave a faint black P.
We went on a German school outing to the north shore this past weekend. It was restful.
Kids had some weird congested snuffling problem that caused them to wake up in the night. To my utter and lasting surprise, the homeopathic remedy we bought for $11.00 at the Grand Marais Coop didn’t do shit. It was kind of entertaining as Frank flopped violently around the hotel room trying to dislodge the remedy. Should have read the directions better.
We didn’t feel like we could afford skiing, so we took a couple of nice hikes around Grand Marais and spent hours in the municipal pool’s hot tub, listening to the locals chat about their money problems. The scenery was very much about the transition from winter to spring. We were standing on the beach north of town at the exact moment the ice broke up. Just before it happened, the waves were making the thin ice undulate. Gulls, just to show they could do it, were out there standing on it, pretending to walk on water. Then it all came apart and ice pushed to shore in great broken plates. We could balance large stones on top of the broken ice and watch them appear to float.
Several kids brought their violins and put on a little impromptu concert for us.
