Look what I found in the attic!
It appears to be a small old book, but actually it’s a game for the 1984 Apple Macintosh. It appears for a moment at time stamp 2:41 in the original Steve Job’s announcement for the Macintosh. Oh dear, he’s wearing a bowtie!
The game was written, originally for the Lisa, [...]
Apparently this is the first hurricane, that we know of, to ever form in the South Atlantic. Roughly it’s due east of Uruguay and a bit North while Rio de Janeiro is a bit off the top of this image.
Wednesday, March 10, 2010
I just sold a car I bought back in Sept. of 2003. Back in 2005 I wrote a posting attempting to estimate the cost of owning a car. At the time my estimate was $12.65/day or 42 cents per mile.
I’m not going to attempt to redo that calculation having just handled the appropriate bits of paper [...]
Friday, February 26, 2010
bash-3.2$ curl -I http://www.sun.com/
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Server: Sun-Java-System-Web-Server/7.0
Date: Fri, 26 Feb 2010 15:39:03 GMT
P3p: policyref=”http://www.sun.com/p3p/Sun_P3P_Policy.xml”, CP=”CAO DSP COR CUR ADMa DEVa TAIa PSAa PSDa CONi TELi OUR SAMi PUBi IND PHY ONL PUR COM NAV INT DEM CNT STA POL PRE GOV”
Location: http://www.oracle.com
Content-length: 0
bash-3.2$
Saturday, February 20, 2010
I like how this quote shines a nice light thru the early 20th century literature on consolidation, amalgamation, aka trusts.
“Where combination is possible, competition is impossible.”
While unsurprising it’s frustrating how the left/right debating points have remained the same for over a century
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
“Nobody celebrates just simple businesses that work.” - Matt Haughey
Nice. But. There are reasons for that. A bunch of the reasons are prosaic side effects of the conventions of story telling and the appetites of the audiences of reptilian brains. Setting those aside, but near neighbors, are reasons arise from our perverse fascination with creative destruction. [...]
Saturday, February 13, 2010
This long essay on Trolls (or Conversation Hacking) is quite fun.
“… people rarely refrain from biting on Steve’s baits. He relished every minute of the argument …There you may find the antique equivalent of Trolls : what people at the time called ’sophists’ or ‘philosophers’ – two words that were used interchangeably by the man on the Forum. Many [...]
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
John Hobo has a short piece on his desire for tools for self binding.
“So I maintain that Western Civilization can be saved … if only someone will come up with a simple app for time-locking our computers and mobile devices. Indeed, it would be such a basic and powerful productivity tool that it should come [...]
I find this chart extremely thought provoking. It illustrates a huge change in American society over the course of my life. Very roughly 10% of the male working age population no longer work. Each time we have a recession a few percentage points never return to the work force.
A few insta-theories:
The discriminatory wage differential means [...]
I liked this tentative list from Peter Gray’s “Freedom to Learn” blog at Psychology Today. Writing on the Value of Play he begins with a long definition, in short:
Play is self-chosen and self-directed;
Play is activity in which means are more valued than ends;
Play has structure, or rules, which are not dictated by physical necessity but emanate from [...]