Random bits
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2010-04-06
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2009-12-23
The world is the totality of facts, not of things.
— Ludwig Wittgenstein
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2009-12-14
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2009-12-09
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Edsger W. Dijkstra on “the financial industry”
“…An unpleasant complication is that the world of finance is so disreputable and that a whole bunch of new euphemisms has to be introduced to cover up this new layer of dishonesty. For instance, there is no such thing as “making money”: some people succeed in transferring money out of the pockets of others into their own. A number of years ago, the institutions that try to become rich by speculating at someone else’s expense —in Western Civilization known as a “bank”— needed a new euphemism to cover their activities and they started to refer to themselves as “the financial industry”. Lately, they have started to refer to their more elaborate extortion schemes as “(sophisticated) banking products”! Industries are expected to produce something, aren’t they?”
— Edsger W. Dijkstra, December 3, 1993, http://bit.ly/8QYa1X -
2009-12-07
How the Soviet Union collapse contributed to global warming
When the Soviet Union rapidly collapsed in 1989/91 they did not maintain many of their surface temperature measuring stations. Thousands of the cold stations were closed.
Source: “Non-Aerospace Research Quests of a Designer/Flight Test Engineer” by Burt Rutan (a PDF file): http://bit.ly/TmdZC
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2009-11-28
Source: textfiles.com
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2009-11-25
St. Mary’s Cathedral, San Francisco
