This strange map recently appeared in Powell BART station:

Forward is to the left because that’s the way the train goes, as seen by a passenger facing the map. What’s strange about it is that the minor branchings are true to topology but the major branching is not: the rightmost path, which ought to be on top, is to Fremont (green), followed by Dublin (blue), Pittsburg (yellow), Richmond (red).

Perhaps the designer originally intended to include the Fremont-Richmond line (orange), which on this diagram would fit like a lining within the major fork. That would make the chart more useful, because after 7 pm and on Sundays the red and green lines don’t run: to get to Fremont or Richmond from Powell, you must switch from blue or yellow to orange.

Me: “Hamachi sashimi.”

Cashier: “It depends on what kind of fish, sir.”

Jonny Crossbones is an adventure in the style of Tintin.

Strange Maps is a new blog of obscure and hypothetical geography. Linked from a comment there is a Regional Map of North America’s Place-Based Food Traditions, showing Maple Syrup Nation, Pinyon Nut Nation, Salmon Nation and so on.

nun isn’t weatherproof

Number Systems of the World: lists of number-words from 0 to 100, ranked, somewhat arbitrarily, by “complexity”. (Cited by LanguageHat.) To me the most remarkable is Alamblak (#7) whose number-words are all compounded from the words for 1, 2, 5 and 20, thus 56 is yima hosfi tir hosfirpati rpat = twenties two, fives two-one, one.

On Wikipedia, a quarrel over this sentence:

Most members of libertarian parties support low taxes and a balanced budget because they believe citizens should keep most of the money they earn, while logically consistent libertarians, including anarcho-capitalists, refuse all methods to subject people to tax.

The words logically consistent were inserted by Irgendwer (German for anywho), who objects to replacing them with radical or even other. While any taxation is obviously inconsistent with the letter of the nonaggression principle, I do not agree that the NAP is the only coherent foundation for libertarian policy; two proofs of the same theorem need not resemble each other. (See also.) I see nothing logically inconsistent in the minarchist opinion that an anarchic order cannot keep the burden of crime below that of crime-plus-tax in a well-conceived low-tax state, and thus that such a state minimizes coercion (which is undesirable even if not the fundamental sin). I’m an anarchist not because I believe such a state is logically impossible but because I believe it is practically impossible: to prevent such a state from mutating into a predator is a prohibitively difficult engineering problem, which does not lend itself to empirical tinkering.

Some libertarian writers worry too much about the deficiencies of either NAP or utilitarianism in extreme cases. In the absence of divine revelation, moral philosophy makes more sense as an empirical science than as an axiomatic one like mathematics (or theology!). It’s a bit incongruous to insist on individualism, whose moral force comes from our observable differences, and on an axiomatic approach, which must abstract away some of those differences.

An empirical science infers the axioms (laws of nature) from the “theorems” (phenomena), and tests them by attempting to derive the latter from the former. If the derivation fails, the scientist asks where was the flaw in my reasoning? and the engineer asks is this approximation good enough to work with until a better one comes along? As a citizen (by which I mean a member of a civilization) seeking to live a moral life, I am more engineer than scientist; I find the nonaggression principle both “close enough” and conveniently simple. And the Coase principle suggests that wherever nonaggression is not “close enough” the deficiency is not the end of the world.

Thus spake the insomniac, who hopes no one was overly bored by it.

David Morgan-Mar points out that, thanks to modern technology, one needn’t be born in London to claim Cockney status.