mark your calendar
Asteroid 2004MN4 is an exceptionally high impact threat: the boffins give it one chance in 45 of intersecting with Earth on 2029 April 13.
Monday: Or not; newer measurements have taken that date off the list, though they still give 2004MN4 one chance in about thirty thousand of hitting us sometime in the coming century.
temporal foreshortening
On a private mailing list someone wrote:
having just seen the 1951 Britisher version of the Dickens Christmas Carol, it struck me that free marketeers should really live in Dickensian England and try work their way out from the bottom.
I thought of writing a rant about Dickens’s sins, but a better approach presented itself:
FYI
1838: Oliver Twist
1843: A Christmas Carol
1846: repeal of the Corn Laws — commonly cited as the first triumph of the free trade movement
Doctor Matrix’s little helpers
Ed Pegg writes:
I’d like to do a “behind the scenes” look at Mathematical Games for an article. Martin [Gardner] did lots, but he avidly used a lot of help from hundreds of people. I’d like to write an article about the background help. If you ever assisted in one of Martin’s columns, I’d like to hear from you — a note about what you did. I’ll use these notes in my article.
A link from Pegg leads indirectly to a collection of weird and wonderful algorithmic paintings.
if only you believed in miracles
Travis found a choice rant by Don Boudreaux at Cafe Hayek:
But the bluest blue-state left-“liberal” atheist oughtn’t be too quick with the self-congratulatory praise of his or her own rational faculties. Most left-liberals are pure creationists when it comes to society and social order. For them, government is the creator of order . . . .