missing energy
Got a spam (three or four times now) from a Christian kook. In the middle of the prophecies about nuclear war and the biochip of the beast is a paragraph about Creation, including:
THE LATEST RESEARCH IN MOLECULAR PHYSICS HAS COME TO THE CONCLUSION THAT 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (APPROXIMATLY 10 TO THE 34th POWER) JEWLS (POWER UNIT) NEEDS TO BE INPUTED INTO THE WHOLE UNVERSE EVERY SECOND TO KEEP IT FROM FALLING COMPLETELY APART. THEY DON’T KNOW WHERE THIS ENERGY COME S FROM BUT (— THIS IS ENOUGH ENERGY TO LIGHT NEW YORK CITY FOR 200 YEARS –) THIS IS PART OF THE WILL OF GOD- PLAIN AND SIMPLE-.
Whee! Where do they find this stuff? Of what is it a distortion?
If my figures are right 10^33 watts is about 3 million suns; negligible in the Galaxy, beneath measure in the Universe. But 10^33 joules is indeed enough to power New York City for two hundred years – assuming 8 million people each using twenty terawatts.
having a Lilecious day
. . . in the slow moments of my temp job.
Lileks watches 9/11 documentary:
It says something about America that you can’t blow up an average skyscraper without killing people of every race and creed on the planet.
It says something about America’s critics that fighting Arab Islamists is automatically racist — and the murder of diverse peoples by an ethnically homogenous group is explained as a response to . . . racist American policies.
Lileks explains practical socialism:
(It’s always okay to kill lower-case people on behalf of upper-case People. Class warfare always involves a lot of case warfare.)
Lileks on presidential language:
in the entirelty of Bill Clinton’s career he issued an endless stream of soggy bloviation, and the only three lines for which he will be remembered — “The era of big government is over,” “It depends what the meaning of the word is is,” and “I did not have sex with that woman” — were, in turn, insincere, evasive, and dishonest.
Aw come on. What about “We can’t be so fixated on our desire to preserve the rights of ordinary Americans”?
stupid computers
Save me from software that tries to outsmart me!
( . . more . . )
QotD
Eric Raymond: Why Python?
Ugly programs are like ugly suspension bridges: they’re much more liable to collapse than pretty ones, because the way humans (especially engineer-humans) perceive beauty is intimately related to our ability to process and understand complexity. A language that makes it hard to write elegant code makes it hard to write good code.
successful turns of phrase
The phrase “Iron Curtain” was coined by Churchill in a speech in Missouri, if memory serves. Is there a known source for “Cold War”?
Update: Dan Kohn did the legwork and got the goods:
Cold War
This term for a conflict between nations that falls short of all-out war was coined, appropriately enough, by George Orwell in October 1945. Many, including Safire, credit Bayard Swope, a speech writer for Bernard Baruch[,] for coining the term in a draft speech in 1946. Baruch didn’t use the phrase, though, until 1947. But Orwell beat him to the punch in an article in the Tribune.
Dan adds, “BTW, Churchill’s speech is here“.
yes, I’m bigger than you; so?
Lately the panhandlers (and nobody else) keep addressing me as “big guy”. They did not always, or so it seems.
I suppose I could reply, “What do you want, little guy?”