this and that

I’m sneezing up a storm today, and the good old allergy pill hasn’t helped. I do hope it’s not the same virus that afflicted my housemate for two weeks last month.

Who is the center of the movie universe? Kevin Bacon is not even in the top thousand. Rod Steiger has the lowest total path length. But would the result be different if actors were weighted by some measure of prominence (e.g. number of credits)?

It’s annoying to find a crank on our side. Rex Curry has for some time been documenting the sordid history of the Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag, and bully for him; but lately he’s gone a bit nuts in his efforts to demonstrate that the Nazi swastika stands for Socialism, frequently citing sources that, like this, show the word Sieg or Sieg-rune (symbol of victory, appropriate to any flavor of statism) but not Sozialismus; and here he reads a scribbled Adolf as another S-rune (standing for Sozialist, since no other German word begins with S) despite the wiggly remnants of the original letters and the cross-stroke of the f. Rex, a few pieces of unambiguous evidence – which are probably somewhere in among the chaff – would be far more effective than this farrago.

I lived in Los Angeles for three years without ever knowing how to get to the Hollywood Sign. And speaking of views from on high, every time I fly to Chicago (come to think of it, the last time was quite a few years ago) I look for Fermilab, but I’ve never spotted a buffalo.

Aaron Krowne should stick to mathematics rather than writing absurdities like this:

The H1-B program has allowed companies hiring software engineers to pay less for more engineers by running to the government for help.

As if there were no migration in a state of nature! It would be more accurate to say that the Immigration Acts (in which you’ll find the H-1B program) allow skilled natives to get paid more by running to the government to restrict supply. This incidentally reduces the wages of similar workers in other countries, giving foreign employers a price advantage (to the extent that their products are able to enter the market).