friends far away

Posted on Friday, 2004 December 31 by Anton

I am pleased to hear from Udhay that his family in Madras are all safe.

Madhu apparently was in transit from Sunnyvale to Bangalore at the time of the disaster. I hope his path was not through Bangkok!

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links? what links?

Posted on Friday, 2004 December 31 by Anton

why women live longer

backyard monorail

animation of the Sumatra tsunami

Operation Republican Freedom

Conduct Unbecoming

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the jolly old elf

Posted on Wednesday, 2004 December 29 by Anton

My contemporary Jim Henley (alternate archive) reminisces:

Dammit, when I was a boy we had to work at atheism and agnosticism. We walked uphill in the snow – both ways! – to doubt the cogito! Nobody handed us disbelief on an hors d’oeuvre tray like these lazy brats you see nowadays, with their video games and their piercings!

This comes in the middle of some musings on the effects of Santa Clausery.

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a rifled revolver

Posted on Saturday, 2004 December 25 by Anton

In the first episode of Have Gun Will Travel (1957), Paladin points out that his custom-made revolver has a rifled barrel, “a rarity in a hand weapon.” Say what?!

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mark your calendar

Posted on Saturday, 2004 December 25 by Anton

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.

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a hacker’s tale

Posted on Friday, 2004 December 24 by Anton

I hope this yarn is true: one of my favorite MacOS toys was developed clandestinely.

We wanted to release a Windows version as part of Windows 98, but sadly, Microsoft has effective building security.

(Cited by Travis.)

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temporal foreshortening

Posted on Friday, 2004 December 24 by Anton

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

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