to boldly spam

A recent fad in spam is Star Trek filler:

Sisko swiveled toward his chief engineer. “What do you think? Is there anybody still aboard the cargo shuttle?”
The commander nodded grudgingly. “Yes, I know. But you thought they might steal a couple of pods off the station. This is bigger than that. What did those Klingon renegades get out of it? Not the antimatter. So we have to assume that they were paid for their participation.”
Epilogue
“No!” she shouted.
The planet was a bit closer now, a bit more fiery at the edges, but it remained dark and essentially featureless. Picard peered at it as if he could have spotted the Mendel just by looking hard enough- as if he could have outdone the Enterprise’s vast array of instruments, not to mention Troi’s considerable abilities, by determination alone.

I wonder what’s the source.

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amazing restraint

Roderick Long defines right-conflationism as defending existing economic structures as if they were outcomes of a genuinely free market (what Kevin Carson calls vulgar libertarianism), and left-conflationism as using those outcomes to attack the concept of free markets. I hope my paraphrasing doesn’t offend either of them.

Left-conflationism asks us to believe that Big Business, through its corrupt control of legislatures, prevents political interference in the market and goes no further; that mere market freedom allows it to loot us so thoroughly that it does not seek subsidies or protection from competition.

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n-k-1

The blog “Degrees of Freedom”, which had been inactive for some time when last I looked at it, has vanished. James, do you still visit here?

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preprocessor fail

I’ve been getting comments like this: Continue reading

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late antiquity

An argument is offered that New Zealand is the wrong place to film Tolkien’s works:

One of Tolkien’s great accomplishments was making Middle-earth seem vividly old. Wherever the reader looks, ruins and crumbling statues poke through the lichen. […]

To do justice to Tolkien—to capture the essence of Middle-earth—a filmmaker needs to convey that sensibility. And the problem with New Zealand is that it is decidedly young—both geologically and as a place inhabited by people. […]

The criticism of tone is valid, but on the other hand: our world is, by definition, older than Bilbo’s; Tolkien had no grasp of geology anyway; Eriador has been depopulated (why?) for a thousand years by Bilbo’s time, and Rhovanion always was relatively empty.

Posted in cinema, prose | 2 Comments

do you speak my calendar?

In MacBSD, the command cal 9 1752 shows the shortening of that month in the British Empire. If I reinstall MacOS and choose Italian as its default language, will the shift show up instead in October 1582?

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off by one

A look at 404s in my HTTP log revealed a bug in my math pix page, which in two places chooses randomly from families of images. I didn’t know that the PHP function rand(nmin,nmax) is inclusive at both ends.

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