Lost in OK

Here’s an interesting little article about a classical Greek computing device that was discovered around 1900:

At the beginning of the 20th century, historians were shocked to learn that Greek thinkers had built a rather sophisticated analog computer in the neighborhood of 82 B.C. and then, astonishingly, left no record of its existence.

[Via: Interesting Thing of the Day: The Antikythera Mechanism]

I’ve always been fascinated with knowledge that has been made and then lost for centuries. I remember seeing a great documentary by Nova on the history of the Archimedes Palimpsest in which he toys around with many of the concepts of integral calculus some 2000 years before Newton and Leibniz. Ah, it just breaks your heart to think of the knowledge lost of the numerous fires of the ancient libraries.

Perry de Havilland over at Samzidata, in his usual English way, has a much more calm response to this Marxism on the Right article:

To be a libertarian is to believe that society (which is the sum of its parts but not more than that), not the state, is what actually matters, and moreover the state, far from being society’s protector as conservatives fondly imagine, is as often as not highly corrosive to many of the very values conservatives often implausibly claim to champion.

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If you ever wondered why I’m not a Republican, you should check out this article by Robert Locke at the The American Conservative. The Republican Party is made up primarily of pragmatists to whom the following questions are logically consistent:

Libertarians need to be asked some hard questions. What if a free society needed to draft its citizens in order to remain free? What if it needed to limit oil imports to protect the economic freedom of its citizens from unfriendly foreigners? What if it needed to force its citizens to become sufficiently educated to sustain a free society? What if it needed to deprive landowners of the freedom to refuse to sell their property as a precondition for giving everyone freedom of movement on highways? What if it needed to deprive citizens of the freedom to import cheap foreign labor in order to keep out poor foreigners who would vote for socialistic wealth redistribution?

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According to This Day in Music, the number one song in the US on my birthday was “Play that Funky Music” by Wild Cherry. There is just no way to put a good spin on that.

Finally, a theme for all you Mozilla Pimps out there: Pimpzilla [Via: Photo Matt » Firefox Theme]

I’ve signed up for a neat dual purpose service called AudioScrobbler. Essentially, it tracks every song you play on your local machine, uploads them to their server and builds a musical profile of your taste. They then use that information to sell to record companies to help them market their new music to the appropriate listeners. They do that through a great little radio station tied in called last.fm which, once you have a nice profile built up it really does a great job of introducing you to new music that doesn’t drive you completely nuts.

There is a great discussion going on over at the Beckner - Posner Blog (the dueling University of Chicago Professors) about ways to solve the illegal immigration problem including one of the best ideas I’ve never thought of: charge for admittance.

Given these realities of free immigration, the best alternative to the present quota system is an ancient way of allocating a scarce and popular good; namely, by charging a price that clears the market. That is why I believe countries should sell the right to immigrate, especially the United States that has so many persons waiting to immigrate. To illustrate how a price system would work, suppose the United States charges $50,000 for the right to immigrate, and agrees to accept all applicants willing to pay that price, subject to a few important qualifications. These qualifications would require that those accepted not have any serious diseases, or terrorist backgrounds, or criminal records.

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Hunter S. Thompson, the acerbic counterculture writer who popularized a new form of fictional journalism in books like “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” fatally shot himself Sunday night at his home, his son said. He was 67.

[Via: Yahoo! News - Author Hunter S. Thompson Kills Himself]

I don’t know how to feel about this one. I always though that it was a complete waste that Thompson had such an abundant writing talent and squandered it on the meaningless and trite. However, it is sad that such a raw talent disappear. Well, I hope the afterlife is as gonzo as the real world was for you.

Thanks to the excellent help of the guys over at WordPress, the feeds are back. Besides this little set back, 1.5 is a great product. The theme system alone is enough to make it worth while. I’m still evaluating looking at a .NET product, such as DasBlog, so that I would be in a better position to edit the system, but for the time being I’m shelving any conversion for the time being.