Lost in OK

If you ever wanted a sign that the world is coming to an end, here it is:

At the time Elvis Presley died in 1977, he had 150 impersonators in the US. Now, according to calculations I spotted in a Sunday newspaper color supplement recently, there are 85,000. Intriguingly, that means one in every 3,400 Americans is an Elvis impersonator. More disturbingly, if Elvis impersonators continue multiplying at the same rate, they will account for a third of the world’s population by 2019.

[Read More]

Well, I’ve vanished again. I wish I had some exciting excuse for my absence, but it’s the same old, same old. Working like a dog and being similarly productive. But things are good. We are doing incredible things at work right now and it’s exciting to see it develop.

I have very little to report on the social front. I made my way to Chicago a few weeks back for the bachelor party for my friend Rob. The party was fun and it was good see good friends; nothing too wild or crazy, but certainly a good send off from bachelorhood. However, there was quite an adventure on my way up to Chicago that I thought I would pass along . . .

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.

[Read More]

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?

[Read More]

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.