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Quote of the moment
This actually dovetails nicely with Bevelry’s adage “Look as busy as possible” theory of retail. From the 37 signals book “Getting Real”
If you want something done, ask the busiest person you know
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Sign ranting
Check out the short rants on a roadside sign in Pennsylvania.
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Not dead
And I did make it to Alabama, just not all the way back under my own power (though I did make it back, thanks Mike and Erin!).
More details later.
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15 million illegal immigrants can’t be wrong
Happy Birthday America!
You’re 230 today! That’s 1,610 in dog years. And over 140 years without a civil war, which isn’t that bad, considering.
I’m off to celebrate the day by riding to Alabama and back. If this site isn’t updated by this time tommorow, would someone please look for me?
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Biz Links
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Quote of the moment
There is scarcely anything in the world that some man cannot make a little worse, and sell a little more cheaply. The person who buys on price alone is this man’s lawful prey.
John Ruskin -
Sunday round up
- Cool Outlook tool – with mapping
- Flash + AJAX – could be cool, it seem to duplicate Atlas and Ruby on Rails, but could still be useful
- Hansel Minutes – for good taste in code
- A good description of government
The federal government is like a fence around a farm. The fence raises no crops of wheat and no fields of corn. It only protects the farmer while he raises his crops, he giving a good portion of his time to keep the fence in repair. Just so we give a good share of our taxes to keep the great government fence in repair. I beg of you to keep this thought in mind that government has not a dollar to give any man not a bed, not a cow or calf. Nothing but protection while you are at work for yourself. Government has nothing to give anybody.
- Photoshop Plug Ins!
- I think Blurb will be the publisher of my first photo book.
- An interesting history of the John Birch Society
- Online Diagrams! Finally.
- Brain Scanners? I remember this from a GI Joe comic in 1984.
- Possibly a real electric car. I’ll let you know when I find out more.
- Atlas the ever shrill goes to a protest. The interesting point is the mixture of text, photos and video on the page.
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What dreams may come
Yesterday I did a tough 80 miles on the Silver Comet. It was a hotter than usual, and for some reason I decided to push myself speed wise. I averaged a mile an hour over my usual speed for that distance, and my heart rate was about 10-15 bpm over the usual rate as well. I mistimed the start of the ride and wound up riding for an hour in a darkness usually found in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Riding safely in this sort of dark mandated an unusually upright and uncomfortable posture for the final hour (I had to keep my vision focused on the area covered by my headlight, which was small).
I’m also on a low-carb kick at the moment.
After I got home I finished Eric Hoffer’s autobiography, Truth Imagined. I’m sure I’ll have more thoughts on the book later. The book describes his time as a migrant farm worker in California in the 20s and 30s. One interesting thing he writes about is the sheer variety of people he encountered while on the bum. People of learning and accomplishment, forced by the depression into a migrant way of life. It struck me that this is a as a little remarked price of prosperity, as well as the relative meritocracy that is part and parcel of a free society. To wit; in good times one is more likely to meet people just like oneself than in times of physical and economic catastrophe, for good or ill.
That night I had a dream where I attended a cocktail party, wearing a tuxedo. I was talking to an interesting and confident woman my age named Trea. I had told her the observation mentioned above and she opined that I had the cause and effect backward. Economic catastrophe’s are caused by the mixing of people (grouped by ability, not race) which interferes with the division and specialization of labor.
What does this labor produce? Society and culture. The conventional view (of mine anyway) is that society and culture are like an investment portfolio; it’s outside one’s immediate grasp, it changes over time, and grows incrementally. Trea’s view was that society is produced and consumed, and does not change incrementally at all. It’s like the contents of one’s pantry; food goes in, it goes out, but it doesn’t last forever, and neither grows nor evolves.
In economic parlance, society/culture are stocks, not flows, which is the way I usually think of them.
I’ve usually don’t have these sort of dreams, nor do I have new (to me) ideas in dreams. I’m not sure what to make of it all.
And if you’ve read this far, I’m impressed.
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Johnny Cash
MySpace is streaming the soon be released final Johnny Cash album this weekend, it’s here http://www.myspace.com/johnnycash. It’s the final Rick Rubin/American record.
It’s being released on July 4th.
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Things that annoy me about our modern world
At the moment, it’s the politically correct West, and their treatment of Islam. I recently came across an ad for the movie Islam: What the West Needs to Know.
I read the site and found it irritating. The phrase “religion of peace” has been repeated often enough to be ridiculous, and it is a patently ludicrous assumption. But the opposite of a falsehood is not necessarily the truth, it’s usually another falsehood, as it is in this case.
Plainly put, saying a religion is a religion of peace is about as meaningful as saying the Norelco Bodygroom is an electric shaver of peace; it’s a term that doesn’t apply. Religions aren’t inherently anything, it’s all in the practice, and that varies with people location and time. If the practice at a given point in time and place is warlike or placid, then so be it. It’s a meaningless statement. It’s like imputing anti-semitism to vegetarians due to Hitler’s aversion to meat.