Monthly Archives: February 2007

Slavery Ties Sharpton to Thurmond – New York Times

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Ok, so Thurmond’s ancestor once owned Sharpton’s ancestor (although, I take a lot of that genealogy stuff with a grain of salt), and we all know how Thurmond believed in segragation (except for when it came to his parent’s housekeeper)*, but:

Slavery Ties Sharpton to Thurmond – New York Times ** : “Sharpton, who ran for president in 2004 on a ticket of racial justice, said he met Thurmond only once in 1991 when he visited Washington, D.C., with the late soul singer James Brown, who knew Thurmond. Sharpton said the meeting was ”awkward.””

wtf were James Brown, Al Sharpton, and Strom Thurmond meeting about? Blows my mind.

Do you think it was maybe this James Brown? —–>

* Thurmond’s children have acknowledged that Thurmond fathered a biracial daughter. Essie Mae Washington-Williams’ mother was a housekeeper in the home of Thurmond’s parents.

** And if you need a login combo, remember: cypherphunk/cypherphunk (there’s always bugmenot too)

Jesus: Tales from the Crypt – The Middle East Blog – TIME

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Ok, so this will probably be big news on Monday: Jesus: Tales from the Crypt – The Middle East Blog – TIME.
What I love about these type of speculations is that a 423 word article can lead to a comment section which has over 250,000 words. Say what you will about Jesus, but I know one thing: People love to discuss H/him.

Our long Universal Thermodynamic nightmare is over

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This may be the nicest news I’ve heard yet today:

news @ nature.com – Universe bounces back from the brink – Cycling cosmos obeys thermodynamics without ripping itself apart.

It has to be the closest ever shave. Two physicists have proposed that, a fraction of a second before a cataclysm that would destroy space-time itself, the Universe may escape by abruptly collapsing to a virtually empty state that ‘resets’ it for a fresh cycle of cosmic expansion.

The theory claims to reconcile the notion of a cyclic universe, which expands and contracts for eternity, with the second law of thermodynamics, which seems to imply that the current expansion cannot reverse.

As escape clauses go, this one is jaw-droppingly extravagant. Not only does the turnaround happen less than a thousand-trillion-trillionth (10-27) of a second before a ‘Big Rip’ in which everything falls apart, but it splits our Universe into countless new and independent ones.

So, now we know that a young Alvy Singer was fretting over nothing.

Mother(to doctor): He’s been depressed. All of a sudden, he can’t do anything.
Doc: Why are you depressed, Alvy?
Mother: Tell doctor Flicker. It’s something he read.
Doc: Something you read, heah?
Alvy: The universe is expanding.
Doc: The universe is expanding?
Alvy: Well, the universe is everything, and if it’s expanding, someday it will break apart and that would be the end of everything!
Mother(shouting): What is that your business? (to doctor) He stopped doing his homework.
Alvy: What’s the point?
Mother: What has the universe got to do with it? You’re here in Brooklyn! Brooklyn is not expanding!

Terminal Velocity, X&Y, and Solar Eclipses

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Three random things that I came across in Wikipedia recently that probably only interest me:

X&Y – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: “The album’s cryptic cover art was designed by Tappin Gofton (aka Mark Tappin and Simon Gofton), who created the cover for The Chemical Brothers’ latest release, Push the Button. The blocks are the Baudot code-encoding (ITA2, a 5-bit alphanumeric encoding used by telegraphs) of the title of the album, X&Y (although due to an error in the coding process, the cover code actually translates as ‘X96′);”

Terminal velocity – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: “On August 16th, 1960 U.S. Air Force Captain Joe Kittinger came close to breaking the sound barrier during a free-fall from the high altitude balloon Excelsior III, at an altitude of 102,800 feet (approximately 20 miles), hitting a speed of 614 mph (274 m/s) as reported by National Geographic. This made Captain Kittinger the fastest human on the planet.”

Solar eclipse – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: “Final totality: Due to tidal acceleration, the orbit of the Moon around the Earth becomes approximately 3.8 cm more distant each year. It is estimated that in 600 million years, the distance from the Earth to the Moon will have increased by 23,500 km, meaning that it will no longer be able to completely cover the Sun’s disk. This will be true even when the Moon is at perigee, and the Earth at aphelion.

A complicating factor is that the Sun will increase in size over this timescale. This makes it even more unlikely that the Moon will be able to cause a total eclipse. We can therefore say that the last total solar eclipse on Earth will occur in slightly less than 600 million years.[13]“

The Power (and Peril) of Praising Your Kids — New York Magazine

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Here’s a nice article, The Power (and Peril) of Praising Your Kids — New York Magazine, relating some psychological work which I’ve always tried to explain to my relatives and friends that were parents. i.e. I’d rather be hardworking than lucky and I’d rather be lucky than smart. Drive, perseverance, resiliency are so much more important than any innate abilities or aptitudes one starts out with.

Bottom line: Praise effort, not intellect. And emphasize the motivatee’s process, not the motivatee’s abilities.

SeeqPod Music and Democracy Player for all your media needs

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Nice dynamic webpage which scours the ‘net for all those mp3s laying around:SeeqPod Music (beta). You can leisurely listen and compose fair use reviews of all that intellectual property.

Then, when you want to download the NBC Nightly News (not sure why you would do that), search Youtube easily and save the vids locally, or play any video file on your computer, you can use the version 0.9 Democrazy Player.

Just imagine if there was a site where you could search for books and any text document…

May you live in interesting times.