Category: Uncategorized
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No quibbles on this one….
Question by Kirn, and excellent answers by the responders. After a point, the main thing money can buy — that I can see — is more money. Yet few seem to stop at this point, or even slow down. So maybe there’s something to be had in life I don’t know about. Power? Is power…
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More clavecin oculaire
Here’s a short harpsichord piece by Jean-François Dandrieu, roughly contemporary to Castel. Called La Contrariante, it’s a pretty good demonstrator for the clavecin oculaire. Two melodic lines chase each other across the keyboard like squirrels mating. Later note: This demonstration helps to debug the animation. The stripes on the display screen are correctly positioned wrt…
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Irresistible attraction
I’ve been hammering on the strange shibboleth of bitcoin. Influencers who are realistic and skeptical about most topics are selling bitcoin. Influencers who are realistic and skeptical about bitcoin are utterly insane about other topics. At the corporate level this balance doesn’t apply. Nearly all corporations have tried to get on the bitcoin train at…
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Clavecin oculaire
I haven’t been “inspired” to do a tech history piece for a while. This instrument came in through one of those offerings from Academia.edu. I’m surprised that I’d never encountered it before; it stands at the intersection of everything I’ve been doing for the last 20 years. Louis Bertrand Castel invented the color harpsichord or…
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The 1950 Census is online!
This piece was tacked onto an item about political personalities. As I was thinking about Obama, I noticed that the 1950 Census was finally available. I then started writing about the census as a footnote. Here’s the part about the census on its own, with a properly searchable title. (Learning the metalesson from the census…
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How old?
Earlier I mentioned a 1953 interview with science writer Ruth Moore, who was pushing her book Man, Time and Fossils. I decided to buy the book, mainly as spiritual ‘pay for value’. I opened it, not expecting much of substance, and got a tremendous surprise. This is the best non-fiction book I’ve ever read. Moore…
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Non-barking cult
Basic fact: When a political party has a BIG PERSONALITY, the party develops a personality cult. In recent decades the Repooflicans had two big personalities, Reagan and Trump. Both became the PERSONAL center of the party. In recent decades D hasn’t matched those two. Bill Clinton is the same size, but he didn’t have a…
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Hotshot salesman
I enjoy highlighting the business uses of miniature cars. Metropolitan. Bantam. Crosley wagons. Here’s an unexpected one from a 1954 broadcasting trade journal. The Crosley Hot Shot was designed as a midget racer, not a business coupe. = = = = = Here’s my Poser version of the Crosley wagon, and here’s my Bantam. I’ve…
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Permitted concerns
Random thought about media vs experience. The current Officially Permitted Concern is inflation. Politicians and central banks are “responding” to the “public will” on inflation. Does this agree with my experience? No. I’ve never been bothered by inflation. In 1973-74 I was driving long distances for work and pleasure, and I wasn’t bothered by high…
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Ready when needed
It’s always a pleasant surprise when a needed bit of memory pops up after LONG storage. I’m already grumpy from loss of sleep due to the psychopathic thunderstorms last night. Random yellow and red blobs on radar, sometimes missing, sometimes fading, sometimes suddenly growing, and ALWAYS coming from unexpected directions. Every time you think Okay,…
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Two parallel stories
Two stories that illustrate perfectly why you should ignore media and stick with your own experience. 1. Via the Pillar substack: The “news” “story” that Pope Benedict had died was spreading like wildfire. After careful tracing by JD Flynn, it turned out that an Italian professional faker named Tommaso deBenedetti had spent a year setting…
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As usual….
A few days ago, watching the lethal end of Abe and the non-lethal end of Boris, I wondered about the motives of the competitors: Basic historical fact: Leaders are NEVER killed by lone gunmen. Leaders are ALWAYS killed by competing leaders. True for thousands of years. See Machiavelli. Why did the competition want Abe dead?…
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Beyond convergence
Looking for a link, I noticed my earlier discussions of the fake “free university” in Austin. Decided it was time for another peek at their website. The main banner still shows their lack of real purpose. They’re waiting for accreditation instead of going ahead and running some classes. Dammit, rent a suite of offices and…
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Nice graph of Real Value
A beautiful graph from a 1939 book on radio advertising. Verifies yet again the correct picture of the Depression, which is almost always misstated by ShareValue commentators. The boom of the ’20s ran up beyond the realistic capacity of the economy. The collapse from ’29 to ’33 brought the economy down to where it should…
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Clerihew Day
Well, actually yesterday was Clerihew Day. A new American Radio History upload from 1955 includes a couple of near-Clerihews. Like many large stations, KFI in Los Angeles sent out a weekly newsletter with a mix of recipes, articles about local affairs, and jokes and poems submitted by readers. Most of the jokes and poems were…
Polistra's Mill 