Texas is for sale, y’all
The great state of Texas is for sale. All proceeds will go towards paying off the national debt of the United States of America. Must sell before she secedes! You’ll receive the whole state including all sports teams. Historic sites include the Alamo, Lyndon Johnson’s boyhood home, Bishop’s Palace, and so many more. Think of the income opportunities. The state is also plentiful in both hunting and fishing sites. As an added benefit you can make all your friends real, Texas Rangers. How about that!
Current bid, US $99,999,999.00.
A bidder asks:
Can Texas is moved?
Answer: Yes, Shipping is extra but please consult your local zoologist and botanist in the geographic zone you wish to move Texas to as many of her plants and animals do not do well outside their native climate range. In other words, there are no refunds on dead cactus and prairie dogs.
The sound quality isn’t
terribly good, but “the day the volume won” is one of Micah P Hinson’s most affecting and lovely songs. “You rescued me / from me” indeed.
cwalken t-shirt
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quote out of context
People should remember that while they have the right to their opinion, they are not entitled to be taken seriously.
quote out of context
If a guy can’t rape his wife, who’s he gonna rape?
Bang-an
Lost World by David Lazar via HELLO BAULDOFF
Usually mugshots just make me sad
objectophile
This has been making the rounds (kottke, Andrew Sullivan): a web site for people who are attracted to, and have sexual relationships with, inanimate objects.
This international website about objectùm-sexuality, (widely known as Objektophil in Germany), is designed to offer a support network for objectùm-sexuals (Objektophile) and education for friends and family about objectùm-sexuality (Objektophil), and insight into our way of accepting, living, and adapting as individuals who are in love with objects.
Counter Balance, the Homer Simpson of Trucks
the search for mersenne primes
A downloadable program called GIMPS helps mathematicians harness personal computers to search for really large prime numbers.
Chris Caldwell, a mathematician at the University of Tennessee, Martin, says that the main obstacle in proving that these numbers are prime is just doing the arithmetic with numbers that are millions of digits long. Caldwell says there is a formula for testing whether a large number is a Mersenne prime, but it’s computationally intense.
“Not only do you have to multiply a 13 million-digit number by a 13 million-digit number, but you have to do that about 13 million times,” Caldwell says. “And that just takes a tremendous amount of computation.”
GIMPS has been plugging away at this for 13 years now, and has found 12 Mersennes so far.
Why?
“Nobody there looking at the Hope Diamond ever asks, ‘Why did they bother to dig it up?’ or ‘What is it good for?’ — even though it really isn’t good for much other than to just hang there and people to look at,” Caldwell says. “And in many ways the Mersennes play that same role — that they really are the jewels of number theory.”
Rand vs. Marx
In these times of economic uncertainty which polarizing economic thinker gets the most Google searches?
So, in lots of the developing world, we’re seeing lots of searches on Marx and very little on Rand. Rand only registers in the Philippines. In the US, Rand beats Marx by a small margin; same in India. In Canada, Marx beats Rand; same in Norway and New Zealand and … pretty much every country that makes the top ten in searches on Ayn Rand. The green bars show searches for “Atlas Shrugged”. Only in the US and India do searches on Rand beat searches on Marx.
(via marginal revolution)
Pirate Bay four sentenced to one year
I didn’t expect this to happen to be honest:
The court found that the men — the three founders, Frederik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg and Peter Sunde, as well as Carl Lundstrom, who provided financing — had aided copyright infringement by operating the site, which provides links to thousands of songs, films, video games and other material, and helps users download them.
They were each sentenced to a year in prison and were also ordered to pay 30 million kronor, or about $3.6 million, in damages to leading entertainment companies.
if Texas were not in the Union
If Texas were not in the Union, there’d be a good case for making football an Olympic sport, which would sure as hell beat rhythmic gymnastics.
Meet the Flockers: Dave Vogt
I like animals. Mammals, mostly, but I’ve met a few decently agreeable snakes. Tinkering on computers was my first love. I got some intelligent-sounding advice in high school that I should take my second love and make it a career so I got a BS in Animal and Poultry Sciences, which is essentially a four year course in livestock. There is much more to be known about livestock than I realized five years ago.
Incidentally, we are observing an anniversary here in Blacksburg today. The mood is different this year than last. I wonder what it will be like in three or four years from now, when no students are left who were here when it happened.
I think I’m the youngest flocker, which is a comfortable position for me. It turns out Amanda Mae is younger than me, but I guess that’s ok. I’m still young enough to be sensitive about how old I am.
I’m from upstate New York, although for a couple of years I spent most weekends in the city. I’ve spent the past three years in Virginia, and I always have to point out to people that I’m not from the city, yes we have cornfields, no the entire state is not covered in skyscrapers.
I love knowing people’s secrets.
I have seven other “Meet the Flockers” posts open to get an idea of what I should write. I like to think that I know myself pretty well, but I never know what someone else would want to know. If you wanna know, ask. I love answering questions.
Read more
dear clusterflock
This is a pretty good conversation, but it would seem to me that this one would be more fun:
What did your parents deny you?
1.5 million-year-old microbes
A living time capsule of sorts has been found buried under hundreds of feet of Antarctic ice – a colony of microbes that have been sealed off from the rest of the world for more than 1.5 million years.
The microbes, which live without light or oxygen, were detected in meltwater flowing out from Taylor Glacier, one of the outlet glaciers of the vast East Antarctic Ice Sheet in the otherwise ice-free McMurdo Dry Valleys.
“It’s a bit like finding a forest that nobody has seen for 1.5 million years,” said study team member Ann Pearson of Harvard. “Intriguingly, the species living there are similar to contemporary organisms, and yet quite different – a result, no doubt, of having lived in such an inhospitable environment for so long.”
“Oh, the snot
has caked against my pants.”
I go on record
utterly opposed to boxer shorts with a button fly. If the manufacturer can’t make a no-gap fly without a button, it should get out of the business.
I rather like
this song (and one other), but found the album as a whole disappointing.
let them buy cake
A hundred and thirty eight year old piece of cake is up for auction.
The cake is thought to be the only surviving item from the 1871 wedding of Queen Victoria’s fourth daughter, Princess Louise, to the Marquis of Lorne.
It went on sale for 145 pounds ($215) Thursday at the Antiques for Everyone fair in Birmingham. The seller is antiques dealer John Shepherd. He bought the slice from a private seller who is a descendant of a noble family from Kent.
The slice, which is one-inch thick and protected by parchment, is a tiny portion of the towering 5-foot (1.5 meter) cake served at Princess Louise’s wedding. The entire cake originally weighed over 225 pounds (102 kilograms) and took three months to create.
separated at birth: Jim Lehrer and Stephen Root
WHY I HATE THE INTERNET
Equally ridiculous is the idea that the future of education will involve link-ups from home computers with which students will communicate with teachers via the internet. How brilliant. The one thing that keeps most teenagers in school to begin with is the opportunity for daily social interaction with their peers. Ask any red-blooded teenager what it is they like about school and they will undoubtedly list friends, gym or art class, school clubs or teams, driver’s ed., or other such aspects of high school life which could never be delivered direct-to-you through the internet. Surely stripping school down to the barest, driest facts will lead to a sudden surge of interest in lessons by teenager around the world (I know I’m planning on joining this trend right after that date I have lined up with Brad Pitt).
To be honest, I wouldn’t have predicted facebook or myspace either. I was fifteen in 1995 and more concerned about what girls thought of me. Oh, wait. That was my friend, Rob. I was the kid who was menaced in the hallway for reading Kant or messing with a Rubick’s cube. I always seem to forget that.
Spam ‘produces 17m tons of CO2′
The Carbon Footprint of e-mail Spam report estimated that 62 trillion spam emails are sent globally every year.
This amounted to emissions of more than 17 million tons of CO2, the research by climate consultants ICF International and anti-virus firm McAfee found. Searching for legitimate e-mails and deleting spam used some 80% of energy.
The study found that the average business user generates 131kg of CO2 every year, of which 22% is related to spam.
Demon Denim?
Edmund Burke — what he would have thought of the denimization of America can be inferred from his lament that the French Revolution assaulted “the decent drapery of life”; it is a straight line from the fall of the Bastille to the rise of denim — said: “To make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely.” Ours would be much more so if supposed grown-ups would heed St. Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, and St. Barack’s inaugural sermon to the Americans, by putting away childish things, starting with denim.
Alphonso Bow
The trailer for friend of clusterflock M Sarki’s new film.
