maarsen

" and now for the sound of John Denver being strangled.."

China's future is Japan's present.

Well before Maxwell, Faraday showed that there was a link by showing a current carrying wire has a magnetic field associated with it. Faraday did not have the math to show why this is so. Maxwell needed Hamilton's quaternions to create his equations. There is a YT channel called Kathy Loves Physics and History that explains all this in much more detail than I ever could. If anything it does show how intelligent and well read a teenage Mary Shelley actually was.

The latest news on the origin of Covid seems to be that it came from infected raccoon dogs at the Wuhan live market. Raccoon dog DNA was found with the original version of the Covid virus in samples taken at the beginning of the pandemic at the market. Chinese authorities did shut down this exchange of information online but not before the data was released. As to the why of the censorship, I assume that being associated with eating dogs is more problematic than being associated with incompetent lab techs.

If you took all the economists in the world and laid them end to end they would still all point in different directions.

As a lie or honest belief, it is still stupidity.

A sad anniversary and an event that I remember all too well being a teenager who was all too aware how lucky I was to be Canadian and not American.

Ran I agree that the 70s were a great era for films. I was there and loving it. I just don't think the critics, through no fault of their own, were as open to new ideas and concepts as someone like me who was also enjoying the fantastic SF that the era also produced. The teenager reading Dangerous Visions is not going to be satisfied with the mundane in books or film.

Pauline Kael in particular disliked 2001. She did however go back and revise her opinion later and liked it a lot more. The audiences were the ones that knew. 2001 ran continuously for years at the Cinesphere in Ontario Place. Of course watching it in Imax was a huge draw. 50 years from now people will still be watching and discussing Stanley Kubrick and his genius. All those others? Not so much.

Did you know that a common slang term during the 30s in Hollywood for the director of a movie was 'the brother-in-law'? I stopped taking the Academy awards seriously back in the 70s when Stanley Kubrick lost with A Clockwork Orange, a movie people are still watching and discussing over 50 years later. Before that 2001: A Space Odyssey also failed to win, despite being called the greatest movie ever made by a great number of critics, and still being watched today.

Who would have thought a few hundred years of evidence for vaccination working to gain immunity in a population would actually work. One for the books.

Guardalavaca. I have been coming here off and on since 2002. Wonderful staff here. I am at the Brisas if you know it.

Sunny and 30 C outside. Did I mention I am at a beach in Cuba?

I didn't think you could pedal that fast.

This reminds me of a phrase I heard as a child. "Strong like bull. Smart like streetcar. "

Better Uranus than mine.

Any day now Trump will say he went to Palestine and brought peace to the region.

I definitely get paid for owning stocks. I tend to put my retirement savings, here in Canada, in dividend paying stocks. My favourite stocks are Canadian banks because they tend to be boring and reliable payers. A couple of them that I own have not missed a dividend payment for the last 150 years or more. When you look at a stock, divide the price of the stock by the dividend payable each year. This gives you your price/earnings ratio. A ratio of ~10 to 15 is really good as in 10 to 15 years the dividends will pay back your purchase price. Any lower than this is a sign the company may be in trouble. Much over 20 for the ratio means the stock is overvalued and I would hold off on buying it. If buying a stock, buy after bad news has affected the price. The dividends remain the same even as the price drops. Unless the bad news is a dividend cut. I hopes this helps

As in Canada a new PM is expected to get a new mandate.

He was very smart, very arrogant, and women were mad for him. He did date Barbra Streisand. He was all the things conservatives weren't.

He is still reviled in parts of Canada. Especially amongst the conservative sorts.

Wasn't that obvious after the collapse of the Soviet Union? Inspectors were being offered missile parts in exchange for vodka. If anything I suspect that the going price for missile bits has dropped now.

When the Puritans left England, they first went to the Netherlands because they had religious freedom there. They then left for America as the Dutch tolerance of other religious beliefs irritated them to no end.

A few years ago an AI learned how to master the game of Go and became unbeatable. Jut yesterday I read an article about another AI that found a strategy that an average Go player can use to consistently beat the unbeatable Go AI. AIs are still stupid machines in the final analysis.

Economists talk about the four factors of production. Those being land, labour, capital, and entrepreneurship. Somehow in western culture capital and entrepreneurship have gained precedence of labour and land. I suspect that this is a relic of the feudal system where the lord of the manor is ordained by God to rule over those beneath him. There is no reason to not challenge this as any philosophical justification of capitalism that relies on feudalism as its beginning axiom is just so much shit.