Saturday, November 28, 2015

Cab Thoughts 11/28/15

"It is a cruel mortification, searching for what is instructive in the history of past times, to find that the exploits of conquerors who have desolated the earth, and the freaks of tyrants who have rendered nations unhappy, are recorded with minute and often disgusting accuracy, while the discovery of useful arts, and the progress of the most beneficial branches of commerce, are passed over in silence, and suffered to sink into oblivion."--John Kenyon’s 1983 volume, The History Men

The Netherlands is a land of tall people. Average height is more than six feet. 

A guy has a website where he argues that any time a deck of cards is shuffled, the resulting order has probably never been seen before. This is from his reasoning:
He starts with picking three cards of the 52 for three positions.
How many different possible combinations are there for three cards in order? We just multiply how many possibilities there were for the first position (52) with the possibilities for the second position (51) with the possibilities for the third position (50). So there are 52 • 51 • 50 = 132600 different possibilities for three cards in order.
What about a whole deck? We just multiply the possibilities for each of the 52 positions, which is 52 • 51 • 50 • 49 • 48 • 47 • 46 • 45 • 44 • 43 • 42 • 41 • 40 • 39 • 38 • 37 • 36 • 35 • 34 • 33 • 32 • 31 • 30 • 29 • 28 • 27 • 26 • 25 • 24 • 23 • 22 • 21 • 20 • 19 • 18 • 17 • 16 • 15 • 14 • 13 • 12 • 11 • 10 • 9 • 8 • 7 • 6 • 5 • 4 • 3 • 2 • 1. A mathematical way of representing all those numbers multiplied together is called the factorial, so we could write this as 52!, which means the same thing. When you multiply all those numbers together, you get 80658175170943878571660636856403766975289505440883277824000000000000. That number is 68 digits long. We can round off and write it like this: 8.0658X1067
Now how many shuffles have been made in human history?  Cards were developed in the 1300s, so everyone in the last 700 years shuffling cards for five seconds throughout their lives...... well it's a lot and doesn't come close.
So next time you shuffle a deck of cards and lay them on the table, chances are you're looking at some never-before-seen piece of history. You are, with the deck, unique in history.

Entrepreneurship is a democratizing process, allows for more transparency of knowledge and is a logical outgrowth of the academic world. Regrettably, the academic world still  must learn this.
Hemingway’s letters are being published in a series that is expected to fill 17 volumes.
Originally the Internet served to interconnect laboratories engaged in government research, and since 1994 it has been expanded to serve millions of users and a multitude of purposes in all parts of the world.  Two innovations have changed the way people use the Internet. In the social web people have found a new way to communicate. Since its creation in 2004, Facebook has grown into a worldwide network of over 1,000 million subscribers. Mobile technology, on the other hand, has made possible a much greater reach of the Internet, increasing the number of Internet users everywhere.

Who is....Alphonse Marie de Lamartine?



It is a bit surprising to me the El Faro sinking did not get more attention. The 790-foot (241 meters) container ship left Jacksonville on a weekly cargo run to Puerto Rico on the evening of Sept. 29. It was last heard from on the morning of Oct. 1 when the captain communicated that the ship had taken on water, was listing at 15 degrees and had lost propulsion. Its last known position was close to the eye of Hurricane Joaquin, battling 50 foot (15 meters) waves and winds over 100 miles per hour (161 km per hour). Sinking ships with loss of crew is from the older world of danger.

The Delaware River was first explored by Henry Hudson (ca. 1570-ca. 1611), who called it 'one of the finest, best, and pleasantest rivers in the world.' Along the Delaware's western bank in Philadelphia, the muddy/gravelly edge of the river originally lapped up to the future location of Water Street.
Some of the city's first settlers actually lived in caves they dug into the embankment, pretty much within the space between where Front and Water Streets came to be.

A former NSA intelligence analyst has claimed that a senior European diplomat told him that the entire government of a European country considers president Obama to be literally mentally unwell. John Schindler, a security expert and whistle-blower who now writes for The Daily Beast, has claimed that a senior EU official from an undisclosed country also inquired about impeachment proceedings, saying that the nation believes Obama is not fit for office. According to Schindler’s source, one of the EU governments considers Obama to be mentally unstable. Schindler is a former U.S. Naval War College lecturer and is known to have many high level military and government contacts. This in the Daily Beast!

Nefertiti, the famous Egyptian queen, means “the beautiful one has come.”

An informative summary: Beginning in the late nineteenth century, and especially after 1930 in the United States, the term liberalism came to be associated with a very different emphasis, particularly in economic policy.  It came to be associated with a readiness to rely primarily on the state rather than on private voluntary arrangements to achieve objectives regarded as desirable.  The catchwords became welfare and equality rather than freedom.  The nineteenth-century liberal regarded the extension of freedom as the most effective way to promote welfare and equality; the twentieth-century liberal regards welfare and equality as either prerequisites of or alternatives to freedom.  In the name of welfare and equality, the twentieth-century liberal has come to favor a revival of the very policies of state intervention and paternalism against which classical liberalism fought.  In the very act of turning the clock back to seventeenth-century mercantilism, he is fond of castigating true liberals as reactionary!--the Friedmans

Golden oldie:

Playboy
will no longer feature full nudity. Instead, it will be moving toward a partially clad, cheesecake pin-up style.The disappearance of full nudity from Playboy magazine is a perfect example of Schumpeter’s concept of creative destruction. Schumpeter wrote that the “essential fact about capitalism” is creative destruction — the process “that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one.” In essence, Playboy created a new environment that allowed new innovators within it to destroy them. So the offspring destroys the creator.

The Constitution is "the law that governs those who govern us."

In his CBS interview, when told Russia's Vladimir Putin was challenging his leadership, President Obama's first response was to say that his "definition of leadership would be leading on climate change." There is a weird quality about this where the Americans are depending upon the good nature of their opponents and enemies. And history. Obama seems to agree with Fukyama: It's all over but the shouting. Reagan believed this but never thought the decline of failing states would be voluntary. In some ways, Obama is like Bush, where high-mindedness wins.

The germ that causes the plague began infecting humans thousands of years earlier than scientists had previously thought.
Researchers analyzed teeth from the remains of 101 individuals that were collected from a variety of museums and archaeological excavations. They found DNA of the bacterium that causes plague, called Yersinia pestis, in seven of these people. The earliest sample that had plague DNA was from Bronze Age Siberia, and dated back to 2794 B.C., and the latest specimen with plague, from early Iron Age Armenia, dated back to 951 B.C.
Previously, the oldest direct molecular evidence that this bacterium infected humans was only about 1,500 years old.

Black Friday, a day the Americans have set aside as devoted to intense and unashamed commercialism. It is really horrible. But what it signifies is beyond me. Capitalism vs. commercialism? Feeding frenzy? Media influence? Whatever it is is ugly.

Oniomania n: 1. an uncontrollable desire to buy things. ety: Oniomania derives from the Greek ṓnios meaning "for sale" and the Late Latin mania meaning "extreme desire." It entered English in the late 1800s from the German Oniomanie.

In the 1580s, Seville's Royal Prison incarcerated over 20 per cent of that City's official population for such crimes as "blasphemy" and "greed." What sounds oppressive was loosely managed. Anyone who tried to escape was unlikely to be stopped unless his face is well known to the guards. Many a new prisoner would keep his head down for a fortnight or so and then simply walk out as though he were a visitor, while some more familiar characters, who feared being recognized, dressed up as women and escaped that way.

A survey of economists asked: If the federal minimum wage is raised gradually to $15-per-hour by 2020, the employment rate for low-wage US workers will be substantially lower than it would be under the status quo. Agree or disagree? 
Less than a quarter of the surveyed economists disagreed.  And a greater percentage of the surveyed economists (26%) either agreed or strongly agree that such a hike (of 107%) of the national minimum wage in the U.S. would substantially shrink the employment prospects of low-skilled workers.
Astonishingly, 74 percent of these surveyed economists either disagreed, were “uncertain,” or expressed no opinion that such a huge hike in the minimum wage would cause substantial shrinkage of low-skilled workers’ job prospects. That is 74% were not sure raising prices would decrease availability.
How is that possible?

In the year 1898 a watershed moment in American history brought the Spanish-American War and the capture of the Philippines as the first American colony. It was America's first step toward becoming an empire. Yet many Americans were appalled and as a result, galvanized into an "Anti-Imperialist" League. Some members included ex-President Cleveland; his former Secretary of War, William Endicott; former Secretary of the Treasury, Speaker Carlisle; Senator 'Pitchfork Ben' Tillman; President David Starr Jordan, of Stanford; President James B. Angell, of the University of Michigan; Jane Addams; Andrew Carnegie; William James; Samuel Gompers, president of the American Federation of Labor, and numbers of other Congressmen, clergymen, professors, lawyers and writers. The novelist William Dean Howells thought the war 'an abominable business.' When his friend Mark Twain came home from an extended trip abroad, he too became a member of the League. 

Early in the morning of 23 June, 1848, some seven to eight thousand workers marched unopposed onto the Place de la Bastille in Paris. A new revolution was stirring. This was seen by Marx as the end of the Old World as he expected the farmers to join the disaffected workers in the revolution and the working class soldiers to stand down. It did not happen; the farmers joined the soldiers and the revolutionaries were cut to pieces. The first deaths came at noon on 23 June, when the barricade at the Porte Saint-Denis was attacked by National Guards. It is said that two beautiful prostitutes hoisted up their skirts and, taunting the troops with obscenities, dared them to fire. They were immediately cut down in a hail of bullets. The National Guards managed to overcome the defenses, but only after losing thirty men in some bitter fighting.
Alphonse Marie de Lamartine, who joined the fighting at twilight, saw the cannon sent by Cavaignac levelling the fortifications in the north-eastern Faubourg du Temple. He counted 'four hundred brave men, killed or mutilated, [who] strewed the faubourg'. It was carnage.
Marx was so disillusioned he withdrew and reworked his philosophy away from human dynamics.


AAAAAaaaaaannnnnnddddddd....a graph: Internet Growth Statistics over the Years:


Internet Growth Statistics over the Years

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