Cab Thoughts 2/21/15

"Please be aware that if your spoken words include personal or other sensitive information, that information will be among the data captured and transmitted to a third party."--Samsung's Smart TV privacy policy

Samuel Morse invented the first electrical telegraph and Morse code. He was originally a well regarded painter. This single-wire invention altered the field of communication (providing communication over long distances in short time) and advanced civilization. Morse also believed that Blacks, Jews, Catholics and all Austrians wanted to destroy the White Anglo-Saxon Protestants of America; he even wrote several books on the topic. He was a leader in the anti-Catholic and anti-immigration movement of the mid-19th century and worked relentlessly to unite Protestants against Catholic institutions, wanted to forbid Catholics from holding public office change immigration laws to limit immigration from Catholic countries.
 

Only the people of Japan and Spain trust their government less than the people of the U.S. trust our government. 

Who was.... Virginia Dare?

 

Carving over Montaigne's fireplace: "In the year of Christ 1571, at the age of thirty-eight, on the last day of February, anniversary of his birth, Michel de Montaigne, long weary of the servitude of the court and of public enjoyments, while still entire, retired to the bosom of the learned Virgins [Muses], where in calm and freedom from all cares he will spend what little remains of his life now more than half run out. If the fates permit, he will complete this abode, this sweet ancestral retreat, and he has consecrated it to his freedom, tranquility, and leisure."

Yoshiro Nakamatsu is the world's most prolific inventor with over 3,000 patents. Some of Nakamtsu's inventions: the karaoke machine, floppy disks, CD and DVD player, the digital watch.
 

Empedocles was an ancient Greek philosopher, the first to speak about the four elements that make up the world - fire, earth, water and air. He declared air is a substance and that the Earth is spherical. Empedocles even posited a haphazard theory of evolution and natural selection that influenced Darwin's theory; Aristotle regarded him as the father of rhetoric.

He also believed he was god and - as a faithful follower of the Pythagorean religion - he believed in reincarnation. To prove it, he threw himself into Mt. Etna, an active volcano.

Smart guys can get too complicated.

A stats guy ran scenarios on investing over the last ten years and his conclusions are these:
1) Taxes and inflation will destroy your investment return, even if you use the government's understated inflation numbers.
2) Buying majorly held stocks and indexes, even several YEARS before an all-time high, will destroy your investment returns.

So the stats guy asks: Is the risk worth it?
 

Payments are routine at major banks, several of which have explicit policies, found in filings with the SEC, outlining automatic awards for executives who rotate into government. Goldman Sachs offers "a lump sum cash payment" for government service, for example.

It is said that there are 26 trillion dollars in derivatives directly tied to the value of the euro.

 

In 1996 world chess champion Gary Kasparov lost the first game of a six-game match against Deep Blue, an IBM computer capable of evaluating 200 million moves per second. Kasparov bested Deep Blue in the match with three wins and two ties and took home the $400,000 prize. In a rematch in 1997 against an enhanced Deep Blue Kasparov won the first game, the computer the second, with the next three games a draw. On May 11, 1997, Deep Blue came out on top with a surprising sixth game win--and the $700,000 match prize.

 

In order for someone to operate a taxi legally, many cities require the owner to purchase a license, or medallion. In Philadelphia, Chicago, Boston and New York, medallions cost between $350,000 and $700,000.

 

It is commonly argued that Islamic fundamentalist radicalism is a function of poor education and economics. But is radicalism really a function of deprivation? Is it possible that the West is applying its recent (150 years) experience with radicalism to people outside it? Is it possible that religious radicalism is a sign of the failure of materialism?

 

While its vineyards almost certainly existed in the first and second centuries (under Gallo-Roman influence), the first written evidence of Burgundy vineyards dates to 312 AD, according to the Bourgogne Wine Board.

 

Golden oldie:

http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2011/10/free-time-occupy-ballpark.html

 

George Canning (11 April 1770 - 8 August 1827) was a British statesman and politician who served as Foreign Secretary and was briefly Prime Minister. He wrote poetry, politically tinged, especially anti-Jacobin. One of his poems, aimed at what he perceived as French thought of the time, is interesting in respect to current criticism of Obama:

No - through th'extended globe his feelings run
As broad and general as th'unbounded sun!
No narrow bigot he; - his reason'd view
Thy interests, England, ranks with thine, Peru!
France at our doors, he sees no danger nigh,
But heaves for Turkey's woes the impartial sigh;
A steady patriot of the world alone,
The friend of every country - but his own.

Astonishingly, Canning fought a duel in 1809 with Castlereagh. He had never held a gun before and Castlereagh, an experienced pistol man, almost killed him. The story of the two cabinet ministers' duel is quite amazing. (Castlereagh was central to the management of the coalition that defeated Napoleon and was the principal British diplomat at the Congress of Vienna.)

 

Claiming that thousands of public comments condemning "dark money" in politics can't be ignored, the Democratic-chaired Federal Election Commission on Wednesday appeared ready to open the door to new regulations on donors, bloggers and others who use the Internet to influence policy and campaigns. So national policy is going to be determined by letter writing campaigns?

 

The history of the minimum wage: The famed Fabian socialist Sidney Webb was as blunt as anyone in his 1912 article "The Economic Theory of the Minimum Wage":
"Legal Minimum Wage positively increases the productivity of the nation's industry, by ensuring that the surplus of unemployed workmen shall be exclusively the least efficient workmen; or, to put it in another way, by ensuring that all the situations shall be filled by the most efficient operatives who are available."

The intellectual history shows that whole purpose of the minimum wage was to create unemployment among people who the elites did not believe were worthy of holding jobs.

 

There has never been a lower percentage of American men in the workforce. What is even more stunning - given the daily avalanche of "buy-and-hold" for a "safe-retirement" holding hands with your loved on as you stroll the beach at sunset - the percent of Americans aged 65 years or older has almost doubled in the last 30 years and is near its highest since the mid '60s.

Solipsistic: adjective: 1. of or characterized by solipsism, or the theory that only the self exists, or can be proved to exist.  Solipsistic descends from the Latin terms sōlus meaning "alone" and ipse meaning "self." It entered English in the late 1800s.

Syria sits on the U.N. Human Rights Commission.

 

To a botanist, a fruit is an entity that develops from the fertilized ovary of a flower. This means that tomatoes, squash, pumpkins, cucumbers, peppers, eggplants, corn kernels, and bean and pea pods are all fruits; so are apples, pears, peaches, apricots, melons and mangos. A vegetable, botanically, is any edible part of a plant that doesn't happen to be a fruit, as in leaves (spinach, lettuce, cabbage), roots (carrots, beets, turnips), stems (asparagus), tubers (potatoes), bulbs (onions), and flowers (cauliflower and broccoli). However, democracies can make things confusing.  In 1893 in the Supreme Court Justice Horace Gray ruled in favor of the tomato being a vegetable."Botanically speaking," said Justice Gray, "tomatoes are the fruit of the vine, just as are cucumbers, squashes, beans and peas. But in the common language of the people.all these vegetables.are usually served at dinner in, with, or after the soup, fish, or meat, which constitute the principal part of the repast, and not, like fruits, generally as dessert."

Waze is a driving app--a very energy hungry one--that tries to give a lot of local info via driver real-time feedback. This includes more than traffic; it includes police locations and speed traps. Now police in Miami are subverting the app by filling it with loads of bogus police sightings. 

 

 

AAAaaaaaannnnndddddd........a graph: