The Daily Bendiken

» Discovery News: Galileo's fingers and tooth recovered by collector

“The tooth and fingers (from Galileo’s right hand [which had held the pen with which so many great works were written]) were removed in 1737 when the scientist’s body was exhumed from his unconsecrated grave [in] a solemn event, fully described by a notary report. For 95 years since the death in 1642 of the great scientist, ecclesiastical authorities refused to allow Galileo to be buried in a consecrated ground.”

US economy vs Chinese economy

The Dow priced in gold, 1900-2009

NSA: Now Spying on Americans

Lisp Machines in Ten Documents

“ I’m not throwing up and hungover, I’m just reallocating the malinvested resources of the boom.

— Steven Horwitz, Austrian Business Cycle Theory for Dummies: Recovery Chapter

Internet speeds around the world

Solid-State Drives (SSDs) FTW

Halloween skull

“ Resistance movements are governed by the same dynamic as the open-source software community, as described by Eric Raymond in “The Cathedral and the Bazaar.” Innovations are developed rapidly by self-managed individuals, independently — stigmergically — and then those innovations that prove themselves useful are rapidly adopted by the entire network. In hierarchies, the inefficiencies of organizations are multiples of all the individual inefficiencies of their members; in networks, they’re contained and bypassed as the innovations of the most efficient are adopted universally with zero transaction costs. That’s what “Fourth Generation Warfare” is: asymmetric warfare governed by the developmental ethos of Linux. […] The generals in the giant bureaucracies are always busy fighting the last war. The TSA bureaucrats expend tens of thousands of committee man-hours to make sure nobody can ever hijack a plane again, or hide explosives in their shoes, or smuggle in explosives in shampoo bottles — stuff that Al Qaeda would never try twice anyway, because they turn on a dime to come up with the next thing the TSA bureaucrats haven’t thought of yet. […] We see hierarchical institutions challenged, and soundly beaten, on every side by the new network culture.

— Kevin Carson, The Network Revolution Versus the State and Its Allies (via Mike Gogulski)

“ I was now getting, as I have said, one dollar and fifty cents per day. I contracted for it; I earned it; it was paid to me; it was rightfully my own; yet, upon each returning Saturday night, I was compelled to deliver every cent of that money to Master Hugh. And why? Not because he earned it, — not because he had any hand in earning it, — not because I owed it to him, — not because he possessed the slightest shadow of a right to it; but solely because he had the power to compel me to give it up. The right of the grim-visaged pirate upon the high seas is exactly the same.

— Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself

Dilbert humanitarian award strip

What hyperinflation looks like…

» Report on Slovak State Police attacks against Mike Gogulski, 5 September 2009

Spread the link and help bring Miroslav Pašek, corrupt Slovak police officer, to justice.

Trying new things is the best part of being young