The BA goes beyond, beyond with Rummy as Christian cheerleader for Bush and Cheney. Even though I am an atheist, I thank god Bushworld (("It's their reality. We just live and die in it.")is gone even though the stench of same will take decades to overcome.
If this is a new kind of Kool Aid, I'm ready to drink some. It's time to change our attitude about how socialism works because god knows, capitalism in the US isn't doing too well as of late. I have a good friend from Sweden who shakes his head when discussing healthcare and bailouts in America. In Sweden, single payer universal healthcare is the law of the land and when Swedish banks imploded a few years ago, they were allowed to die, thus enabling the country to get out of recession with greater haste than thought possible, something Obama and company are NOT doing as we continue to pour our money into the black hole of WS zombie banks.
FF is without a doubt, one of the funniest sites in the world as these guys find unintentionally hilarious corporate videos that rock. The Winnebago man is a classic along with the Wendy's training video on how to grill spam. To see other beauties, click on the FF trailer seen below.
As a systems guy who knows a little bit about communications, the web and databases, it never ceases to amaze me when politicians' unenlightened self interest enables greed and incompetence to be injected into, in this case, Universal Health Care, an environment the vast majority of Americans, including me, want as a single payer entity. According to Ralph Nader, there's a damn good reason why...
Click here to see civil "disobedience" at it's best, something we are going to see a lot more of in the weeks and months ahead as the economy continues it's downward slide while the connected and powerful take the "Let them eat cake." attitude toward us great unwashed.
I wonder if Obama and company remember what happened to Marie Antoinette even though she probably did not say that famous quote. I do.
Answering questions is something long sought after for internet trolls like yours truly. If Wolfram Alpha lives up to the hype, the answer to my prayers will have been answered. :)
Addendum: We haven't even discussed the looming specter of commercial property defaults, the dirty secret the banks are holding onto to limit losses on their books, something that must eventually be reported if they are to be considered as viable business entities in this rapidly contracting economy.
We all know the horrors of voice mail and the "options" one must endure in order to find a "human" to deal with the situation at hand. Now there's hope. Click on da Vinci's iconic image to go to Get2Human.com. It seems they have a list of "secret numbers" by which one can actually find a member of homo sapiens able to help you escape from digital hell. :)
Needless to say, reading Proust is intense. I still remember Swann's Way as a novel filled with summer light, something akin to Edwin Hopper's paintings but much warmer in tone and oh so precious in attitude.
This quote below says it all, especially the part with James Joyce, the other great SOC writer, meeting Proust for the first and only time in 1922.
One of the best books I have ever read is Into the Cool by Eric D. Schneider & Dorion Sagan. The best passage in their book, IMHO, is "Nature Abhors Gradients", a statement that stays in my head, foreverreminding me nature is both modular and economical in terms of how reality works. Take the most energy efficient way possible to delineate anything (flows) because the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics rules. Because of this, the linkage between living and physical systems becomes common sense, something now codified as science fact in Constructural Theory whereby "Thermodynamics becomes a science of systems with configuration."
While looking at the Constructural site, the connect to D'arcy Thomson's seminal On Growth & Form resonates as Thompson explains not only how biological forms take shape but also how their shapes relate to design and mathematics.
To better understand why D'arcy Thomson's 1917 masterpiece never ceases to amaze me, just look at the transformation piece of a fish using shear mapping, a concept that shows, in elegant fashion, how structural changes in an evolving species can happen in logically consistent ways.
I don't care much about music. What I like is sounds. - Dizzy Gillespie
To get another take on Constructural Theory, click here.
Had to put a clip of Dizzy (& Bird) in this piece as Dizzy was simply awesome as composer, musician and really cool guy.