voluntaryXchange

Birthday Dirge Trivia

So I'm listenting to Glenn Miller's Lost Recordings, and there is a piece called "Song of the Volga Boatmen".

As I listened, I realized I had heard "Happy Birthday" sung to this melody growing up in western New York in the late 70's (that's several years earlier than the references I found on the net).

It turns out this is a fairly common thing (although MP3s of this version are not - probably because of urban non-myth about ownership of the copyright and residuals of "Happy Birthday").

This version goes by a lot of names: the birthday dirge, the mongolian/barbarian birthday song, and the SCA birthday song. Here's a snippet:

Sausage Trivia

Who first thought up the idea of taking an animal apart and stuffing loose little bits of it back into its intestines?

I would've thought this went back to the early Middle Ages, but sausage actually goes back to Sumeria, where there was a word for this around 3000 B.C.

FWIW: You wonder these things when helping 4 other people make 110 pounds of sausage over the weekend.

Office Trivia

The most used keystrokes in Office are:

Ctrl-v (paste)

Ctrl-S (save)

Ctrl-C (copy)

Ctrl-z (undo)

Ctrl-b (bold)

Via OFFICE Watch.

Birds "See" the Earth's Magnetic Field

Cool science: they're in the process of establishing that birds migrate by seeing the magnetic field of the Earth.

This would go a long way towards figuring out how they navigate over such long distances with limited memory capacities.

Less important, but still intriguing, is that it would explain why most bird migration stays in the same  longitude - since the magnetic field lines of the Earth parallel longitude.

This isn't that far-fetched: the light we see is called electromagnetic radiation because they are all related. We have chemicals in our eyes that respond differently to changes in light, and birds have chemicals in their eyes that respond to changes in magnetic fields.

Technorati Tags: bird,see,magnetic,field

Obama Planned Political Expediency

From Best of the Web Today:

The real proof that Wright is right about Obama, though, comes from this passage in a New York Times story from April 30, 2007--a year ago yesterday:

Mr. Wright, who has long prided himself on criticizing the establishment, said he knew that he may not play well in Mr. Obama's audition for the ultimate establishment job.

"If Barack gets past the primary, he might have to publicly distance himself from me," Mr. Wright said with a shrug. "I said it to Barack personally, and he said yeah, that might have to happen."

Assuming Wright's account of the conversation was accurate--and as far as we know, Obama has never disputed it--Obama not only is acting out of political expediency now, but was making plans a year ago to do so.

This is really damning ...

Technorati Tags: wright,obama,distance,denunciation,expediency

Wright and Obama as a Dominant Strategy Equilibrium

People are surprised that Jeremiah Wright would speak out the way he has.

I think this is a dominant strategy for him.

If Obama wins, Wright will look like he supported a winner.

If Obama loses (the election or the nomination), Wright will have more fodder for his arguments.

I think the lesson here is that someone in the Obama campaign was too dumb or complacent to do what it takes to get this guy to pipe down.

N.B. Since Wright has a dominant strategy equilibrium, Obama's choice of strategy is easier because there are less outcomes to worry about. This makes the content of his denunciation of Wright less valuable than if he had done it a month ago. This suggests his campaign management is even dumber.

Technorati Tags: wright,obama,dominant,strategy,equilibrium

The GDP Grade

The advance estimate of real GDP growth for the first quarter came out this week at 0.6%.

That's weak, but not a recession.

On my preferred grading scale, this grades out as a D.

On a scale that contemporary college student grading scale are used to it grades out as a C.

Technorati Tags: real,gdp,growth,rate,letter,grade,2008,1,I,first,quarter

Nobel Prizes All Around

Scientists have found memristors at nanoscale.

All of our electronics are built around combinations of 3 items: resistors (that reduce current by converting it into heat), capacitors (that can stop, store, and discharge potential), and inductors (that convert electricity into magnetism and back again).

In 1971 the memristor was posited as a 4th item that should already exist, if only someone could find it. This weeks' Nature News announced that titanium dioxide acts as a memristor at nanoscale.

Why should you care? This is easy: if they built all this stuff around us out of 3 items, how much could they build out of four?

But wait ... guess what capability that 4th item adds?

What's neat about this is that a memristor is that it "remembers" the amount of voltage that was applied to it and for how long it was applied. This is a physical property that doesn't require power. So, your computer or cellphone could shut itself on and off as often as it liked - even millions of times per second without rebooting.

This would solve a huge part of the problem with batteries: limited storage, frequent recharging, disposal because we wear them out so fast, and so on.

This is will be so good for the environment that it shouldn't take environmentalists long to come out against memristors. ;)

Technorati Tags: memristor

Bernard Goldberg On Liberalism

David Mamet's conversion to conservatism generated a lot of interesting letters to the editor in The Wall Street Journal.

From Bernard Goldberg came this opinion about liberalism:

Most of us "defectors" have one important belief in common: That liberalism deserted us and not the other way around. Liberals, I fear, forgot how to be liberal.

This struck me pretty early:

• Age 9: my teachers didn't like to be satirized, and responded like controllers
• Age 10: even little religious things - like the golden rule - weren't acceptable to some of my peers
• Age 12: my father started to reject idealism in favor as his politics moved towards the Democrats
• Age 13: no matter how cool I thought the counterculture was, I had more respect for America than some of Carter's folks
• Age 14: our liberal family friends couldn't properly place the country whose revolution they were in favor of
• Age 15: decentralization seemed like a pretty good thing to me and just about no one else

I didn't like Reagan until 1983, but I was already fertile ground as a 16-year-old in 1980.

College Student Writing Example

I received this e-mail this morning:

is are final thur @ 9? I freaking out I will go tomorrow and see but if not sorry I am a little slow.

I just thought for some reason it was tuesday