Category Archives: Splendor

Is this the end of America? Canada’s Financial Post: Helicopter Ben Bernanke’s Federal Reserve is dropping trillions of fresh paper dollars on the world economy, the President of the United States is cracking jokes on late night comedy shows, his energy minister is threatening a trade war over carbon emissions, his treasury secretary is dithering […] Continue reading →

One of the fun devices in Part III of Atlas Shrugged is something author Ayn Rand called “the policy of the microsecond.” Despite the high-flown philosophical claims of the looters, their actual motivation was never anything other than “the expediency of the moment” — one absurd rationalization after the next, justifying theft and visiting the […] Continue reading →

They’d wake up and catch a clue, that’s what. From the Wall Street Journal: It is simply wrong for commentators to continue to focus on President Barack Obama’s high levels of popularity, and to conclude that these are indicative of high levels of public confidence in the work of his administration. Indeed, a detailed look […] Continue reading →

From TED Talks:

Very inspiring, yes? And think of all the emerging branches of science Professor Enriquez leaves out: Simulation, massive data sets, crowd-sourcing, nanotechnology, bio-computing, etc. It’s raining soup but we’re all so bus… Continue reading →

We call it inauguration after the Romans, of course. Beginning at midnight on January 1st of each new year, the priests would take the augurs — the signs and portents — for the two new consuls, the duoviri who would govern the Republic for the next year. The ceremony would end with a long, slow […] Continue reading →

The Technium: Instead of dozens of geniuses trying to program an AI in a university lab, there are billion people training the dim glimmers of intelligence arising between the quadrillion hyperlinks on the web. Long before the computing capacity of a plug-in computer overtakes the supposed computing capacity of a human brain, the web—encompassing all […] Continue reading →

I hate lies, and I hate just about everything that doesn’t hate lies. We live our lives enmired in lies — in hoke, in smoke, in hints and allusions and innuendoes, in juice and hustle and jive — and it is entirely too easy to become one of the liars, de facto, without really intending […] Continue reading →

I’m kicking this back to the top of the blog, as well. I think this is a good example of the kind of behavior that has been denounced for millennia by would-be bosses, but I also think this approaches an ideal expression of how human beings should behave. Plus which, it’s the stuff I’ve been […] Continue reading →

I edited 1,407 files in 1,407 folders on Friday. Not by hand, mind you. That would have been a tedious and error-prone path to an inevitable suicide for someone like me. No, I built a spider to do the job, … Continue reading →

I don’t do well in despair. Clarify that. I don’t mean that, when I find myself in despair, I fare especially badly. What is mean is, if despair were a classroom discipline for which one could be tested and graded, … Continue reading →