This quote by Ray Bradbury reminds me of the quote from “Good Will Hunting:”
“You dropped a 150 grand on an [] education you could have gotten for a dollar fifty in late charges at the public library.”
I have loved books and libraries since I was old enough to know what they were.
That’s me, on the right, with my good buddy Mickey.
In fact, in a somewhat meta twist, one of my favorite books as a child was Julia L. Sauer’s “Mike’s House,” a tale of a library and a very, very special book.
As I mentioned elsewhere, I learned to read largely through the works of Charles Schulz, and have been a voracious reader ever since. In with my own family, reading time was a regular activity, and would go on as long as I could keep from falling asleep, at which point I would keep reading – although what came out was never intelligible. The kids always got a laugh out of that – but they grew up loving books.
For more beautiful pictures of drool-worthy libraries and some great quotes, visit Buzzfeed.
And, as primitive as it was, the old Macintosh game “Missile Command” put the fear of God into me as those incoming warheads began to MIRV, and I saw that no matter how many you took out, your cities would still be reduced to smoking ash.
The effects of nuclear damage are horrifying. Eyewitness accounts, footage and images from Hiroshima and Nagasaki should have been enough to convince humanity that these weapons of mass destruction have no place anywhere on the planet, but unfortunately this was not the path we took. In fact, some people actually capitalized on the fun of using atomic bombs on your enemies.
Atom Bomber Toy, above and below.
Then there was the next level: Mutoscope’s Atomic Bomber arcade game.
Remember, the “Atomic Bomber is built for profits and pleasure.” Never mind the charred ruins of two cities and hundreds of thousands of lives ruined or shattered.
What the hqiz is wrong with people? One would think we as a species would have learned from the past, but it’s chilling to remember that there are certain factions and certain governments who would gleefully launch nuclear attacks on their enemies if they only had viable technology: North Korea and Islamic terror groups come quickly to mind. And sadly, it’s only the threat of massive retaliation that has kept our nuclear arsenals locked up.
My voice is only a small one, but the more people who call for peace and the abolishment of such engines of horror, the sooner we will live in a world worthy of being called human. For the sake of us all, I pray that it may happen sooner than later.
I was led to this sad video by AmazonWatch via one of my friends, found on his blog “Chevron Shills.”
Because Marina Aguinda Lucitante was singing about Texaco, I had to ask him what the relationship between Chevron and Texaco was, and he kindly explained that Chevron purchased Texaco in 2000. He wrote to me,
“When they purchased Texaco’s assets, they also took on its liabilities. They were warned from the get-go that this would make them responsible for the catastrophe in Ecuador, but they didn’t care. So, although it was technically Texaco that destroyed the rain forest, Chevron still has plenty of blood on its hands, because its army of lawyers and its PR team have fought tooth and nail to prevent Chevron having to perform the kind of cleanup or make the type of reparations that could/would have prevented the many cancer deaths which have occurred over the last few decades.”
When we stick that nozzle in our car, we don’t think about the human carnage left in the wake of oil companies. It’s difficult, too, because our entire world runs on fossil fuels, despite small advances being made in various places. One can’t curl up in a cave and not be part of society. But spreading awareness and promoting alternate energy sources wherever possible can be done.
I now live in a small community whose power is provided by natural gas – still a non-renewable resource, but less polluting than coal. But when I lived in Salt Lake, I took full advantage of their Blue Skies program which allowed consumers to pay a small surcharge, guaranteeing that their energy would be purchased from wind power.
I purchased a Prius to keep my gasoline usage down, and although there are numerous analyses that show the net carbon footprint is not significantly less because of the costs and impact from manufacture and disposal of the battery technology, I still feel that over the 7 years that I’ve owned it, my gas consumption has been significantly less than it otherwise might have been.
While an eGallon is significantly cheaper than gasoline, even in the most expensive states, fully-electric vehicles still have issues, since that electricity has to come from largely fossil sources at the moment, but we can’t let that stop us from continuing to push for renewable and non-polluting energy sources.
Laser printers have come along way. These days you can buy one for almost nothing, and avoiding the manufacturer’s scam by having your cartridges refilled makes using them pretty cost-effective.
The first laser printer I ever saw was the size of a small web press, used by the State of Washington in 1980 to print its payroll checks. The next one I encountered had shrunk considerably:
This is actually the Xerox version of the Wang LPS-12 (or LIS-24) laser printer, which would manage 12 or 24 pages per minute. We had several of them in the Translation Department of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and they got heavy use because we were able to dive into the font files and character mapping tables and tweak the characters to customize Wang’s OIS system for 116 languages instead of the 16 supported ones. I recall loading these onto hand trucks and moving them from office to office occasionally, as we had one physical location that for security purposes could not be connected to the outside world. Toner was loaded in bulk from large gallon bottles, and could be supremely messy.
After decades of searching, the Internet finally disgorged this cartoon, seen in the November 15, 1988 issue of PC Magazine:
The same printer in its original incarnation was also used with our Xerox Star 8010 system and its successor, the 6085.
This system was the result of research at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), and had Xerox been as good at marketing as Steve Jobs, we might be using Xerox iMacs today. You can see the GUI elements, graphic capability and multilingual fonts that the Macintosh was so successful at popularizing, here being used years before the Macintosh hit the market.
Going even farther back, I was reminded of the first electronic calculator I laid hands on in 1968, the Wang 320SE. It had four nixie-tube terminals connected to a central processing unit, and I remember prominent instructions on each terminal never to do bad things like dividing by zero or setting up any trig function that resulted in an undefined result, because it would crash the CPU and take 3 hours to reboot, or some such nonsense.
Sheesh. My Droid may have more computing power than the room-sized Univac 1108 I learned to write Fortran code on in 1969.
Memories. They’re interesting to look back at, but I would never want to return to that level of technology.
Charlie Chaplin in New York, appearing with Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. during WWI. They were promoting war bonds for Third Liberty Loan. Photo taken in April, 1918 in front of the Sub-treasury building.
Another view.
Fairbanks addresses the crowd.
Some comments over at reddit are worth noting:
The respect. No policemen, no crowd control, everyone keeping a respectful distance.
The hats. Almost everyone was wearing hats. The wearing of hats was largely abandoned in the 1960s; some have hypothesized that the explosion of the automobile made wearing hats for protection from the elements less necessary.
The crowd is overwhelmingly men. Women just did not go out as much at the beginning of the 2oth Century. It was truly a man’s world.
The crowd is overwhelmingly white. That was our country in 1918.
An intriguing glimpse of a tiny slice of history that I had never seen before.
Apparently in Denmark people throw dishes at one another’s doors for New Years. The more your doorstep is littered with worthless shards of pottery, the luckier you will be. Supposedly because you have more friends willing to huck priceless Ming vases at your residence.
I always thought Jiggs and Maggie were Irish, but it appears that they may have been Danes.
This comic strip always puzzled me; despite the constant abuse which Jiggs endured at the hands of his tyrannical wife, it enjoyed immense popularity during its day. Of course, if it were a real drama, things would have turned out somewhat differently:
(I think this is from Mad, but I’m not certain.)
Well, enough of that. In Germany, it’s considered traditional to enjoy a viewing of Dinner for One. 90-year-old Miss Sophie throws a birthday party for herself, setting the table for long dead friends. Her butler, James, play acts all of them, getting more and more drunk as the night rolls on.
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2013 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
The Louvre Museum has 8.5 million visitors per year. This blog was viewed about 190,000 times in 2013. If it were an exhibit at the Louvre Museum, it would take about 8 days for that many people to see it.
The Goodwoman of the House just posted this on her Facebook page:
If only it were just Candy Crush Saga. I think the mad rush for these online stupidities started around the time that Farmville became popular. Every time someone posted “A poor little lamb just wandered onto your farm,” I’d reply with something about dragging out the mint sauce.
I immediately block any request for an app or game so that I never see them again; just hover your mouse over a request in your notifications, and you’ll see a “turn off” option:
Facebook gives you the option to see which apps you’ve blocked, and this made me curious. You can see your own as well. Below, my blacklist, sorted alphabetically:
★ Your Daily Photo
❤ SpeedDate App
21 questions
411.ca
Angry Birds
Anniversaires
Answers™ About Me
Are you my best friend ???
Atlantis Fantasy
Backgammon Live
Backyard Monsters
Badges
Badoo
Battle Pirates
Best Friends Forever
Bingo Bash
BINGO Blitz
Birthday Calendar by Davia
Birthdays
BranchOut
Bubble Island
Bumper Sticker (New)
c56
Caesars Casino
Café World
Calendarul Meu
Candy Crush Saga
Castle Age
CastleVille
Causes
Causes
ChefVille
Chirpme
City of Wonder
CityVille
CoasterVille
Compleanni
Crossword Buddies
Cumpleaños
Date New People
Empires & Allies
Family Farm
Family Tree
FARKLE
FarmVille
FBCredits Giveaway
Flixster
Födelsedagar
Food Fling!
Free Gifts
Friend Hug
Friends Albums
Friends Forever – You and Me
FrontierVille
fTalk
Fun Cards – New Year & More!
Gardens of Time
Get Revealed
Goodreads
Halloween Treats Old
Hidden Chronicles
Hidden Haunts
Hollywood Spins
Holy Town
Hotel City
Hugged
Il Mio Calendario
Indiana Jones Adventure World
Invite Your Friends Button
Jackpot Bingo
Klout
Knighted
Knighthood
Legends: Rise of a Hero
Likeness
Listia
Lost Bubble
LoVe to YoU ❤~
Lucky Slots
Mafia Wars
Mahjong Trails
Maine Stuff!!
Marvel: Avengers Alliance
Mastering the Joy of Chocolate
Middle Kingdom
Movie Blitz
My Calendar
My Calendar
My Friend Secrets
My Holiday Cards ★
My Tetris Friends
MyFamily
Ninja Saga
Organizing for Action
Pengle
PetVille
Photo Contest
Pink Ribbon
Pioneer Trail
Pool Master 2
Promo!
Promotions
PurePlay Casino
Question Party
Quien visita tu perfil?
Ravenskye City
Rich Schefren Endorses FBWebinars
schoolFeed
SimCity Social
Slingo
Smarter Than A 5th Grader?
Sorority Life
Stik for Small Business
Suggest This
SuperPoke! Pets
Talent.me
THE FRIEND FIGHTING QUIZ
The Guardian
The Only Government Approved Money System
The Sims Social
Threads of Mystery
To my Online Friend
Treasure Isle
TripAdvisor
Truth Game
Truths About You
TSO Atlantic City Flyaway!
Verjaardagen
Would you rather
Zoo World
全民捕魚
我的王國
誕生日
Every single one of these apps wants permission to access all my information, my friends list, my wall, and often requests permission to post on my behalf, including spamming itself to all my friends. To Pluto with that.
A recent blog entry by Dave Ramsey quotes Tom Corley, on his website RichHabitsInstitute.com, outlining a few of the differences between the habits of the rich and the poor. I have summarized these differences in the table below, which makes the comparison a bit more readable.
Percent of Wealthy
Activity
Percent of Poor
70
Eat less than 300 junk food calories per day
97
23
Gamble
52
80
Focus on accomplishing some single goal
12
76
Exercise aerobically four days a week
23
63
Listen to audio books during commute to work
5
81
81% of wealthy maintain a to-do list
19
63
Parents make their children read two or more non-fiction books a month
3
70
Parents make their children volunteer 10 hours or more a month
3
80
Make Happy Birthday calls
11
67
Write down their goals
17
88
Read 30 minutes or more each day for education or career reasons
2
6
Say what’s on their mind
69
79
Network five hours or more each month
16
67
Watch one hour or less of TV every day
23
6
Watch reality TV
78
44
Wake up three hours before work starts
3
74
Teach good daily success habits to their children
1
84
Believe good habits create opportunity and luck
4
76
Believe bad habits create detrimental luck
9
19
Believe in lifelong educational self-improvement
5
86
Love to read
26
There’s no question that these are habits which will improve one’s mind and create an environment where the chances for wealth-building are increased. There’s no guarantee that you’ll get rich if you do every one of these things (or don’t, as the case may be), but your odds of strengthening your position in life are radically increased.
I will be looking at this list closely as I determine what worked during this past year, what didn’t work, and what’s next.
Apparently Dave’s blog post attracted a storm of ignorant and negative comments, so he added some commentary which is worth the read.
