My inner viking tells me I need one.
Thursday, December 1, 2016
Venezuela's currency goes "Poof!"
Just recently, their money, the Bolivar, lost 15% of its value in just one day as the Venezuela hyperinflation began its terminal phase.
Too much socialism, and everyone gets screwed. Bernie Sanders, anyone? Bitcoin, anyone?
Haha! This reaction tells you everything you need to know about whether America picked the right president.
David Remes, the lawyer of one of the prisoners at Guantanamo, recounted to Brennan what his client told him about election night.
“He said that many detainees thought that it was the end of the world and felt terrible and that many detainees asked for tranquilizers, sleeping pills because they were so distraught,” Remes said.
Remes said he is afraid that once Donald Trump officially becomes president, the doors will “slam shut” and remaining detainees will not be able to be released.
Darn right. They are in fact lucky they weren't shot summarily on the battlefield, as being enemy soldiers out of uniform, as allowed by international law. Instead, they get free food, healthcare and housing, courtesy of the American taxpayer, for however long we feel like hosting their stinking selves.
Don't even ask what I think we should do with them.
He’s really the wildest craziest sharpest cat we’ve ever met. And what I love about him is he’s the big hero of the West Coast. . . . Besides all the background he has, in Oriental scholarship, Pound, taking peyote and seeing visions, his mountainclimbing and bhikkuing, wow, Japhy Ryder is a great new hero of American culture
A nice article in the New Yorker about my favorite local poet, Gary Snyder.
Cool personal anecdote: the boy had a job at a local used book store. One of his jobs was to take in donated used books. One night when I picked him up after work, he showed me a book he bought that had just come in, and inside were a couple of letters the previous owner had folded and put there from Snyder himself, discussing various upcoming projects.
Ephemera!
He, not being real familiar with Snyder, told me he had almost thrown them out (apparently lots of junk comes in with used books like this), but recognizing the name from some stray comment I had made, decided, with hand hovering over the trash can, to show them to me at the last possible minute. Whew, close call there. I still have them with the book.
Anyway, a good article, and good poetry.
Cool personal anecdote: the boy had a job at a local used book store. One of his jobs was to take in donated used books. One night when I picked him up after work, he showed me a book he bought that had just come in, and inside were a couple of letters the previous owner had folded and put there from Snyder himself, discussing various upcoming projects.
Ephemera!
He, not being real familiar with Snyder, told me he had almost thrown them out (apparently lots of junk comes in with used books like this), but recognizing the name from some stray comment I had made, decided, with hand hovering over the trash can, to show them to me at the last possible minute. Whew, close call there. I still have them with the book.
Anyway, a good article, and good poetry.
Hay for the Horses
He had driven half the night
From far down San Joaquin
Through Mariposa, up the
Dangerous mountain roads,
And pulled in at eight a.m.
With his big truckload of hay
behind the barn.
With winch and ropes and hooks
We stacked the bales up clean
To splintery redwood rafters
High in the dark, flecks of alfalfa
Whirling through shingle-cracks of light,
Itch of haydust in the
sweaty shirt and shoes.
At lunchtime under Black oak
Out in the hot corral,
---The old mare nosing lunchpails,
Grasshoppers crackling in the weeds---
"I'm sixty-eight" he said,
"I first bucked hay when I was seventeen.
I thought, that day I started,
I sure would hate to do this all my life.
And dammit, that's just what
I've gone and done."
From far down San Joaquin
Through Mariposa, up the
Dangerous mountain roads,
And pulled in at eight a.m.
With his big truckload of hay
behind the barn.
With winch and ropes and hooks
We stacked the bales up clean
To splintery redwood rafters
High in the dark, flecks of alfalfa
Whirling through shingle-cracks of light,
Itch of haydust in the
sweaty shirt and shoes.
At lunchtime under Black oak
Out in the hot corral,
---The old mare nosing lunchpails,
Grasshoppers crackling in the weeds---
"I'm sixty-eight" he said,
"I first bucked hay when I was seventeen.
I thought, that day I started,
I sure would hate to do this all my life.
And dammit, that's just what
I've gone and done."
For the first time, astronomers have observed a strange quantum phenomenon in action, where a neutron star is surrounded by a magnetic field so intense, it’s given rise to a region in empty space where matter spontaneously pops in and out of existence.
I wish I knew enough math and physics to fully grasp this, but even without, it's still an amazing discovery.
In the classical physics of Newton and Einstein, the vacuum of space is entirely empty, but the theory of quantum mechanics assumes something very different.
According to quantum electrodynamics (QED) - a quantum theory that describes how light and matter interact - it’s predicted that space is actually full of 'virtual particles' that pop in and out of existence and mess with the activity of light particles (photons) as they zip around the Universe.
These virtual particles aren’t like regular physical particles like electrons and photons, but are fluctuations in quantum fields that have similar properties to a regular particle - the big difference being that they can appear and vanish at any point in space and time.
In regular empty space, photons aren't affected by these virtual particles, and travel without interference.
But in the empty space near the incredibly intense magnetic field of a neutron star, these virtual particles are 'excited', and they have a dramatic effect on any photons passing through.
"According to QED, a highly magnetised vacuum behaves as a prism for the propagation of light, an effect known as vacuum birefringence," Mignani explains in a press release.
"This effect can be detected only in the presence of enormously strong magnetic fields, such as those around neutron stars," adds team member Roberto Turollafrom the University of Padua in Italy.
As Jay Bennett reports for Popular Mechanics, the researchers directed the world's most advanced ground-based telescope, the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (VLT), at their neutron star, and observed linear polarisation - the alignment of light waves influenced by electromagnetic forced - in the empty space around the star.
"This is rather odd, because conventional relativity says that light should pass freely through a vacuum, such as space, without being altered," says Bennett.
"The linear polarisation was to such a degree (16 degrees, to be precise) that the only known explanations are theories of QED and the influence of virtual particles."
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