http://www.kk.org/cooltools/archives/002856.php
Friday, October 24, 2008
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
Monday, October 20, 2008
Visualizing Moore's Law - iowa arts and crafts
Moore's law describes an important trend in the history of computer hardware. Since the invention of the integrated circuit in 1958, the number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit has increased exponentially, doubling approximately every two years. The trend was first observed by Intel co-founder Gordon E. Moore in a 1965 paper. It has continued for almost half of a century and is not expected to stop for another decade at least and perhaps much longer.Almost every measure of the capabilities of digital electronic devices is linked to Moore's law: processing speed, memory capacity, even the number and size of pixels in digital cameras. All of these are improving at (roughly) exponential rates as well. This has dramatically increased the usefulness of digital electronics in nearly every segment of the world economy.[8] Moore's law describes this driving force of technological and social change in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
Because we talked about this during the 'poseur' discussion/debate
This Land
Facts Mix With the Johnny Cash Legend on the Road to Redemption
Ángel Franco/The New York Times
COME ALONG, WILD FLOWER CHILD Rosanne Cash took the stage Saturday in Starkville, Miss., as part of the Johnny Cash Flower Pickin’ Festival, which paid tribute to the night in 1965 that her father spent in the city jail. Ms. Cash said she did not usually appear at such events but admitted this one had appeal. “There’s something so American about it,” she said.
A plaque adorns the door to Room 22 at the motel where Johnny Cash stayed. More Photos
He had said hey to the porter, he had made her cry, cry, cry, he had walked the line. Now, with another worshipful crowd sated and with the rest of the band already on the road back to Memphis, a troubled and restless Johnny Cash stayed to explore the magnolia-scented darkness of a place whose name he could not have made up: Starkville.
Searching for parties, he found them. Then, searching for cigarettes, he got arrested for public drunkenness — or, as he later put it, for “picking flowers.” He kicked his jail cell so hard he broke a toe. Released after six hours, he collected his things in a motel, ate breakfast and left town.
What happened in Starkville stayed in Starkville. Few cared in May 1965 about the antics of a rowdy musician; fewer still connected those antics to a drug addiction. And while Cash later wrote a song about his experience called “Starkville City Jail,” it never rose very high in the canon.
But since that night, and especially since his death in 2003, Johnny Cash has become for some the craggy patron saint of redemption, his rumbling voice imparting freight-train blessings for all of America. Fact swirls with legend, suffering with salvation, shots of cocaine with peace in the valley, defiance of The Man with obedience to The Lord.
Now, if you want to trace Cash’s path to Damascus, you have to pass through Starkville, a town of 22,000 that last weekend celebrated its second annual Johnny Cash Flower Pickin’ Festival. It promised the pardoning of sins and featured an amused Rosanne Cash, the gifted and firmly established singer and songwriter whose father happens to be an icon.
“I usually don’t make a habit of making pilgrimages to a place where my father spent one night,” said Ms. Cash, who rarely appears on the Johnny Cash circuit. Although she loved her father, she says, she has no interest in having people looking through her for him.
In 1965, when her father was deep in amphetamine addiction, rarely spending time with his family in California, Ms. Cash was a 10-year-old girl who knew only that something was wrong with Daddy. She did not speak of those days this weekend.
Instead, Ms. Cash said she came at the request of her dear friend Marshall Grant, 80, the last of the Johnny Cash and the Tennessee Two band and, for so many years, her father’s keeper, the one who flushed pills down the toilet by the bushel. But she also admitted to being intrigued by the festival’s swirl of fact, myth and redemption.
“There’s something so American about it,” she said.
The flower-picking festival was started by Robbie Ward, 30, a gangly Cash enthusiast who arrived as the Starkville correspondent for a regional Mississippi newspaper. He was struck by how few here appreciated their town’s connection to Johnny Cash, or knew of the “At San Quentin” album that features “Starkville City Jail”:
They’re bound to get you.
‘Cause they got a curfew.
And you go to the Starkville City Jail.
Mr. Ward soon wrote an almost mystical story about that long-ago May night. A man named Smokey Evans claimed that when he was 15 and drunk, he was thrown into the same cell as Cash. After Cash broke his toe but before he left, he recalled, the singer handed him his black shoes and said: “Here’s a souvenir. I’m Johnny Cash.”
The man called Smokey, who supposedly had worn the shoes maybe four times in 40 years, died in a fight in 2005. The shoes are now said to be in the possession of a nephew in Georgia who says the relics were left to him in a will. It is not known whether he wears them.
Mr. Ward left journalism for a public relations job here at Mississippi State University, but his research into Cash’s night in Starkville remains a part-time job. He eventually persuaded the town to begin holding a Cash festival, overcoming grumblings that it celebrates an addict’s carousing by arguing that Starkville has the pedigree to become the host of the essential Cash festival.
“Johnny Cash was arrested in seven places,” Mr. Ward said. “But he only wrote a song about one of those places.”
He recounts Cash’s Starkville wanderings with a zealot’s fervor. How Cash wound up at a fraternity house after the concert in the Animal Husbandry building at Mississippi State. How he tossed his jacket to a student who had expressed admiration for it. How he made his way to a private party in the Longmeadow subdivision. How he got a ride to his room at the University Motel, where June Carter, a performer in his show and his future wife, was staying in another unit. How Cash was clearly not ready for sleep.
U.S. pilot was ordered to shoot down UFO - Yahoo! News
LONDON (Reuters) – Two U.S. fighter planes were scrambled and ordered to shoot down an unidentified flying object (UFO) over the English countryside during the Cold War, according to secret files made public on Monday.
One pilot said he was seconds away from firing 24 rockets at the object, which moved erratically and gave a radar reading like \"a flying aircraft carrier.\"
The pilot, Milton Torres, now 77 and living in Miami, said it spent periods motionless in the sky before reaching estimated speeds of more than 7,600 mph (12,000 kph).
After the alert, a shadowy figure told Torres he must never talk about the incident and he duly kept silent for more than 30 years.
His story was among dozens of UFO sightings in defence ministry files released at the National Archives in London.
In a written account, Torres described how he scrambled his F-86 D Sabre jet in calm weather from the Royal Air Force base at Manston, Kent in May 1957.
\"I was only a lieutenant and very much aware of the gravity of the situation. I felt very much like a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest,\" he said.
\"The order came to fire a salvo of rockets at the UFO. The authentication was valid and I selected 24 rockets.
\"I had a lock-on that had the proportions of a flying aircraft carrier,\" he added. \"The larger the airplane, the easier the lock-on. This blip almost locked itself.\"
At the last moment, the object disappeared from the radar screen and the high-speed chase was called off.
He returned to base and was debriefed the next day by an unnamed man who \"looked like a well-dressed IBM salesman.\"
\"He threatened me with a national security breach if I breathed a word about it to anyone,\" he said.
The documents contain no official explanation for the incident, which came at a time of heightened tension between the West and the Soviet Union. Planes were on constant stand-by at British bases for a possible Soviet attack.
The files blame other UFO sightings on weather balloons, clouds or normal aircraft. Torres said he had been waiting 50 years for an explanation.
\"I shall never forget it,\" he told the Times. \"On that night I was ordered to open fire even before I had taken off. That had never happened before.\"
UFO expert David Clarke said the sighting may have been part of a secret U.S. project to create phantom aircraft on radar screens to test Soviet air defences.
\"Perhaps what this pilot had seen was some kind of experiment in electronic warfare or maybe it was a UFO,\" he said. \"Something very unusual happened.\"
The files are online at: www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ufos
One pilot said he was seconds away from firing 24 rockets at the object, which moved erratically and gave a radar reading like \"a flying aircraft carrier.\"
The pilot, Milton Torres, now 77 and living in Miami, said it spent periods motionless in the sky before reaching estimated speeds of more than 7,600 mph (12,000 kph).
After the alert, a shadowy figure told Torres he must never talk about the incident and he duly kept silent for more than 30 years.
His story was among dozens of UFO sightings in defence ministry files released at the National Archives in London.
In a written account, Torres described how he scrambled his F-86 D Sabre jet in calm weather from the Royal Air Force base at Manston, Kent in May 1957.
\"I was only a lieutenant and very much aware of the gravity of the situation. I felt very much like a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest,\" he said.
\"The order came to fire a salvo of rockets at the UFO. The authentication was valid and I selected 24 rockets.
\"I had a lock-on that had the proportions of a flying aircraft carrier,\" he added. \"The larger the airplane, the easier the lock-on. This blip almost locked itself.\"
At the last moment, the object disappeared from the radar screen and the high-speed chase was called off.
He returned to base and was debriefed the next day by an unnamed man who \"looked like a well-dressed IBM salesman.\"
\"He threatened me with a national security breach if I breathed a word about it to anyone,\" he said.
The documents contain no official explanation for the incident, which came at a time of heightened tension between the West and the Soviet Union. Planes were on constant stand-by at British bases for a possible Soviet attack.
The files blame other UFO sightings on weather balloons, clouds or normal aircraft. Torres said he had been waiting 50 years for an explanation.
\"I shall never forget it,\" he told the Times. \"On that night I was ordered to open fire even before I had taken off. That had never happened before.\"
UFO expert David Clarke said the sighting may have been part of a secret U.S. project to create phantom aircraft on radar screens to test Soviet air defences.
\"Perhaps what this pilot had seen was some kind of experiment in electronic warfare or maybe it was a UFO,\" he said. \"Something very unusual happened.\"
The files are online at: www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ufos
Sunday, October 19, 2008
American corps traded w the Nazis
Excerpts Trading with the Enemy The Nazi - American Money Plot 1933-1949
Sounds wacko to some, but read for yourself. Blood is thicker than water, but money is thicker than blood.
We (humans) have unleashed upon the world these entities (corporations) whose most important goal is to maximize profit.
A note some may consider "out there": I've wondered whether the "capitalist" system is the Great Whore of Babylon spoken of in Revelations chapter 17.
Sounds wacko to some, but read for yourself. Blood is thicker than water, but money is thicker than blood.
We (humans) have unleashed upon the world these entities (corporations) whose most important goal is to maximize profit.
A note some may consider "out there": I've wondered whether the "capitalist" system is the Great Whore of Babylon spoken of in Revelations chapter 17.
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