[Anonymous selections from recent correspondence]
Russia has a larger surface area than Pluto.
Pluto never made a full orbit around the sun from the time it was discovered to when it was declassified as a planet.
If you shrunk the sun down to the size of a white blood cell and shrunk the Milky Way Galaxy down using the same scale, it would be the size of the continental United States.
It rains diamonds on Saturn and Jupiter.
Also, that's what Jupiter would look like [see above] if it were as close to us as the Moon is.
If a piece of paper were folded 42 times, it would reach to the moon.
If you dug a hole to the center of the Earth and dropped a book down, it would take 42 minutes to reach the bottom
- "Florida students protest Koch influence over college professors"
- "Scott Walker's ‘less dependence on government’ ad features recipient of over $1 million in government subsidies!"
- "Americans find something else not to believe in"
- "Justice Stevens: Citizens United ‘giant step in the wrong direction’, calls for overturning"
- "Cardinal Dolan says women can just go to 7-11 for their health care"
- "Boy Scouts of America revoke Seattle chapter after its refusal to boot gay scoutmaster"
- "Actual Republican Senate candidate says democracy is socialism"
My daughter called from school. Her teacher saw one of my campaign signs this morning and asked her if she was related. She said, "that's my mom." Does it get any better? Feeling good!
When my dad ran for Congress in the 70's I entered junior high school and learned a teacher there had students earning extra credit volunteering for Dad's campaign. It's a great feeling for the children of candidates too.
The ability of money to win what it wants is the defining characteristic of our politics—one exacerbated by the Supreme Court’s recent decision in McCutcheon, and Citizens United before that. A reflection of this power, and a not-so-silent partner in the ethical crimes it perpetrates, is the manner in which demonstrable bullshit is able to dominate our political discourse and thereby mask all of the above behind ideological assertion and meaningless cliché. In his discussion of Piketty, Krugman recalls Upton Sinclair’s famous observation that “it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” Thanks to the simultaneous corporatization and conglomeratization of our media apparatus, that category now includes almost every credentialed political pundit in America.
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While there's no "typical" creative type, there are some tell-tale characteristics and behaviors of highly creative people. Here is one of 18 things they do differently.
They "fail up."
Resilience is practically a prerequisite for creative success, says Scott Barry Kaufman, a psychologist at New York University who has spent years researching creativity. Doing creative work is often described as a process of failing repeatedly until you find something that sticks, and creatives – at least the successful ones – learn not to take failure so personally.
"Creatives fail and the really good ones fail often," Forbes contributor Steven Kotler wrote in a piece on Einstein's creative genius.
Since [an uncomfortable encounter with someone], I have, thankfully, not run into this woman again, but given the fact that we live in the same neighborhood, and that our sons are in child care together, I probably won’t be able to avoid her indefinitely. I recently found myself thinking of this when I learned of the existence of a smartphone app called Cloak. The app’s tagline is “Incognito mode for real life,” and it offers its users the ability to “avoid exes, co-workers, that guy who likes to stop and chat—anyone you’d rather not run into”,...Cloak works by linking with your Instagram and Foursquare accounts to uncover the locations of these undesirables and revealing their avatars on a map, thereby empowering you to give them as wide a berth as possible; in this sense, it’s like a contemporary urban version of those maps from the Middle Ages, with their admonitory illustrations of dragons and sea monsters: “Here Be Vague Acquaintances.”
...There’s a certain novelty value in the idea of an anti-social-media app, a kind of satirical inversion of the assumption of gregariousness built into your Facebook and your Foursquare. According to the New York Times, Cloak was downloaded from iTunes nearly three hundred thousand times its first three weeks. Clearly, there are a lot of people out there looking to avoid running into other people.
I thought you and some family members might like this "ad hoc" public concert:
McPriceless! When you see what McDonald's is spending its money on, you really start to wonder about their claims that they will have to raise prices if they're going to pay their workers more than the legally required minimum:
Why do I like living in the Deep South?
Pledge Politics: "Conservative Christians Don’t Want You To See This Clip Of Porky Pig Reciting The Pledge."
Limerick of the Week:
"He is risen"; "He lives" (the Easter spin –_______________
now back to everyday); "Gay acts are sin";
"Priests mean kids no harm";
"Men don't make Earth warm";
"God has a plan"; "God affects climate, not men."
Copyright © 2014 by Morris Dean
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Thanks for all the correspondence! Planets, political candidates & their children, money, truths, funnies, McPriceless, nightmare, misspelled movie advertisement, post-Easter limerick. And much, much more.
ReplyDeleteI need help to understand how a piece of paper would reach to the moon if it were folded 42 times.
ReplyDeleteThat's 42 doublings of the paper's thickness, each doubling after the first being "compounded." 4 times, 8 times, 16 times,..., 2-to-the-42nd-power times altogether. It adds up geometrically.
DeleteThe moon is 238,900 miles from earth. Let's calculate how thick the paper would be folded 42 times. The value of 2 to the 42nd power is 4,398,046,511,104. If the sheet of paper is 1/200th of an inch thick (0.005 in.), then folding it 42 times (which is impossible, by the way; we're talking theoretics here) will result in a "stack" 0.005 times 4,398,046,511,104 inches thick. Converted to miles: 347,068, which is actually more than the distance to the moon. And 1/200 of an inch thick is VERY thin paper.
DeleteI'd appreciate someone's checking my math, if you'd care to assist in that way.
Thanks to Coy Pittman for explaining the 42 foldings in a formal mathematical way:
DeleteI'm making the assumption that you can fold the piece of paper an infinite number of times. Each time the paper is folded the thickness doubles. At zero folds the paper is at the original thickness (T), so we have T * 2n [T times 2-to-the-nth power; we can't superscript in a comment, unfortunately] as the formula for the thickness of the folded paper at fold n. So, if the moon is a distance d away, then we set d = T * 2n to find how many times the paper has to be folded before reaching the moon. Solving for n, n= log(Base2)(d/T).
The thickness of copy paper is about 1 * 10-4 meters [1 * 10-to-the--4th power, or 1/10,000 of a meter; i.e., a stack of 10,000 sheets would be 1 meter tall], and the moon is a distance of about 4.044108 * 108 meters away [about 404,410,800 meters]. Plugging into the formula, n=log(Base2)((4.044108 * 108)/(1 * 10-4)) = 41.88. Because folding 41 times would not actually get us to the moon, a little more than half way in fact, and we cannot do half folds then 42 folds would have to be made before reaching the moon. Keep in mind that the moon has a distance from Earth that changes throughout the month.
Mercy Morris! I wouldn't have picked you as a person with too much time on his hands. ha! ha! Vic
ReplyDelete"Too much ttime," Vic? I don't think I recognize the concept. Anyway, I usually take the time to respond to interesting queries. I was thrilled that someone wasn't familiar with the marvelous power of repetitive squaring, even though, presumably, he or she is familiar with compounding interest.
DeleteBy the way, I've had private confirmation that only 42 repetitive foldings of ordinary paper (if it were actually possible) would indeed result in a compound thickness that would reach beyond the moon. I'll share the submitted formal proof later today.