December 2008
8 posts
My Mars - Ray Bradbury →
When I was six years old I moved to Tucson, Arizona, and lived on Lowell Avenue, little realizing I was on an avenue that led to Mars. It was named for the great astronomer Percival Lowell, who took fantastic photographs of the planet that promised a spacefaring future to children like myself.
Along the way to growing up, I read Edgar Rice Burroughs and loved his Martian books, and followed the...
A Bum's Christmas by H. L. Mencken →
“Despite all the snorting against them in works of divinity, it has always been my experience that infidels—or freethinkers, as they usually prefer to call themselves—are a generally estimable class of men, with strong overtones of the benevolent and even of the sentimental. This was certainly true, for example, of Leopold Bortsch, Totsaufer [customers’ man] for the...
WatchA Junky’s Christmas (via Google Video)
In Defense of Scrooge - Michael Levin - Mises... →
“It’s Christmas again, time to celebrate the transformation of Ebenezer Scrooge. You know the ritual: boo the curmudgeon initially encountered in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, then cheer the sweetie pie he becomes in the end. It’s too bad no one notices that the curmudgeon had a point—quite a few points, in fact.”
Letter to a Young Engineer (from a purported Honda... →
Soichiro Honda once pointed out “Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon, philosophy without action is worthless”. He really believed that the only reason anyone would even show up to work is to have fun, and the real aim is to have fun you can share. He also said “If you hire only those people you understand, the company will never get people better than you are. Always...
Gay marriage: the database engineering perspective... →
“Note: By popular demand, this problem is now known as ‘Y2gay’.”