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There are 10 kinds of computer humorists: Those who understand binary, those who don't, and those who weren't expecting a base-3 joke.

via Reddit, ca. 06-25-2013

#ternary

[Haresh Kamath of the Electric Power Research Institute] began his talk by noting that the whole purpose of the grid is to let you disconnect the generation of power from its use in space, letting people take advantage of efficiencies of scale and location. Energy storage does the same thing but across time, allowing power to be generated when it's cheapest and then used as needed.

John Timmer, Batteries: What's here versus what we need. Ars Technica, 2014-03-06

#the grid #energy

IBM had been very generous to MIT in the fifties and sixties, donating or discounting its biggest scientific computers. When a new top of the line 36-bit scientific machine came out, MIT expected to get one. In the early sixties, the deal was that MIT got one 8-hour shift, all the other New England colleges and universities got a shift, and the third shift was available to IBM for its own use. One use IBM made of its share was yacht handicapping: the President of IBM raced big yachts on Long Island Sound, and these boats were assigned handicap points by a complicated formula. There was a special job deck kept at the MIT Computation Center, and if a request came in to run it, operators were to stop whatever was running on the machine and do the yacht handicapping job immediately.

Tom Van Vleck, The IBM 7094 and CTSS, 1995-06-22, multicians.org

#multics #yachting

Jimmy Knepper, Mingus’s longtime trombonist, lost an octave of range when Mingus punched him in the mouth and capped one of his teeth. When Knepper filed suit, Mingus sent him a package with a bag of heroin inside and no return address, then called the cops on him. Knepper eventually forgave him; everyone did.

Adam Shatz, An Argument With Instruments: On Charles Mingus, The Nation, 2013-09-17

#mingus #dick_move

Richard M. Nixon decried yesterday the similarity in the pronunciation of the Du Bois Club and the Boys Club of America, saying it misled people into confusing one organization with the other. The former Vice President, who is national board chairman of the Boys Club of America, said in a statement that the confusion was "an almost classic example of Communist deception and duplicity."

Douglas Robinson, Du Bois "Duplicity" Decried By Nixon, New York Times, 1966-03-09

#nixon #w.e.b. du bois #communist deception

You were a good person if you were an entrepreneur. You were creating jobs, until you weren’t. The big floor-through lofts of Broadway between Houston and Spring filled up with inexpensive furniture and even less expensive young people, each with a bitter mouthful of Adderall, each office bright and identical. So far, we’ve disrupted a few things, mostly coffee-related.

Choire Sicha, Let Me Tell You About the Most Heartfelt $200 I Ever Made, NY Magazine, 2013-09-08

#entrepreneurship #startups

Petter reports that once the bees were installed, the thefts stopped.

Jimmy Stamp, Why Are Honeybees and Skyscrapers sweet for each other?, Smithsonian Magazine, 2013-09-04

#honeybees #security systems

The police were bewildered. They found nearly a dozen shell casings but no victims. Gravy had scrambled inside and up to the seventh floor, to Hot 97, where he proceeded with the interview and the freestyle, as planned. Joell Ortiz didn’t notice that anything was amiss. “Gravy seemed relaxed up there, and he killed it when called on to rhyme,” Ortiz said.

Ben McGrath, Where Hip-Hop Lives, The New Yorker, 2006-07-10

#hot 97 #victimless crime

True masonry is not held together by cement but by gravity. That is to say, by the warp of the world. By the stuff of creation itself. The keystone that locks the arch is pressed in place by the thumb of God.

Cormac McCarthy, The Stonemason

#cormac mccarthy #masonry

To be a mass tourist, for me, is to become a pure late-date American: alien, ignorant, greedy for something you cannot ever have, disappointed in a way you can never admit. It is to spoil, by way of sheer ontology, the very unspoiledness you are there to experience. It is to impose yourself on places that in all noneconomic ways would be better, realer, without you. It is, in lines and gridlock and transaction after transaction, to confront a dimension of yourself that is as inescapable as it is painful: As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing.

David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster, Gourmet Magazine, 08-2004

#lobsters #tourism #dfw

The orchid is a cuntlike plant. Don't you think? Menacing in its beauty. Some plants just stand here. The orchid lures a person.

Don DeLillo, Great Jones Street, 1973. Picador edition, 1998, p251

#delillo #orchids #cunts

[Pynchon] simply chooses not to be a public figure, an attitude that resonates on a frequency so out of phase with the prevailing culture that if [he] and Paris Hilton were ever to meet—the circumstances, I admit, are beyond imagining—the resulting matter/antimatter explosion would vaporize everything from here to Tau Ceti IV.

Arthur Salm, "A Screaming Comes Across the Sky (but not a Photo)", San Diego Union-Tribute, 2004-02-08

#pynchon #annihilation #paris hilton

He thought each memory recalled must do some violence to its origins. As in a party game. Say the word and pass it on. So be sparing.

Cormac McCarthy, The Road, p131

#cormac mccarthy

With one part of my mind I thought of the British Raj as an unbreakable tyranny, as something clamped down, in saecula saeculorum, upon the will of prostrate peoples; with another part I thought that the greatest joy in the world would be to drive a bayonet into a Buddhist priest’s guts. Feelings like these are the normal by-products of imperialism; ask any Anglo-Indian official, if you can catch him off duty.

George Orwell, Shooting an Elephant, New Writing, 1936

#elephants #george orwell #british raj

[British Admiral John Fisher] feared that [Germany] would strike out of the blue, probably on a long holiday weekend—so, over the years, his aides were always kept on special duty and thus missed many such holiday weekends.

Daniel Yergen, The Prize, 1991, p153

#paranoia #British admiralty #shitty bosses

Richard Stallman has argued that the central bargain in copyright is that the public gives up a right they couldn’t actually use. Until recently, it was more expensive to make a copy of a book than it was to simply buy the book. So when society agreed to grant authors and publishers the monopoly, it was a good bargain. Now that the public can make copies of something, they are giving up a right they could in fact enjoy—or, rather, the public has proceeded to make copies anyway, regardless of the previous bargain, a kind of jury nullification. As with any law that loses the consent of the governed because it no longer reflects the logic of society, the law is not overturned, just ignored. It recedes into the past, like laws forbidding pigs to enter saloons or alcohol sold on Sundays or adultery or interracial marriage.

Richard Nash, What is the Business of Literature?, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Spring 2003

#literature #stallman #jury nullification

Given these fundamentals of cold and poverty, perhaps we shouldn't be asking why Detroit declined. Perhaps we should be asking why 777,000 people remain as of 2008.

Edward Glaeser, Triumph of the City, 2008, p63

#urban planning #Detroit

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