MemeMachineGo!

I’m a happy geek.

A while ago, I bought a used Xbox advertised on Craigslist. Then I bought a modchip¹, and hired a teenager (also found on Craigslist) to install it. (As a solderer, I make a good programmer.) I put a larger hard drive in it, and a better fan, and installed Linux, and spent some time struggling to make it useful. Trouble is, most of the versions of Linux tailored for the Xbox are out of date² and, thus, hard to build current software packages on.

Finally, I stopped worrying and learned to love XBMC (Xbox Media Center.) It makes a home theater PC of your Xbox, something it’s pretty well-suited for³ — cables are available for most TV input formats, it has an Ethernet jack to put it on your home network, and there’s a remote control available.

Now, we can simply use a remote to select from a menu any video we have on our network drive, or any of our music (well, all the CDs I’ve ripped so far) and listen to it on a decent stereo. (Audiophiles would doubtless scoff at my attributing decency to it, but it sure beats anything else I’ve ever had.)

Further, I’ve installed Xbox versions of MAME, an Apple II emulator, and Stepmania (a Dance Dance Revolution clone.)

So now I’m playing Time Pilot, and Dino Eggs, and Sabotage, and otherwise reliving my misspent youth, and having a good time trying to become competent at Stepmania, while lusting after an arcade-style DDR dance pad.

The learning curve to do all this was steep in places, but once you know what to do, it’s not that hard. And I saw refurbished Xboxes going for $60 at a local game store, so it’s cheap!

¹ The Xbox was designed to only run software officially signed by Microsoft. This worked out so well for them that it launched a whole industry of modification chips to get around this limitation.

² At least the versions that facilitate reformatting the whole drive with a Linux filesystem, which were the ones I tried. This doesn’t seem to be true of GentooX or a recent update of XDSL, which co-exist with the native Xbox formatting and organization. I avoided them because I thought recreating the native formatting on a larger hard drive was harder than it is. Now that I’ve done so, I’ll definitely try one or both of them.

³ For non-cutting-edge values of well-suited. Its LAN speed is too slow to stream HD video to it, and, even if it weren’t, its computing power too weak to decode it in real-time.

A story sixty years in the making — a man interviews his father about a puzzling cartoon face his father had been drawing on cards and birthday cakes for years.

I hope you’re not putting this on your site.

Why?!

This is not for publication.

Are you crazy? This is ABSOLUTELY for publication. The only reason the internet exists is for this conversation to be on it!

He may be right.

(via Boing Boing)

At age 61, Cliff Young entered an 875 km ultra-endurance foot race in Australia competing against world-class athletes. The usual strategy was to run 18 hours a day and sleep 6 hours a day. Young had a different strategy.

Cliff did not stop after the first day. Although he was still far behind the world-class athletes, he kept on running. He even had the time to wave to spectators who watched the event by the highways. When he got to a town called Albury he was asked about his tactics for the rest of the race. He said he would run through to the finish, and he did. He kept running. Every night he got just a little bit closer to the leading pack. By the last night, he passed all of the world-class athletes. By the last day, he was way in front of them. Not only did he run the Melbourne to Sydney race at age 61, without dying; he won first place, breaking the race record by 9 hours and became a national hero!

And then he gave away the award money.

When Cliff was awarded the first prize of $10,000, he said he did not know there was a prize and insisted that he had not entered for the money. He said, “There’re five other runners still out there doing it tougher than me,” and he gave them $2,000 each. He did not keep a single cent for himself.

Goebbels is quoted as saying:

If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.

Someone is even selling that quote all over various Cafepress merchandise.

But it seems to be yet another apocryphal quote.

Rather than championing the use of the big lie as a propaganda technique, both Goebbels and Hitler criticized its perceived use by others, Hitler in Mein Kampf attributing its use to Jews:

In this they proceeded on the sound principle that the magnitude of a lie always contains a certain factor of credibility, since the great masses of the people in the very bottom of their hearts tend to be corrupted rather than consciously and purposely evil, and that, therefore, in view of the primitive simplicity of their minds they more easily fall a victim to a big lie than to a little one, since they themselves lie in little things, but would be ashamed of lies that were too big. Such a falsehood will never enter their heads and they will not be able to believe in the possibility of such monstrous effrontery and infamous misrepresentation in others; yes, even when enlightened on the subject, they will long doubt and waver, and continue to accept at least one of these causes as true. Therefore, something of even the most insolent lie will always remain and stick-a fact which all the great lie-virtuosi and lying-clubs in this world know only too well and also make the most treacherous use of.

and Gobbels to the English:

One should not as a rule reveal one’s secrets, since one does not know if and when one may need them again. The essential English leadership secret does not depend on particular intelligence. Rather, it depends on a remarkably stupid thick-headedness. The English follow the principle that when one lies, one should lie big, and stick to it. They keep up their lies, even at the risk of looking ridiculous.

• Convivial: Habitually drunk.
• Did not suffer fools gladly: Monstrously foul-tempered.
• Gave colorful accounts of his exploits: A liar.
• A man of simple tastes: A complete vulgarian.
• A powerful negotiator: A bully.
• Relished the cadences of the English language: An incorrigible windbag.
• Relished physical contact: A sadist.
• An uncompromisingly direct ladies’ man: A flasher.

Fraktur is a Gothic typeface that was popular in Germany in the early 20th century. Then Martin Bormann issued a decree condemning it as Jewish.

It is false to regard or describe the so-called Gothic typeface as a German typeface. In reality the so-called Gothic typeface consists of Schwabacher-Jewish letters. Just as they later came to own the newspapers, the Jews living in Germany also owned the printing presses when the printing of books was introduced and thus came about the strong influx into Germany of Schwabacher-Jewish letters.

The German Shepherd was the product of Captain von Stephanitz’s efforts to breed a working shepherd dog. He defined the breed standard for German Shepherds; the original dog recognized as a German Shepherd was dark-coated, but his grandsire was a white dog, and he sired both white dogs and dark-coated dogs that bore the recessive white coat gene. But then the Nazis decided that white German Shepherds were racially inferior.

The Nazis, including Hitler, saw the white coat as an undesirable trait, and further assumed that the white coated dogs’ genes paled the darker coated dogs’ colors. With little knowledge of science, they blamed the whites for many diseases as well. Germany soon barred white German Shepherds from the conformation ring and the breeding pool.

I imagine one could dedicate a daily blog to wacky Nazi beliefs and have material for years.

A MetaFilter user has collected all of the Ask MetaFilter book recommendation threads on the MetaFilter wiki.

One thread I’ve meant to post for a while is what single book is the best introduction to your field? nominated as the most expensive thread in the history of Ask Metafilter.

For some counter-recommendations, here’s a Making Light thread on books citing which will make you look like an idiot to people knowledgeable in the relevant field.

Here’s a provocative story. 67% hotel maids reported that they didn’t exercise, over a third of that 67% saying they didn’t get any exercise at all, despite having an obviously physical job. A researcher educated one group of maids in just how many calories their jobs burned, and tracked them and a control group of maids whom they didn’t tell anything.

One month later, Langer and her team returned to take physical measurements of the women and were surprised by what they found. In the group that had been educated, there was a decrease in their systolic blood pressure, weight, and waist-to-hip ratio — and a 10 percent drop in blood pressure.

One possible explanation is that the process of learning about the amount of exercise they were already getting somehow changed the maids’ behavior. But Langer says that her team surveyed both the women and their managers and found no indication that the maids had altered their routines in any way. She believes that the change can be explained only by the change in the women’s mindset.

The article makes no mention of the researchers recording even self-reporting on the groups’ food consumption. I’m inclined to suspect that the one group may have changed their habits, some of them possibly without thinking about it.

It remains an interesting suggestion of the mind’s power over the body, though.

I can’t believe I’d never heard of this.

In the space of about 27 years, everything turned upside down. Out of all of the major bronze age cities [in and around the Middle East] we know of, all but two were attacked and burned viciously to the ground by unknown invaders or rebels. The first city burned around 1225 BCE. The last sighting of the city burners was when they were defeated at great cost by Ramses II in the Second Battle of the Sea Peoples in 1198 BCE.

And we don’t know who did it.

Wikipedia’s article on the Bronze Age Collapse.

(Via The Early Days of a Better Nation)

Bibliodyssey provides beautiful pages scanned from various odd books.

Strange Maps does the same for maps.

This Flickr photoset has scans of dozens of sf pulp paperbacks.

This is simultaneously the most creepy and heartwarming thing you’ll read all day.

(Via The Pawn Shops of Isher)

Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to James Madison, 1796:

I view [a proposition respecting post roads] as a source of boundless patronage to the executive, jobbing to members of Congress and their friends, and a bottomless abyss of public money. You will begin by only appropriating the surplus of the post office revenues; but the other revenues will soon be called into their aid, and it will be a source of eternal scramble among the members, who can get the most money wasted in their State; and they will always get most who are meanest.

Warren Buffett describes why he had become so bearish on the dollar that in 2002, for the first time ever, he invested in foreign currencies.

To understand why, take a wildly fanciful trip with me to two isolated, side-by-side islands of equal size, Squanderville and Thriftville. Land is the only capital asset on these islands, and their communities are primitive, needing only food and producing only food. Working eight hours a day, in fact, each inhabitant can produce enough food to sustain himself or herself. And for a long time that’s how things go along. On each island everybody works the prescribed eight hours a day, which means that each society is self-sufficient.

Eventually, though, the industrious citizens of Thriftville decide to do some serious saving and investing, and they start to work 16 hours a day. In this mode they continue to live off the food they produce in eight hours of work but begin exporting an equal amount to their one and only trading outlet, Squanderville.

The citizens of Squanderville are ecstatic about this turn of events, since they can now live their lives free from toil but eat as well as ever. Oh, yes, there’s a quid pro quo — but to the Squanders, it seems harmless: All that the Thrifts want in exchange for their food is Squanderbonds (which are denominated, naturally, in Squanderbucks).

Over time Thriftville accumulates an enormous amount of these bonds, which at their core represent claim checks on the future output of Squanderville. A few pundits in Squanderville smell trouble coming. They foresee that for the Squanders both to eat and to pay off — or simply service — the debt they’re piling up will eventually require them to work more than eight hours a day. But the residents of Squanderville are in no mood to listen to such doomsaying.

Meanwhile, the citizens of Thriftville begin to get nervous. Just how good, they ask, are the IOUs of a shiftless island? So the Thrifts change strategy: Though they continue to hold some bonds, they sell most of them to Squanderville residents for Squanderbucks and use the proceeds to buy Squanderville land. And eventually the Thrifts own all of Squanderville.

At that point, the Squanders are forced to deal with an ugly equation: They must now not only return to working eight hours a day in order to eat — they have nothing left to trade — but must also work additional hours to service their debt and pay Thriftville rent on the land so imprudently sold. In effect, Squanderville has been colonized by purchase rather than conquest.

Weak Dollar Fuels China’s Buying Spree Of U.S. Firms.

In 2007, acquisitions in the United States by foreign ventures hit $407 billion, up 93 percent from the previous year, according to Thomson Financial. The top countries investing were Canada, Britain and Germany; the Middle East and Asia — especially China — are quickly catching up.

The biggest deals in recent months have involved Wall Street firms hit by losses from exposure to mortgage-related investment vehicles. […]

“The U.S. dollar is getting weaker and weaker, and many medium to small U.S. companies are in economic crisis. So they need investments from China. It is very good timing,” said Yu Dan, a representative for the state of Pennsylvania in China.

Yu, who is one of about 30 people in China who represent American cities and states, said at least six Chinese companies are in the process of closing deals in Pennsylvania. One will make some purchases in the food industry. Another will invest in the wood industry, because as Yu put it, “Pennsylvania has very good hardwood resources, and the aboriginal people in the north Pennsylvania woods are good workers.”

Aboriginal people? The Amish, Yu clarified.

The Prince of Seborga is addressed as Sua Tremendità — Your Tremendousness.

(Via The Volokh Conspiracy)