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Free Theater
I’m sure everybody who works with free software has occasionally encountered the question as to why anybody would work on it. Obviously people do work on free software, and there are many different reasons why they do. However, there is a certain type of person who finds it all rather mysterious. I recently thought of…
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SF Book Covers
I’ve always liked the science fiction author Eric Frank Russell, who is best known for short stories like “Allamagoosa” and “And Then There Were None.” I happened across an old novel of his in a used book store, The Mindwarpers. It was OK, not great, but really struck me afterward was the cover. The novel…
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China Money
The flow of money in the U.S. for the last several years has been as follows. Somebody in the U.S. buys something made in China. The dollars are aggregated and sent back to the Chinese manufacturer. The manufacturer converts them to Chinese renminbi at a Chinese bank at the government mandated exchange rate. The Chinese…
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The Simulated Universe
It’s possible that what we think of as reality is a simulation being run on some powerful computer. Perhaps the entire universe as we think it exists is a simulation. Or perhaps the simulation is much simpler, and merely covers the solar system and space around it in detail, with everything else being only sketched…
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Interest Rates
The Fed made a big cut in interest rates today. These days everybody looks to the Fed to fix all economic problems, but the funny thing is that they don’t really have very much control. Since the dot com collapse, the U.S. economy has been driven largely by the housing market. Homeowners were able to…