Lunatic Fringe

We discussed the idea of September for the first time today, right now it’s only August, the days of which are in the terminal stages of some sort of disease the doctors as yet don’t understand. I slept through today’s round of treatment, if you can call surrender that. I’ve been alive, truly, for ten years now, and I don’t mind making myself patently aware of that fact. It’s funny how, for all it’s boldness, youth doesn’t fight back. In fact it’s quite an elusive fighter, having found itself in a war it never wanted to wage, and has no designs on winning. There are no fortresses of redoubt, no bastions of youth, simply a lifetime of fighting along diminished and increasingly timid frontlines, vast armies put asunder by the mechanized legions of time, pressed relentlessly onward by the hordes of death and non-existence. I vowed to fight, ten years ago. An impassioned plea the first time I felt it necessary to comment on these dying days. My mind is still for it, even as the gray of bat...

If thou art a writer, write as if thy time were short, for it is indeed short at the longest. Improve each occasion when thy soul is reached. Drain the cup of inspiration to its last dregs. -Henry David Thoreau We should also strive to live life in this way. Interestingly enough Hemingway's advice was to always leave a bit of inspiration in the well for the next day, so it may replenish of itself, he may have said that in A Moveable Feast , I should look into that.

I come from a sleepy little town, full of small ideas and big frowns. I once was a good writer, on this place called earth. I’m just a tree falling in the forest now. I’m surrounded by new growth and illiterates. I hope she carves me up good this time. I always wanted to be a guitar.

There is a lot of disinformation about health insurance reform out there, spanning from control of personal finances to end of life care. These rumors often travel just below the surface via chain emails or through casual conversation. Since we can’t keep track of all of them here at the White House, we’re asking for your help. If you get an email or see something on the web about health insurance reform that seems fishy, send it to flag@whitehouse.gov. Sound familiar? Perhaps an excerpt from George Orwell's 1984? Maybe a billing posted in Nazi Germany or Stalin's Russia? Nope. This is from the Whitehouse's website, encouraging you, the average American citizen, to inform on your fellow Americans for intellectual thought-crimes against Obama's great plan, and the current regime. I wonder what the reward is for thwarting these would-be "email terrorists?" Favored citizen status? Maybe first in line for big brother's healthcare? Who knows. But as our secon...

I find it ironic that what is left in this world that can be considered "magic" is quite actually hard work. And now it turns out the coin toss, long held to be a 50/50 proposition quite actually isn't. Via The Big Money This is adapted from David E. Adler's book Snap Judgment, published this month by FT Press. Coin tosses are a classic metaphor in economics for randomness. For instance, in his book about market efficiency, A Random Walk Down Wall Street, economist Burton Malkiel compares the price movements of the stock market to the random outcome of a flipped coin: "[S]ometimes one gets positive price changes for several days in a row; but sometimes when you are flipping a coin you also get a long string of ‘heads' in a row." According to Malkiel, mathematicians' terms for the sequences of numbers produced by any random process—in this case a coin flip—is known as a random walk. To him, this is exactly what stock price movements look like; hence t...