Nervetree

I was wondering today, if we took all the money spent in Iraq, as dollar bills, would it blanket the entire country?

Dollar bill = 6.6294cm * 15.5956 = 103.3894 square cm per dollar bill

square cm per square meter = 10,000

square m per square km = 1,000,000

cm per km = 10,000,000,000

dollar bills per km = 96,721,714

cost of Iraq war so far $450,000,000,000

km of paper coverage = 4,653 square kilometers ( the state of Deleware is 5,133 square km )

area of Iraq = 437,072 SQ KM

We have a way to go, we’ve only gotten a little over 1% coverage so far.

If it were pennies:

$1 = 156.3175 cm of pennies,arranged in a hexagonal fasion 6 pennies touching every penny

7,035 square km. Probabally enough to pave all the roads in copper.

I bought a nice ripe pineapple a few days ago. I took a little too long to cut it up for chutney, resulting in hundreds of little fruit flies.

I found a good way of getting rid of them. A glass of vinegar, with a dash of dishsoap.

They land on the surface of the vinegar, and sink. No surface tension. Most of the flies were gone in 12 hours.

I just heard a great new term. Theres offshoring, where you job out a project to a bunch of people overseas. And there is Lakeshoring, where you job out a project to local consultants ( who may be working at their lake shore homes. )

The power adapter for my macbook melted last night.

I'm going to take it to apple and see if warranty covers it. I looked up the problem and it seems that alot of others have the same issue.

I like cushy socks. My old socks were all worn, so I threw them out; bought a bunch of new socks I thought were comfey. Last night, in a store, I remembered my dad going on and on about some great socks he bought; “Dr Scholls Diabetic Socks”.

He went on and on about how comfortable they are.

And now, so am I.

They are great. Don’t bind, itch, they stay cool, and are really soft. They are the best socks EVER. Wow, I sound like an Apple fanatic…….

The market adjusted alot yesterday at 3pm est, on the top of the hour. I was wondering about the time as well as the suddenness. Things that happen at the top or the bottom of the hour seem to be more likely to come from systemic causes. Markets open at the top or bottom of the hour. Markets close. Banks open and close. But 3 pm EST wasn’t one of those times anywhere on the globe. However it was Midnight in Dubai, Alot of banking happens there. Midnight is usually when batch processes are scheduled to kick off.

I’ve got a theory that the China selloff the previous day left a few LARGE accounts rather dry in Dubai. Automated batch processes spooled up to at Midnight and like good little drones they sold off off their stake in some holdings to cover the losses.

Sort of like each major financial market is like a needle sticking up in one of those wind up music boxes, waiting to pluck those 5 chords (market open,close, bank open,close, Midnight ( settle the account time ) )

Today on the way to work, I noticed something I never really paid attention to. I was nibbling on a breakfast sandwich driving my brick shaped large pickup truck to work. Normally I take surface streets along the mississippi to work but today was the freeway. As I speeded up my ears popped. I thought, whoa hot coffee, thinking the coffee’s heat pressurized my head. Then I realized that the speed created a vacuum inside the truck. I’ve seen it in wind tunnels but never noticed it. This might explain carsickness. As the driver speeds up and slows down the pressure in the car goes up and down, depending on the aerodynamics of the car. So a driver who leapfrogs others may be treating the passengers to the equivalent to a hilly ride even on the prairie.

I just got bit by an assumption. I am writing unit tests for some CRUD ( create, read, update, delete ) methods. While writing the delete method test I assumed that the status for a deleted item is “deleted”, many hours later I noticed that it should, infact be “disabled”. I assumed this was obvious, and asked my wife what a flag should be called that indicates that a file has been deleted, she says “inactive”. I guess everyone is correct, I was just less correct than the others.

I have had some OK polk audio 5b speakers for going on 20 years. I have been toying with getting better sounding speakers of late.

My amp died, It would take 30 minutes to “warm up” then sounded really bad. I bought a digital amplifier from online. The cheap plastic version was $30, I spent about $140 for a metal cased version, same electronics though. The sound is amazing. Better than my Onkyo amp of a few years ago, better than an old Pioneer tube amp I had. Better than anything I have ever heard. It plays reasonably loud, and sounds very very crisp up to past half way ( its only 15 watts but its 88% efficient, most amps are at best 55% ). I can hear bass at low volumes where before I would crank the power to get full spectrum audio.

The short of it is, the T-amp is stupid simple and sounds great.

We just put the little podling in daycare. A nice montessori with bright looking kids, the thing that sold me was a little girl about ours age that had on a t-shrit saying “im with the band”.

We looked at 5 daycare centers today. Marijo looked talked with the providers and I sat quietly and watched the children. Some of the children looked like the chimps I have seen in psych videos, less the chicken wire monkey. We passed on those. Some of the centers were so packed with kids I could only think of feedlots. Don’t parents shop around? Sheesh. Anyway it’s $995 a month, at that rate 1 year is more than I spent on my university education. I heard from Marijo’s brother that I can get it paid for pretax in some states. I need to look into that.