What’s wrong with this picture?

Astronomy for New Hobbyists, Old Nerds

I tweeted a link to this huge, panoramic photo of the sky today that I think is cool because you can move around it with your mouse and zoom in with the scroll wheel. Yeah, ZOOM in!

Then later on, I was lurking around Reddit.com which is a social aggregator where nerds go to socialize. I saw this page where a dude asked what sorts of hobbies “Redditors” could recommend to him besides video games. The responses comprised of well-targeted hobbies such as archery, fractal art, and one I can dig: astronomy.

I remembered the cool zoomy photo I saw yesterday and then remembered how much of a nerd I was when I was a kid. I went to Space Camp! (NO PICTURES WILL BE POSTED.) Not only that, but I had posters of the planets stuck all over my room and of course a bajillion glow-in-the-dark stars on my ceiling (they were not arranged in a homogeneous and isotropic fashion). I maintain an interest but it’s about the same as my interest in the last funny and biting thing to come out of Ann Coulter’s mouth – barely.

Not that I’m saying I’m going to start sneaking out again to lay down in the grass and gaze at the sky at night, but here are some cool links that I found for wanna-be astronomers:

• Astronomy Clubs listing
• Visual Astronomy dot com
• Space Weather dot com
• Sky & Telescope magazine
• Stellarium
• Clear, Dark Sky
• Astronomy dot com
• Amazon.com search for “Astronomy”
• The Space Store
  

  Stick a scale-picture of the Space Shuttle on your bedroom wall!

Airline Travel Pictorials: Death and Fees

Cropped from two larger pictorials

Top picture from this airlines pictorial. Bottom picture from this safety pictorial.

I love a good conspiracy theory

But this is for real…an explanation of the function of the Federal Reserve (ie “Fed”) comparing it to similar functions able to be done in World of Warcraft (an online role-player game ie WOW RPG). Long story short, why it serves you well to always look for ways to barter rather than use cash.

(WOW) Blizzard, for example, has a system of money goods and services on World of Warcraft. The economy inside the game requires labor (grinding, questing, leveling) for every good that is dropped. If you could see a chart on this, the amount of goods that exist in game should rise roughly proportionally to play time of all characters.

(REAL) Money, before the Federal reserve worked like this. Anyone who extracted a resourse like lumber, gold, silver, animal furs, did so at a cost of labor and time. The amount of goods in existance is equal to the amount of labor used to extract/create it. They could trade those items directly but in real life (unlike WoW) they can’t carry them all around. So they gave them to a third party store owner who had a vault. Paid him a little money to keep them in the vault and got a recipt for each of the items stored. Rather than carrying bear pelts and gold everywhere, it was convenient to just trade the recipt knowing that a trusted source is keeping the goods in store should anyone want to redeem the recipt for the real world items. The Paper has NO ACTUAL VALUE; it’s the items in store that the paper represent.

(WOW) Gold Farmers use programs to automate play on ten computers at once, monitored by just one guy to keep it running undetected. They can get goods at a FRACTION of the labor costs everyone else pays. This means they get more value when they trade it. Farmers can trade their goods for items that take 10x as much time to find/make.

(REAL) A Bank today runs on fractional Reserve Requirements. That means that whatever amount of money you want in your loan, they can create right there provided they have 1/10th of the amount in their vault. They get money at a FRACTION of the labor costs everyone else pays. This means they get more value when they trade it. Banks can “LOAN” money they don’t have and you have to work off the full value of the loan plus interest. Banks that pay just 1/10th of your actual house cost (and print the rest) literally own your house until you work of the full 100% cost PLUS INTEREST.

(WOW) But the REAL winner is Blizzard. They can manufacture as much of these wow$ as they want with a single keystroke. They can make any character’s bank have any amount of money. Imagine they suddenly flooded trillions of gold into the system and people began buying up all the rare items on the auction house. More $ would be chasing fewer goods causing all the prices to go up FAST. Even if you’ve saved your whole character life trying to get to the point your guild could retire from the GRINDING and just have some fun… your savings are stretched thinner and thinner now and you have to keep working to get by.

(REAL) The Federal Reserve can manufacture as much of the paper/digital dollars as they want with a single keystroke. They can secretly fill anybody’s account without permission from congress. They can suddenly flood any market with trillions causing inflation and artificial price increases. They do this for two reasons; 1) to flood the housing market means people will have to take out larger loans and work even MORE to pay off a property that is actually worth less. Many properties are defaulted and the bank which has done NO labor now owns the house you worked hard for. 2) When they then contract the money supply and cause the market to deflate, there isn’t enough money in the system for everyone to get ahold of some causing more bankruptcies and more free property for the FED.

They also punish your parents and grandparents who have worked their WHOLE LIVES to pay off their houses and get to a place where they can retire and afford the things they need. When they print money they steal value from people who have saved, meaning Grandma no longer can afford to relax and has to keep grinding away.

(PS do you really think that you will ever see online WoW gold sales gone forever? Even though Blizzard impliments all kinds of Farmer prevention acts, it’s an illusion… Blizzard is not regulated by the gaming commission; their employees can make Millions of side profit money selling their imaginary credits online… income that is less traceable and untaxed. They won’t ever stop selling gold online.

And the Federal Reserve is scared shitless that we might see what they’ve been doing with our savings… they are fighting HARD against Ron Paul’s Audit the Fed bill to keep their private secret actions to themselves)

(PPS It should also be mentioned that the Federal Reserve is actually owned by a cartel of banks like JPMorgan, Chase, etc, not only are their actions allowed WITHOUT congress or treasury approval or oversight, but the owners are secret too!)

Netbook & Notebook Buyer Guide

I haven’t been able to make up my mind ALL YEAR: Netbook or notebook? Big and fast or little and slow(er)? If little, how little and which aspects should I give up in favor of others?

Most buyer’s guides I’ve seen online are really just a mash-up of reviews with links to discounts on different models. THIS ONE is not. Each page focuses on what the differences between similar models are and how they may affect you, a decent price range you should look for, and links to actual reviews of highest-rated or -lauded models. I noticed that the netbook review covered the dirty details of the specs I’m interested in and highlighted the two models it seems most of us get stuck choosing between.

Let me know what you decide.

Read The Local News, Learn Swedish

I followed a link to The Local, a website of news from Sweden written in English. I discovered it has a cool feature: when you double-click any word, a new window pops up with a dictionary entry in English and Swedish, complete with spoken voice in Swedish.

The company behind the capability is VoiceCorp, none other than the service provider for the Dow Jones Factiva, a text-to-voice solution for business news & information consumers. Pretty cool…