My point was that people who advocate the purchase of gold know that in the long term the price of gold in terms of dollars or other fiat currencies has never gone down. Gold is a good means of preserving wealth, but not for deriving income from such wealth.
Excellent point on wealth versus income, I see you know your balance sheet. I was soul-searching to discover why gold-over-time comparisons tickle my funny bone, aside from being generally perverse. Not so savvy as Karl Denninger who has his reasons to be bearish on gold as an investment or plaything. As one who has never owned any gold or even more than a fistful of dollars I don't implicitly trust either, so I find it easy to make light of the choices that people of wealth are facing right now.
While pondering the dollar and gold I grew bored and made a sandwich, and contemplated that instead. Bread you can sink your teeth into, and throughout history love of it has transcended love of fiat money and precious metal.
Looking into bread vs. gold, I found this, "it is said that an ounce of gold bought 350 loaves of bread in the time of Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, who died in 562 BC" (cited here)
Fascinating! What if you view bread itself as the exchange pivot plotted against on gold (for the US via the dollar)? A quick search did not reveal anyone who had done it, so I gathered gold fixes and one-pound-loaf statistics for the hundred years of 1913-2012 and created a gold:bread ratio. How many loaves/pounds of bread 'buys' an ounce of gold. Here is my resulting chart and data.
So in 1913 the gold:bread ratio was ~337.9 which is comparable to Nebuchadnezzar's time. It stayed more or less in the same magnitude until the 1971 Nixon Shock when gold heads through the roof. Bread rises steadily but gold's rise is meteoric.
1980 is the worst-ever year for bread, with ~1,281 loaves to purchase an ounce of gold. We're so used to seeing things from the dollar/gold point of view but 1970 and 2001 were really great years for bread, with gold purchasing power twice what it had in Babylon.
Then we went to war and everything went to hell. But the gold:bread chart does offer one surprise: even though gold is massive right now, the actual gold:bread ratio is similar to what it was in 1980 before it started to fall.
So what we need right now is a Reganomics sandwich.
Who's got the power? think massively parallel computing power think specialized hash computation arrays think of the precomputed rainbow table warriors think oligarchy (of computer power = money) think no public accountability of resource usage or mission once these people take an interest in bitcoin it's 'done'
Who's round and jolly and all full of fun Who's shaped like a great big hamburger bun? Who's got a job that's a super-breeze? I'm sure you guessed it, it's Mayor McCheese!
"So which would you rather have today, a $20 bill or the amount of gold that such a bill would have bought in 1913?"
To have personally acquired either one I would have to be considerably older than 100 years old today. Yuck. So respectfully the answer is no.
To accept hypothetically-offered economic woudja-rather gifts fronted by those trying to illustrate trended price conversions between two time periods is in violation of the Temporal Prime Directive and the 2250 Temporal Treaty of Algernon.
Such choices were / will be discovered to influence the entire time line between the two cited moments in time, encouraging the least desirable social consequences like reckless hoarding and obssessive economyopia syndrome.
Why is it your duty to observe a treaty that will not be ratified for another 237 years??
Secret plans for incursion epinova alien energy device for thought control hidden in cosmic background static of FM broadcast, later in vertical blanking interval of analog television broadcast. Digital realm unaffected until development of Mosaic when secret browser code inserted to extend all color palettes +1 past base two boundaries to create an subvisible 'hyngry hyppo' color (the 17th, 257th, 65537th and 16777217th palette index) whose boundary is perceivable by the subconscious mind. Diagrams and simple directives cloaked in transparent interval of BLINK tag.
Mission for alien conquest of human race cancelled due to budget cuts and general unsuitability of pixelated thought processes of humans reared in the digital age. Technology passed by alien operatives secretly to the Gobymynt in exchange for a ride off the planet.
BLINK subsequently relegated to 'kitsch' status by unsuspecting nerd culture and its use in web design has been generally defecated.
Disclosure of BLINK mission a limited hang out to provide cover for epinova deployment into specification for CCSS (cascading cascading style sheets). Under this progressive regime (CSS, CCSS, CCCSS etc) style is expected to overtake content by 2015, with content completely defecated by 2020.
Covert intelligence insiders will also recall another alien epinova plot which peaked in the late 70s and early 80s, introduction of the hated and feared 'eiplady' device.
For recommending this valuable service. I have completed the interactive component, choosing British Virgin Islands, $10M laundered in via phoney lawsuit with 3% interest over 5 years and payed out as a rigged gambling 'win'. Now all I need to do is sit back and wait for the money!
My only complaint with the component is the loud 'bloink' sound it produces repeatedly brought everyone in the house running to see what was happening and look over my shoulder. Now I must share the money when it arrives. And I fear the IRS might be able to monitor for that sound... there was a helicopter in the area soon after I had placed my order.
It's slower but more than fast enough, supports printers too although you'll really miss those Novell print queues. And Lantastic has evolved too, you are no longer limited to Arcnet, it supports the *new* 10baseT half duplex cards! Patches are available for the DOS stack to accommodate just about any combination of hardware IRQ and base IO PORT. Just be sure to load the network TSRs BEFORE you run Borland Sidekick.
Google search result says you are the FIRST person in the digital age ever to compare a comparison to comparing bananas to goats!
And I think that's cool. Congratulations.
Hence forthwith I will deign to point out to others they are comparing bananas to goats, as they do so. I will even do it myself to show them how it ought to be done.
It will soon rise to a tumultuous crescendo of cliche and there will be songs, there will be hip-hop lyrics. There will be T-shirts. Dave Letterman will hold off making his first 'banana and goat' salvo for months, even as the audience waits for it intently. Then when he does there will be applause! Presidential candidates will say with a Groucho Marx eyebrow-raise, "If he's a banana what does that make me?" And the crowd will wave their signs that say the answer. Slashdot will suffer a round of nananse and goatse again.
And it all started here. We are all present at this profound moment in history.
There, I just took a picture of us all together. It will be portrayed in future documentaries as a vivid photograph that fades to sepia accompanied by soulful yet inspiring music.
Television commercials will have goats! Dancing! With Bananas!
This thing could be bigger than Yankee Doodle Dandy.
If slashdot was a paper newspaper, every day they'd be receiving tons of papers by return mail marked up with pen, crayon and lipstick. Typos circled, comments in the margins. Parakeet poop used as white-out.
"[...] and please mail paper back when you see this comment. I'm not finished reading it yet"
Lemmie guess. Obama will help push through sin tax penalties for industry on gasoline and diesel... then will stand for a moment poised to funnel it into the Algorian Fantasy Options like solar and wind --- because he's a slow learner. Then someone will whisper in his ear, "we tried that already" and he will instead toss the money into the air and it will flutter down into personal tax credits for everyone. Like the Bush Beans, only this cow will be milked quarterly. There will be lots of flowery language surrounding this voter kickback, how free money is "helping to offset the cost of fuel" and how everyone in America is now a "personal stockholder in the energy companies."
A socialist page from the Chavez playbook but it will have a cute and catchy American name.
And the energy corporations who have not done so already will move to Qatar. Then Al-Qaeda militants will surface in Qatar, who'da thunk it. The rest is history, again.
Or president Obama could stop with the floundering and fleecing already, and offer tax credits to encourage the building of clean energy alternatives that will actually scale to meet current levels of demand. Not easy to do, but easy to figure out since there is only one to choose from.
Nuclear fission (someday Thorium or fusion --- there is not enough time to dork around at present). I'm talking about a 100% nuclear powered North American electric grid with ~50% additional baseload capacity to finally realize electric cars and trucks. And I'm talking about a real interim solution for the storage of spent fuel until it can be bred back into the cycle. And making breeding a research priority too.
Basically I'm talking about turning back the clock to a time after the "eternal" Texas and Oklahoma and fields had dried up and before the "eternal" Saudi oil fields were discovered. In the 1960s and early 70s no one believed that North American oil could sustain us any longer, and no one was imagining that coal would scale without environmental suicide. We were about to invest in nuclear energy --- all the way. If we had we would be at the 150% mark already. We'd have "real" electric cars already. This country would be a very different place, and the world would be a more peaceful and better place.
But instead we turned our attention to colonizing the Middle East. First by enabling the oil-rich Saudi Arabia to evolve into the space age feudal system it is today... later, by managing and transmogrifying existing regimes through OPEC-bribes and armed conflict.
In 1977 President Carter declared a moratorium on reprocessing spent nuclear fuel. For no damned reason at all that made any sense. Storing spent fuel forever was now the 'only' option. Concerned about proliferation he said, as the rest of the world set about to take the lead in breeder technology. On that day every nuclear engineer in the United States' jaw dropped to the ground in astonishment.
Might I be so bold as to suggest that oil money and influence played a part in this.
In 1979 The China Syndrome movie happened and Greenpeace happened. Despite the stern businesslike wording of Greenpeace's Wikipedia page concerning nuclear energy, how it is not the best option for the future... I must point out that they must have hired someone to write that. Because they have been emotionally, hysterically and shrilly against nuclear power for 35 years. BUT. While they have demonstrated a firm and 'manageable' resistance to oil production (without fronting any other options, that's someone else's job)... when it is time to move against nuclear energy their own money, energy and resources to wage these battles seem to have known no bounds.
Might I be so bold as to suggest that oil money and influence played a part in this.
Since Carter's mistake... Chernobyl and Fukushima (really bad) have happened and Three Mile Island (close call, still bad) has happened.
1a. pulling the plug to their router 1b. (And, because their traffic is interleaved) everybody's
2a. taking out their satellite. Or because they don't have one, 2b. taking out everybody's satellite
3a. assembling a target-specific pathogen and insert it 3b. spreads everywhere to everyone and creates chaos
4a. Denial of service flood attack 4b. Again, everybody's problem
5a. Centcom infiltrate websites with sock puppet and troll 5b. Oops, the Internet is already down, this should have been #1
I know the military likes to do cyber-stuff so they can be cyber-mean and cyber-modern and send cyber-letters on cyber-stationary and everything, but this sounds less like strategic warfare and more like some drunken nerd frat party, or a bunch of Luddites taking axes to looms in a garment factory. To destroy industry in order to save it.
Now I have installed an Active People Filter to remove people from all those Internet videos and movies and DVDs I watch. Along with speech and vocal removal filters for music, speech removal.
The filters have learned what people look like and do a fair job at stamping them out of still images too.
Now my life is like a series of paintings in still-life. Sitcoms are rooms of silent furniture and no stupid laughter, the Olympics and football a breathtaking vista of grand spaces and odd sporting equipment lying around.
I take long walks through the Internet, I am surrounded by the sounds of nature and gallivant in sun dappled glade. All is well.
Now I am alone in the whole world. And then the silent spell is broken shrilly. Microsoft wants to install updates on my computer.
My life is light, waiting for the death wind, Like a feather on the back of my hand. Dust in sunlight and memory in corners Wait for the wind that chills towards the dead land. ~TS Eliot
The strength of session keys does not matter. Forget difficulty of proprietary protocol reverse engineering, it is child's play.
Key negotiation is where the gold is, and there is only one real security wall that exists today among symmetric security systems: the Public Key Infrastructures with their strong prime factorization wall.
There are no other walls, only hurdles.
If someone were to pass along one little flash drive with the Certificate Authority chain signing and actual operating SSL private keys to NSA, FSB, whomever, Skype security becomes invisible. Same goes for the private keys for Google, others' SSL certs used for webmail/simap/spop3.
And I'm not talking about some dramatic ninja mission impossible burglary either. Suppose Skype, Google, et cetera were merely threatened with something awful, unthinkable --- unless they comply and hand over the keys. Once they do the pressure is off and everyone can go back to pretending everything is secure. And there are no direct corporate liabilities.
Ain't no free security lunch. Only true security that could ever exist is point-to-point between trusting individuals who have exchanged keys in person.
It does not even matter that truth serum does not work.
5th Amendment "[...] nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, [...]"
Subjected involuntarily to an inhibition-reducing drug while one's statements are on the record (or could influence the outcome of the trial in any way) is 'compelled'.
Even knowledge that one will be or has been subjected to this form of coercion satisfies the definition of 'compelled'.
A moratorium against this tactic on Constitutional grounds must be upheld to ensure that all persons on trial must be able to present themselves in their natural (untouched) state of mind.
Failure to do so will usher in a new era of supposedly-neutral but actually-corrupt pharmacology applied to ALL criminal and (why the hell not) civil cases. Today's 'insanity test' is tomorrows 'fishing expedition' is the next day's 'Ministry of Love'.
It just gags me out that a judge who upholds modern law and would gladly see a drug-date rapist convicted, would fail to recognize that assault by drug as a form of violence.
Regardless of the insanity finding and the verdict, this one should be appealed all the way to the Supreme Court.
I am personally opposed to insanity pleas to begin with. First degree murderers should all be equal under the law. If we have the stomach to put down a 'sane' man or man-killer dog, it should cover everything in between.
I'd even rather see a monster like this get off scot free --- than invite any procedure of involuntary drug coercion into our justice system.
That would take us quickly to a place that is bad beyond words.
H'yup. Several cool trillions in political subsidies for we-knew-they-will-never-scale energy alternatives (I include ethanol here!) based on grossly overstated sea level rise, ice within historical norms, pure-carbon causation madness based some forced-feedback 'greenhouse effect' robot chicken theory which its own originator Fourier would not even recognize as his own---
Does not count. But when a few billionaires collect the spare change from their couch cushions and manage to raise $120 million for something----?
Well. That changes everything. Twice. Which means it does not change anything at all.
I, for one, would welcome my new karma-reducing Slashdot AGW proponent overlords.
The study is flawed, it treats defecation as the problem. Poop is the problem, defecation is the solution.
"What a piece of work is a cow! how now in reason! how infinite in lactation! in form and moooving how express and admoooable...'' ~Captain Jean Luc Picard, USS Enterprise: Cow Greeting, Alpha Prime
As a boy I began to explore the possibility of a planetary asteroid defense.
What a relief.
My teenage years were marked by bouts of Acute Cold War Survival Anxiety. I was prepared to explore and debate such things as, What effect and scope of all-out nuclear exchange? What are nearest likely strategic targets? Wind and ocean factors? Social and political conditions? When fallout arrives, how can you be sure your family is getting enough? If there is somewhere left to go, where to go? What to bring? Who to eat first?
I would listen to the daily English commentaries of Radio Moscow on shortwave. Lots of gesticulation and predictable posturing. Then I would listen to President Reagan: lots of gesticulation and predictable posturing.
Minutes to midnight.
I worked survival scenarios; collected books, studied maps, stockpiled chocolate. I'd be tuned to the local radio station when they conducted the EBS test every week... as in, "This is a test of the Emergency Broadcast System. It is only a test." When it was preempted by a baseball game I was the only one who ever called to complain. Because no one else did.
Survival aside, what could one actually do to address the threat of nuclear war? Sneak around gathering warhead, missile and fission lump and muck... head for Mount Doom, toss them in and run like hell?
I tried to debate the issue with others but didn't get far. The objective, they would begin, is to prevent nuclear war. "Can be done, but not a good approach." Oh really, they'd muse, explain. "Considering the angles and who the players are... there is only one tool we know of that is capable of preventing nuclear war: nuclear war."
Smiling, I suppose you think that's funny. "No, I'm serious. It would work. For sure."
End of debate.
Or... continuing the debate later by myself, with myself... what if, instead of preparing for nuclear war... we just choose not to have one? All day. Every day. It was easy to see that this tactic might 'save the day' so to speak. But the real beauty of such a regimen is that the benefits actually accrue over time. A day? O.K. A week? Great. A whole year without nuclear war? Splendid!
As it turns out that's exactly what we did. It would be silly to claim credit for the ultimate success of this simple idea; but I did think it up first.
And I did my part... right to this day.
No matter how hectic the day or late the hour, I always set aside enough time to not start a nuclear war. As should you. I admit at times it may have been a little one -- say, a hypothetical series of tactical bursts along the border of two small imbecile countries. It never works. The dust settles and there is the border again, right where they left it. Wider, even.
On Friday I fail to start three successive wars, each one more horrifyingly pointless than the last; to clear my slate for the weekend. With nuclear survival addressed and prevention unnecessary -- had all this extra free time.
So I kissed plutonium goodbye and set my sights on iron, nickel and ice; humble ingredients to be sure but pretty effective when you stir in mass, velocity and plenty of aftermath.
If you see one mushroom cloud you've seen them all, if one could be so lucky. They only seem to come in one flavor, up up and away.
Planetary impacts though are serious fun.
Exposing the earth's mantle -- even a tiny bit -- is always a fiery crowd pleaser. Then a rain of molten pellets begins, right on schedule; everyone gets to take home a souvenir. There is angle of entry: like playing spin-the-bottle, with God. Bad news for those in the cheap seats.
I like best a night-side volley into the ocean. The shores of surrounding continents are ringside seats; you can start the show early, since most of the audience is already there. Toss a few little ones, now they're watching. Different metals make pretty colors as they tear through the atmosphere.
Clever surprises. Eyes with telescopes will see here... a Really Big One! In all the humanitie
00:14 The Slashdot Community has eyes that exceed human spectra, to root out commercialist cause and effectra.
01:00 Once a burrow is excavated, all attention is focused on preparing defenses. Using found objects of technological innovation and nerd society, it is trying to leverage the more dynamic cultures it's inherited and make itself more nimble and innovative.
02:02 Here we see Slashdot decorate its burrow with one of its most cherished objects, the brain of Linus Torvalds.
02:21 A member of the Microsoft benchmark team uses the the brain of Linus Torvalds as cover, attempting to infiltrate the burrow with stats that prove that Windows gives comparable server performance to linux.
02:30 Slashdot attacks the benchmark infiltrator devouring stats and all. Slashdot asks if you can work fast, you can't just say yes. You'll have to use your previous achievements to prove that you can. Microsoft failed to prove its case. Slashdot spits out the GUI mess in a fury of determined resolve.
03:00 Slashdot's greatest foe is the Corporate Recruiter Lionfish, a formidable adversary who seeks to gather intelligent minds into coordinated pursuits of innovation. The price is dear for its victims are soon bound tightly to Nondisclosure Agreements. But it is a magnificent sight as its spines of available startup capital warn other Corporations that they's rather not step on it. The Recruiter Lionfish tests the defenses of Slashdot's burrow. The defenses hold, and poor Yvonne Lee, Community Manager at Dice.com is met with a brutal and frenzied response.
03:45 Its fortress also serves as camouflage. Here we see an NFL recruiter passing over the burrow as the thriving Slashdot Community hidden within goes completely unnoticed. Politics and sporting culture find it impossible to penetrate its topic defenses unless they present some technical challenge or have suffered an IT disaster.
04:15 Finally we see Slashdot making forays into the world to gather properly vetted discussions to place into its firehose.
All rights reserved. Trademarks cited herein remain sole property of their various evil corporate overlords.
Of whom --- it would seem --- we would welcome --- I, for one.
Actually some in the USA were accustomed to seeing flying cars as early as 1979. But most of our attention was drawn to the possibility that Daisy Duke might explode out of her jeans.
The media's directly linked, it has a URL--- Hi! ho! the derry-o, we simply GET the stream.
The link has gobble-de-gook, it changes every time--- Hi! Ho! the derry-o, we follow redirect.
It's encrypted with a key, the key is passed to me--- Hi! ho! the derry-o, our extension reads it for free.
The key comes from a script, the script talks only to Fred--- Hi! Ho! the derry-o, our sandbox looks like Fred.
A dongle decodes the stream, which plugs into USB--- Hi! Ho! the derry-o, its Certs have just been leaked.
It's all secure at last! A special TV decodes it all--- Hi! Ho! the derry-o, they didn't sell any at all.
It's encrypted again but now, NO ONE gets the key--- Hi! Ho! the derry-o, we watch Gaussian noise for free.
I'm used to it. Digital TV reception in my area closely resembles watching a raw stream of encrypted video where only God has the key. A pretty mosaic of brightly colored boxes that rearrange themselves into endless, hypnotic patterns. Its audio is mercifully muted.
Jumping the gun is not necessarily the best way to get things done.
The most oft-discussed and visible triumphs of manned space have been by necessity "get there, plant the flag and get out."
But the ultimate goal should be not just to visit space or establish some dangerous and isolated outposts there (though there is no shortage of volunteers!)...it should be to move into space in a series of self-sustaining stages.
This means we first need to build a space colony here on Earth, and decide on some practical steps to take that will achieve the ultimate goal. And each step should be of immediate practical and commercial value.
I would like to call attention to Marshall Savage's amazing project and book, The Millennial Project.another synopsis and at Amazon. Some have picked fun at Savage's priorities, but frankly until this book/project arrived on the scene there had been nothing like it.
In that plan, terraforming Mars is step 6 of 8. In this scenario we are not just landing on Mars to establish an outpost... at that stage we have already perfected the technology for habitats in space. If our focus is on 'the next logical (small) step' instead of some ultimate goal and devote our complete effort to these steps, by 2033 we could be moving outward in all directions... instead of just one.
When we were growing up on our little island in the Caribbean we could just pick up the 'phone --- and yes, oh best beloved, in those days an apostrophe would typically precede the word phone --- we'd dial five digits. And the call would just go through.
Not seven, not ten. Never eleven! It is so obvious looking back, the seconds we saved by not dialing those unnecessary digits stretched into minutes, hours, days... by 1980 we were wandering, listless, the burden of those extra hours weighed heavily on us. Many would gaze at their telephones, silently pleading for some sign or answer. But the phones were silent too --- with so much accrued time it was pointless, there was nothing left to say, all had been said.
Then one day a visitor came ashore and asked the number for such-and-such. While dialing the five digits they remarked, "We dial seven. This would not work where I come from."
What an disturbing idea! Ripples of amusement and shock passed through our small society. 'Phones began to ring once again as people mulled this concept. It was unsettling, the idea that should we venture too far from home those familiar numbers we use to communicate would simply not work!
But how far was too far, we wondered? In whispers at first. For now it was possible there was some unknown, invisible boundary surrounding us. For our safety and that of our children it must be mapped. So we asked for volunteers... and sent them out to neighboring islands at all points of the compass, and the US mainland --- and waited by our 'phones.
We sighed with relief when the first reports came in from adjacent islands. Five digits, all clear!
But then our worst fears were confirmed. From Puerto Rico, nothing. From The United States, nothing. We never heard from those brave souls again. Time accrued and the days became longer still.
Then one day a village idiot --- the same who had once suggested we borrow a lug nut from each of the other wheels --- wondered that maybe there are really seven digits... but two of them are somehow invisible. A digits of the land and one of the sky he said, that are unknown to us because we live on and breathe them unaware.
I was intrigued by this idea. What would those digits be? How could one discover them? There are only a hundred possibilities. We all were amused by this but I was perhaps the first one who actually started dialing through them. That is when I discovered that 'phones are patient. Unlike all the people I knew, my 'phone did not seem to mind if I repeatedly dialled numbers that did not work. I had found a new friend!
It is hard to describe what happens after a lifetime of complacent acceptance, as one applies barely an hour of concentrated effort towards some insane idea -- only to reach a moment where you break through and the world changes forever. The call went through and my friend picked up and I heard a familliar 'Hello?' For In those days, oh best beloved, when we answered our 'phone we always said "Hello." We did not bark or grunt, and especially not the impolite "...yes?" or "what the fuck now??" of today.
I shouted breathlessly "I am speaking to you from SEVEN DIGITS! SEVEN! Can you hear me??" Sure, he said, I don't think he knew what I meant and it was past midnight anyway. Being a scientist or explorer of uncharted waters is a heady responsibility. I circled and underlined the two amazing digits and proceeded to complete the sweep. The next combination yielded nothing, and the next. Finally --- the last.
Only one circled pair of digits on my worksheet. I had concieved a simple experiment of technology that was bound to an existential question, performed an exploratory experiment and had obtained a clear and astounding result. We were all saved, we could dial seven digits now like everyone else... and all our time would be spent dialing --- glorious dialing!
I hugged my 'phone.
And in days to come I would discover that dialling a leading '1' forced long distance trunking to occur (Why are these local numbe
I for one would welcome our Bayesian filtering Overlords.
They shall spill forth from Artesian wells.
The invasion had begun with the introduction of the foul and mysterious word 'mesian' into our language... a word none can define --- yet somehow by dark design has become acceptable for use in Scrabble.
Slashdot Mirror
My point was that people who advocate the purchase of gold know that in the long term the price of gold in terms of dollars or other fiat currencies has never gone down. Gold is a good means of preserving wealth, but not for deriving income from such wealth.
Excellent point on wealth versus income, I see you know your balance sheet. I was soul-searching to discover why gold-over-time comparisons tickle my funny bone, aside from being generally perverse. Not so savvy as Karl Denninger who has his reasons to be bearish on gold as an investment or plaything. As one who has never owned any gold or even more than a fistful of dollars I don't implicitly trust either, so I find it easy to make light of the choices that people of wealth are facing right now.
While pondering the dollar and gold I grew bored and made a sandwich, and contemplated that instead. Bread you can sink your teeth into, and throughout history love of it has transcended love of fiat money and precious metal.
Looking into bread vs. gold, I found this, "it is said that an ounce of gold bought 350 loaves of bread in the time of Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, who died in 562 BC" (cited here)
Fascinating! What if you view bread itself as the exchange pivot plotted against on gold (for the US via the dollar)? A quick search did not reveal anyone who had done it, so I gathered gold fixes and one-pound-loaf statistics for the hundred years of 1913-2012 and created a gold:bread ratio. How many loaves/pounds of bread 'buys' an ounce of gold. Here is my resulting chart and data.
So in 1913 the gold:bread ratio was ~337.9 which is comparable to Nebuchadnezzar's time. It stayed more or less in the same magnitude until the 1971 Nixon Shock when gold heads through the roof. Bread rises steadily but gold's rise is meteoric.
1980 is the worst-ever year for bread, with ~1,281 loaves to purchase an ounce of gold. We're so used to seeing things from the dollar/gold point of view but 1970 and 2001 were really great years for bread, with gold purchasing power twice what it had in Babylon.
Then we went to war and everything went to hell. But the gold:bread chart does offer one surprise: even though gold is massive right now, the actual gold:bread ratio is similar to what it was in 1980 before it started to fall.
So what we need right now is a Reganomics sandwich.
Who's got the power?
think massively parallel computing power
think specialized hash computation arrays
think of the precomputed rainbow table warriors
think oligarchy (of computer power = money)
think no public accountability of resource usage or mission
once these people take an interest in bitcoin it's 'done'
Who's round and jolly and all full of fun
Who's shaped like a great big hamburger bun?
Who's got a job that's a super-breeze?
I'm sure you guessed it, it's Mayor McCheese!
"So which would you rather have today, a $20 bill or the amount of gold that such a bill would have bought in 1913?"
To have personally acquired either one I would have to be considerably older than 100 years old today. Yuck. So respectfully the answer is no.
To accept hypothetically-offered economic woudja-rather gifts fronted by those trying to illustrate trended price conversions between two time periods is in violation of the Temporal Prime Directive and the 2250 Temporal Treaty of Algernon.
Such choices were / will be discovered to influence the entire time line between the two cited moments in time, encouraging the least desirable social consequences like reckless hoarding and obssessive economyopia syndrome.
Why is it your duty to observe a treaty that will not be ratified for another 237 years??
Well, clever isn't it.
Secret plans for incursion epinova alien energy device for thought control hidden in cosmic background static of FM broadcast, later in vertical blanking interval of analog television broadcast. Digital realm unaffected until development of Mosaic when secret browser code inserted to extend all color palettes +1 past base two boundaries to create an subvisible 'hyngry hyppo' color (the 17th, 257th, 65537th and 16777217th palette index) whose boundary is perceivable by the subconscious mind. Diagrams and simple directives cloaked in transparent interval of BLINK tag.
Mission for alien conquest of human race cancelled due to budget cuts and general unsuitability of pixelated thought processes of humans reared in the digital age. Technology passed by alien operatives secretly to the Gobymynt in exchange for a ride off the planet.
BLINK subsequently relegated to 'kitsch' status by unsuspecting nerd culture and its use in web design has been generally defecated.
Disclosure of BLINK mission a limited hang out to provide cover for epinova deployment into specification for CCSS (cascading cascading style sheets). Under this progressive regime (CSS, CCSS, CCCSS etc) style is expected to overtake content by 2015, with content completely defecated by 2020.
Covert intelligence insiders will also recall another alien epinova plot which peaked in the late 70s and early 80s, introduction of the hated and feared 'eiplady' device.
For recommending this valuable service. I have completed the interactive component, choosing British Virgin Islands, $10M laundered in via phoney lawsuit with 3% interest over 5 years and payed out as a rigged gambling 'win'. Now all I need to do is sit back and wait for the money!
My only complaint with the component is the loud 'bloink' sound it produces repeatedly brought everyone in the house running to see what was happening and look over my shoulder. Now I must share the money when it arrives. And I fear the IRS might be able to monitor for that sound... there was a helicopter in the area soon after I had placed my order.
The storage solution for the waste is to gather it and dissolve it into molten salt to extract the wasted energy from it and make electricity. As is described in this generally ignored slashdot submission although it is a timely topic and has not been directly featured on slashdot before, video. Yeah, that one.
It's slower but more than fast enough, supports printers too although you'll really miss those Novell print queues. And Lantastic has evolved too, you are no longer limited to Arcnet, it supports the *new* 10baseT half duplex cards! Patches are available for the DOS stack to accommodate just about any combination of hardware IRQ and base IO PORT. Just be sure to load the network TSRs BEFORE you run Borland Sidekick.
Whoa! I was having 1984 flashbacks for a moment.
When they see all the news headlines they'll think it is all about them.
Imagine your name is Previously Thought and check out the hilarious mad-libs in Google News.
An example,
"Polar bears and brown bears, species known to produce fertile hybrids, have much more in common genetically than Previously Thought."
More entertaining than reading about The Artist Formerly Known As The Artist Formerly Known As Prince.
The soon to be announced iPhone 6 will only charge and operate from wind, solar, geothermal and hydro power sources.
All other power sources will be incompatible.
Time to change the world.
Google search result says you are the FIRST person in the digital age ever to compare a comparison to comparing bananas to goats!
And I think that's cool. Congratulations.
Hence forthwith I will deign to point out to others they are comparing bananas to goats, as they do so. I will even do it myself to show them how it ought to be done.
It will soon rise to a tumultuous crescendo of cliche and there will be songs, there will be hip-hop lyrics. There will be T-shirts. Dave Letterman will hold off making his first 'banana and goat' salvo for months, even as the audience waits for it intently. Then when he does there will be applause! Presidential candidates will say with a Groucho Marx eyebrow-raise, "If he's a banana what does that make me?" And the crowd will wave their signs that say the answer. Slashdot will suffer a round of nananse and goatse again.
And it all started here. We are all present at this profound moment in history.
There, I just took a picture of us all together. It will be portrayed in future documentaries as a vivid photograph that fades to sepia accompanied by soulful yet inspiring music.
Television commercials will have goats!
Dancing!
With Bananas!
This thing could be bigger than Yankee Doodle Dandy.
If slashdot was a paper newspaper, every day they'd be receiving tons of papers by return mail marked up with pen, crayon and lipstick. Typos circled, comments in the margins. Parakeet poop used as white-out.
"[...] and please mail paper back when you see this comment. I'm not finished reading it yet"
Lemmie guess. Obama will help push through sin tax penalties for industry on gasoline and diesel... then will stand for a moment poised to funnel it into the Algorian Fantasy Options like solar and wind --- because he's a slow learner. Then someone will whisper in his ear, "we tried that already" and he will instead toss the money into the air and it will flutter down into personal tax credits for everyone. Like the Bush Beans, only this cow will be milked quarterly. There will be lots of flowery language surrounding this voter kickback, how free money is "helping to offset the cost of fuel" and how everyone in America is now a "personal stockholder in the energy companies."
A socialist page from the Chavez playbook but it will have a cute and catchy American name.
And the energy corporations who have not done so already will move to Qatar. Then Al-Qaeda militants will surface in Qatar, who'da thunk it. The rest is history, again.
Or president Obama could stop with the floundering and fleecing already, and offer tax credits to encourage the building of clean energy alternatives that will actually scale to meet current levels of demand. Not easy to do, but easy to figure out since there is only one to choose from.
Nuclear fission (someday Thorium or fusion --- there is not enough time to dork around at present). I'm talking about a 100% nuclear powered North American electric grid with ~50% additional baseload capacity to finally realize electric cars and trucks. And I'm talking about a real interim solution for the storage of spent fuel until it can be bred back into the cycle. And making breeding a research priority too.
Basically I'm talking about turning back the clock to a time after the "eternal" Texas and Oklahoma and fields had dried up and before the "eternal" Saudi oil fields were discovered. In the 1960s and early 70s no one believed that North American oil could sustain us any longer, and no one was imagining that coal would scale without environmental suicide. We were about to invest in nuclear energy --- all the way. If we had we would be at the 150% mark already. We'd have "real" electric cars already. This country would be a very different place, and the world would be a more peaceful and better place.
But instead we turned our attention to colonizing the Middle East. First by enabling the oil-rich Saudi Arabia to evolve into the space age feudal system it is today... later, by managing and transmogrifying existing regimes through OPEC-bribes and armed conflict.
In 1977 President Carter declared a moratorium on reprocessing spent nuclear fuel. For no damned reason at all that made any sense. Storing spent fuel forever was now the 'only' option. Concerned about proliferation he said, as the rest of the world set about to take the lead in breeder technology. On that day every nuclear engineer in the United States' jaw dropped to the ground in astonishment.
Might I be so bold as to suggest that oil money and influence played a part in this.
In 1979 The China Syndrome movie happened and Greenpeace happened. Despite the stern businesslike wording of Greenpeace's Wikipedia page concerning nuclear energy, how it is not the best option for the future... I must point out that they must have hired someone to write that. Because they have been emotionally, hysterically and shrilly against nuclear power for 35 years. BUT. While they have demonstrated a firm and 'manageable' resistance to oil production (without fronting any other options, that's someone else's job)... when it is time to move against nuclear energy their own money, energy and resources to wage these battles seem to have known no bounds.
Might I be so bold as to suggest that oil money and influence played a part in this.
Since Carter's mistake... Chernobyl and Fukushima (really bad) have happened and Three Mile Island (close call, still bad) has happened.
1a. pulling the plug to their router
1b. (And, because their traffic is interleaved) everybody's
2a. taking out their satellite. Or because they don't have one,
2b. taking out everybody's satellite
3a. assembling a target-specific pathogen and insert it
3b. spreads everywhere to everyone and creates chaos
4a. Denial of service flood attack
4b. Again, everybody's problem
5a. Centcom infiltrate websites with sock puppet and troll
5b. Oops, the Internet is already down, this should have been #1
I know the military likes to do cyber-stuff so they can be cyber-mean and cyber-modern and send cyber-letters on cyber-stationary and everything, but this sounds less like strategic warfare and more like some drunken nerd frat party, or a bunch of Luddites taking axes to looms in a garment factory. To destroy industry in order to save it.
Now I have installed an Active People Filter to remove people from all those Internet videos and movies and DVDs I watch. Along with speech and vocal removal filters for music, speech removal.
The filters have learned what people look like and do a fair job at stamping them out of still images too.
Now my life is like a series of paintings in still-life. Sitcoms are rooms of silent furniture and no stupid laughter, the Olympics and football a breathtaking vista of grand spaces and odd sporting equipment lying around.
I take long walks through the Internet, I am surrounded by the sounds of nature and gallivant in sun dappled glade. All is well.
Now I am alone in the whole world. And then the silent spell is broken shrilly. Microsoft wants to install updates on my computer.
My life is light, waiting for the death wind,
Like a feather on the back of my hand.
Dust in sunlight and memory in corners
Wait for the wind that chills towards the dead land.
~TS Eliot
The strength of session keys does not matter. Forget difficulty of proprietary protocol reverse engineering, it is child's play.
Key negotiation is where the gold is, and there is only one real security wall that exists today among symmetric security systems: the Public Key Infrastructures with their strong prime factorization wall.
There are no other walls, only hurdles.
If someone were to pass along one little flash drive with the Certificate Authority chain signing and actual operating SSL private keys to NSA, FSB, whomever, Skype security becomes invisible. Same goes for the private keys for Google, others' SSL certs used for webmail/simap/spop3.
And I'm not talking about some dramatic ninja mission impossible burglary either. Suppose Skype, Google, et cetera were merely threatened with something awful, unthinkable --- unless they comply and hand over the keys. Once they do the pressure is off and everyone can go back to pretending everything is secure. And there are no direct corporate liabilities.
Ain't no free security lunch. Only true security that could ever exist is point-to-point between trusting individuals who have exchanged keys in person.
It does not even matter that truth serum does not work.
5th Amendment "[...] nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, [...]"
Subjected involuntarily to an inhibition-reducing drug while one's statements are on the record (or could influence the outcome of the trial in any way) is 'compelled'.
Even knowledge that one will be or has been subjected to this form of coercion satisfies the definition of 'compelled'.
A moratorium against this tactic on Constitutional grounds must be upheld to ensure that all persons on trial must be able to present themselves in their natural (untouched) state of mind.
Failure to do so will usher in a new era of supposedly-neutral but actually-corrupt pharmacology applied to ALL criminal and (why the hell not) civil cases. Today's 'insanity test' is tomorrows 'fishing expedition' is the next day's 'Ministry of Love'.
It just gags me out that a judge who upholds modern law and would gladly see a drug-date rapist convicted, would fail to recognize that assault by drug as a form of violence.
Regardless of the insanity finding and the verdict, this one should be appealed all the way to the Supreme Court.
I am personally opposed to insanity pleas to begin with. First degree murderers should all be equal under the law. If we have the stomach to put down a 'sane' man or man-killer dog, it should cover everything in between.
I'd even rather see a monster like this get off scot free --- than invite any procedure of involuntary drug coercion into our justice system.
That would take us quickly to a place that is bad beyond words.
> Wow- AGW is a full-fledged cult at this point.
H'yup. Several cool trillions in political subsidies for we-knew-they-will-never-scale energy alternatives (I include ethanol here!) based on grossly overstated sea level rise, ice within historical norms, pure-carbon causation madness based some forced-feedback 'greenhouse effect' robot chicken theory which its own originator Fourier would not even recognize as his own---
Does not count. But when a few billionaires collect the spare change from their couch cushions and manage to raise $120 million for something----?
Well. That changes everything. Twice. Which means it does not change anything at all.
I, for one, would welcome my new karma-reducing Slashdot AGW proponent overlords.
The study is flawed, it treats defecation as the problem. Poop is the problem, defecation is the solution.
"What a piece of work is a cow! how now in reason!
how infinite in lactation! in form and moooving how
express and admoooable...''
~Captain Jean Luc Picard, USS Enterprise: Cow Greeting, Alpha Prime
Bovidae in Absurdiae Gloria. Being a treatise on sundry bovidae topics as: Cow Greetings. Cow Banners. Also may contain capricious claptrap. codswallop. and flapdoodle.
As a boy I began to explore the possibility of a planetary asteroid defense.
What a relief.
My teenage years were marked by bouts of Acute Cold War Survival Anxiety. I was prepared to explore and debate such things as, What effect and scope of all-out nuclear exchange? What are nearest likely strategic targets? Wind and ocean factors? Social and political conditions? When fallout arrives, how can you be sure your family is getting enough? If there is somewhere left to go, where to go? What to bring? Who to eat first?
I would listen to the daily English commentaries of Radio Moscow on shortwave. Lots of gesticulation and predictable posturing. Then I would listen to President Reagan: lots of gesticulation and predictable posturing.
Minutes to midnight.
I worked survival scenarios; collected books, studied maps, stockpiled chocolate. I'd be tuned to the local radio station when they conducted the EBS test every week... as in, "This is a test of the Emergency Broadcast System. It is only a test." When it was preempted by a baseball game I was the only one who ever called to complain. Because no one else did.
Survival aside, what could one actually do to address the threat of nuclear war? Sneak around gathering warhead, missile and fission lump and muck... head for Mount Doom, toss them in and run like hell?
I tried to debate the issue with others but didn't get far. The objective, they would begin, is to prevent nuclear war. "Can be done, but not a good approach." Oh really, they'd muse, explain. "Considering the angles and who the players are... there is only one tool we know of that is capable of preventing nuclear war: nuclear war."
Smiling, I suppose you think that's funny. "No, I'm serious. It would work. For sure."
End of debate.
Or... continuing the debate later by myself, with myself... what if, instead of preparing for nuclear war... we just choose not to have one? All day. Every day. It was easy to see that this tactic might 'save the day' so to speak. But the real beauty of such a regimen is that the benefits actually accrue over time. A day? O.K. A week? Great. A whole year without nuclear war? Splendid!
As it turns out that's exactly what we did. It would be silly to claim credit for the ultimate success of this simple idea; but I did think it up first.
And I did my part... right to this day.
No matter how hectic the day or late the hour, I always set aside enough time to not start a nuclear war. As should you. I admit at times it may have been a little one -- say, a hypothetical series of tactical bursts along the border of two small imbecile countries. It never works. The dust settles and there is the border again, right where they left it. Wider, even.
On Friday I fail to start three successive wars, each one more horrifyingly pointless than the last; to clear my slate for the weekend. With nuclear survival addressed and prevention unnecessary -- had all this extra free time.
So I kissed plutonium goodbye and set my sights on iron, nickel and ice; humble ingredients to be sure but pretty effective when you stir in mass, velocity and plenty of aftermath.
If you see one mushroom cloud you've seen them all, if one could be so lucky. They only seem to come in one flavor, up up and away.
Planetary impacts though are serious fun.
Exposing the earth's mantle -- even a tiny bit -- is always a fiery crowd pleaser. Then a rain of molten pellets begins, right on schedule; everyone gets to take home a souvenir. There is angle of entry: like playing spin-the-bottle, with God. Bad news for those in the cheap seats.
I like best a night-side volley into the ocean. The shores of surrounding continents are ringside seats; you can start the show early, since most of the audience is already there. Toss a few little ones, now they're watching. Different metals make pretty colors as they tear through the atmosphere.
Clever surprises. Eyes with telescopes will see here... a Really Big One! In all the humanitie
Video footage and musical soundtrack:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4ZxR1C0xmc
Captions:
00:14 The Slashdot Community has eyes that exceed human spectra, to root out commercialist cause and effectra.
01:00 Once a burrow is excavated, all attention is focused on preparing defenses. Using found objects of technological innovation and nerd society, it is trying to leverage the more dynamic cultures it's inherited and make itself more nimble and innovative.
02:02 Here we see Slashdot decorate its burrow with one of its most cherished objects, the brain of Linus Torvalds.
02:21 A member of the Microsoft benchmark team uses the the brain of Linus Torvalds as cover, attempting to infiltrate the burrow with stats that prove that Windows gives comparable server performance to linux.
02:30 Slashdot attacks the benchmark infiltrator devouring stats and all. Slashdot asks if you can work fast, you can't just say yes. You'll have to use your previous achievements to prove that you can. Microsoft failed to prove its case. Slashdot spits out the GUI mess in a fury of determined resolve.
03:00 Slashdot's greatest foe is the Corporate Recruiter Lionfish, a formidable adversary who seeks to gather intelligent minds into coordinated pursuits of innovation. The price is dear for its victims are soon bound tightly to Nondisclosure Agreements. But it is a magnificent sight as its spines of available startup capital warn other Corporations that they's rather not step on it. The Recruiter Lionfish tests the defenses of Slashdot's burrow. The defenses hold, and poor Yvonne Lee, Community Manager at Dice.com is met with a brutal and frenzied response.
03:45 Its fortress also serves as camouflage. Here we see an NFL recruiter passing over the burrow as the thriving Slashdot Community hidden within goes completely unnoticed. Politics and sporting culture find it impossible to penetrate its topic defenses unless they present some technical challenge or have suffered an IT disaster.
04:15 Finally we see Slashdot making forays into the world to gather properly vetted discussions to place into its firehose.
All rights reserved. Trademarks cited herein remain sole property of their various evil corporate overlords.
Of whom --- it would seem --- we would welcome --- I, for one.
Or we could land 71% of a person on Mars, today!
Actually some in the USA were accustomed to seeing flying cars as early as 1979. But most of our attention was drawn to the possibility that Daisy Duke might explode out of her jeans.
The media's directly linked, it has a URL---
Hi! ho! the derry-o, we simply GET the stream.
The link has gobble-de-gook, it changes every time---
Hi! Ho! the derry-o, we follow redirect.
It's encrypted with a key, the key is passed to me---
Hi! ho! the derry-o, our extension reads it for free.
The key comes from a script, the script talks only to Fred---
Hi! Ho! the derry-o, our sandbox looks like Fred.
A dongle decodes the stream, which plugs into USB---
Hi! Ho! the derry-o, its Certs have just been leaked.
It's all secure at last! A special TV decodes it all---
Hi! Ho! the derry-o, they didn't sell any at all.
It's encrypted again but now, NO ONE gets the key---
Hi! Ho! the derry-o, we watch Gaussian noise for free.
I'm used to it. Digital TV reception in my area closely resembles watching a raw stream of encrypted video where only God has the key. A pretty mosaic of brightly colored boxes that rearrange themselves into endless, hypnotic patterns. Its audio is mercifully muted.
Frankly, I'm amazed at the progress we've made.
Jumping the gun is not necessarily the best way to get things done.
The most oft-discussed and visible triumphs of manned space have been by necessity "get there, plant the flag and get out."
But the ultimate goal should be not just to visit space or establish some dangerous and isolated outposts there (though there is no shortage of volunteers!)...it should be to move into space in a series of self-sustaining stages.
This means we first need to build a space colony here on Earth, and decide on some practical steps to take that will achieve the ultimate goal. And each step should be of immediate practical and commercial value.
I would like to call attention to Marshall Savage's amazing project and book, The Millennial Project. another synopsis and at Amazon. Some have picked fun at Savage's priorities, but frankly until this book/project arrived on the scene there had been nothing like it.
In that plan, terraforming Mars is step 6 of 8. In this scenario we are not just landing on Mars to establish an outpost... at that stage we have already perfected the technology for habitats in space. If our focus is on 'the next logical (small) step' instead of some ultimate goal and devote our complete effort to these steps, by 2033 we could be moving outward in all directions... instead of just one.
When we were growing up on our little island in the Caribbean we could just pick up the 'phone --- and yes, oh best beloved, in those days an apostrophe would typically precede the word phone --- we'd dial five digits. And the call would just go through.
Not seven, not ten. Never eleven! It is so obvious looking back, the seconds we saved by not dialing those unnecessary digits stretched into minutes, hours, days... by 1980 we were wandering, listless, the burden of those extra hours weighed heavily on us. Many would gaze at their telephones, silently pleading for some sign or answer. But the phones were silent too --- with so much accrued time it was pointless, there was nothing left to say, all had been said.
Then one day a visitor came ashore and asked the number for such-and-such. While dialing the five digits they remarked, "We dial seven. This would not work where I come from."
What an disturbing idea! Ripples of amusement and shock passed through our small society. 'Phones began to ring once again as people mulled this concept. It was unsettling, the idea that should we venture too far from home those familiar numbers we use to communicate would simply not work!
But how far was too far, we wondered? In whispers at first. For now it was possible there was some unknown, invisible boundary surrounding us. For our safety and that of our children it must be mapped. So we asked for volunteers... and sent them out to neighboring islands at all points of the compass, and the US mainland --- and waited by our 'phones.
We sighed with relief when the first reports came in from adjacent islands. Five digits, all clear!
But then our worst fears were confirmed. From Puerto Rico, nothing. From The United States, nothing. We never heard from those brave souls again. Time accrued and the days became longer still.
Then one day a village idiot --- the same who had once suggested we borrow a lug nut from each of the other wheels --- wondered that maybe there are really seven digits... but two of them are somehow invisible. A digits of the land and one of the sky he said, that are unknown to us because we live on and breathe them unaware.
I was intrigued by this idea. What would those digits be? How could one discover them? There are only a hundred possibilities. We all were amused by this but I was perhaps the first one who actually started dialing through them. That is when I discovered that 'phones are patient. Unlike all the people I knew, my 'phone did not seem to mind if I repeatedly dialled numbers that did not work. I had found a new friend!
It is hard to describe what happens after a lifetime of complacent acceptance, as one applies barely an hour of concentrated effort towards some insane idea -- only to reach a moment where you break through and the world changes forever. The call went through and my friend picked up and I heard a familliar 'Hello?' For In those days, oh best beloved, when we answered our 'phone we always said "Hello." We did not bark or grunt, and especially not the impolite "...yes?" or "what the fuck now??" of today.
I shouted breathlessly "I am speaking to you from SEVEN DIGITS! SEVEN! Can you hear me??" Sure, he said, I don't think he knew what I meant and it was past midnight anyway. Being a scientist or explorer of uncharted waters is a heady responsibility. I circled and underlined the two amazing digits and proceeded to complete the sweep. The next combination yielded nothing, and the next. Finally --- the last.
Only one circled pair of digits on my worksheet. I had concieved a simple experiment of technology that was bound to an existential question, performed an exploratory experiment and had obtained a clear and astounding result. We were all saved, we could dial seven digits now like everyone else... and all our time would be spent dialing --- glorious dialing!
I hugged my 'phone.
And in days to come I would discover that dialling a leading '1' forced long distance trunking to occur (Why are these local numbe
I for one would welcome our Bayesian filtering Overlords.
They shall spill forth from Artesian wells.
The invasion had begun with the introduction of the foul and mysterious word 'mesian' into our language ... a word none can define --- yet somehow by dark design has become acceptable for use in Scrabble.