Please note that all blog posts before 8 April 2007 were automatically imported from LiveJournal. To see the comments and any LiveJournal-specific extras such as polls and user icons, please find the source posting at http://brianenigma.livejournal.com/2003/01/The fun thing about the Santa Ana[*] winds today: very large, very dead Christmas trees rolling around in the streets like tumbleweeds that will mess up your car (unless you drive an SUV). [*] = For those not in Southern California, the Santa Ana winds are extremely strong, hot, dry winds that blow “backward” (from the inland to the coast). They usually happen here a couple of times a year.
Kate and I were discussing money and economics the other day, in relation to pirating software and music. At the time, I first vocalized an idea that had been kicking around in my head for months. The idea applies physics to economics, specifically thermodynamics. If you look at money as if it is energy, then moving the energy around generates a certain amount of “friction.” Like entropy, this energy is lost during transfer. It all makes sense in a strange sort of way. When you go to the store and purchase a CD, a certain amount of the money you place on the counter is lost and does not end up with the distributor of the CD (specifically, 7.75% goes to state sales tax, so only 92.25% is retained through the transaction). The money then goes from the distributor to the record company (and some fraction is lost), then to the artist (after more is lost).
We saw Star Trek: Nemesis the other night. While the movie was pretty good (at least, pretty good for what I expected), some of it was a little surprising. For instance, I was not expecting a vehicle chase and firefight with jeep-mounted machine guns. I kept expecting Shinzon to put his pinky to his mouth and say “One Million Dollars.” I wasn't expecting the multiple “shoot the bad guys in the hallway,” a la shoot the Storm Troopers in Star Wars. I wasn't expecting Reiker to jump down the chute in the wall during the laser fight in the corridor (unlike Luke, he did not end up in a trash compactor). I was expecting yet another Enterprise to get destroyed in a movie, but it did not. I was not expecting the ending. I was not expecting Data to sing Irving Berlin. I was not expecting the super-cool Picard “well, we can't fly the shuttle out the shuttle bay exit, so we'll have to fly it through the ship” routine. Overall, it was a really well done episode.
I am learning a lot more Objective-C, and am contributing a good deal to the OS X “SoleSeek” project. Yeay!
