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Monthly Archives: November 2005

Terabyte Server For Your Home

Roll your own terabyte file server. Lordy, that looks like fun.

Fly in My Soup

Andrew Thompson. You know who that is? It’s the Dow Jones Average.


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Criticism of “Buy Nothing Day”, from the Left

Of course capital would like nothing better than a population that defines politics as the decision to shop or not to shop; business interests spent most of the last century trying to convince us to find meaning in such gestures. When we do that, capital wins, since unless you’ve got the capacity to grow your own food and ride a horse and buggy to work, you’ve obviously got to start shopping again at some point.

Impotent gestures like Buy-Nothing Day are symptoms of a left that prefers doing something to nothing, even if that something doesn’t even reach the level of an empty gesture. Fantasizing our power isn’t the same as building it, and we’re unlikely to build it by advertising our powerlessness in ephemeral pursuits.

[Brooklyn Rail]

Google Dreams of Electric Sheep

Dreamlines is an attempt to visualize dreaming as a process. Provide the site a few keywords from your dream, and Dreamlines fetches the Google Image results for those words. Instead of displaying the results, the images are used to alter the vector of 1500 autonomous particles, whose trail composes the image you’re shown when the process is complete. Confused? Try reading the official explanation instead. [via Info Aesthetics]

8,333 1/3 Sheets of 100% Virgin Copier Paper Grow in Brooklyn

  • 1 ton of uncoated virgin (non-recycled) printing and office paper uses
    24 trees
  • 1 ton of 100% virgin (non-recycled) newsprint uses 12 trees
  • A pallet of copier paper (20-lb. sheet weight, or 20#) contains 40
    cartons and weighs 1 ton. Therefore:

    • 1 carton (10 reams) of 100% virgin copier paper uses 0.6 trees
    • 1 tree makes 16.67 reams of copy paper or 8,333.3 sheets
    • 1 ream (500 sheets) uses 6% of a tree (and those add up quickly!)
  • 1 ton of coated, higher-end virgin magazine paper (used for magazines
    like National Geographic and many others) uses a little more than 15 trees
    (15.36)
  • 1 ton of coated, lower-end virgin magazine paper (used for newsmagazines
    and most catalogs) uses nearly 8 trees (7.68)
  • [Straight Dope]

    The Means of Measurement

    VATICAN CITY (AP) A Vatican document posted on the Internet by a Catholic news agency says sexually active homosexuals are not welcome in the priesthood unless they have gotten over homosexual tendencies for at least three years.

    So how do we know? Odometers in their pants? Homo-sexo-meters?

    Scanlon

    WASHINGTON (AP) Michael Scanlon, a former aide to Rep. Tom DeLay,
    pleads guilty in conspiracy to bribe public officials.

    He’s not even thirty and already has pseudonyms? What a slimeball pimp.

    Why Didn’t We Think of That?

    AMMAN, Jordan (AP) State-run TV announces the resignations of 11 top officials, including the national security adviser, in the wake of Jordan bombings.