Hopefully Interesting

So, MIT has this IM system called Zephyr that I still unaccountably find useful.  Clients generally let you display a signature with your message that might be some static bit of text or might be the result of a script if you’re more into that.  I have a script that selects from a bunch of sayings, jokes, etc that I’ve collected over the years.  And which I now want to inflict on you. Please forgive the puns and don’t take these too seriously. Unfortunately the universe doesn’t agree with me.  We’ll see which one of us is still standing when this is over.  Reality is what you can get away with. The truth is whatever you can’t escape. I used to think that the brain was the most wonderful organ in my body.  Then I remembered who was telling me this. I feel more like I do now than I did a while ago. I intend to live forever. So far, so good. Don’t ascribe to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity. You can’t know that this sentence ...

People have been thinking about life on Mars for a long time, ever since the writings on the illusive channels of Mars were mistranslated as being about canals if not even longer back.  The original Viking landers had some experiments to help detect life and people have been looking ever since.  If life had ever existed on Mars it's quite likely that the loss of hydrogen and breakdown of the magnetic field have ended it so I wouldn't bet on there being life now.  But for reasons I'll explain I think it's actually pretty likely that there was life at some time in the past. A while ago I blogged about a timeline of life on Earth  extending from its origin in Earth's path to its end in the future (if we don't do something about it).  Here it is again. Of course that's not how things went or will go on Mars.  Well, Mars formed at the same time as Earth did and I can't find any reason that liquid water would have taken a very different amount of time t...

I'm not going to try to defend the formula of adding a state's senators to its representatives to figure out how much say it should have in who becomes president.   You can make an argument for giving minorities extra influence but why should that only apply to minorities that correspond to a state's border?  Why should Rhode Island get extra influence so politicians pay attention but up state New York be dominated by New York City? But there is a reason to group votes at the state level in that votes are counted at the state level.  It's at the state level that voting is organized and if it were the case that a state was strongly dominated by one party or the other then there would be a temptation for that party to over count their vote to influence the national election.  But if the whole weight of a state is going to one party or the other anyways then there's less incentive to do something like that.  And for more balanced states it's (hopefully) hard...