I can’t describe (or explain, really) how much I like this.
Some clever geek took a short Bach canon and did the following:
Played it.
Played it backwards.
Played it backwards and forwards simultaneously.
Played it backwards and forwards simultaneously as a Mobius strip.
And created a visualization of all of the above.
Here you go!
CNN yesterday: “Insiders Sell Like There’s No Tomorrow“
Me? I’m out, with the exception of some gold mining stocks which have tended to rise when everything else was cratering.
Just noticed that the Dow closed at 9605 yesterday–the 8th anniversary of 9/11. Would you like to guess where the Dow was when trading was halted on that day eight years ago?
9605
Weird, huh? Not to mention discouraging for buy-and-hold stock investors.
Eight years after the fact, there is still no better resource for understanding the history of militant Islam and the specific events that led to the 9/11 attacks than Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11.
It is also, unintentionally, a devastating refutation to all the “9/11 was an inside job” kookery that represents a sort mental swine flu pandemic in this country.
Get it if you haven’t read it. If you have children teenaged or older, have them read it as a vital, fascinating history lesson and as an innoculation against Charlie Sheen fever.
It’s available as an audio book as well–probably at your public library.
Submitted for your consideration . . . Here are the home search pages for Google and Bing today.
An article in Scientific American suggests that the human brain’s capacity for “patternicity” and “agenticity” explains why we tend to love a good conspiracy theory. Read “Why People Believe in Conspiracy Theories.”
President Obama is going to become the first U.S. president to physically chair the U.N. Security Council. A sort of “President of the World” for a day or two. No wonder Chris Matthews’ Leg is tingling.
John Hindraker over at the he Powerline blog has a fascinating, if troubling, post about the long term economic implications of the policies of the Obama-Reid-Pelosi government. It’s titled “What’s In Store, Inflation or Default?”
It makes for sobering reading. The silver lining? The end of the welfare state is coming . . . one way or the other.
Arriving yesterday: The End of Secularism by Hunter Baker.
This goes in the “Waiting” pile that includes recent acquisitions:
The National Geographic Channel . . . or “NatGeo” is the new hip new name, I believe . . . is running a great little special over the next few weeks. It’s called “9/11: Science and Conspiracy.” In it, a team of scientists in various specialties examine the key elements of the major conspiracy theories surrounding the 9/11 attacks on the WTC and the Pentagon.
They set up experiments to test things like the effects of burning jet fuel on structural steel (Guess what, Rosie . . . Fire actually can melt steel!) In fact, they laid a length of of structural steel over a shallow pit with jet fuel in it and placed a small amount of weight on the beam. Then they lit the jet fuel and started a stopwatch. The steel bent, buckled and twisted after only 3:51 seconds–even though the fire only reached a temperature of 2000, several hundred degrees lower than the steel’s “official” failure temp.
The best parts of the special are when they show a group of high profile “truthers” each experiment and the scientific findings. In each case, the truthers simply refused to accept what they were seeing. They were so invested in their preferred narrative that no amount of refutation could move them.
I was reminded of a great Thomas Sowell quote I heard recently. “A person cannot be reasoned out of a position they did not reason themselves into.”
Check out this video excerpt from the special. And catch one of the airings of this special if you can.