Wednesday Zeitgeist

Another brief Zeitgeist. Distracted last night by the return of Crush from her sojourn in the Kapital. I was the delighted recipient of an awesomely pissweak Houses of Parliament Snow-Dome. And some much-overdue loving.

Work ... is, well, work. Discovered last week that my "golden handcuffs" are all handcuff and not much gold. CEO heard me cursing our software so have been talking about how to improve it this morning ... re-write the whole thing is not really a productive answer, but meh, what can you do?

Planning empires, boxing, listening to The Samuel Jackson Five. All is good.

Today's edition is a little heavy on the science. And may contain cartoon ass-rape. Just so you know.

• How Much Is a Seat on the Security Council Worth? Foreign Aid and Bribery at the United Nations
  

  In this paper, the authors find that when a country takes over one of the rotating seats on the UN Security Council, U.S. foreign aid jumps by almost 60%. When the country leaves the Security Council, the aid falls back to the old levels. The impact on aid is even larger when there are important international events (like invasions of Iraq) that put the Security Council in the spotlight.

• Testing claims of Free Energy. This one is dedicated to my physicians (Elaine and Charles).
• Ah ... the new world order. Found this little snippet:
  

  Groups that are aligned along ethic and religious lines are not susceptible to classic warfare tactics, because they are often mixed in with another population of people who are not responsible for the problem. To take an example, given that a lot of IRA funding was from the sympathetic Irish Catholic populations in Boston and Chicago, would it have made sense, at least in this kind of thinking, for the UK to go and bomb North America. An instant of thought shows how ridiculous this would be. (Cardboard Spaceship)
  

• The scale of a hydrogen atom.
  

  The page is scaled so that the smallest thing on it, the electron, is one pixel. That makes the proton, this big ball right next to us, a thousand pixels across, and the distance between them is... yep, fifty million pixels (not a hundred million, because we're only showing the radius of the atom. ie: from the middle to the edge). If your monitor displays 72 pixels to the inch, then that works out to eleven miles - making this possibly the biggest page you've ever seen.

• The following link is possibly not work-safe. Depends on where you work, of course.
  
• Not a metaphor and proof that Fan-Fic is dangerous: The Hulk ass·rapes the Marvel Universe
  

  Hulk wants to fuck!

• I want the above on a t-shirt.
  
• www.myspace.com/theclaubergopera
  Superb, raw, experimental punk-edged post-rock.
  
• The Utility of Hyperglyphic Media: I have no real idea of what this about
• You just have to love the Aztecs
  

  Skeletons found at an unearthed site in Mexico show Aztecs captured, ritually sacrificed and partially ate several hundred people traveling with invading Spanish forces in 1520.

• One of my guys, Colin Wilson, who is mental, just so you know, wrote a book suggesting that the Egyptians and Aztecs (and Sumerians?) were actually refugees from Atlantis. Which was destroyed in some sort of catastrophe. Possibly involving UFOs. That explains the similarities between the cultures. The Atlanteans were like hyper-beings who enslaved the local populations & etc, hence the structure of the societies with elite "Priest-Caste" at the top of the Ziggurat/Pyramid and the masses below. Or something.
• Sayings I have picked up from Crush: "one of my guys".
  
• RE: Pluto. Way to go scientists! Way to fucking embarrass us in front of the entire universe ... what the fuck do we do with the Pioneer Plaque now? Now the aliens will never find us!