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Comment Neatness and orderliness (Score 2) 181

One day when i was working in a chemical laboratory i realized that neatness was a visual quality with only a tenuous relationship to orderliness. Orderliness tends to persist over time, but it does not necessarily look neat. Neatness means in art terms that there are clear top surfaces and hard transitions between perpendicular surfaces such as between stacks of things and walls and floors. Soft transitions such as piles of things lessen the perception of neatness. You can make a room neat without orderliness which means that its entropy will lead it soon back to orderliness but it will not be neat long.

Comment If it is painting that you love... (Score 1) 173

A simple clip to hold the paintbrush is sufficient. In fine arts painting, the finger tips are still, and most of the guidance comes from the arm and body movements as in classical fencing. Monet in old age had very gnarled hands from arthritic joints and had to have his family strap the long handled brushes to his wrists so that he could continue painting in the loveliness of his gardens.

Comment Re:Prosecute, Prosecute, Prosecute (Score 1) 400

So, if the two party system is rootkitted by the 0.000063 per cent of voters who fund it and is non constitutional anyway, and is not functioning for most voters,why do we keep using it? It seems that we should recode the system using modern algorithms and data techniques so that it functions as it should for equal rights for humans and is less hackable to moneyed interests. A lot of money has been spent so we will never dare consider challenging that maybe the two party system is not mother or apple pi or the American Way. There are other methods of electoral politics possible.

Comment Re:I'm old (Score 1) 330

I was a late adopter in my fifties because i thought they might lead to The Cerebrum Communicator http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUa3np4CKC4 but finally my adult children imposed one on me about 2006. If i had been told in the 1950's that people on bicycles would carry a telephone, i would have checked their pupils to see if they were on something.

Comment Re:But ... (Score 1) 135

Perhaps we could make a large ocean going tug with the 200 meter enclosure in its center to go cowboy tropical storms and jump start them to hurricanes and then park them so that their cloud bands feed into the Sahara or other deserts. It would be one way of keeping maverick hurricanes from assaulting the populated coasts and balancing the global heat engine nevertheless. I know the New Mexicans like an occasional hurricane coming up the Rio Grande Valley or so my uncle used to say. .

Comment Re:End fiat currency! End THE FEDERAL RESERVE!!! (Score 1) 943

That is a vary intriguing idea and more in keeping with a real just free market system. It would mean an end to lies and games in the market place if the golld or silver dollar had its content set by its scarcity in the marketplace as a fixed currency and then we could make coins of lesser value as needed to buy everyday goods as dollars grew in value. We might need to have coins for thousands and ten thousands of the dollar but it would all be in relationship to the fixed unit1, as in the metric system. If a silver oz cost 33.440 Federal Reserve Notes, and a silver dollar was .77344 oz than your two cents worth would be worth about .52 FRN's at the going market price. And it would be constant value rather than the variable value we have now so you could decide how much money you wanted to put into the minting of a given coin.

Comment Re:MOD PARENT UP!!! (Score 2) 943

An original US gold dollar contained a gram and a half of gold on close order and at today's gold price was worth about 85.34 Federal Reserve Notes. A seated Liberty silver dollar contained .77344 troy oz of silver (about 3/4 of a troy oz) and was worth about 25.86 Federal Reserve Notes today. When i grew up in Eastern Montana, we almost always spent cartwheels and almost never saw a silver or gold certificates as the state motto is Oro Y Plata. There is a move afoot in this state to move to trade in silver by weight as it would be paying for things with real market goods or art works instead of fictitious paper goods foisted on us on by an entity that is not our real government. Silver dimes are worth somewhere around 3 FRN's and silver quarters are worth somewhere in the vicinity of 6 FRN's and silver fifty cent pcs come out around 11 dollars or so.

Comment Re:America's hand is being forced... (Score 1) 609

Perhaps the federal government is a failed experiment by the states which does not seem to be able to deal with any of the problems with which it is presented and we need to call a section V constitutional convention and spend time in designing a new constitution or amendments to limit the powers we will allow it to have. Certainly we have already cited some of the forces that prevent the cooperation needed to do the important planning for such a complex system as this nation. Certainly i cannot see paying congressmen or supreme court justices who are only acting in the short term interests of their corporate overlords who probably are supported by non citizen or even hostile powers. And i certainly cannot see any reason to pay them for stonewalling the process. If they don't cooperate, bang their heads together and fire them and get someone who well. I nominate the team of engineers who put the Nuclear Dune Buggy on Mars with all the cameras. At least they were capable of planning and finding solutions to their persistant problems.

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