An Israeli Engineer

In the past, I had worked with Chaim Krichly in several interesting industrial projects. I foundr him reticent which accounted for regular Ashkenazi eccentricity. Well, nobody is perfect (from "Some like it hot"). Now I have heard his story. As a member of the elite parachute battalion, at age 18 he was shot in the head. He re-trained himself and graduated and established a successful engineering studio. What most surprised me is his age: he is approaching eighty. The retirement age in Israel is 67, but no one retires ever. A role model for me.

Plymouth Rock landed on them

Antimetabole is a literary artifact meaning "turning about” - repeating a phrase in reverse order.

• “Eat to live, not live to eat.”- Socrates
• “The great object of [Hamlet’s] life is defeated by continually resolving to do, yet doing nothing but resolve.” – Samuel Taylor Coleridge on Shakespeare’s Hamlet
• “We didn’t land on Plymouth Rock. Plymouth Rock landed on us.” Malcolm X, “Malcolm X” (pic)

A Gift from Heaven for China

The Shuval (Heron) robot airplane can stay in the air for two days. It can visit far away places or fly over a target for long periods. It is practically noiseless, has no signature. It was sold to the Indian Armed Forces which crashed it on Chinese soil. Now the Chinese are busy back-engineering it.  Its secrets - probably, gone.

Crypto monies vs A general surrender of sovereignty

Bitcoin and other crypto monies enable smuggling resources out from a country, which is illegal everywhere. Most of all, the USA is fanatically cracking down on foreign accounts and virtual money sanctuaries like Seychelles, Panama, etc. The old Swiss banks surrendered years ago. America is firmly decided to follow money transfers all over the planet and collect all the taxes it deems its right. America, the country of the free, the colony that rebelled against the British crown's tax collectors. Now, please ask me if tax-crazy America will allow free and anonymous flow of resources, letting those saucy taxable goodies escape between its grabbing fingers? 

No way!

I bet they are sitting in secrete conclaves pondering the most effective method to control and tax the crypto flow. They will never surrender their monetary sovereignty. Anarchist initiatives like the crypto coin will be corralled and made to pay. Do you people out there in the blogosphere know which crime is the most severely punished? No, it is not fucking some Hollywood actress/prostitute. May be calling a Negro, Negro? Wrong again. It is printing counterfeit dollars. Bitcoins.

P.S.: I am not saying that crypto coin is fake money, I am saying that once it is taxed it will be no better than a bank transfer. Much worse, in fact, because the bank or the Western Union is insured.

America wasting millions of little Einsteins

A week ago, the whole blogosphere that I visit was laughing and mocking the New York Times article about the millions of potential little Einsteins the country was wasting. What the NYT writes, the HaAretz (our local Palestinian fishwrap, in high Hebrew) writes and twice magnified. The article at the left is titled "The Lost Einsteins of America". It is not only pure nonsense but also irrelevant for our little country that has no significant population of Asians, Hispanos, African Americans - nor White non-Jewish Americans.

Why they do this? First, it must be because it is cheap page filler, it comes ready made from the mouth of the Master.  Second, because the article is strongly subversive as it implies that the Government is purposefully destroying the minds of those millions of little Einsteins, that is, the Government is the enemy. This message is avidly absorbed by the local subversives and it re-enforces their gut feeling that the Government of Israel, specifically Bibi Netaniyahu, is evil. The article, laughable and irrelevant as it is, is a political propaganda weapon.

P.S.:  Give me a reason why the Israeli intelligentsia is so worried about the minds of millions of little American Black, Hispano, etc. einsteins going to waste?   The late Ayatollah Khomeini said that America is the Big Satan while Israel is the Small Satan sitting in its brain. He was wrong, Israel has no mind of its own, it is America that sits in its brain. America is so pervasive in the minds of HaAretz writers that they imagine they are the Big Satan and not the miserable small satans they are. They feel nothing of their own buy deeply mourn the tragedy of millions of little African einsteins that never existed nor will.

Symmetric people

I think Ancient Greeks, as seen through their representations in stone and bronze sculpture (other materials didn't survive), were more beautiful and symmetric than the people I meet on the street.

Fluctuating asymmetry is of course a measure of health and intelligence, so humanity is less perfect today that then. The Woodley Effect, as measured by fluctuating asymmetry, shows over 160 years (6.4 generations) 0.16 IQ points drop/decade.

Pic.: Zeus

Synecdoche

Meditate on Shelley's synecdoche in his poem Ozymandias:

“Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them.”

“The hand” in the above lines refers to the sculptor who carved the “lifeless things” into a statue.

“Mocked” in Shelley’s context means, “made, fashioned” rather than “derided.” The sense of the word originates in the German “machen (gemacht)” and survives in engineering usage today in terms like “mock-up” for a crude prototype.

Or "The hand" refers to Ozymandias?