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Just wanted to plug the latest and greatest version of WordPress, its interface is easier to use (I hated the WYSIWYG after awhile). Plus it has auto-save built-in.

Also, if you are shopping the market, my webmaster operates a company that specializes in hosting and design: www.betanaught.com (Mike is an econ PhD student at UCSD… betanaught is an inside joke to statisticians).

Or maybe you do.

Peter Klein pointed to a recent piece on Slate regarding the fallacious need for an FCC, how its existence hurts market innovation much more than it helps.

See also: The Spectrum Should Be Private Property
The Evaporation of the FCC

Apropos my windy discussion on Wikipedia comes a sweet surprise: various court cases have cited entries found within Wikipedia to give context to certain issues.

Again, as a general reference guide, Wikipedia is typically good enough as a starting point, however it would behoove you to find more meticulous research on a specific topic for say, a doctoral dissertation.

Assuming you visit every hemisphere on a crisp, clear evening, a human observer with good eyesight is theoretically able to see about 9600 stars with the naked-eye. Realistically however, you might be lucky enough to only see half of these due to numerous variables (e.g. weather conditions, low altitude).

These stars range from the seemingly up close and personal North Star (at 430 light-years) to Deneb which is about 1,000 light-years away. The closest star to our own Solar system is actually a trio located a little more than 4 light-years away (Alpha, Proxima Centauri).

In addition, humans are supposedly capable of seeing stars up to a threshold of around 4,075 light-years (Mu Cephei is around that distance). And the most distant object we can see with our unaided eyes is the Andromeda Galaxy, approximately 2.5 million light-years away. See also: video from astronomer Phil Plait.

I mention this because various proponents of a theistic creation (Young-Earth Creationists specifically) and Intelligent Design suggest that the Earth is a mere few thousand years old.

The problem with this is that, as I detailed above, there are thousands of visible stars spread out over hundreds of light-years.

And it takes a lot of energy to move mass through space, as the object must counter numerous forces acting upon it (e.g. gravity from planets and stars).

In fact, the fastest moving space probe launched into space (New Horizons) screams through the cosmos at over 40,000 mph (it will get an extra nudge thanks to a gravity assist by Jupiter) — it also weighs 1,000 pounds, a paltry sum compared to stars.

However, even at that relatively brisk pace, it will take the probe hundreds of years to reach the closest of neighboring stars.

At this point, it should be noted that the most accurate method to measure the movement of colossal amounts of mass (expansion of space) is by their Red Shift, formulated by the late Edwin Hubble.

And guess what? None of the several thousand visible stars floating relatively near the solar system are moving away at much more than New Horizons, let alone the speed-of-light.

In fact, one of the fastest moving objects ever discovered is cruising at a spry 10 million mph (about 1.5% the speed-of-light). However, “ejected masses” like these are few and far between.

And it is the speed of our neighboring stars (or lack thereof) that raises the question: if an omnipotent deity capable of transcending the known laws of physics, supernaturally placed these stars in their current location, why would the same deity purportedly claim that Earth and homo sapiens had been around for only a few thousand years — when the visible evidence suggests otherwise?

You see, the biggest problem in denying that something fishy has taken place is that enterprising individuals like Galileo tinkered with lenses and ultimately pioneered the telescopic industry (the scope he used to peer onto the moon’s surface had a 20x magnification).

And as a result, we are now capable of seeing billions and billions of stars located millions of light-years away.

So, either astronomers are wrong; or YECists cannot acknowledge that distances between stellar objects exist and is muy vast, otherwise this key part of their theology is wrong and/or is a loyalty test from Zeus himself…

If you have watched the new film “The Pursuit of Happyness” there is a scene in the film in which Will Smith’s character is trying to check into a shelter and a shelter worker tries to stop him.

That worker (whose meat space name is Robert Peters) emailed me after reading my recent Mises article letting me know that,

Came across this the other day, which you may have seen.

Interestingly enough it lists Bhutan as being the 8th happiest country.  Of course it is easier to please people when their view of the number of choices in the world is severely limited.

It is interesting to compare it to Heritage’s Index of Economic Freedom.

I see a close correlation.

It reminded me of the fable in which the socialist bemoans to a capitalist that there are just too many choices for an individual in a free-market economy… it is too confusing. 

And the capitalist retorts that at least they have those choices, those options, those possibilities — because entrepreneurial activity and private property are allowed to exist.

Burn (#1).

So this guy named AC emailed me earlier today, about an online petition he started.

It is a grass-roots effort to try and convince Nike to make those laceless shoes that Marty McFly had in Back to the Future Part II (circa 2015 AD).

And while I doubt the petition will be of much use, the self-made commercial is pretty funny.

Perhaps this could be one area homemade 3D printers can be of use.

I can hardly be accused of being a pinko-hippie granola crunching populist (unless you ask my older sister), yet I still enjoy Colbert much more than O’Reilly.

And I barely watch Comedy Central to begin with.

That said, I managed to catch O’Reilly’s appearance on the Colbert Report last week.  It wasn’t nearly as explosive as I thought it would be (see the video here).

In fact, if you want to watch these guys go toe to toe, check out the recent visit Colbert made to O’Reilly’s studio (video).  O’Reilly was well, O’Reilly — spewing anger and hatred at his guest.

And while Colbert was very witty, the funniest part of the segment were the snickers you can hear from the production crew, to Colbert’s tactful comebacks.

Note: one wonders if the self-righteous Lewis Prothero (“Voice of London”) in V for Vendetta was partially inspired by O’Reilly’s pompous arrogance.

See also: O’Reilly versus Krugman; and O’Reilly versus Moore

Be sure to visit neatorama to view a larger version.  And also check out the brief clip of MacGyver on Family Guy.

And if you liked that, then you will probably chuckle at this small diagram from XKCD.

And lastly, if you have any teenagers that frequently text message one another, then they might like this before & after.  An albino gorilla?!? Kenny Rogers?

It seem Bob Parsons is too hot for TV.  Or rather, his company ads (GoDaddy.com) are.

This is the second year that the Super Bowl ad they created got cancelled.

Here it is in all its glory. 

And for what it is worth, I think the one from last year was much more “racey.”

If you’ve watched all of the Star Wars movies then you will probably get a kick out of this “between the lines” revisionist history of the plotline.