Who Were the Sea Peoples?

Oh, and this one, too: View them or else Santo will slit your throat.

Well, Wabulon and I are developing the screenplay for the pilot of a new TV series, based on Starsky and Hutch , but in which the character of Starsky is replaced by that of Alfred Tarski, the famed twentieth-century mathematician. Here is my first draft, awaiting Wabulon's comments: Play Pen Night Club: Night. (Inside people are dancing. Tarski and Hutch stand at the bar with Huggy.) Huggy: How do you like this little gold mine I gotta take care of until my cousin Louie returns? Tarski: Huggy Bear, you’re just an invariant transformation of Superfly. Huggy: Funny, Tarski. But you know Superfly and me ain't never been in any sorta one-to-one correspondence! Anyway, my uncle got a big stake in frog futures. He had to leave for Venezuela to check out his new frog ranch. All this happened after the IRS read his latest tax returns. Really. (Walks away. Hutch spots two girls sitting alone.) Hutch: Would you look at that? (Hutch points at girls.) Tarski: Look at that. (Tar...

For those of you wondering where the Bruno and Ron Paul post went: it was a slug trap. I put it up, watched the comments build up, and once I had caught enough of the slimy little critters, I threw the thing out, without of course, looking inside.

I passed by "Man from Ravenna" again and was reminded of what I believe is my father's only limerick. I don't think I've posted it here before, but who really knows the future, or the past, or anything but this passing moment? Now what the ^&;$#!*$% was I trying to post? Oh, yeah, the limerick: There was an old man of Rhode Island Who was known as King William the Silent.     When they bade him good morning,     He replied without warning, "Garunchnik!" and then he grew violent.

Yum yum yum

Since pundits gain a great deal of fame from having correctly predicted the future, let me take a stab at saying what will being going on, say, two years from now, on June 13, 2011. First of all, the stimulus programs will be seen to have fallen short of the mark. The Dow will stand at, say, 11,985, give or take a couple of points. Gold will be about $1515 an ounce, and oil at $97 per barrel. The yield on ten-year treasuries will be just under 3%. Unemployment claims will be stuck above 400,000. In response, Paul Krugman and Brad DeLong will be saying "I told you so: the stimulus was too small." And in his response to their response, on June 13, 2011, Mario Rizzo will write a blog post pointing back to the blog post where he foresaw Krugman saying this, and claim that Hayekians have a right to say "I told you so" as well. And I predict Daniel Kuehn will come back with a note saying Mario's post has not proved anything. And Mario will agree!

I had stopped by to peruse the recent messages and was just about to sign out when I for no particular reason remembered this, due to W. van O. Quine: "Yields a falsehood when appended to its own quotation" yields a falsehood when appended to its own quotation. Keep up the good work.

Talks about inflation at FEE.

So, I says to my daughter, 'Where's that bad book I was reading? I have to find it.' She replied, 'If it's so bad, why do you want to find it?' 'If I find it and finish it, I've just read a bad book. But if I don't find it, I'll be in the middle of a bad book for the rest of my life!'

Yesterday I was at the Post Office ordering new passports for two of my children. The woman working the window, once again (it was the same woman I dealt with in January), lost track of several of the documents I handed her, despite the fact that it wasn't that huge a stack of paper, and they are the sort of things she deals with every day. She told me the passports should arrive in 3-4 weeks. I told me wife, 'Well, that gives us two weeks [alveolar consonant][schwau]sp[long a]r'. She said, 'That's good.' I responded, 'Did you think I said "two weeks to spare"? What I said was "two weeks despair", after the four weeks have passed and we're despairing of ever getting the passports'.

When told that a post is 'very good', think 'very bad'.

is a total piece of rubbish. It hangs on my Mac about once a day, losing all my work since my last save. It lets you work on outlines, but doesn't seem to let you print them. The printouts of your slides are crap. The help is pathetic. And just today, I worked on a presentation for a while in outline mode, and when I went back to slide view it turned out that working in outline view had trashed all of my slides -- formatting was ruined, photos and graphics moved to different slides, and more. I'm going to go buy a real piece of software.

When directed above , look below .

The above "proof" adduces the square-free integers--a very interesting set. For all finite sets P of primes, Product P ordered by Sum P (and within each tranche by Size P ) give a canonical ordering of the square-free integers: 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 10, 15, 14, 21, 30, 11, 35, 42, 13, 22, 33, 70, 26, 105, 39, 55, 66, 17, 210, 65, 77, 78, 110, 19, 34, 165, 51, 91, 130, 154, 38, 195, 231, 330, 57, 85, 102, 182, 23, 273, 385, 390, 462, 95, 119, 143, 114, 170, 46, 255, 455, 546, 770, 69, 133, 190, 238, 286, 1155, 285, 357, 429, 510, 910, 115, 187, 138, 266, 1365, 29, 399, 595, 715, 570, 714, 858, ... This uncomfortable order reflects the uncomfortable properties of primes in general, which is of course why I like it. Like the primes themselves, the square-free integers may be isolated by the Sieve of Eratosthenes thus: 1) Write down the integers greater than 1. 2) Start with the first square greater than 1 (that's 4). 3) Strike it and all multiples. 4) Take the next square. 5)...

You've probably seen these already, but just in case... Partnoy Li Li

The number of primes is finite. Proof: We know that the number of subsets of a set is incommensurably greater than the number of members: {a.b.c} has eight subsets; the integers have uncountably many subsets (maybe of the power of the continuum, maybe not, depending on your axiomatic taste). Consider the set of all finite subsets of the set of primes. The primes, being a subset of the integers, can be only countably infinite. If the number of primes is infinite, the number of finite subsets of primes is uncountably infinite. But to each finite subset of primes there corresponds uniquely an integer, namely the product of the members of the subset. The set of finite subsets of primes is in one-to-one correspondence with a subset of the integers, namely the “square-free” integers, those having no prime factor to a power higher than one. Thus the set of square-free integers and a fortiori the set of all integers is uncountably infinite. But we know that the set of all integers is not unc...

Here .

snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

Did they mean to write "China Firm, to Buy Hummer"?

corrupted file to hand in to your professor and get extra time until she notices the problem! (Hat tip to Tyler Cowen.)

that running through crowds of children, the elderly, etc. because "I've got to keep jogging" is not just rude but unnecessary: it turns out that taking walking breaks during a run is healthier .

First, this (you only need to watch if you don't remember the original here): Next, this: (Hat tip to Katie Reeves.)