Who Were the Sea Peoples?

This was displayed on my exercise bicycle on my cruise ship, as I was biking some Tour de France course on the bike's display. My first thought was "What a weirdly specific number they chose to follow the vague word 'almost.'" My second thought was, "Oh, they made the same mistake as the people who stated that the average human body temperature is '98.6.'" What is the mistake?

And in other DevOps Cafe news, a guest mentioned, "people are our most expensive things, so we should optimize their productivity." I believe he thought he was demonstrating how much he cares about people!

On the DevOps Cafe podcast I was listening to today, one of the guests said, "this helps us to understand rich statistical observability." If you ever find yourself talking like that, take a year or two-long vow of silence to let the crud clear out before you speak again.

It is from Braun. You can see it for yourself on YouTube: I can't produce it at will, but I see it a lot. Some twenty-something guys are shaving while staring into their phones. The voice over says something about how Braun electric razors are so good that they leave you time for what is really important . And then you see the phone screen, and the guys are playing video games.

People voice this complaint about their paychecks from time to time. It is silly, because: 1) In the absence of the government your taxes pay for, your salary would be... well, you have no idea! If libertarian anarchists are right, it would be much higher. But what if communists anarchists take over? Your salary, if it is high, might be much lower. Or maybe social democrats are right, and we already have the perfect sized government that happens to be maximizing your salary already...? 2) But, much more importantly, you have no idea how much you are paying in taxes right now . What?! Well, let's hear from Ludwig von Mises: "It is the operation of the market, and not the government collecting the taxes, that decides upon whom the incidence of the taxes falls and how they affect production and consumption" ( Human Action , Scholar's Edition, p. 260). This is very important and I think the full consequences of this are rarely thought through, but it means th...

I am on a Carnival cruise as a matter of family obligation.  If I die in a state of mortal sin, the Lord will surely punish me by sending me on an eternal Carnival cruise. 

The half-educated love to show off the half they got. For instance, in Blue Bloods , Erin Reagan periodically mocks her working-class detective, Anthony Abetemarco's use of "double negatives." When he says, "I ain't got no problem with that," she tells him, "Oh, you mean you do have a problem with that?" This is utter silliness: sure, in mathematics or formal logic, something like − − 2 is equal to +2, but so what? Why should formal systems, especially since they are parasitic on natural language, get to dictate to natural language how it should be spoken? Reagan obviously knew exactly what Anthony meant. That she would insist he meant the opposite is simply a way of asserting that her social is higher than his.

I think people will start calling it "the m-word" soon. For instance, in this post , the author writes: "Beyond that, the authorities have changed the calculation methodology." If there is a more clear-cut case than this for the use of the simple word "method," I don't know what it would be. Nonetheless, the author adds three (here) meaningless syllables on because... well, because everyone else does!

Today, I saw an ad from Braun showing how their electric razors are so easy to use that... you don't need to stop staring into your smart phone to shave ! I don't think there was ever an ad showing how you could shave while reading the newspaper. We are witnessing what is far and away the most rapid change in human behavior that has taken place in our 300,000 years of existence... and no one has any idea where it is taking us.