A MarketPlace of Ideas

I was on the bus the other day returning to Lagoa talking to a guy from my Portuguese class.  I mentioned that I will probably marry my girlfriend soon and that she is half black.

Unlike in the USA in Brazil a girl this good looking can still be sweet.

His response was ” oh that is great and we are about to have a black president”

Which I responded to with the following “The blacks here in Brazil are alot more classy than the ones in the USA.  If we live in the states we will live somewhere mostly white to avoid her having problems.  She is very pretty and I do not want any brothers and their inappropriate behavior including poor impulse control making her the victim”

So does that make me a racist?  I have to laugh because she is half black so you know I am not.  But I do not tow the party PC line on American blacks.  By and large as a whole they comport themselves poorly.  Their incarceration rate is extremely high and is empirical data for a problem much larger than the typical words used to varnish over the problem.

Finally with this preface I can make my point.  John McCain was interviewing potential Veep candidates and Bobby Jindal was on of them.

This guy is a brown Ronald Reagan if you believe the descriptions of some.  John McCain is probably going to pick him if he is smart to be his Veep candidate.  Why do I say that? I say that because he is brown.

If people are so stupid with B.O. Obama to only see negro and vote because its stylish then brown must be in.  I hate style because its little more than a marketing money pump mechanism.  But brown must be in style.

I like the idea for various reasons.  Can you hear the media twisting themselves into knots trying to differentiate shades of brown?  It would go something like this:

Media guy  #1: 2008 is the year of the brown presidential candidate

Media guy #2:  Yes John but you must remember because Jindal is an indian his brown point score is lowered by 50 points because as we all know Indians excel at engineering school.  He is brown but not a negro.  And as we all know there are not alot of negros in engineering school.  They consider it uncool and too white to study.

Media guy #3: Yes and of course McCain picked him only because of Obama

Of course they never mind that Obama the Brown Dan Quail who thinks there are 57 states is preferred by democrats pretty much ONLY because he is black. 

I am hoping he picks Bobby Jindall because he is brown.   That is because I hold little hope he will pick him because he is a brown Ronald Reagan.  Maybe we will get a good guy in the mix in spite of all the other big freakin fat losers we have in the choice of McCain, Clinton,  Obama.

If brown is what people want then give it to them.  Let us end this affirmative action program for the office of the presidency.  Its insulting to the intelligence.

I am staying in Americana, Sao Paulo for a few days at my girfriends.  She lives in a very nice modern high rise.  Here is the view from the window of the lot next to it:

Those are chickens, ducks and Geese you see in the lot.  In the photo below you can see they are obviously killing time until they get the right offer for the land.

Now remember that I am in Brazil.  They tend to copy alot of taxation ideas from the USA.  Unfortunately they have copied sticking it to you also.  Thus the guy has to keep chickens in his yard while he waits for a high enough offer.  Just like the USA.  Agriculturally classified land is taxed less.  Governments need to get a clue and just taxe everyone less.  And everyone at a fixed percentage.  It would be easier on us and limit their power by a large degree in the right direction too.  They currently use the ability to give tax breaks on a selective basis as a billy club on all of us.

Another little detail is the brick barbeques on the top of the high rises.  They call them churrascos.

Its good to give money to Big Oil

Government gives nothing for your toil

A tax? A fee? Tack on the bottom line

Its only you the buyer more in a bind

From Exxon we get petrolatum in The Pounder size

And thus my right arm gets its exercise!

In 1992 I bought out a computer school.  For the total of 1500 dollars I got

-1- a bunch of computer desks, chairs

-2- television projection units ( an ancient version of DLP )

-3- washer / dryer

-4- a couple of computers

-5- god knows what else

This was one of the computers

This was my first deal where I was trying to make a buck on my own.  So I ended up with all this stuff piled up in the garage and now needed to sell it!  One of the more memorable encounters selling this stuff was with Carlos Coquet the Computer Maverick.

     Carlos’ business card.  Colorful character, colorful card

He called up and got directions.  He was driving from North Scottsdale to Litchfield Park Arizona.  It took him about 50 minutes to drive there.  I had listed the computer for 120 dollars but he did what everyone tries to do when they buy secondhand…they try to finagle a lower price. 

Carlos: I am looking at this computer and I think I could not possibly pay more than 80$ for it.

Me: Well … I have another guy coming to see it tomorrow night.  If he does not buy it then you can come back and buy it.

Carlos: Ooohhh the drive here was so long.  Alright I will give you the 120.

Me: chuckling inside and thinking..there was not another person coming to look at the computer.  But finally the endless ripping I had been sustaining as a novice seller had come to an end.  I had finally learned a little deal jujitsu.

The portuguese word for summer is Verao. Its late May here and we just had a very warm spell after having been cold for a month.  This is typical for May as is Indian Summer in the USA midwest.  They call it veraonique.  And thus you know where another common name came from.  Veronica must have been derived from this latin word a long time ago. 

So many names are like this.  Linda is portuguese for “pretty”.  I can not remember all the names that have been derived this way as I sit here and write but there is a long list.

When I came to Brazil I had 2 laptops and 1 desktop computer with me.  The desktop was for development and the laptops for sale.  They cost alot more here than the states.

So what happens?  A couple of weeks ago I sold a really nice Toshiba laptop and then I proceeded to try to get the older cheaper Dell ready for sale.  When I tried to use it …it promptly died.    So I was left with only my desktop.   The mini desktop then proceeded to act really funny and stop booting! 

I was that quickly transported back to the pre 1990 era.  You know the one.  People labored in obscurity unable to communicate very well with each other.  I don’t know about you but my personality is not suited to that era.  I wish I could have been born 20 years later so I could have lived totally in the internet era.  

Why would I say that ?  Well I had some time away from my computer to think.   I’ve met alot of good people via the internet.  Most of the really high quality women that I have dated I have met through it.   I have friends that I have never met in person but would trust with large sums of money and have done so!  I sent several PS3’s to my friend Marcos in Fortaleza Brasil when they were first out and in extremely high demand.

Its a lonely feeling without your computer.  You can imagine where this is all going.  You can imagine a wireless internet in the future that is connected directly to you.  You want to talk with one of your cohorts?  Think about who it is and give a special confirmation command and your talking with them.  ( the confirmation is necessary to keep spurious thoughts from triggering the comm link when you’re taking a crap ) 

There are still people who are not so totally connected and such power users as I.  But they complain about when the internet goes down too. 

On a good note my right shoulder feels better.  Its been sore since the gym rash enraged my rather aggressive immune system while I was doing super heavy bench presses.  I think that was due to the right hand in forward position holding mouse.

And yes….its good to be back. Very good.

Nuke the Moon.

Now that the cold war is over and we have an excess of nuclear weapons we should fly a few to the moon and detonate them.  It would be like the most incredible firework ever right? Unless of course you have an environmental mindset.  That is to say your religion is nature. Why do I say this? -1- nothing lives on the moon…we will not hurt a single living thing -2- the radiation from it to the Earth will be NILL Thus absolutely no harm can come from it. But there is what I am really writing about.  You know the environmentalists would come up with some kooky reason why it was bad for the environment.  Thus ends my proof that environmentalism is a religion and not a science. Go peddle your mumbo jumbo witch doctor bones and dust somewhere else! …. Later after writing this piece I found a blog with this banner! Looks like the explode nuclear bombs on the moon movement is gaining momentum.  This is a doubling of the constituency.  

Assumptions:

-1- You had a 3 bit register with each bit in a mix of both states —  states 0 and  state 1

-2- You then perform operations on the register

When you perform the operation you will be performing the operation on all the possible values 000  through 111.  Thus is explained the parallelism of quantum computing.  That is its advantage over classical computing.  

If you do not understand how a physical system can be in both states at the same time you need to go back and study more quantum mechanics.  

More detailed explaination here 

An introductory course online 

Be Brave. Be Free.

I crank out a similation every morning around 10