"If the public ever figures out that it can escape the clutches of higher education in the United States, which absorbs about a third of a trillion dollars a year, the game will end. The guilds will have to compete in a free market. They are not used to this. They will resent it. But they are going to have to learn to live with it."

– Gary North, "The Self-Serving System of Peer Review"

Thanks to this web page and this video (and especially thanks to neural who is my long-suffering and ever-patient Mac guru), there's a new, bigger hard drive in the Mac Mini and my family's blogs and websites are back online on the correct machine, now upgraded to all the most recent software.

Hosting sites on a dying laptop is kind of cool, but it's nice to have everything back where it belongs.

(The local fixit shop told me $60 for a 60GB hard drive and $70 for an hour's labor. I found an 80GB hard drive for $40, and I decided not to charge myself for labor. There are always opportunity costs, but I'm willing to call this a hobby, so it gets filed under consumption rather than capital investment.)

Anyone who tried to read this blog in the past 2 or 3 days either found it down or found it upside down.

Black Bloke left a comment asking, "Why did posts from early 2007 suddenly come up on my RSS Reader?"

Fair question, not least because he'd just left another comment making an interesting point about how "in the context of an empire a nationalist of the ruled people can have a philosophy that is pro-liberty and decentralist, but a nationalist of the ruling people will be entirely the opposite."

He left these comments on my January 2007 post on nationalism: "Le Pen versus Joan of Arc"

Sorry for the absence and subsequent confusion, folks. The hard drive on my web server died, but it died slowly, so I spent a lot of time troubleshooting and attempting to fix via software what ultimately turned out to be a hardware issue. Only when I figured that out did I get a temporary substitute up and running instead, and when I did that, everything came up in "ascending" chronological order: old before new, just the opposite of what everyone is used to. That turned out to be the very weird result of an incompatibility between old blog software and new database — or maybe it was the other way around. Anyway, it was all fixed by updating everything: latest MySQL, latest PHP, and latest WordPress, all running on a defunct powerbook laptop (defunct as a laptop because half the pixels on the monitor are purple! but not defunct, it turns out, as a web server).

We've had terrible, terrible luck with computers in the Marcus household this month. Of the 3 computers in use, all 3 broke in some way: aforementioned purple pixels (corrupt VRAM); aforementioned dead hard drive; and my wife's optical drive stopped working, too. I haven't been elbow deep in technology problems in quite a while. It's fun, if you ignore the time, money, and stress involved.

2:26:35 PM David Miller: did you note that Arthur C. Clarke died?

2:26:42 PM BK Marcus: yes

2:26:45 PM BK Marcus: age 90

2:28:13 PM David Miller: yup, interesting that technology seems to have been so much more focused on earthspace than his books suggested.

2:28:50 PM David Miller: The iPod the Web... not manned flights to Jupiter

2:30:11 PM David Miller: I wonder if I'll ever be able to enjoy sci-fi that ignores economics again.

4:19:35 PM BK Marcus: An interesting note from my wife:

Nathalie Marcus

4:01

I find this interesting.  Rothbard is talking about  the Hansen stagnation thesis: "As for technological progress, that too is slowing down. After all, the railroads have already been built and the automobile industry has reached maturity. Whatever minor improvements there might be will probably be withheld by 'reactionary monopolists,' etc."

4:01

They didn't seem to have much imagination.

4:02

Should have read more science fiction...

4:35:16 PM David Miller: yes , it is an interesting note and compliment to my observation. Economist ought to read more Sci-fi and Sci-fi writers should read more econ.

The exchange reminded me of the opening of an old friend's movie review of Speed (1994):

The day began, as all days should, with Ray Bradbury. In Saturday's early afternoon, I had just climbed back into the cab of my frequent movie partner's truck to have him tell me that the voice on the radio came from that old man of SF. While I was mailing our bills, he had tuned in Writer's Corner on our local NPR station. It must have been fifteen to twenty minutes before we were able to date the interview. For all we knew, the conversation could have been live; Bradbury could have been dead for years. I find I am able to keep track of these things less and less without cues.

We drove, listening to 1978. [Read the rest »]

Just discovered:

The Engines of Our Ingenuity is a radio program that tells the story of how our culture is formed by human creativity. Written and hosted by John Lienhard, it is heard nationally on Public Radio and produced by KUHF-FM Houston. Among other features, this web site houses the transcripts for every episode heard since the show's inception in 1988. Click here for the newest Engines episode, No. 2342. Recent Engines episodes are now available as a Podcast. Click Here. Each individual episode begins with a link to its audio version.

Also available through iTunes U.

I was reviewing a list of the kings of England today and stumbled on this interesting mix of history and technology:

Origin of the name and the logo

Bluetooth was named after a late tenth century king, Harald Bluetooth King of Denmark and Norway. He is known for his unification of previously warring tribes from Denmark (including now Swedish Scania, where the Bluetooth technology was invented), and Norway. Bluetooth likewise was intended to unify different technologies, such as computers and mobile phones.

The name may have been inspired less by the historical Harald than the loose interpretation of him in The Long Ships by Frans Gunnar Bengtsson, a Swedish Viking-inspired novel.

The Bluetooth logo merges the Nordic runes analogous to the modern Latin H and B: hagall and bjarkan from the Younger Futhark runes forming a bind rune.

unsung: stephen carson

The man credited with founding Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales — known to Wikipedians as "Jimbo" — was a finance major at Auburn University when the Mises Institute's Mark Thornton suggested he read "The Use of Knowledge in Society," a now-famous essay written by Austrolibertarian economist and Nobel laureate Friedrich von Hayek.

The essay argues that prices in the market represent a spontaneous order that results from the interaction of individuals with diverse wants, allowing them to cooperate to achieve complex goals. According to a June 2007 Reason magazine interview, this insight of Hayek's is what led Wales to found Wikipedia.

The rather lofty vision that inspired Wales?

"Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing."

FULL ARTICLE

I confess I felt strange about the former price tag on this, my first audio project:

$40 now $15!

I'm listening to Tom Woods's book, How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization, in which we learn of the 11th-century Benedictine monk named Eilmer of Malmesbury, who, having worked out his own rudimentary theory of flight, tested it by fashioning a pair of wings for himself and jumping off the roof of the abbey. He glided for some 600 feet before plunging to the ground and breaking both his legs.

"Crippled for life but undaunted," says Wikipedia, "Eilmer believed that he could make a more controllable landing if his glider were equipped with a tail, and he was preparing for a second flight when the abbot of Malmesbury Abbey forbade him from risking his life in any further experiments."

The Titzling story turned out to be apocryphal. Could the Crapper story be true?