furiousBlog

A friend just forwarded this picture to me and I thought I'd pass it along:



From his email:

Its a hard disk in 1956.... The Volume and Size of 5MB memory storage in 1956. In September 1956 IBM launched the 305 RAMAC, the first computer with a hard disk drive (HDD). The HDD weighed over a ton and stored 5MB of data.

I've bene slowly reading the Federalist Papers over the past few months. In case you don't know what the Federalist Papers are, here's a short description from the linked page:

The Federalist Papers were written and published during the years 1787 and 1788 in several New York State newspapers to persuade New York voters to ratify the proposed constitution.

They're basically an in-depth argument for the US system of government written by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay. As I read them, I find myself frequently thinking that it'd be a good idea if some of our current leaders would read them (they should probably check out the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence while they're at it, too).

Anyway, I'm going to start posting a blog entry when I come upon a section that really strikes me. Like I said, this has happened a couple of times, but I'm not going to bother going back and trying to find where they were. Also, I'm not planning to comment on them much, but may as my whims dictate.

The first one comes from Federalist #10, which continues #9's topic of The Union as a Safeguard Against Domestic Faction and Insurrection.

Here's the section that really struck me (with the preceding three paragraphs for context):

By a faction, I understand a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adversed to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.

There are two methods of curing the mischiefs of faction: the one, by removing its causes; the other, by controlling its effects.

There are again two methods of removing the causes of faction: the one, by destroying the liberty which is essential to its existence; the other, by giving to every citizen the same opinions, the same passions, and the same interests.

It could never be more truly said than of the first remedy, that it was worse than the disease. Liberty is to faction what air is to fire, an aliment without which it instantly expires. But it could not be less folly to abolish liberty, which is essential to political life, because it nourishes faction, than it would be to wish the annihilation of air, which is essential to animal life, because it imparts to fire its destructive agency.

I think the relevancy to today's environment of terrorism and the reactionary liberty-smothering of the government is obvious.

Here are some recent events documented by my phone's camera:

Number 1: Claire recently had her first dentist appointment. She was pretty stressed by the whole thing, but handled it well.

Number 2: We're already planning a few projects around the new house and some of us are somewhat impatient to get going on them. For example, about a week after we moved in, Cyndi started picking at some wallpaper in the kitchen that we're planning on removing. We were also planning to remove the wallpaper by the stairs, so when Cyndi started picking in the kitchen, Jake decided it was time for the stairs, too. So, he started ripping it off and we all joined in and had a little wallpaper-ripping party. Well, we weren't ready to complete that task, so it sat with most of the wallpaper backing still on the wall until a week ago when I finally got around to removing it in preparation for painting.

Another project that we want to do is to remove half of the wall between the kitchen and dining room and build a little breakfast bar. Cyndi decided it was time to start on that project, too, so she got a hammer and we all took turns banging holes in the wall. The funny thing about this, is that we're nowhere near being ready really do this project, so this hole will be around for quite a while.


Number 3: Lastly, today was our first snow; it's been a pretty lame winter so far. The kids were finally able to use the sleds they got for Christmas and Claire was very excited to build a snowman. This is what greeted me when I got home from work:

I was sick all last week. I went in to work on Wednesday, but left after only a couple hours. I was exhausted. I still have a cough, but I'm basically all better. I had planned to use the sick time to do some blogging, but I ended up doing almost nothing.

One thing I did do was to watch a marathon of the TV show Psych. It's about a guy who pretends to be a psychic and a friend who run a private detective service. I was lukewarm on it when it started, but after watching an episode or two, I quite liked it. I ended up watching several episodes and now recommend the show. New episodes are on right after Monk (another excellent show).

On a different subject, for those of you who have blogger/blogspot blogs: unbeknownst to me, my RSS reader hasn't been able to read your feeds lately. Thankfully, blogger has finally started using true RSS feeds in addition to the ATOM feeds they've always had. My reader likes the RSS feeds better, so I can now start reading your blogs again.

Also, Heroes starts back up tonight. Yay!

Pure genius:

(via Whedonesque)