clasqm's preposterous posterous

Sortable How Green is the iPad?

Fur

http://jonathanturley.org/2012/01/15/10-reasons-the-u-s-is-no-longer-the-land-of-the-free/

http://www.iphonelife.com/blog/94/it-was-best-reads-it-was-worst-reads

No, there is no deep mystical meaning to this, as far as I know. But it is something you only experience if you happen to live in the first twelve years of the century.

For ten years I've been pointing this out to people and never got more than a shrug of the shoulders in response. But this is your final alert. On 12 December next year, throw a party! After all, what are the odds you will make it to 01/01'01?

The autobiography of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was to go on sale later today despite efforts by the Australian anti-secrecy campaigner to suppress the book, its British publisher said.  

Seen on http://twitpic.com/67ykpa/full

Swedish to Spanish
Spanish to Swedish
Spanish to Danish
Spanish to English

Get them from http://tinyurl,com/profmichel

And before you even ask, yes, these dictionaries do work under Mac OSX 10.7 "Lion".

If America had a Facebook page ...

Original at http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/07/04/opinion/20110704_OPART.html?hp

What the title says. See it here: http://www.manolution.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/history-of-computing-ful...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/may/27/martin-amis-father-english-langua...

From Frederik Pohl's autobiography "The way the future was". This is just too good not to share, and it holds equally true whether you are writing novels, academic articles or dissertations ...

----------

In the minds of most civilians, the life of a writer has got to be glamorous and exciting. Well, it is, some of the time. A writer often gets to meet special people, visit fascinating places, do exciting things. But none of these occur when he is actively engaged at his employment. When he is writing, he is the nearest thing to a vegetable that you will find registered to vote. He sits. He doesn't even have the apparent function of pushing typewriter keys most of the time, because during most of that sitting time the activity is all internal and thus invisible.

Let me show you the numbers: Any jackleg typist can manage seventy-​five words a minute. If you type at that rate from nine to five every day, with time out for lunch and a ten-​minute break at the end of each hour for flexing the fingers, you will produce the equivalent of two 75,000-word novels in every five-​day week.

It is an observed fact that writers do not ordinarily produce two novels a week. Most don't even manage two a year. Therefore it is demonstrated that writing is not merely a matter of putting words down on the page. Some other activity is taking place.

The name of that process is “thinking.”

The trouble with a career in which ninety-​five percent of your working time is spent thinking is that, therefore, ninety-​five percent of the time you don't look as if you're working. Or even thinking. What a writer looks like he is doing, generally speaking, is watching TV, playing solitaire, cleaning his typewriter keys, or taking a nap. Writing is not much of a spectator sport. I have had one or two nonwriting friends whose curiosity was so piqued that they coaxed to be allowed to watch me write. After ten or fifteen minutes they always fled to some other room. The boredom reaches criticality very soon. It does for the writer, too, unfortunately, so that actually getting words on paper becomes a test of strength, willpower against terminal tedium. Which is why it is said that writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.

Writing is the only job I know that your wife will nag you out of. Why wouldn't she? There you are, sprawled out on the living-​room sofa, rereading the real-estate section from last Sunday's Times although it is known that you have no extensive real-​estate holdings, and little prospect of acquiring any. Meanwhile, the dishwasher needs fixing. Poor soul! How can she know that if she interrupts you now, you will lose a precarious train of thought that has taken you four hours to construct?

The other side of the coin is that sometimes your wife is right, and you're just loafing. There simply is no external way to tell when a writer is working, and maybe even the writer himself doesn't know.

Nevertheless, the end product is easily recognizable. If the writer is a writer, at some point words will come out, and finished works, and if he is any good they will sooner or later be published. This is conclusive diagnostic evidence. Pity it doesn't come along in time to be useful when you need to know whether the dishwasher should be fixed.

Music is where iTunes got its start, and it remains central to the program’s identity. But once again, South Africans get short-changed. You will not be able to buy and download any music from the iTunes store, and that also means you won’t get much use out of Apple’s Ping social network (no great loss, really). But there are ways to get music onto your system:

Rip your own CDs: Surprisingly, this requires no extra software: iTunes itself is an accomplished ripper of music from CDs. Just insert the CD into the CD/DVD tray of your Mac or PC running iTunes, and iTunes will sense its presence and query a service called Gracenote to find out what it is. Now you can optionally click on the Import Settings button to set the kind of files the ripping process will place into iTunes, and click on the Import CD button. A few minutes later, the contents will be in iTunes, ready to play or to sync with your iDevice.

The one thing this does not give you is cover art. But that is easily fixed. Just google the title of the CD and once Google gives results click on Images on the left top of your browser window. Select the best image you can get (try for at least a 300x300 picture) and drag it to your desktop. Now, in iTunes, select the songs you just ripped. In the bottom left corner of iTunes is a little square box that you can toggle between Selected Item and Now Playing by clicking on the title. Make sure it is showing Selected Title and drag the picture file onto it. Once the image has been pasted onto the songs, you can delete the copy on the desktop.

Rhythm Online Music Store: South Africa’s very own music store sells songs for R7.00 each, and it’s all local talent. Most of its songs are in Afrikaans and English. Point your browser to http://www.rhythmmusicstore.com/ and when you have bought and downloaded your MP3s, just pick them up with the mouse and drag them over to iTunes. Don’t forget to grab the cover art image of the website while you are shopping: just pick the image up in Safari and drag it onto the desktop,

Free Music:  There is still a lot of free music available out there on the web, some legal, some not so legal. Not as much as 15 years ago, but you can still get it if you know where to look. http://coverfreak.com/ is a favourite of mine: it updates every weekend and gives you the songs you know and love, but performed by different artists, sometimes in very different styles. http://rcrdlbl.com/ gives you free and legal music by indie bands, usually just one or two at a time rather than entire albums.

If you can stand badly designed websites, http://www.myspace.com/ is still where lots of bands post free samplers of their music. If you like older music (or if you are a Grateful Dead fan), have a look at the collection at the Internet Archive: http://www.archive.org/details/audio.

A Fake US Address: We’ve been over this before, haven’t we? Look, I don’t recommend it, but there are people who use this method and they are happily downloading music from the iTunes Store.

New Italian-English dictionaries have been posted at http://tinyurl.com/profmichel

The longest journey starts with a single step ... but to where?

Not by me, but too good to pass up. See the original at http://imgur.com/wwNkr

Decisions, decisions, decisions ...

Part I: Mac 

Getting apps for a MacIntosh computer is almost disgustingly easy. Buying CDs filled with software at Incredible Connection is sooo 90’s: Almost everything is done online. There was a time when Apple fans had to make excuses for the lack of software available. Those days are far behind us. There may not be an exact Mac version of your favourite software, but there is very likely to be something that matches it feature for feature.

Apple itself supplies a lot of software with every Mac, and it might almost be enough for you, depending on your needs. You get a suite of apps called iLife. This contains iMovie, a program to paste video clips together; iPhoto, which catalogues your photos and, if you want to, other graphics; and GarageBand, a music-recording application. It also includes a website-creation app called iWeb and a DVD authoring tool called iDVD, though those seem to be on their way out.

TIP: Before the current version of iMovie came along, there was something called iMovie HD. Many users (myself included) preferred the old version – it was just so much easier to use. But it is possible to have both!

First, open a Terminal and type the following command:

touch /Library/Preferences/com.apple.iLife08.plist

Press Enter

Now download the following file:

http://www.note-2-self.com/files/iMovieHD6.dmg

And install it

Finally, to get some free extra effects to play with, download and install

http://www.partnersinrhyme.com/osx_software/FreePlugins/SlickSampler.dmg

Also included with every mac are a web browser, basic e-mail program, a calendar, a very bare-bones text editor/word processor, a graphics/PDF viewer and an address book. And iTunes, let’s not forget iTunes. 

Once your productivity needs exceed what comes with the Mac, Apple will potentially still supply you: the iWork suite gives you Pages, a word processor with DTP capability; Keynote, a really slick presentation program; and Numbers a spreadsheet. Not directly from Apple, but from their Filemaker subsidiary, comes the Bento database.

Still, sooner or later you will be wanting more, and for practically all these programs, there is a more fully-featured alternative. Microsoft produces a version of their Office suite that is one of the few things you still have to buy on a disc. Another is Adobe’s Creative Suite, the best known part of which is Photoshop.

Where are you supposed to get all of this goodness? Well, if your Mac is running  OSX 10.6 and you have installed recent updates, then the first place to look is the Mac App store, which you will find both in the Dock and in the Apple menu right at the top left of your screen. Lots of software, both free and paid-for, available here.  Many of the apps mentioned above are for sale on the Mac App Store, and they have been unbundled, so if you never use a spreadsheet, you don’t need to buy Numbers. The Mac App Store also keeps track of updates to the software you have downloaded from it.

But the Mac App Store is far from the only way to get Mac software. The easiest way to find it is just to google for what you want:

mac osx word processor

Will quickly find you the various word processors that are available. If you prefer a more structured approach, try these websites:

http://osx.iusethis.com/

http://www.macupdate.com/

http://download.cnet.com/mac/

Now, games. The one thing you are not going to find in the Mac App Store in South Africa are games. The story goes that all computer games must be approved by the Publications Board, and Apple finds this too much of an imposition. Whatever the reason, there are no games available if you log in with a South African Apple ID.

There are two ways around this: First, you can organise yourself a non-South African Apple ID. This is against the law, but google around and you will find the instructions easily. Secondly, you can find plenty of games being sold or made available outside the Mac App Store. Google something like

mac osx first-person shooter

Or try this South African website: http://www.macgaming.co.za/

Part II: iThingies

There are two different sources for iOS apps: The iTunes App Store and Web Apps.

You can buy commercial apps or download free ones for your iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch simply by running iTunes on your Mac or PC. You can also do it on the device itself. Once you have bought an app, you can load it and run it on any device you own (up to some limit, I’m sure, but I haven’t bumped into it yet). The number of apps is incredible, and your biggest problem will be to sort out which ones you want.

Web apps were originally supposed to be the way to get apps on iOS devices. A web app is basically a website that pretends to be an app. Developers have managed to get these websites to do some pretty amazing things. Mostly, they require you to be online when you use them, but there are a few that use caching techniques that enable them to run even when you are offline. And like any website, you can put an icon on your device’s home screen. For a good selection of web apps, point the browser on your device to:

http://openappmkt.com/

Finally, you may have heard of “jailbreaking”. This means that you make some fundamental changes to the software in your device that makes it possible to install software that would not be accepted in the iTunes App Store. A jailbreak will install an alternative store called Cydia that sells these alternative apps, both free and paid-for.

However, the vast majority of Cydia apps are actually system tweaks. For example, there is a tweak that puts five icons on the bottom row of  the iPhone’s screen instead of the regulation four. There are very few apps on Cydia that directly compete with the official apps. Also be aware that jailbreaking will probably be undone when Apple brings out the next update to iOS and you’ll have to wait for the hackers to develop a new jailbreak and do it all over again.

Once again, there are NO games for iOS available to South African users, and again, this changes completely if you use a fake US Apple ID (complain to sjobs@apple.com). Alternatively, take a close look at the Entertainment section of the iTunes App Store. There are a few games in there that must have gotten lost. There are also games written as web apps. Sorry, neither of those will get you Angry Birds.

Next installment: movies and TV shows!

Boldly going where no meditator has gone before!

Begin forwarded message: 

 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Smashwords/~3/sn8LSyfXS-0/smashwords-acquires-... 

 Smashwords today announced a definitive agreement to acquire Amazon. 

 As you might imagine, this is exciting news for us. We launched Smashwords three years ago, and now this happens. We are blessed. 

 In the last 18 months, Smashwords has developed successful ebook distribution relationships with the Apple iBookstore, Barnes & Noble, Sony, Kobo and the Diesel eBookstore. Noticeably absent from the list is Amazon, the world's largest ebook retailer. Problem solved. 

 The combined company is named Smashazon. 

 I can hear the naysayers already. Sure, $69 billion is a lot of pay for distribution, but we think it's money well-spent, especially when it's someone else's money. We purchased Amazon with with one of those no-money-down deals sponsored by the US Treasury Department. Full details are below in our our official press release. 

 Other naysayers probably think this is some cruel April Fool's prank. Can we help it that April 1 landed on April 1? Read on and decide for yourself. 

 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE 

 Smashwords Acquires Amazon in World’s Largest Leveraged Buyout 

 (Los Mirages, Calif. and Seattle WA) – April 1, 20111 – Smashwords, a leading ebook distributor, today announced a definitive agreement to acquire Amazon for $149.99 a share or $69 billion, a 20% discount off of yesterday’s closing list price. 

 The merger will create the world’s largest ebook publishing and distribution platform serving billions of authors, publishers and consumers worldwide. 

 The combined company, to be renamed Smashazon, will undergo a strategic product line rationalization. 

 Although Amazon has achieved minor success in the ebook market, the Smashwords management team believes it can lead Amazon to greater success by eliminating its distracting non-book operations. 

 “Amazon’s doing bang-up business in edible undergarments,” said Mark Coker, founder and CEO of the company formerly known as Smashwords. “Although we appreciate their focus on customer satisfaction, these products don’t fit with our palate or long term vision. We’d rather please the customer with words. The words of great stories light up our imaginations to create sights, sounds, smells and experiences more vivid than reality.“ 

 The Smashwords management team is optimistic the former Amazon can leverage some of their non-book experience to sell more ebooks. 

 “Ebooks could taste and smell better,” said Jeffrey Bezos, former Amazon CEO who will assume the new position of Chief Satisfaction Officer at Smashazon. “We will fully service the needs of our customers.” 

 Following the acquisition, Smashazon will operate as a private company. The combined companies’ physical operations will be consolidated into the current Smashwords Smashoplex campus in Los Mirages, California. 

 Financing for the leveraged buyout was arranged by Smashwords Bank, N.A., a newly formed FDIC-insured banking institution that has secured a $69 billion credit line facility. The massive credit line, which makes this the largest-ever leveraged buyout in world history, was enabled by a new US Federal Reserve zero –interest– rate economic stimulus program called “Regulated Overnight Treasury Facilitation Loan Maturity Acquisition Obligations,“ better known as ROTFLMAO. 

 At a press conference to announce the acquisition, Coker said he expects the new Smashazon will pay off the US taxpayer-funded loan within five years, based on his projection that ebooks will grow from 10 percent of the overall book market today to over 450 percent of the market within three to five years. 

 “Amazon generated over $3 billion dollars in cash flow in 2010, and Smashwords generated nearly that much,” added Coker with an air of understated modesty that led some market observers to infer Smashwords’ cash flow might actually exceed Amazon’s. 

 “This acquisition proves that Smashwords is bigger than Amazon, otherwise the acquisition wouldn’t have been possible,” said one publishing industry consultant in attendance who requested anonymity. 

 When a reporter challenged Coker about the mathematical impossibility of any market growing to 450% of its future size, Coker responded, “We were wrong to underestimate the growth of ebooks to date, so the laws of probability therefore indicate an underestimation of the probable potential of ebooks in the future, no matter how improbable. The market will grow faster than any of us expect, which means my projections understate the true potential of the ebook market.” 

 Smashwords, which was founded a mere three years ago, now publishes and distributes over 41,000 ebooks from 16,000 authors and publishers around the world. The company’s catalog, which added 5,400 books in the last 30 days, is on track to surpass over 75,000 ebooks by the end of 2011. 

 Smashwords distributes ebooks to most of the major ebook stores, including the Apple iBookstore, Barnes & Noble, Sony, Kobo and the Diesel eBook store. Noticeably absent from this list is Amazon, a problem now remedied by the acquisition. 

 “We’re thrilled our ebooks can now flow to our new Smashazon KindleWords store,” said Coker. 

 One Smashwords insider, who asked not to be identified, commented, “We reached profitability last year, but billions in profits? I want a raise! Our office is only 1,200 square feet, so where are all those thousands of Amazonian employees going to fit? And we’re based in Los Gatos, not Los Mirages. This smells of an April Fools prank to me.” 

 About Smashazon 

 Created by the fictional merger of Smashwords and Amazon on April 1, 20111, Smashazon, Inc. will again become known as Smashwords starting April 2, 2011. Founded in 2008, privately held Smashwords operates the world’s leading ebook publishing and distribution platform serving authors, publishers, readers and retailers. Smashwords makes it free, fast and easy for the world’s authors and publishers to publish and distribute multi-format ebooks. Smashwords puts authors and publishers in full control over the pricing, sampling and marketing of their works. Authors and publishers receive 85 percent of the net proceeds from sales of their works. Smashwords has distribution relationships with leading online retailers such as Apple, Barnes & Noble, Sony, Kobo and the Diesel eBook Store, and also distributes to the leading mobile e-reading apps including Aldiko and Stanza. Smashwords is based in Los Gatos, California, and can be reached on the web at http://www.smashwords.com/. Visit the official Smashwords blog at http://blog.smashwords.com/. >

 ###

So you like Apple gear. You have the iMac, the AppleTV and the iPhone. You appreciate the sleek industrial design, the sane release schedule, the smooth interaction between hardware and software. You revel in living in the Reality Distortion Field. Go away, you don’t need to read this. Heck, you could probably write it.

On the other hand, perhaps you’ve dipped your toes into the Apple waters, but you keep bumping into these strange restrictions, things you should be able to do but somehow can’t. It’s not your fault, well, except perhaps for choosing to be born in South Africa. Apple doesn’t support its South African users, much. Anyway, this series of blogs is for you. And if you are just thinking about trying out something by Apple for the first time, welcome.

Let’s start with the hardware. Apple makes three lines of desktop computers, three (for the moment) lines of laptops, a phone, a tablet and a range of “media players” (more about that later).

DESKTOPS

Mac Pro – A traditional sort of desktop computer, with a separate box for the CPU, drives and such. Bring your own screen. Mac Pros are intended for, well, pros. You are unlikely to need one, especially since the higher-end iMacs are now overlapping the bottom-end Mac Pros in capability. But hey, if you have money to burn, who am I to say otherwise?

TIP: Apple will sell you those screens too – gorgeous but wildly overpriced.

iMac – The all-in-one design. You get a big screen and … well, that’s it, that’s your computer.  Everything is built in. The iMac is currently on its fourth major redesign and if you are buying second-hand, I suggest you restrict yourself to this generation. The third generation was made out of white plastic, while generation 4 is made of aluminium. Aluminium is a much, much better conductor of heat than plastic, and in South Africa’s climate, the white plastic iMacs had an unfortunate habit of overheating and cooking their innards. Trust me, I have a white plastic boat anchor in the wendyhouse.

TIP: google “smcFanControl” It is a little app that lives in your menu bar and allows you to set up your computer’s fans to the max. You shouldn’t run a Mac like that 24/7, but it is useful when you are transcoding video or doing something else that really heats up the machine.

Mac Mini – This gets a real South African “Haai siestog, its so small” response. A tiny little aluminium rectangle is all there is to it. Bring your own screen, keyboard and mouse. The Mini has been the favourite of people setting up home entertainment systems. Others have built it into cars and boats. It also serves just fine as a general purpose computer. But don’t be fooled by the price: by the time you’ve set it up with  decent peripherals, you might as well have bought an iMac.  And you will have those wires trailing all over the place.

TIP: Yes, you can use a USB or wireless keyboard off a PC with your Mac. But you won’t be comfortable with it. Mac keyboards are arranged just that little bit differently. Spend the money, you can thank me later. On the other hand, Apple has a long history of idiotic experimenting with pointing devices and they have never built anything as sublime as the plain-vanilla Logitech USB Optical mouse or the mouse that comes with the Wacom Graphire4 tablet. Apple more or less invented the mouse, or at least they were the first to bring it to market. Why can’t they just get it right?

LAPTOPS

Macbook – The last of the white plastic Apple laptops. By the time you read this, it might already be gone. But it remains a sturdy workhorse.

Macbook Air – If this thing does not make you want to max out your credit card on the spot, then sorry broer, you have no sense of style at all. Impossibly thin and beautiful, with full performance levels. The computer to be seen with at your local Mugg & Bean. But very low on expandability.

Macbook Pro – These are the manne in Apple’s range. From a reasonably portable 13” to a gargantuan 17-incher, the Macbook Pros are the Apple laptops for power users. There’s probably a kitchen sink tucked away in there somewhere.

OTHER

iPhone – Well, what can I say? Almost all high-end cellphones now mimic the iPhone to some extent. More computing power than NASA used to launch Apollo 11, in your pocket. And it makes calls too. Available in South Africa on both MTN and Vodacom.

iPod Touch – The iPhone without the phone. Also without the contract and without the GPS receiver. I get withdrawal symptoms if mine is not immediately within my reach. But you’d better have a Wi-Fi network at home if you want it to do anything useful.  TIP: Don’t make the mistake I made and start of with an 8GB model “just to see if it is right for me”. Go straight for the 64 GB model. Trust me, you will fill it up. And don’t call it the iTouch.

iPad – “Just a big iPod Touch”, the Apple haters will tell you. Well, it is, and that is a good thing. I want one, but having an expensive slab of glass in the same house as a rambunctious 2-year old is asking for trouble. You have to choose between Wi-Fi-only models and ones with 3G built in. There are also different amounts of memory involved. Once again, buy the one with the most memory you can afford. And keep in mind that non-3G models will not have GPS receivers. That limits the kind of apps you can run: if the gadget doesn’t know where you are, it cannot tell you that there is a restaurant nearby.

Apple TV – This little gadget will pick up all the movies, podcasts, TV programs, music and photos via Wi-Fi, and then play them on your HD Television. Your 10-year old Telefunken won’t work with the Apple TV, sorry. You’ll need a fairly up-to-date TV, preferably one with an HDMI port.

iPods – Apart from the iPod Touch, Apple makes a range of other iPods. These change regularly, so I won’t try to go through them. If all you want to do is listen to music, check them out.

SOFTWARE

Apple Macs run their own operating system called OS X (That’s “X” as in Latin for “ten”). OS X. If you know your way around computers, you’ll figure it out. The toughest part is learning to ignore the CTRL key.

The iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad run their own operating system, called iOS.

There is one piece of software that ties the whole Apple universe together. It is called iTunes and it comes free with every Mac. If you really must, there is a Windows version of iTunes available for free download.

iTunes started out as a little mp3 jukebox application. Today, here are some of the things you will use it for:

• Watching downloaded movies and TV programmes

• Downloading and updating iOS apps

• Updating iOS itself

• Watching and/or listening to university lectures

• Watching and/or listening to podcasts

• Controlling the contents of your iOS gadgets.

• Ripping music CDs

• Streaming content to the Apple TV 

Mooi groot geword, né?

WHERE TO BUY

Apple itself does not have any sort of presence in South Africa. Instead, there is an official importer, a company called Core. Opinions among South African Apple users about Core start from mildly negative and go downhill from there.

The mybroadband website has a list of all known Apple resellers. Find it here:

http://mybroadband.co.za/vb/showthread.php/63202-Mac-Shops-in-SA

Just do your homework! It is not unusual for models to appear in the South African shops up to a year after the rest of the world. Until then, the old models get dumped here. Case in point: the original iPad was unavailable in South Africa until a week after the launch of the Samsung Galaxy Tab. Coincidence? I think not! While we were waiting, unscrupulous grey-market importers were selling iPads online at outrageous prices.

So make sure that you are paying a reasonable price and that the product you are buying is the most recent version. If there is any doubt, ask on the mybroadband Apple forum. They are an opinionated bunch over there but they know what they are talking about.

In the next  blog, we will talk about where to get software for OS X and iOS machines.

Latina ➠➠ Deutsch
Latina ➠➠ English
Latina ➠➠ English
Latina ➠➠ Français
Latina ➠➠ Svenska

Dansk ➠➠ LatinaEnglish ➠➠ Latina
English ➠➠ Latina
English ➠➠ Latina
Svenska ➠➠ Latina

Go get them at http://tinyurl.com/profmichel

These dictionaries translate between Norwegian and Danish, English and Swedish, in both directions.

These dictionaries translate between Norwegian and Danish, English and Swedish, in both directions.

There are in fact two official and another two unofficial written forms of the language. Sorry, my Norwegian friends, you will just have to load these dictionaries and see which one they give you.
Michel

"Common or Garden Dharma. Essays on Contemporary Buddhism, Volume 1" is now available on Smashwords. From the Introduction:

The emergence of e-books has created new opportunities for academic authors. Like many academics, there are a number of shorter works that I have published over the years for which I never signed away the electronic publishing rights - mostly because they didn't exist at the time!

Some of these started out as academic articles and have needed to be rewritten extensively to appeal to a broader audience. Others were always written in a more popular style, but were tucked away in newsletters that were not archived effectively, or appeared in now-defunct websites. A few were published in books that went out of print years ago.

I am making a few of these available as a free e-book on Smashwords. It does not include articles that can easily be found online, even if they are stuck behind a paywall. If you would like to see a volume 2 in this series, drop me a note: my email addresses are listed at the back of the book.

These essays have served their purpose: they appeared where they needed to appear, they were read by the people whom I needed to read them. They brought me to where I am today. So why dredge them up and rework them for a new audience?

Academics are funny creatures: most of us are used to working for below-average salaries, and we can labor on for years with no realistic hope of tenure. The one thing academics can't stand is being ignored, having no-one read their work. So, is this a vanity project? Why, yes, of course it is. I am a Buddhist. I never said I was a good one. This is an attempt to get my thoughts onto the perpetual backlist of e-books, my pathetic little shot at immortality. Thank you for participating!

The essays that follow are not arranged from oldest to newest. They don't pretend to form any sort of coherent whole. Each essay stands (or falls, more likely) on its own. Each one expressed my opinion at the time: I may have changed my mind since then, but you will have to wait for my new publications to find out. And here and there I have sneaked in something that doesn't deal with Buddhism at all, but which I still think is worth sharing.

Download it for free from https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/37135

Have fun reading it (I hope) and let me know if you would like to see a version 2.
Michel

PS The PDF version is the best looking one. I'll have to tweak the formatting to get it looking as good on EPUB.

IS THERE A SANTA CLAUS?

As a result of an overwhelming lack of requests, and with research help from that renowned scientific journal SPY magazine (January, 1990) - I am pleased to present the annual scientific inquiry into Santa Claus.

• No known species of reindeer can fly. BUT there are 300,000 species of living organisms yet to be classified, and while most of these are insects and germs, this does not COMPLETELY rule out flying reindeer which only Santa has ever seen.

• There are 2 billion children (persons under 18) in the world. BUT since Santa doesn't (appear) to handle the Muslim, Hindu, Jewish and Buddhist children, that reduces the workload to 15% of the total - 378 million according to Population Reference Bureau. At an average (census) rate of 3.5 children per household, that's 91.8 million homes. One presumes there's at least one good child in each.

• Santa has 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to the different time zones and the rotation of the earth, assuming he travels east to west (which seems logical). This works out to 822.6 visits per second. This is to say that for each Christian household with good children, Santa has 1/1000th of a second to park, hop out of the sleigh, jump down the chimney, fill the stockings, distribute the remaining presents under the tree, eat whatever snacks have been left, get back up the chimney, get back into the sleigh and move on to the next house. Assuming that each of these 91.8 million stops are evenly distributed around the earth (which, of course, we know to be false but for the purposes of our calculations we will accept), we are now talking about .78 miles per household, a total trip of 75-1/2 million miles, not counting stops to do what most of us must do at least once every 31 hours, plus feeding and etc.

This means that Santa's sleigh is moving at 650 miles per second, 3,000 times the speed of sound. For purposes of comparison, the fastest man-made vehicle on earth, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a poky 27.4 miles per second - a conventional reindeer can run, tops, 15 miles per hour.

• The payload on the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium-sized lego set (2 pounds), the sleigh is carrying 321,300 tons, not counting Santa, who is invariably described as overweight. On land, conventional reindeer can pull no more than 300 pounds. Even granting that "flying reindeer" (see point #1) could pull TEN TIMES the normal amount, we cannot do the job with eight, or even nine. We need 214,200 reindeer. This increases the payload - not even counting the weight of the sleigh - to 353,430 tons. Again, for comparison - this is four times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth.

• 353,000 tons traveling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air resistance - this will heat the reindeer up in the same fashion as spacecrafts re-entering the earth's atmosphere. The lead pair of reindeer will absorb 14.3 QUINTILLION joules of energy. Per second. Each. In short, they will burst into flame almost instantaneously, exposing the reindeer behind them, and create deafening sonic booms in their wake. The entire reindeer team will be vaporized within 4.26 thousandths of a second. Santa, meanwhile, will be subjected to centrifugal forces 17,500.06 times greater than gravity. A 250-pound Santa (which seems ludicrously slim) would be pinned to the back of his sleigh by 4,315,015 pounds of force.

In conclusion - If Santa ever DID deliver presents on Christmas Eve, he's dead now.

---------------
From: unknown
Subject: More on the existence of Santa
Some time ago, someone had posted an article saying how the existance of Santa Claus was impossible. I took this article and sent it to a number of friends on campus. Somehow, it got to one of the professors on campus by the name of Ted Davis. He wrote the following reply.

Dear Mr. Crowell:

The analysis you sent me about the death of Santa Claus, based on classical physics, is seriously flawed owing to its neglect of quantum phenomena that become significant in his particular case. As it happens, the terminal velocity of a reindeer in dry December air over the Northern Hemisphere (for example) is known with tremendous precision. The mass of Santa and his sleigh (since the number of children and their gifts is also known precisely, ahead of time, and the reindeer must weigh in minutes before the flight) is also known with tremendous precision. His direction of flight is, as you say, essentially east to west.

All of that, when taken together, means that the momentum vector of Mr Claus and his cargo is known with incredible precision. An elementary application of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle yields the result that Santa's location, at any given moment on Christmas Eve, is highly imprecise. In other words, he is "smeared out" over the surface of the earth, analogous to the manner in which an electron is "smeared out" within a certain distance from the nucleus in an atom. Thus he can, quite literally, be everywhere at any given moment.

In addition, the relativistic velocities which his reindeer can attain for brief moments make it possible for him, in certain cases, to arrive at some locations shortly before he left the North Pole. Santa, in other words, assumes for brief periods the characteristics of tachyons. I will admit that tachyons remain hypothetical, but then so do black holes, and who really doubts their existence anymore?

Hence, to sum up my reply: Yes, Virginia, there is a Bob Knight, and there is an Indiana. Now, what were we talking about...?

Yrs sincerely,

E.B. Davis, Ph.D., A.B.D., I.D.I.O.T., Fellow