Here at the Max 256 blog we don’t celebrate anniversaries, only multiples of 256 and other round numbers. This is entry number 256, which means there are currently no more than 65 536 words (or 64 kilowords, for certain definitions of “kilo” and “word”) in the blog. Who else can say the same thing with such precision?! Amazing.

Best of all, this is only the first out of many magical number events you have to look forward to over the coming years, such as the 128 kiloword event next year, the 256 kiloword event in late 2011, the megaword event in ca 2021, and the gigaword event some time around the year 15 989. That’s a party you don’t want to miss – tell your children to tell their children! (This year’s celebration, however, has been cancelled to avoid sending the wrong signals in this time of economic hardship.)

What can you expect from the next 256 entries? Ideas in the planning stage include: A dictionary marathon, lolcatz (cats with funny captions!), anthologies of my favorite Twitter messages, a pictorial series on the growth of the grass outside my window, and fashion advice. Enjoy!

Yes yes yes.

(In tomorrow’s installment of “You know you’re a geek when ..“, two unlucky contestants will settle the relative worth of Firefly and Babylon 5 using LotR weapon replicas.)

Via Tor.com.

No rights were ever given to us
By the grace of God
No rights were ever given
By some United Nations clause
No rights were ever given
By some nice guy at the top
Our rights – they were bought by all the blood
And all the tears of all our
Grandmothers, grandfathers before.

For all the folk who gave their lives for us
For all the folk who spit out – never say die
For all the fires burning on our highest hills
For all the people spinning tales tonight
Fight all the powers who abuse our common laws
Fight all the powers who think they only owe themselves.

- New Model Army, My Country

Patapsychology begins from Murphy’s Law, as Finnegan called the First Axiom, adopted from Sean Murphy. This says, and I quote,”The normal does not exist. The average does not exist. We know only a very large but probably finite phalanx of discrete space-time events encountered and endured.” In less technical language, the Board of the College of Patapsychology offers one million Irish punds [around $700,000 American] to any “normalist” who can exhibit “a normal sunset, an average Beethoven sonata, an ordinary Playmate of the Month, or any thing or event in space-time that qualifies as normal, average or ordinary.”

In a world where no two fingerprints appear identical, and no two brains appear identical, and an electron does not even seem identical to itself from one nanosecond to another, patapsychology seems on safe ground here. [..]

The canny will detect here the usual Celtic impulse to make hash out of everything that seems obvious and incontrovertable to Saxons, grocers and other Fundamentalist Materialists. Patapsychology follows in the great tradition of Swift, who once proved with a horoscope that an astrologer named Partridge had died, even though Partridge continued to deny this in print; Bishop Berkeley, who proved that the universe doesn’t exist but God has a persistent delusion that it does; William Rowan Hamilton, who invented the noncommutative algebra in which p times q does not equal q times p; Wilde, who asked if the academic commentators on Hamlet had really gone mad or only pretended to have gone mad.

- Robert Anton Wilson

View the whole thing at Strange Maps.

Neil deGrasse Tyson, the astronomer who “killed Pluto” (OMG!!) talks about how to define a planet, and why it really doesn’t matter how many planets we have.

About why people were so upset about Pluto:

You know what I think it was? Because I put a fair amount of thought into this. When you learn something early in elementary school, and – you didn’t learn what things were, you just memorized something – that’s really what happened there. If you memorized something, and then later on that breaks, you feel like something attacked you. The memorization of the planets was kind of like an intellectual version of comfort food. All was well in the world, because there were nine planets, and the ninth planet was Pluto. And you memorized it. Had you learned that these were dynamic bodies, that had these properties, and then you learned that there were new objects that had new properties, I don’t think people would have gotten upset. [..] My hope is that in the textbooks to come, there will not be an exercise in memorizing planets.

Which is a good excuse to link to Richard Feynman’s essay on what science is.

I played the violin when I was a kid, for seven years. I gave it up because I didn’t want to practice for hours every day. If you want to be a good violin player, you have to practice. A lot. I had other things to do, (what with puberty arriving etc.), so I put it away.

That was seventeen years ago. I haven’t touched a violin since, until a few months ago, when I bought a Yamaha SV-150 electric violin. It’s sold as a silent violin, which isn’t really true – even without a body, violin strings are quite audible. But it’s more silent than a normal violin, which makes it neighbour-friendly.

The SV-150 sounds good, is practical to use, and has many nice features. I like it.

Besides, electric violins are awesome.

But here’s the amazing part: After all those years, I actually remember how to play. I’ve forgotten a lot. I don’t hit the notes right. I’m nowhere near good enough to perform – like I said, playing the violin well is hard. But I remember enough to enjoy myself. The ability has been stored in muscle memory all these years. I can even almost hear my old violin teacher gently reproaching me.

I still don’t want to be a good violin player. It costs too much time. There are other things to do. But I love having the ability to pick up a violin and play something just for myself.

Paul Krugman talks about the financial crisis:

I don’t have an opinion here. The consensus seems to be that governments everywhere need to spend a lot of money in some clever way. I respect economists who believe that, especially those like Krugman here who are honest about the effects: It might not work. Nobody really knows how to solve this, in the end it comes down to luck.

I also respect critics like the libertarians at Reason who point out that governments aren’t good at spending huge amounts of money. There’s a certain arrogance among economists about how finally, this time, they understand the economy well enough to know how and where to spend. Spring time for Keynes. I’ll believe that when they have a track record, not just anecdotes from the last crisis.

But maybe a wild and expensive shot with a hope of success is better than the alternatives. I don’t know. I’m not qualified.

Here’s what I believe: If this works, it will encourage people to think “hey, if the government can save the economy from a crisis by bluntly manipulating macroeconomic variables, maybe it’s also qualified to manage it in detail under normal circumstances.” That would be bad. We’re feeding a monster here, in the hope that it will help us, but even if it does we’ll have to wean it off the taste of blood later. (Alarmist metaphor? We’re encouraging politicians to spend huge amounts of money. Think about that for a second.)

Here’s more.