Thursday Miscellany!

Thursday, Thursday, gotta get down on Thursday....

• Today is the 70th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki. It's a good time to take note that it will cost us nearly a trillion dollars to upgrade our nuclear arsenal. For that kind of money, we could build a high-speed rail system and still have enough to build enough wind power for 100 million homes (at 2KW/home average and $2M per megawatt of generation). Again: it's not about fiscal responsibility, it's about priorities.


• Martin O'Malley is pissed that the DNC is only allowing six debates. I can't blame him for being mad --- debates are a chance for someone who's third tier (like him) to maybe make enough of an impression to squirm their way up to second tier. The flip side is that I'm not convinced that the general public wants more than six debates, given that there are only five candidates. Really, if anyone should be screaming bloody murder, it's Bernie Sanders. So far, he's kept quiet.


• Speaking of both debates and man-made disasters, the first Republican debate is tonight. Bloom County is on it.


• The big thing that hurt me while I was an undergraduate wasn't the math courses (I enjoyed those even when they were difficult), it was time management. Would that I had this brief guide (PDF), or even better, a 150-or-so page book, on the practice, I probably would have done better.


• LibreOffice 5.0 is out! Download it here!