August 2nd, 2009
Free Willy?!
Metelkova – http://www.metelkovamesto.org/
Slovenia has a thing for dragons…
Russia vs Slovenia:
July 31st, 2009
July 27th, 2009
Realistically, Holyfield’s only gonna be able to punch that horse once, before it goes totally berserk. And then, when it’s thrashing around in the ring, he’s gotta punch that horse right in the neck and face, and keep on punching and punching and punching until it dies. That’s how you beat a horse.
Evander Holyfield To Box Horse For Heavyweight Title, The Onion News Network, http://www.theonion.com/content/video/evander_holyfield_to_box_horse.
July 27th, 2009
Within the past thirty-five years the world has experienced two global wars of tremendous violence. It has witnessed two revolutions–the Russian and the Chinese–of extreme scope and intensity. It has also seen the collapse of five empires–the Ottoman, the Austro-Hungarian, German, Italian, and Japanese–and the drastic decline of two major imperial systems, the British and the French. During the span of one generation, the international distribution of power has been fundamentally altered. For several centuries it had proved impossible for any one nation to gain such preponderant strength that a coalition of other nations could not in time face it with greater strength. The international scene was marked by recurring periods of violence and war, but a system of sovereign and independent states was maintained, over which no state was able to achieve hegemony.
Two complex sets of factors have now basically altered this historic distribution of power. First, the defeat of Germany and Japan and the decline of the British and French Empires have interacted with the development of the United States and the Soviet Union in such a way that power increasingly gravitated to these two centers. Second, the Soviet Union, unlike previous aspirants to hegemony, is animated by a new fanatic faith, anti-thetical to our own, and seeks to impose its absolute authority over the rest of the world. Conflict has, therefore, become endemic and is waged, on the part of the Soviet Union, by violent or non-violent methods in accordance with the dictates of expediency. With the development of increasingly terrifying weapons of mass destruction, every individual faces the ever-present possibility of annihilation should the conflict enter the phase of total war.
On the one hand, the people of the world yearn for relief from the anxiety arising from the risk of atomic war. On the other hand, any substantial further extension of the area under the domination of the Kremlin would raise the possibility that no coalition adequate to confront the Kremlin with greater strength could be assembled. It is in this context that this Republic and its citizens in the ascendancy of their strength stand in their deepest peril.
The issues that face us are momentous, involving the fulfillment or destruction not only of this Republic but of civilization itself. They are issues which will not await our deliberations. With conscience and resolution this Government and the people it represents must now take new and fateful decisions.
National Security Council (NSC) 68: United States Objectives and Programs for National Security, April 14, 1950, A Report to the President, Pursuant to the President’s Directive of January 31, 1950, http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/nsc-68/nsc68-1.htm (Truman Library: http://www.trumanlibrary.org/whistlestop/study_collections/korea/large/week2/nsc68_1.htm; Declassification).
July 24th, 2009
According to the U.S. Consumer Price Index, one dollar from 1913 today (e.g. if someone put a dollar in a box and buried it and it was dug up today) would have lost 95.54% of its purchasing power. Things were quite stable from 1774 until 1917.
http://www.measuringworth.org/datasets/uscpi/result.php?year_source=1774&year_result=2008 and http://www.measuringworth.org/datasets/uscpi/result.php?year_source=1913&year_result=2008 for above. Data: cpi
For example, CPI (2008) / CPI (1913) = 215.30 / 9.60 = 22.43 => $22.43 in the year 2008 has the same “purchase power” as $1 in the year 1913. Inverse equation for “percent purchasing power.”
MeasuringWorth is a site “to make available to the public the highest quality and most reliable historical data on important economic aggregates, with particular emphasis on nominal measures,” created by Professor Lawrence H. Officer from the University of Illinois at Chicago, with faculty from Stanford, Harvard, etc. on the Board of Advisors.
MeasuringWorth is a site "to make available to the public the highest quality and most reliable historical data on important economic aggregates, with particular emphasis on nominal measures," created by Professor Lawrence H. Officer from the University of Illinois at Chicago, with faculty from Stanford, Harvard, etc. on the Board of Advisors. http://www.measuringworth.com/aboutus.html” target=”_blank”>http://www.measuringworth.com/aboutus.html
If you are asking what a monetary value in the past is “worth” today, there is no one correct answer. A price or an income in the past would have been valued in different ways in that time by different people and under different contexts. That must be taken into account when asking the same question today.
We suggest ten different measures of worth in our essay “Measures of Worth”. (http://www.measuringworth.com/worthmeasures.html)
Choosing the Best Indicator to Measure Relative Worth, MeasuringWorth, http://www.measuringworth.com/indicator.html.
Determining the relative value of an amount of money in one year compared to another is more complicated than it seems at first. There is no single “correct” measure, and economic historians use one or more different indicators depending on the context of the question.
Most indices are measured as the price of a “bundle” of goods and services that a representative group buys or earns. Over time the bundle changes; for example, carriages are replaced with automobiles, and new goods and services are created such as cellular phones and heart transplants.
These considerations do not stop the fascination with these comparisons or even the necessity for them. For example, such comparisons may be critical to determine appropriate levels of compensation in a legal case that has been deferred. The context of the question, however, may lead to a preferable measure and that measure may not be the Consumer Price Index (CPI), which is used far too often without thought to its consequences.
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Presented here are six indicators for making such comparisons in US dollars between any two years from 1774 to 2007. They are the CPI, the GDP Deflator, the consumer bundle, the unskilled wage rate, the GDP per capita, and the GDP. Note that only two indicators, the CPI and unskilled wage are available from 1774 to 1790, and the consumer bundle is only available from 1900 to the present.
One or more of the indicators may be most appropriate for you depending on the nature of your query. See below for the definitions of the indicators and some examples.
Six Ways to Compute the Relative Value of a U.S. Dollar Amount, 1774 to Present, http://www.measuringworth.com/uscompare/.
Clearly, intrinsic values, objects, or events are difficult, if not impossible, to measure in money terms. There is probably no objective way of assessing the worth of freedom of speech or of the love of your life or of a beautiful sunset. Such items lack a well-defined money amount associated with them. Therefore we do not attempt to measure the worth of such items. Also, we cannot measure the worth even of an item associated with a money amount, if the time period (say, year) of that money amount is not clearly established. What is the worth today of “a loaf of bread produced or consumed sometime in the past”? Such an incompletely phrased question cannot be answered.
We are concerned with measuring the worth of items with which both a monetary value and a past time period are clearly associated. Examples are: A loaf of bread sold for seven pennies in 1915; what is its “value” today? Your great-grandfather’s estate was $1000 or £200 in 1900; what is that worth today?
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When the transaction or asset is not in a range we with which we are familiar, such as 100 million dollars or pounds, or if the transaction or asset occurred or existed in a time different from that in which we live or can remember, then it is much harder to “know” the comparables. There is yet another problem: one person’s “comparable” could be quite different from that of another person. The worth of an amount of money sufficient to buy enough macaroni and cheese to last a week for a very poor person could be merely a tip to a doorman for a wealthy one.
The technique we use is to apply alternative monetary scales or indicators from the desired (later or present) year to an item in the initial (past) year. The result (for each alternative) is a value that has been adjusted (usually increased) by the growth in the indicator. This is the meaning of relative worth over time. Always remember that it is the item in the initial year for which the relative value is calculated. That item, or even something comparable to it, may not exist in the desired year. No matter; relative worth of the past item is still computable.
Measures of Worth, MeasuringWorth, http://www.measuringworth.com/worthmeasures.html.
$22.43 in the year 2008 has the same “purchase power” as $1 in the year 1913.
Purchasing Power of Money in the United States from 1774 to 2008, MeasuringWorth, http://www.measuringworth.com/ppowerus/result.php?year1=1913&money2=1&year2=2008 (http://www.measuringworth.com/ppowerus/).
To be honest, there is some debate among “the experts” about every aspect of this exercise. The discussions begin with the wisdom of even attempting such things and extends down thorough to what data to use, how to do the compilations, and the meaning of the results. Even though this is not the place to reiterate any of these disputes, it is very important to underscore here that they are immensely important and result, reasonably frequently, in a redoing of past calculations and a complete reconsideration of their application. The “science of economics” is no more fixed in its wisdom than any other human attempt at understanding the world about us. Nevertheless, it is also fair to say that, in the interim, on our way to understanding the issues even better, the same scholars who debate these matters also use the CPI as it exists to draw the very same kinds of rough comparisons that are possible from the form at this site. EH.Net does no more than provide visitors to this site with what everyone else is using, no more, no less. It offers no guarantees either of precision or user satisfaction. As in all such matters, caveat emptor.
Comparing the Purchasing Power of Money in the United States Economy from 1774 to 2007, http://www.measuringworth.com/ppowerus/dollarsource.php.
What Was the U.S. GDP Then?, MeasuringWorth, http://www.measuringworth.org/usgdp/. (Data)
The final graph of population versus inflation does not support the argument that inflation is required to keep up with population growth.
Consumer Price Index (Estimate) 1800-2008, The Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, http://www.minneapolisfed.org/community_education/teacher/calc/hist1800.cfm.
Someone’s subjective take on it:
July 24th, 2009
Health, United States, 2008, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), National Center for Health Statistics, 2009, http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hus/hus08.pdf#026 (data: ftp://ftp.cdc.gov/pub/Health_Statistics/NCHS/Publications/Health_US/hus08tables/table026.xls).
Life expectancy is the average number of years of life remaining to a person at a particular age and is based on a given set of age-specific death rates, generally the mortality conditions existing in the period mentioned.
Also includes a table of life expectancy for “Selected countries and territories, selected years 1980–2004.”
July 24th, 2009
The GFSR (Global Financial Stability Report) estimates that expected write-downs on U.S.–based assets suffered by all financial institutions over 2007–2010 will amount to $2.7 trillion (up from the estimate of $2.2 trillion in January 2009). Total expected write-downs on global exposures are estimated at $4 trillion, of which about two thirds will fall on banks, with the remainder distributed among insurance companies, pension funds, hedge funds, and other intermediaries, although this figure is subject to a substantial margin of error. So far, banks have recognized less than one-third of estimated losses, and substantial amounts of new capital are needed. Subject to a number of assumptions, the GFSR estimates that additional capital would be required (measured as tangible common equity) amounting to $275 billion–$500 billion in the United States, $475 billion–$950 billion for European banks (excluding those in the United Kingdom), and $125 billion–$250 billion for U.K. banks.
The International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Economic Outlook April 2009, http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/weo/2009/01/pdf/text.pdf (http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/weo/2009/01/index.htm).
July 24th, 2009
The appeal from officials in Shanghai is the first time in decades, however, that the government has actively encouraged procreation.
China steps back from one child policy, Times Online, Jane Macartney, July 24, 2009, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article6726244.ece.
July 23rd, 2009
Kilobyte = 1,024 bytes (2^10)
Megabyte = 1,048,576 bytes (2^20)
Gigabyte = 1,073,741,824 bytes (2^30)
Terabyte = 1,099,511,627,776 bytes (2^40)
Petabyte = 1,125,899,906,842,624 bytes (2^50)
Exabyte = 1,152,921,504,606,846,976 bytes (2^60)
Zettabyte = 1,180,591,620,717,411,303,424 bytes (2^70)
Yottabyte = 1,208,925,819,614,629,174,706,176 bytes (2^80)
July 21st, 2009
On July 20, 1969, the human race accomplished its single greatest technological achievement of all time when a human first set foot on another celestial body.
Six hours after landing at 4:17 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time (with less than 30 seconds of fuel remaining), Neil A. Armstrong took the “Small Step” into our greater future when he stepped off the Lunar Module, named “Eagle,” onto the surface of the Moon, from which he could look up and see Earth in the heavens as no one had done before him.
He was shortly joined by “Buzz” Aldrin, and the two astronauts spent 21 hours on the lunar surface and returned 46 pounds of lunar rocks. After their historic walks on the Moon, they successfully docked with the Command Module “Columbia,” in which Michael Collins was patiently orbiting the cold but no longer lifeless Moon.
NASA Apollo 11 30th Anniversary, http://history.nasa.gov/ap11ann/introduction.htm.
NASA, http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/hd/apollo11_hdpage.html.
MP3 clips of the first, and second, and third steps: http://history.nasa.gov/alsj/a11/a11.step.html.
“…the first moonwalk by the Apollo 11 astronauts in July 1969… was watched on TV by an estimated 600 million people, a fifth of the world’s population at the time.”
Guinness World Records, Ratings Winners, http://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/news/2008/02/080228.aspx.
Google Code Blog releases Command Module and Lunar Module assembler code.
A view of Earth as the Lunar Module Eagle lifts off from the Moon