Fugato

Note to self: do not buy scientific instruments from websites that smack of the previous millennium.

Many people lose sleep over the idea that (great) wealth is increasingly unevenly distributed, that fewer people have amassed a larger share of the pie than ever before. This conviction seems to arise from observing the very richest and wrinkling one’s nose and scoffing and being indignant.

(Is anyone ever dignant?)

The New York Times today published a summary of the 30 richest Americans of all time, measuring their riches in today’s dollars using the relative share of GDP.

Two of them are alive today, Bill Gates (ranking fifth) and Warren Buffett. Sam Walton founder of WalMart died in 1992, all the others were dead by 1950.

The four richest were born in 1750, 1763, 1794, and 1839.

There’s more to it, of course, but in any case this hardly supports the notion that wealth is more unevenly distributed extreme wealth is accrued by fewer people now than it used to be.

Incidentally, these moguls have one notable thing in common: they all have a Y chromosome. It seems worth investigating the role of this genetic trait in the accumulation of wealth.

Oud master Naseer Shamma (نصير شمة) here plays part of his composition al’Amiriyah, which tells the story of the bombing of public shelter nr. 25 in the Amiriyah district of Baghdad in 1991. Hundreds of civilians were killed (in the range 200-300 according to Human Rights Watch).

In the beginning there is a melancholy quiet, but then the havoc starts, with audible sirens, falling bombs and chaos. All in eleven strings.

Oud is العود in Arabic (al-ʿūd, literally “the wood”), a word believed to come from Persian, rud. The same word probably found its way into European languages as the name of the lute, when pious Europeans had a certain errand to run in the Near East and encountered this fine instrument.

Happy summer solstice, readers near and far (excluding the southern hemisphere). It is today at 18:06 UTC; that’s when the North Pole points closest to the sun.

Here in Reykjavík, sunset tonight is at 00:03. Yeah, three minutes after midnight.

Our time zone designation needs revising at some point.

If you think mostly with your gut, won’t the resulting thoughts be mostly crap?

Here’s John Cleese, in real life, delivering a eulogy at the memorial service for his friend Graham Chapman, who had tragically died of cancer at 48.

… and I guess that we’re all thinking how sad it is that a man of such talent, such capability for kindness, of such unusual intelligence, should now so suddenly be spirited away at the age of only forty-eight, before he’d achieved many of the things of which he was capable, and before he’d had enough fun.

Well, I feel that I should say, “Nonsense. Good riddance to him, the freeloading bastard, I hope he fries.”

He said this to honor his good friend, and he explained that succinctly: “Anything for him but mindless good taste.”

A relative whom I care about forwarded me (and forty-four other people) a chain letter cautioning us about the risk of getting cancer from plastic food wrapping.

That’s nonsense, of course, like everything you receive by email.

The twist? This person — who now is presumably wary of that consarned plastic — smokes as if her life depended on it, and has done so for decades.

The mind boggles.

Consolidated supply of music picked by project.ioni.st, that discriminating bastion of good taste:

project.ioni.st.m3u

(Yes, this will stay up-to-date.)

Kurt Vonnegut must have been the greatest optimist of all pessimists. His novel Cat’s Cradle ends with a jolly narrative of the destruction of life on Earth; armageddon with a grin.

The book probably does not translate well because Vonnegut seems to love wordplay.

In bokononism, a delightful religion made up by Vonnegut, one major ritual is boko-maru, wherein two people sit barefoot facing each other, “letting their soles meet.”

Cat’s Cradle tells of an ominous invention, a new crystal structure for ice having a melting point of 45.8 °C. Below that temperature, it swiftly crystallizes all water into ice upon contact, including the oceans and the water in the human body. This mischievous material is called ice-nine … which sounds like asinine. Vonnegut must have considered this word a good fit for man’s 20th-century pastime of finding practical, cost-effective ways to demolish the planet.