@JOEFRU: Safari 3.1 supports @font-face, so in Safari, you'd see the right font if the developer specified it.

Self-correction: Before I finished the article, I thought the idea was that this was the Taliban's stash. But anyway, yeah, since there are plenty of other providers on the international market, I doubt this will create a shortage leading to windfall prices for any one source.

I like Takuan's idea that having a large portion of your product destroyed increases profit by making the remaining product more scarce. Let me be the first to suggest that the Taliban planted the drugs in the desert so they could be bombed and increase profits. It's almost as good as not making the extra product in the first place!

Yeah, if you pay close attention, you'll see there are specific kinds of blocks (a Yoshi block and a stone block) that actually launch Mario or otherwise alter his vector.

When I first saw this video on Digg, I was amazed to find there were actually a lot of Mario automata to music on YouTube. I was aware of Mario automata as a genre, but I didn't realize how many were timed to music.

#38:
I didn't say it was a perfect 1:1 correlation, but yes, there is a correlation. Does the data upset you?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ#Income

There's a correlation between IQ (as measured by decent IQ tests, not Mickey Mouse Internet IQ tests) and income.

It's not a stretch to imagine there's probably also a correlation between income and budget for computer hardware.

By transitivity, there should be a correlation between IQ and computer hardware cost / up-to-date-ness. So it shouldn't be surprising that fancy new hardware appears at the top of the chart and old, inexpensive hardware appears at the bottom.

The game is basically structured so your only out is to cut defense spending and raise taxes.

It seems to use the 9" pie model of economics: raise taxes 5% and revenue increases by 5%; lower taxes 5% and revenue decreases by 5% (sort of like how the Congressional Budget Office models taxes). Raise taxes? Free money! Lower taxes? Instant budget death! Never mind the effect of either on economic behavior.

There's an interesting set of charts I saw that demonstrate that tax revenues are very closely correlated with GDP. (It's been been close to 18% of GDP for the last 50-60 years.) Meanwhile, the correlation with the top tax rate (which was around 90% in the 50s) is minimal to nil. This suggests that if you want to raise tax revenue (which isn't necessarily the goal, but I'm just sayin'), what you really want to do is encourage business and personal financial prosperity.

Marcelo, I'm with you there. A paragraph I had in my original reply but deleted went something like this:

If I were a religious and otherwise scientific person, my complaint would be that he's pandering and maybe condescending toward spiritual/religious types.

Now, that said, what do you tell someone who's spiritual/religious but not very scientific or intellectual? I think that's Kauffman's audience here-- the people who would never read his other books in the first place, or would read about five sentences before decrying them as BS.

Marcelo, I agree that majesty is not quantifiable in any objective way.

However, having read At Home in the Universe and (part of) The Origins of Order, I think Kauffman is just trying to be more inclusive toward spiritual/religious people who may otherwise find his ideas (e.g. autocatalytic sets) threatening to creation stories, and altogether inaccessible due to jargon and density (I confess I found The Origins of Order challenging). So if you prefer, take "beauty" and "majesty" to mean nearly impenetrable, opaque complexity in nature that arises from simple rules.

Reminds me of the interceptors from Homeworld.

It must be made of silk and gold thread.

Eight kids! Idiocracy is right around the corner.