No idea how long that link will work, so let's put the specifics here:
* Motherboard...for $100.
* Athlon II X4 640 Quad Core Processor
* 4 GB RAM
Well--it's $140 up front, with a $40 rebate, but it still ends up being a system board with a quad-core processor running "up to" 3 GHz, with 4 GB of RAM.
...but I'm not going to do it. It's fun to think about, though.
* * *
Got the usual "your TracFone service will expire in 10 days!" notification, so I guess I need to re-up soon.
Had a bit of a scare on Sunday, when I thought I'd lost my phone on the way to Og's place. I wasn't sure I'd even taken it with me, which is why I didn't jump back on the bike and retrace my steps; and it turned out that I had, after all, left it on the counter at home.
It's not the phone I'm worried about so much as the talk time I've accumulated.
* * *
Tungsten weighs almost as much as gold does so it's pretty easy to make a fake gold bar. You simply cast a tungsten bar in perhaps a quarter-inch of gold, then sell the whole thing by weight. Tungsten costs nothing compared with gold, so if your buyer doesn't insist on an assay of the bar you make out like a bandit. (Literally.)
And naturally with gold trading at record highs there's plenty of incentive for the dishonest to do something like this.
* * *
Two from Vox Day:
Romney makes the mistake of giving voice to a truth which the left finds inconvenient. In this case, it's "that the Palestinians have no interest whatsoever in establishing peace,..."
The Chinese communists apparently want war with Japan.
* * *
Alan Caruba, as part of a book review, reviews Thomas Gold's abiotic oil theory.
We say it's Gold's theory but in fact the theory was first considered in the 1500s, and there was an extensive body of work done on it by Russians in the 20th century.
If Gold's theory is true, then we don't have to worry about running out of oil for a very long time. Long enough that we'll be using fusion before we make so much as a dimple in the total supply of the stuff.
* * *
XKCD's "What If" column on bird droppings. I don't care about bird poop but the discussion leads to the consideration of MPG as a cross-section.
20 MPG, it turns out, has a cross-section of 0.1 square millimeters. I'd bet that's the cross-section of a pipe containing one gallon of gasoline that's 20 miles long. (13 MPG is 0.18 square millimeters. If the pipe is 13 miles long and contains 1 gallon of gasoline, it has to be 0.18 millimeters in cross-section. The higher the fuel economy, the thinner and longer the pipe is.)
* * *
I don't know what time I got to sleep, but I woke up before 7. Denver omelette for breakfast, and now this.
How much fun can a man have and stay sane?