…because the reality is over 10 times worse than what was made public at the time. In fact a total of $7.7 trillion in loan guarantees and lending limits were issued by the Fed, which makes TARP seem like a trifle in comparison.
All you need to know about American cops.
That is all.
A note to the people at Microbytes…
 Y U NO CALL CUSTOMER WHEN ORDER IS READY?
The birds, they’re angry!
Angry Birds is a fun little game, but effectively what you have are a bunch of birds that successively commit terroristic suicide attacks on the pigs who have stolen their eggs.
Currently reading…
Mao’s Last Revolution by Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals. An extremely interesting book that focuses on Mao’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution between 1966 and 1976.
Currently reading…
The Private Life of Chairman Mao By Dr. Li Zhisui, who was the Chairman’s personal doctor from 1954 all the way to his death in 1976. A fascinating insider’s view into the Mao the man and into the politics that ruled China during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution.
Currently reading…
Back from the Brink, a political memoir by Labour Chancellor Alistair Darling. It’s a bit of a break from reading about events in which millions perish and millions more are horribly tortured…
Currently reading…
Survival in the Killing Fields by Haing Ngor, whom some of you may remember as the actor who played journalist Dith Pran in The Killing Fields. A vivid first-person account of what it was like to live in Cambodia before and during the infamous era of the Khmer Rouge, during which some 25% of the country’s population was killed.
Currently reading…
Mao’s Great Famine by Frank Dikotter. This is not the first time I’ve read about the effects of China’s Great Leap Forward in the late 50s and early 60s, but this certainly has highlighted not only the direct effects of the famine itself but also its origins and also the secondary effects by which the GLF had such a devastating impact on the Chinese countryside.
A solution to a fabled problem
We’ve all heard the story in school — when chess was invented in India the local King (they had lots of kings back then apparently) was so impressed by the game that he offered its creator whatever he wanted. The man (who was rumored to be wise but somewhat of a smart-ass) responded that all he wanted were a few grains of rice. The number of grains was to be determined as follows: using a chessboard, place 1 grain on the first square, two on the second, four on the third, 8 on the fourth, etc. To which the King immediately assented, until one of his ministers told him that not only was this more than he had to give, but was in fact more grain that was produced by the entire known world at the time.
So, being somewhat of a smart-ass myself and being in the middle of learning the python programming language I figured I’d come up with a neat and efficient way to calculate exactly what that number was. It’s not that difficult. Basically because the chessboard has 64 squares, the number you’re looking for is the sum of the solutions for 20 through 263.
Since Python is loosely-typed you don’t have to worry about declaring the right type of integer to hold the final result, which is astronomically big. Here’s the code for it:
numTotal = 0;
for numExponent in range (0,64):
numTotal += 2**numExponent
print "Total at", numExponent, ": ",numTotal
print "All done."
Note: even though I declared the range 0 to 64, 64 is not itself included.
So what’s the final result? It’s 18446744073709551615. 18 quintillion, 445 quadrillion, 744 trillion, 73 billion, 709 million, 551 thousand and 615. Quite a large number indeed and assuredly more than the King could deliver.