There are 10¹¹ stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it’s only a hundred billion. It’s less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers.

— Richard Feynman
US educator & physicist (1918 – 1988)

A galaxy is composed of gas and dust and stars — billions upon billions of stars.

— Carl Sagan
Astronomer, author, & media personality (1934 – 1996)

Even though Wikipedia claims 200-400 billion stars in the Milky Way, Feynman’s number varies by only a couple factors of two.

Now:
According to Oxfam, there has been $8.4 Trillion spent on bailouts. So, call that about US $21/star in the Milky Way. That’s a lot of money.

Oh, but doesn’t stop there. According to the Office of the Comptroller, the “notional value of derivatives held by U.S. commercial banks” is around $200.4 trillion. So call that US $500/star in the Milky Way.

As has been widely reported, DK Matai, the Chairman of the ACTA Open, has published that the outstanding value of the derivative market worldwide is US $1.1 Quadrillion. That’s a cool US $2,750/per star in the Milky Way galaxy.

Cormac McCarthy, Vintage Books, 1993.

This is one of those books that I’d had recommended by numerous people numerous times. The description of the story didn’t strike any chord with me. Then Peter read an excerpt at a Meander, and I was intrigued. I resolved to read it. And time passed.

Well, then I read it.

All The Pretty Horses‘ plot is not exceptional. In terms of structure, it’s a love story, a western, a coming-of-age story. The text lacks quotation marks, which can be challenging. And there is a fair amount of vocabulary in Spanish. So much for the mechanics.

The writing is paradoxical throughout. It’s simultaneously simple vernacular and spectacular, soaring literary magic. Nearly every paragraph contains a revelatory sentence that exposes an underlying truth about people or about the world that we barely even suspected — and yet, once revealed, we know to be absolutely correct. The descriptions of a sunset may evoke a place that we have never seen, and yet we immediately know it. A phrase in a conversation will be one we’ve never heard before, but will be intimately familiar. The story unfolds slowly, but also in a strange breathless rush.

It’s a fantastic book.

Seen on the way in to work this morning. Only had my Canon Powershot with me… so, it’s just another reminder to always bring the big camera with big glass at all times.

Semi-aerial combat

So. Millions of people use Apple’s Mail.app. Someone must have a solution to the problem of households … but I somehow have been left in the dark.

Stated more precisely:
I have numerous friends for whom I have multiple contacts. For example, Alice Code and Bob Crypto are what we now call pairbonded partners. They share a common home address, but separate cell phones, email, work addresses, work email, etc. So I end up keeping three records for the two of them: one for Alice, one for Bob, and one for Bob and Alice.

Now, three records for two people isn’t so onerous, particularly when there’s not a lot of redundant information. But then, if they happen to have a land-line, and change the number, I have to update three records (unless I only put home number for the common record, in which case I’d have to remember this protocol). And the fact is that there are a lot of redundant notes I try to keep, such as anniversaries, favorite charities, etc. This makes the system unwieldy, especially since my whole goal is to reduce the amount of stuff I have to remember and maintain.

So how do people in the real world manage this? Bonus points for solutions that will still work when I sync to my Palm-OS based phone!

Having mailed off the charitable/political/ donations for 2008, I thought it might be worth listing some of the recipients here:

• Social Action
  • American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee
  • Amnesty International
  • Bet Tzedek
  • Doctors without Borders
  • Electronic Frontier Foundation
  • FINCA International
  • Five Acres
  • Food on Foot
  • Free Arts For Abused Children
  • Frontline Foundation
  • GLAAD
  • Habitat For Humanity
  • Hillel
  • La Casa De Las Madres
  • Liberty Hill Foundation
  • Los Angeles Regional Food Bank
  • National Immigration Law Center
  • Native American Rights Fund
  • National Jewish Medical & Research Center
  • Para Los Ninos
  • Project Angel Food
  • SOVA Food Pantries
  • Women for Women International
  • Women’s American ORT
  • Women’s Center of Cambridge
• Environment
  • Heal the Bay
  • The Nature Conservancy
  • Surfrider Foundation
• Arts
  • City Garage Theatre
• Animals
  • Pasado’s Safe Haven