I’ve found something surprising recently: that the pirate tradition is alive and well up and down the East coast of the United States. In small sailing towns, talking to sailmakers, woodworkers, and others that work around the water, I’ve seen many men in their 40s with a small accoutrement that seems in stark contrast to their uniforms of L.L. Bean, sober haircuts, and sun-crinkled smiles—earrings. At first, I wondered if these men were gay recluses—the earrings looked so odd. I was surprised to learn that they were married and at least somewhat normally socialized in all other aspects of their lives.
Then I learned something:
Traditionally, a sailor who had rounded the Horn [Cape] was entitled to wear a gold loop earring — in the left ear, the one which had faced the Horn in a typical eastbound passage — and to dine with one foot on the table.
source is
Wikipedia on Cape Horn. I hope Harrison Ford wears an earring for some sailing exploit.
Whatever happens in the National League and American League Championship series unfolding over the next week or so, one outcome has already been decided—the effective end of the theories of Moneyball as a viable way to build a playoff-caliber baseball team when you don’t have the money. That no doubt sounds like heresy to the millions who embraced Michael Lewis’s 2003 book, but all you need to do is keep in mind one number this postseason: 528,620,438. That’s the amount of money in payroll spent this season by the teams still in it—the New York Yankees, the Los Angeles Angels, the Philadelphia Phillies, and the Los Angeles Dodgers.
It appears AT&T Wireless has configured their RNC buffers so there is no packet loss, i.e. with buffers capable of holding more than ten seconds of data. Zero packet loss may sound impressive to a telephone guy, but it causes TCP congestion collapse and thus doesn’t work for the mobile Internet!
This is a pretty geeky article about packets across networks, but it’s important as it does highlight the fact that it’s very difficult to optimize a network for web traffic and voice traffic (latency issues, experience, etc).
