Interesting Stuff - The Sounding Line

This page is a work in progress…

Great Websites

In addition to the websites that I regularly link to in the ‘Top News Stories’ column, I also enjoy reading a small collection of independent news aggregators. Here are some of those sites, in no particular order (some links are now dead, unfortunately…):

Live Charts

The employed-to-population ratio:

All the various official inflation measures:

M1 and M2 money supply growth. The Fed no longer tracks M3.

Other Stuff

Here is a disorganized assortment of things that you may find interesting, or not…

Free Speech:

Rowan Atkinson explains what free speech is and what it isn’t:

The freedom to say that which a given society deems non-controversial has been enjoyed by every society in history. Free speech only has meaning when it applies to speech that society finds controversial, rude, wrong, and/or offensive.

Thomas Sowell on Wealth, Poverty, and Politics:

An aside, Dr. Sowell is 85 in the this interview. 

Milton Friedman: Free to Choose – 1979

I would have loved to know Milton Friedman’s take on the last decade.

Calvin Coolidge on taxes and government spending in 1924:

Calvin Coolidge was the last president to write his own speeches.

The Doomsday Gap:

If you’ve ever wondered about the logic behind doomsday weapons like Russia’s cobalt-60 nuclear tsunami torpedoes and nuclear powered nuclear missiles, Peter Sellers summed it up perfectly back in 1964:

The Doomsday Gap:

If you’ve ever wondered about the logic behind doomsday weapons like Russia’s cobalt-60 nuclear tsunami torpedoes and nuclear powered nuclear missiles, Peter Sellers summed it up perfectly back in 1964:

Short Stories

George Orwell – You and the Atomic Bomb

Orwell wrote the essay ‘You and the Atomic Bomb’ in 1945 within two months of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. Russia didn’t have the bomb yet. Mao hadn’t seized China yet.

E.M. Foster – The Machine Stops (PDF)

E.M. Foster wrote the short story ‘The Machine Stops’ in 1909, amazingly capturing the phycological landscape of our modern tech dystopia decades before the earliest computer had been invented, let alone video chatting on tablets.   

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr – Harrison Bergeron (PFD)

Harrison Bergeron, a short story about the tyranny of equality of outcomes, was assigned reading at my public high school. I rather doubt it still is. 

Kurt Vonnegut’s life, in and of itself, is a remarkable story. 

Books

Here are some books that I have recently read/listened to and enjoyed enough to mention:

Babylon: Mesopotamia and the Birth of Civilization

The Crusades: The Authoritative History of the War for the Holy Land

River of Darkness: Francisco Orellana’s Legendary Voyage of Death and Discovery Down the Amazon

Conquistador: Hernán Cortés, King Montezuma, and the Last Stand of the Aztecs

To be continued…