gramie

Chariot of the Gods, by Erich von Däniken, was actually published in 1968. The nonsense has been going on for quite a while.

There was a story recently about music companies being sued because it turns out their audiophile editions of vinyl records were typically pressed from digital sources (to save money, even though audiophile pressings were being sold for many times the price of regular ones), rather than through a fully analog chain.

A group of international sommeliers were unable to detect that the red wine they were tasting was actually white wine with food coloring in it. I think that the bar for genuinely assessing wines by taste is very low.

Some estimates place Putin's wealth at hundreds of billions of dollars. There is no way he's going to face any consequences.

I also remember the 1980s. A computer with 64k of memory cost $300, about $1,000 in today's money. In 1986 my company bought a 10 MB hard drive. I believe it was around $1,500, or roughly $5,000 today.

My first modem in 1987 ran at 300 baud, slow enough that I could read incoming text as it arrived.

When I went to Africa in 1988 as a volunteer, the only way to communicate with my family was by mail, and a letter typically took one month each way. Now that village in Africa has a cell phone tower.

Moving to Japan in the early 1990s, telephone calls home cost $2.50/minute. I was using email, but almost no one I knew had it.

Even cars, for all their faults, are tremendously safer, more efficient, more reliable, and longer lasting than they were when I was growing up in the 1960s and '70s.

I just ran the numbers through a tax calculator for my province (Quebec). It says that on a salary of $18,000, I would pay about $1,200 for the pension plan and employment insurance. $0 paid for taxes, and I would actually receive a $4,000 as a tax refund.

And, of course Healthcare is free, Quebec has pharmacare so prescription drugs would be free, childcare is about $10/day if I need it, and since my salary is less than $90,000/year, I would qualify for free dental care.

There would also be a few things like the GST refund that would be about $500/year in my pocket.

Canada is not paradise, but I sure prefer living here.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Soul of a New Machine, chronicling the development of Data General's Eagle computer in the 1970s, one of the characters is a microcode developer, responsible for hardwired logic that runs the CPU.

Part of his job is managing electrical impulses that last for microseconds or nanoseconds. One day, the team comes in to find his workstation abandoned, with a note on the monitor saying that he is going to join a commune in Vermont, and never dealing with a unit of time smaller than a season again.

The tech may be ancient for us, but it's a superb book.

I think that the Bip was the battery life champion. I checked sometime in the past year, and I think Amazfit watches typically lasted between 1 and 2 weeks.

It's not a perfect fit for the question, but I absolutely loved the Flashman books by George MacDonald Fraser.

Flashman was the antagonist in a much older book called Tom Brown School Days. Flashman was the school bully who made Tom's life hell.

In the Flashman novels, he has been expelled from the private school and joins the military. As an officer in the British army, he is present at and influences most of the major battles of the early and middle 19th century.

He is an appalling coward, a disgusting misogynist, and generally all-round horrible person.

But the books do an excellent job of describing the politics and military actions, as well as the cultures where they are set. There may be better history books, but nothing has stayed in my mind as well as Fraser's descriptions as the retreat from Afghanistan, Little Bighorn, The charge of the light brigade, and many others.

I'm perfectly happy with my Amazing Bip watch. It keeps track of my steps and sleep, and links to my phone so that it will buzz if I get a call or text.

It's about 7 years old now, and still gets almost a month of regular use on a single charge.

That is actually one of my favorite books of all time. Well, at least the first two trilogies. After that, I don't think he really had much to say.

What worked for me was a protagonist who was in many ways a terrible human being, but actually thought about the morality of his actions, and respected the values of the secondary characters.

It was also the first book I ever read that required me to keep a dictionary nearby. I was only about 16 when I read the first book, but I enjoyed having my vocabulary expanded.

Some people probably dislike the overwhelming amount of similes and heavy use of metaphor, but it made me sit back and think about what I was reading, rather than just burning through it.

I can't remember when a premonition saved me, but I certainly can remember dozens or hundreds of times when I had an irrational fear that something would go badly but it didn't.