The Much Hadham Job

Ann Althouse mentions the theft of a giant bronze statue. You have to admire the daring - stealing two and a half tons of bronze.

I can think of a couple of suspects right away-

• Scott Adams certainly has the mind of a felon.
• Joan Aiken has proved she can think big.

And that mention of a Mini-Cooper, maybe someone from the cast of The Italian Job?

Somewhere, on a blog that I can't remember now, there was a question on the efficacy of savings over very long periods of time; should life extension protocols actually be found that work.

Someone used a quote from the The Notebooks of Lazarus Long:

$100 placed at 7 percent interest compounded quarterly for 200 years will increase to more that $100,000,000 - by which time it will be worth nothing.

Actually, someone has already tried this: Benjamin Franklin.

In 1790 he left in his will 1,000 pounds or about $4000 - a good sum in that day - and gave directions on it's investment, for the next 100 years. Despite various setbacks and changes in investment over the next 200 years the money grew to be more than $5,000,000 by 1990 - substantial increases on the principal, even when inflation is factored in.

This works out to about 3.7% annually compounded interest.

So, why would Heinlein have Lazarus, an immortal, say such a thing?

Well, it's clear from the books that Woodrow Wilson Smith, aka Lazarus Long, was a bit of a rogue. One can imagine him on some distant frontier planet, trying to coerce some earnest young and upright rube into joining a card game. It's payday and the boy's flush - but on his way to the bank to save that money, mindful of what his mother told him. He's just stopped in for a sarsaparilla, but Lazarus has this chair open at his table in the back of the saloon...

Still here. Isn't she a cute puppy? Nothing to do with finite elements, cfd, or space, but I've been too busy for much posting.

Well, it seemed to work.

First post, as the title says.

I've been posting online for quite a while (years), but the other page is primarily a daily journal and I am going to try to focus these pages a bit more on various scientific and technical issues.

I actually tried that once on the old page, and was asked to cease and desist by family members, who apparently visited with "the understanding there would be no math."

First Impression: Composing for this Blogger place is a bit different from using my archaic home-rolled HTML 3.2!

So.

Now to see how to post. Ah. There's a button...