Misc

Video shows evolution of the Crab Nebula over 13 years. I don't know if it's expanding as much as current density is increasing and filaments are growing.

Even though Apple is more successful than Microsoft right now, Microsoft's founders became much richer than Apple's.

"So why are Microsoft founders so rich even as their company’s lost pole position? Because meritocracy is a myth, even at the highest levels of the American economy. Good fortune and random chance are huge influences everywhere. And market rewards, tautologically, accrue to those who are good at making money rather than those who are good at doing things.

Microsoft’s founders did a great job of retaining a huge amount of the company’s stock after its initial public offering, and that’s allowed them to turn its success into a vast fortune. Jobs, by contrast, blundered and got rid of most of his Apple shares in a fit of pique after he was forced out of the company."

That's a big part of it, but another reason is Microsoft was much more successful for most of its history. Apple only surpassed Microsoft in the last decade after running far behind for the previous two decades.

The Ozymandias poem comments on empire.

"The moral of “Ozymandias” seems simple. A great tyrant, otherwise known as Egyptian pharaoh Ramses II, has apparently commissioned a monument to his lofty works. The sculpted likeness, which bears his “wrinkled lip” and “sneer of cold command,” is inscribed with a boast: “My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;/ Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!” By the time we encounter the colossus, though, it has fallen into ruin. “Shattered” and “half sunk,” the “wreck” languishes in “lone and level sands.” Given Shelley’s anti-imperial leanings, the scornful takeaway seems obvious: So much for all that arrogant posturing. Joke’s on you, Oz! Can I call you Oz? Who cares! You’re just some rubble in the desert."

But it may have deeper meaning.

"Here is the joke, says Fry: Confronted by such a tapestry of unreliability, we think we have attained insight into Ozymandias. The sculptor was taken in too, when he tried to commit a version of his ruler to stone. But time warped his handiwork just as surely as it will reframe Shelley’s poem, muddle our recollections, and drag the leavings of our own lives through “lone and level sands.” (Are you laughing yet?) For Fry, in other words, “Ozymandias” links together a chain of egomaniacs who believe they have arrived at a stable form of knowing. It coaxes us into a glib understanding of its subject that it does not necessarily share—and the trench between that easy, seductive judgment and the truth (whatever it is) is the real irony."

Not so different.

Your smart home can be hacked, which doesn't sound very smart to me.