Do you believe in magic?

Having supper with a few of my fellow dumbs and the conversation turned to the building of the pyramids. It was a detour to our main conversation (which was really just a series of detours in itself). The question was asked about the sort of labor used: slave, craftsmen, paid workers, mid-level project managers, or really, really outsourced labor. I decided to get to the bottom of it by spending six and a half minutes perusing the internets.

Path to Enlightenment in Minutes:

Time on the Internets	Proposed Explanation	Plausibility Score
0-2 minutes	The pyramids were built by slaves.	4
2-4 minutes	The pyramids were built by craftsmen and farmers (otherwise idle during the flooding season).	4
4-5 minutes	The pyramids were built by craftsmen, farmers (otherwise idle during the flooding season) and hoards of slaves.	8
5-6 minutes	The pyramids were built by aliens.*	99

*Hey, I was a doubter, too. But then I read this post in a “Mixed Martial Arts Forum” from a poster known as “The Tunisian Bullcrap Monkey.” Let’s just say, I didn’t have to read all the way through the list before I was a believer. Here is his post, the annotations (hover like a saucer over the highlit words) are mine.

Were The Pyramids Built By Aliens? Over the years i have taken a keen intrest in the ancient civilisations of the world. None however so much so as the Egyptians. I am still baffled to this day, at the powerfull corelations the Pyramids present. I cannot beilive that Human Hands actually made the Pyramids, i have yet to see them close up but many on lookers have been amazed at the precise cutting of each slab. The Human race before the Egyptians were unparralled to Civilisations after it. It seems the Egyptions had an advance concept way beyond there time. Isnt this strange? Consider these facts. There is NO record of the Pyramids being built, such wonders would surely have hordes of records attached to it . The Egyptians had not even invented the wheel yet, but the blocks that they had to carry to build the pyramids weighed about 2 tons each? 4,000 lbs.? What did they do... use cement? In fact, they used so much stone, that if you took all of the stone they used and cut it into 1 foot square blocks, it would extend 2/3 of the way around the earth!!! the fact that even though the sides of the base of the pyramid are some 757 feet long, it still forms an almost perfect square? Every angle in the base is exactly 90 degrees. In fact, the sides have a difference in length of something like two centimeters, which is an incredibly small amount. If you take the perimeter of the pyramid and divide it by two times the height, you get a number that is exactly equivalent to the number pi (3.14159...) up to the fifteenth digit. The chances of this phenomenon happening by sheer chance is remarkably small. Did the ancient Egyptians know what the number pi was? Not likely, seeing as it was a number not calculated accurately to the fourth digit until the 6th century, and the pyramids calculate it to the fifteenth. Fungi found in King Tuts chamber was NEVER found on Earth before. Chambers found recentlly show Humans offering food to some kind of Extra Terrestrial creature and there are drawings of Cylinder shaped discs. there is tons more evidence, personally id like to think that some kind of Extra Terrestrial gave us Knowledge in the past, i belive so, but we as humans always try to find a rational answer. Maybe that answer is in the stars.

I'm sure it is. A Tunisian Bullcrap Monkey said so.

The Distance From Macro to Me & You

I'm not sure yet how this idea evolves. But I am increasingly suspicious of the relevance of macro information to me as an individual. The media report daily on the minutia of financial indications and reports which might shed light on the overarching question of whether the U.S. economy is in a recession. Through it all, I wonder...so what? If I am told that the last two quarters of economic data dispositively indicate a recession, it's not as if my salary will be changed. If six weeks later the economic data is revised and the label, recession, is removed, will I ever feel the difference?

The macro and the micro may well be connected. But how long and tortured a path is it from the one to the other - and how many butterfly effect/tipping point branches are there from my micro to yours? The relevance of these questions isn't restricted to economics, of course. But that does seem to be getting the most airplay on the news.

By the way, the weatherman said that there is a 52.3% chance of rain in the United States today. Remember your umbrella.