Is the constant revision of our US paper money worth the trouble? Sure the new money looks a little better and a little more colorful, but it still spends the same. One has to wonder if professional counterfieters are really a greater cost to our economy than the costs of developing the currency, training cashiers and retooling vending machines.
10 Suriname Guilders is currently worth 0.00399616 United States Dollars (less than ½¢). In 2001, it was worth about 2.6 times as much. Before 2001, the Guilder had wild price fluctuations. Then the Suriname government imposed a trading band of 2500 to 2800 Guilders to the US Dollar.
In spite of this historically low value, the bill has quite a few security features including colorful ink, security thread and Moiré patterns to defeat scanners.
The new US $20 is just now getting away from it's monochrome green, but the U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing has introduced several other security features that are aimed at high-tech digital counterfeiting outfits. The Moiré patterns are much tighter and more complicated than the Suriname bill. The faint background gradient is actually composed of nested groups of concentric hexagons. This feature is too fine to be seen in the scan on the left.
The US continues to have a very low incidence of counterfeitting (1–2 in 10,000 bills are fake). But the new twenty has already been faked. As long as there are stupid clerks, poor-quality fakes will continue to be used. There have been at least two individuals that have passed off $200 novelty bills.
In Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina, cashiers took the obviously fake $200 bill at both the Blue Flame and the Food Lion stores. It features a picture of President George W. Bush on the front, and protest signs in the White House lawn on the back.
The police investigated and arrested the perpetrator. He could only be charged with “attempting to obtain property by false pretenses,” not counterfeiting, because there is no $200 US bill.
A similar scenario played out at a Dairy Queen in Danville, Kentucky. Police are still looking for the woman who left with her $2.12 in food and $197.88 in change.
These novelty $200 bills are available across the country and on the internet. I bought mine from TheFreeGuide.com. The 10 Guilder bill comes courtesy of the Vermulens as a reminder of their labors in Suriname guiding churches and translating the Bible.
In case you haven't had your fill of information regarding the latest Wacko Jacko news, Michael Jackson has set up a press release website to archive all his statements regarding the case. In the Statement After Processing in Santa Barbara, Michael opines, “Lies run sprints, but the truth runs marathons. The truth will win this marathon in court.” Jackson deserves a fair trial like everyone else, but the media circus is going to make it very difficult to find jurors who haven't already decided his guilt.
For the last few hundred years, political orientation has been measured with one dimention—left to right. A British group, The Political Compass (keep an eye out for where the British and American spellings differ), was the first to propose a two-dimensional system. They have retained the left–right (economic) axis and added an orthogonal social axis with libertarians on one side and authoritarians on the other.
Where do you think you fit on such a plane? Political Compass has organized a survey to test your views on a variety of subjects and see where you really line up.
There have been some who are concerened that Political Compass’ results are slanted. Political Compass has essentially ignored requests for more openness into how they score the questions and develop the results. Political Compass says it generates its income from sponsorship and seminars and cannot release this information without compromising its viability.
Chris Lightfoot didn't like this situation, so he designed his own, similar political survey. Unlike Political Compass, he shows all of his linear algebra methodology. He also shows all the statements he uses in their positive and contrapositive forms.
I would strongly recommend you not look at either the eigenvectors or the statement list pages until after you have taken the survey.
Chris’ survey consists of 75 questions; Political Compass’ has a few less. Both are split into 6 pages worth of survey. Both are similar in the sense that they make statements and ask whether you agree or disagree.
Where do you stack up against political celebrities like Adolf Hitler or Tony Blair? Political Compass has slightly different results on their analysis page (remember the comment about skewed results?). Another interesting comparison is the mapping of the 2004 US Presidential Primary Candidates.
I took Chris Lightfoot’s survey twice. For some of the questions, my position allowed the question to be answered more than one way. I added the blue dot to represent the region where I think similar surveys should place me. Political Compass’ survey placed me a little more to the left than Lightfoot’s.
I enabled sanitized html in the comments. Currently, the following tags are allowed: a href, b & i, blockquote, br, p, em & strong, ol, ul & li.
I also added comment id tags so links can be made to an individual comment. Thanks maddy.
I have removed the mailto: link from the comments. I already have a spambot prevention method in place, but this should remove any incentive for email harvesters. Except for the occasional off-list comments, the email addresses served no real useful purpose.
I am working on finding a way to remove the email address and URL boxes from the comment entry pages. The plan is to just have a Name and Comments box.
I managed to corrupt the comments database. Fortunately, there weren’t too many comments, so I’ll just replace them and put a note at the top of each comment about the whole thing. The IP addresses and dates won't match the originals, but I guess it will have to do.
