Miscellanea

• Thanks to everyone who offered music suggestions. I'll let you know once I've listened to some stuff.



• I wish I had followed more assiduously the tale of Motorhomicus Vicaribus. It's such a cool adventure and so well documented. Unfortunately now I feel daunted when I want to go back and read up on stuff I missed. Ehren: you should put together the posts and photos in a book when you're done.



• There's a MMORPG called Second Life which is essentially just a virtual world where you can build a house, buy stuff and are encouraged to start your own business. There's a currency (the Linden dollar) with which you can buy stuff and which you earn if you build something or offer a service to somebody. Players in the game also receive a stipend each month from the game in order to fuel the economy.
  Anyway, it's not so much the game that I was interested in, but the fact that you can buy and sell Linden dollars with real money. This isn't such a new thing; people have been trading in virtual resources on eBay and the like for a long time. But now there's a site which offers a real time currency market for exchanges between L$ and USD. This means you could actually make (real) money as  a currency trader in this imaginary currency. There are real economic effects to consider; how much money is the central bank printing? do people save money or is it all in circulation? The world we live in...