MJ

The tragedy of his death was exceeded only by the tragedy of his life.

Clearly seriously mentally ill for decades, the drug use exacerbating the illness, demanding more drugs, in a vicious spiral. He died 25 years ago, and it just took 25 years to complete.

Listen to him sing "Got to be there" and hear the sweetness and purity that I remember listening to a vinyl 45 on the stereo all those years ago.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1m4ddUY4pc

...before all of life came crashing down.

What I would have told him

A week or so ago, it seems that someone around 45 threw himself out the window of an apartment building in the neighborhood. That is all I know.

If it had something to do with the economy... maybe he lost his job, maybe his company went bankrupt (many in this area have), maybe he had a mortgage...

What I would have told him is this:
Money is just worthless pieces of paper. They print more and more when they feel the need. In fact, they don't even bother to do even that anymore... they just type a number into a computer and hit return... The only real thing is you. You are the only thing of value, the only thing of worth.

If you insist on an actual reckoning, you were worth at least a million dollars in future productivity, if not much more.

If life is fleeting

more fleeting still is happiness.

The components of diet that might be most useful

The components of the Mediterranean diet that are associated with lower mortality are
moderate consumption of alcohol,
low consumption of meat and meat products, and
high consumption of vegetables, fruits and nuts, olive oil, and legumes.

High consumption of fish and cereals and avoidance of dairy products in the Mediterranean diet seemed to have little to do with the benefits of the diet.

What is a $100 bill?

Nothing but a no-interest pay-the-bearer bond...

Mexico may stop exporting oil by 2012

As Mexico has provided us with a substantial fraction of our imported oil, this is no small deal.

http://seekingalpha.com/article/144962-should-mexico-stop-exporting-oil

The devil is in the details

Did you hear the one about the statistician who drowned crossing the river of average depth of two feet...

The Money Illusion

During the bubble, agents in the UK, the US, and elsewhere always said: Real estate prices never go down; they only go up.

I said: They say that because the are lying... or stupid...

First, such statements refer to the nominal prices of houses, not to their inflation-adjusted prices.

Bread nominally cost 5 cents when my grandmother was young, but then, wages were 25 cents an hour. Adjusted for inflation, that is like 1 dollar a loaf at a wage of 5 dollars an hour, which is not so different from now in spite of a century of technical progress and us currently burning a whole hell of a lot of oil.

Second, the prices of houses do, in fact, go down. Typically, they double and then drop by half, adjusted for inflation, although there can be significant undershoot. And sometimes they go down and stay down for decades. This is not secret information. Just google it. It is amazing that the biggest housing bubble in history inflated when there was Internet access... or maybe people just looked for what they wanted to hear. (Oh, wait, when you have TimeWarner AOL, you have something vaguely resembling Internet access, except you have to wait on hold for customer service literally for hours just to find out that they set fields so that you cannot access what you want and you have to manually go through 7 separate pages putting in random codes so that it works... just like the YahooBroadbandJapan 6M modem for 15 dollars a month that I picked up, plugged in, and turned on with the computer... ten years ago. They know that if they offered high-speed broadband, like the 50M I have now, everyone would just cancel their cable subscriptions. TimeWarner AOL? 1M and just 30 dollars a month! And what convenience and service! It is not only our roads and bridges...)

Currently, we have a number of monkey wrenches flying around at the same time.
We overbuilt, so there are too many units.
We overbuilt, so many of the units are too big and expensive to maintain.
We overbuilt by expanding farther and farther into surrounding areas, making commutes ridiculous.
The price of oil, and therefore of gasoline, will become progressively chaotic as supply wanes (I guess lows of 2 dollars a gallon and highs of 5 to 10).
The supply of oil has plateaued over the last 5 years, and considering that the price went from 30 dollars to 147 during that time, it is pretty clear that even with the producers pumping as fast as they could, there was no increase in output. That is not a good sign. And it is even a worse portent if this means that new oil projects, while possible, take so much time to set up because of financing and, well, the oil is at the north pole or 7 miles under the sea, that the lag time until the oil actually flows has become the killer.
The dollar could start a steep decline, which would make the price of oil skyrocket denominated in dollars. The US imports 70 percent of its oil. That alone could take oil in the US back up to 150, with 5 dollar a gallon gas, making those overbuilt units accessible only by ridiculous commute worth even less.
Our infrastructure is BIG! But it is also of low quality and requires maintainance, without which, oh, I don't know... bridges fall down for no reason? The roads are so full of potholes that that is further impeding access to the faraway overbuilt units of declining value.
California finances are about to blow up. Ratings agencies (otherwise known as useless shills) are threatening to reduce California's ratings by multiple notches, which would render bonds near junk levels, or actually at junk levels, which would cause wholesale dumping of such bonds since many retirement funds etc. cannot by law hold junk bonds.
Bad economy and less employment means the overbuilt units are worth even less, and the commute becomes even more prohibitive.
It is not just California; other states are in as bad shape. When California blows up, the other states may all follow.

George Soros said the worst is behind us... hmm, I wonder what he is shorting... or buying...

This isn't finished. This is like in an Indiana Jones movie where they fall off a cliff, and after a terrifying plunge, find themselves safely teetering on a ledge, only to fall off in a much much worse plunge. California will be the lighting of the fuse that will really make the whole fiat-currency petrodollar-and-overseas-manufacturing-dollar-recycling overconsumption debt-financed don't-worry-we-will-get-8%-annual-return-on-the-pension-fund ponzi scheme blow up.

The only way out of this: Cause to materialize in the US a whole lot of 20 dollar a barrel oil that will last for decades.
If anyone knows how to do this, please let the rest of us know.

Many people say don't worry

Things will transition gradually.

Yes, like October last year when all the investment banks vanished in one week...

And other people say there are fears the dollar will die, but it hasn't happened yet... Oh, they mean how over the lifetime of my parents a dollar has become 6 cents...

The Chinese want SDRs

The Chinese say they want IMF SDRs to replace the dollar because the SDRs would essentially be a basket of major currencies.

But wouldn't that just essentially be a fiat currency made up of fiat currencies?

My Merrill Lynch broker

Hmm, now that the major blow up from last year is finished and Merrill is in a shotgun wedding with Bank of America, I note the following.

At no time did my broker ever contact me about a potential market crash.

There are only two possibilities here.

1) The broker did not know.

2) The broker knew and did not do anything.

Like the ratings agencies, completely useless either way.

I got out before the crash, so damage was minimal.

Simple procedure cures blindness!

Bravo!

Treatments are really about to become exponentially better.

Absolutely stunning stage show by The Killers

The boreal summer solstice

The Earth is now at the point in its orbit in which the north pole is most tipped toward the Sun. The northern hemisphere therefore receives the maximal amount of sunlight and is starting to heat up. It takes a while to warm up, so the maximum temperatures will not occur until August.

Newsweeks says

Rubin's argument [that we are going to have serious energy problems] is powerful. There's no denying that the international economy has become critically dependent on oil as its main source for energy. Yet, like other believers in the "peak oil" theory, he falls into the trap of underestimating society's capacity to meet future fuel challenges through innovation and conservation. The story of energy over the past century has been one of breakthroughs, not retreat...

Hmm, not sure what they mean. The US imported net 0% of the oil it used in 1970; it is now importing 70%.
If we have to trust in "society's capacity... to meet challenges", the record does not inspire confidence.
How about the trap of "there is no problem because I cannot imagine there being one"? Property prices only go up.
Markets are efficient because people are rational and have perfect knowledge (Can you hear my eyeballs rolling? Just the fact that economists think that is proof of stupidity that will require advanced genetic engineering to correct.)
Pension funds will get a return of 8 percent per year, so no problem there.
We cannot possibly double the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere, and even if we do, no problem.
We cannot fish cod and other fish to near extinction because the sea is so big.
We cannot possibly burn up all the cheap high-quality petroleum in a single lifetime.
The price of gasoline, today, went down, so I can buy an SUV because of course the price of gasoline today accurately reflects the price of gasoline over the service life of the SUV.
Hell, we cannot even control the amount of food we eat.

Origin of Life

We are getting closer to understanding the formation of basic protocells.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/16/science/16orig.html?_r=1&em

Lakes and oceans on Mars

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/06/090617171821.htm

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/11/081117212321.htm

Oil may save us in an unexpected way

The cheap oil that was easy to drill for is gone, the entirety of that resource of the entire planet squandered in a single lifetime. But, in a twist, the oil could save us yet.

As the shallow oil has been depleted, we have learned to drill deeper and deeper. This may lead to the ability to exploit geothermal resources.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=google-invests-in-geothermal

Why I think Gaia Theory is, well, silly

The only way one can think that is planet is a wonderful nurturing Earth-Mother superorganism is to be ignorant of the history of this planet. For most of the last 4.5 billion years, if we were living on another planet and spectroscopically analyzed Earth from a distance, we would have said, "Yuck, unbreathable atmosphere... no sense going to the Sol system." For most of the time, we humans, were we just plopped down on Earth, would have promptly expired.

I am certain that life has altered the atmosphere and the geology of the Earth. This does not make it the best of all possible worlds.
http://judson.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/16/guest-column-heavy-weather/

I am fairly certain that Venus and Mars were similar to Earth and had oceans for the first billion years or so, and I am also fairly certain that they had life. That life was unable to control Venus, and its surface is now sterilized by high temperatures. Mars almost certainly still has life, but again, life was not able to maintain a clement planet, and most of it is now in a deep freeze.

For those of us fortunate enough to live in the first part of the 21st century and fortunate enough to live in one of the wealthier countries and be in one of the wealthier classes, it seems that things are wonderful and always have been so. Place our lives in the context of the last 100,000 years of human existence, and we see we have won the biggest lottery of all time. We marvel at it all because we live in a special time. Plop us down in any other time in the past (and possibly the future) and we would think we were living in Hell.

Why there should be no capital punishment

It is impossible to undo mistakes.

(Not to mention that humans are too stupid to decide things like that.)

Our sense of self is a virtual simulation within a larger simulation of an external reality which is larger still.
Thomas Metzinger

March 13, 1989

Tim Berners-Lee proposes the World Wide Web.

And the world was changed as much as by the control of fire and the invention of writing...

Unfortunately, this does not apply only to this field

It is no crime to be ignorant of economics, which is, after all, a specialized discipline and one that most people consider to be a "dismal science." But it is totally irresponsible to have a loud and vociferous opinion on economic subjects while remaining in this state of ignorance.
--Murray Rothbard

The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.
Winston Churchill

Thanks a lot

After decades of misleading the willingly gullible, because they are stupid or lying shills or both, it seems to finally be beyond the ability of Cambridge Energy Research Associates CERA and the International Energy Agency IEA to keep repeating the mantra of whatever alternate reality fantasyland they live in... hmm, sounds like FoxNews. They have delayed the taking of necessary steps to reduce our dependency on foreign energy by decades, ensuring that trillions of dollars flowed overseas, accelerating the decline of the US. GM and Chrysler believed them, which is, actually, their own fault.

http://energybulletin.net/node/49178

I hope they live a long, long time so they witness the unnecessary chaos they were instrumental in fostering. Stupidity is not harmless.

http://www.straight.com/article-229446/david-suzuki-now-we-own-general-motors-what-should-we-do-it

Instead of poisoning termites, maybe just feed them sugar?

Glucono delta-lactone is a common sugar in certain foods and is used as a food additive. At least in the laboratory, when you feed this sugar to termites, it causes their nest to be infested with fungus and they die!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glucono_delta-lactone

World Bank downgrades 2009 global growth forecast 4.7%

It was +3.0%, now -1.7%.

To whom are they going to sell the 2 trillion dollars in bonds?

Step one: Give money to the banks.

Step two: Have the banks buy the bonds.

Brilliant!

Somehow, though, this sounds like a simple plan...
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120324/synopsis

Analog broadcast TV comes to an end in the US

After numerous problems and a postponement, analog broadcasting has come to an end in the US. It is amazing that something that became common only 60 years ago is now gone. Another step on the long road to the Earth becoming nearly radio-silent.

Detection of extraGALACTIC planet by gravitational microlensing?

This is just amazing.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17287-first-extragalactic-exoplanet-may-have-been-found.html

Failure to take into account exponential advances in technology

The author argues that the empire will be saved because our native tongue is the lingua inglese of the world. We see this idea in Star Trek in which all the the Terrans speak "Standard", which presumably was intended to mean that they all speak "standard English" (but it now seems more likely that they speak "standard Mandarin" and what we are seeing is filtered through the universal translator).

The stats say it all. ... English is a first language for 400 million people, and a fluent second for between 300 and 500 million more... Add on top of that the 750 million who have studied English as a foreign language and you have well over 1 billion members of the English-speaking world. Every globally influential newspaper is either written in English or has an English-language version. The same is nearly true for science, where more than 90 percent of the world's major journals are printed in English. ...

Note that in Star Trek: Deep Space 9, for example, everyone is not speaking Standard. The Ferengi are usually speaking Ferengi, and for our convenience, everything is being processed by the universal translator. We see this when Quark's unit malfunctions and when the Ferengi are heard by we poor 20th century hewmons, who obviously do not have universal translators in our ears.

What the author does not anticipate is how rapidly computer translation will advance and how cheap it will become... like everything in computing... Try comparing a CNN story in English and the corresponding story in Spanish. Take the Spanish version and run it through the free Google translation software. You will be shocked. Now, of course this is much more difficult with other language pairs, and in, for example, many Japanese-English translations, there is not a single word that corresponds, but you can usually get the idea, or at least suspect that a passage is worth closer reading in English.

I would turn what the author is saying on its head and say that what will happen from now is that all publications will be available in real time in a first-glance computer-translated form, followed a day later by a human-edited form if of sufficiently wide interest. All publications, especially scientific publications, will be translated from the original language into all other major languages, and the translations will be subject to automatic indexing and "Google alerts". If something is really important, after seeing the gist in translated form, the person can then read the specific section of interest in the original (English) document or have the excerpt translated by a human translator. In other words, our advantage of being able to skim in our native language will be lost, and everyone will be able to skim in every language.

The result will be explosive advances in non-English-speaking countries as the language barrier nearly disappears. And wait until we actually do have reasonable cheap universal translators, say in ten years...

Senator Boehner vs Senator Coburn

OMG, Senator Boehner is even more gifted than Senator Coburn, stammering and incoherent because he doesn't know what he is talking about. Carbon dioxide is a carcinogen?!? Carbon dioxide does not cause global warming because we exhale carbon dioxide?!? Give him more airtime! It is all being broadcast to the entire galaxy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EpSRAvBNtfA

The comments boil down to
1) I don't know anything about brain surgery either, but I'll just do the operation myself because I don't know what I don't know, and
2) It's expensive, so it is not true.

Psychotic form over function

Most people confuse the form of a thing with the quality of a thing. They design for style and then wonder why performance suffers. They monomanically focus on one characteristic until the whole teetering mess falls over in a banjaxed heap.

For more than a century, roses were bred for the bloom alone. Why? Because that is how the judging was done. The exhibitor would cut the rose and put it in a vase on a table for the judges. Since the bloom was all the judges could see, that is all the hybridizers would hybridize for. Over time, the hybrids became weak-rooted cripples that had to be grafted onto rootstock to grow properly. They became disease-prone and had to be constantly sprayed to stop blackspot and a whole host of diseases, leaving former rose fields toxic.

Finally, some sense has prevailed, and some hybridizers focus on the overall plant.

This kind of behavior becomes downright psychotic in the breeding of animals. This is so unbelievably cruel.
Why do over 80 per cent of Bulldog births happen by caesarian section? http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/peter_wedderburn/blog/2009/04/06/why_do_over_80_per_cent_of_bulldog_births_happen_by_caesarian_section

"Unusual" Water Saving Sink

I added quotation marks above because this has been standard in Japan for decades.

http://www.dannylipford.com/diy-home-improvement/kitchens-and-baths/unusual-water-saving-sink/

First known recording of the human voice

From 1860!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptsePQWJIX0

http://firstsounds.org/sounds/scott.php

There used to be this toy sold in Japan. I don't know if they still sell it. It was a mylar balloon with a long strip of plastic attached to it like you would attach a string. The strip of plastic had small ridges on it, so when you grabbed it between your fingers and pulled, the ridges would cause vibrations that would travel up the strip and cause the balloon to vibrate, making speaking sounds. It was quite amusing.

They still make such things!
http://www.talkietapes.com/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tv20cFYOeZU

White roofs reflect infrared both out of the house and into the house

After reading a lot of comments on various articles about white roofs, there is a LOT of confusion about what white roofs do. This is very counterintuitive. A reflecting surface such as aluminum foil in insulation behind walls, mylar emergency blankets, and titanium oxide elastomeric roofs (sometimes called "white roofs") reflects infrared in both directions.

Even though you cannot see the side that is facing the roof, a white roof coating is reflecting infrared coming out of the roof back into the roof.

If you have a mylar emergency blanket, which is just a thin sheet of mylar, and you put it between you and the Sun, you will not feel any heat from the Sun because all the infrared from the Sun will be reflected back toward the Sun, and the heat from your body will be reflected back to you. Because you emit so much less infrared than the Sun, you will perceive it as being cooler under the mylar. On the other hand, if it were a cold night and you were to wrap the mylar around yourself, the mylar would reflect most of the infrared escaping from your body back to your body, so you would feel warm. If you place the sheet of mylar on the ground on a cold night with no snow, the ground underneath the mylar will not freeze, but the ground around it will freeze. Why? Because the heat in the ground under the mylar will not be lost as infrared radiation because the mylar will reflect it back into the ground.

In brief, what this means is that a reflective roof will reflect heat away from the roof during the summer when the heat would be undesirable, and it would reflect heat back into the house during the winter when it would be desirable to keep the heat in the house.

You see this effect all the time but may not have noticed.
In the summer, it is hot on clear days and cooler on cloudy days because the direct sunlight is being reflected away by the clouds.
In winter, it is cooler on clear nights and warmer on cloudy nights because the clouds reflect infrared back down to the ground so it is not lost to space.
This is because the clouds reflect infrared in both directions.
Having a white roof is like having a permanent white cloud over your house.
If you live in a cold northerly climate, in the winter, the sunlight is not hitting your roof very much anyway, so more heat would be lost through a dark roof than a white roof, and what you want is a lot of southfacing windows.

As I said above, this is very counterintuitive.

Who's minding the mint?

http://www.ottawacitizen.com/Business/Mint+refuses+rule+theft+gold/1667854/story.html

Tickle us, do we not laugh?

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=104952197

The new Star Trek movie

The new cast is absolutely spot on, echoing without mimicking.

The visual references to nearly everything in the scifi universe and the nonstop quotes from the original series and previous Trek movies gave fans a wink a minute.

And for those new to Trek, there was nonstop action from beginning to end (although I could have done without the monsters on the ice moon, but hey, it did make me giggle, as in ice moon Hoth and abominable snowman in Star Wars).

The echoing is thrown into brilliant relief when Chris Pine says "Bones" in the last scene.

What is amazing about The Ship of Dreams being constructed in The Field of Dreams is that we are taken from the real world we know in Iowa to the bridge of the Enterprise in all its looks-like-a-damn-Macintosh-designed-in-Cupertino-California glory (hat tip to the writer who said that first). That is why the first trailer showed us a real-life sweating human working with a blowtorch on a starship. Gorgeous on the inside and out. And they finally got jumping to warp right in the Battlestar way.

My only question is why is San Francisco so ugly in the 23rd century?

Even the basic symmetry is terrific: Woman has child but loses husband, leading to a lot of trouble; husband loses wife and child and look out!

Even the end credits are subversive by warping to terrestrial planet after terrestrial planet (gas giants need not apply). When Trek first premiered in the 60s, we had no evidence of extrasolar planets, except for a possible gas giant around Barnard's Star (which turned out not to be true). With the extrasolar planet tally at 349 so far, it doesn't even make the news when new ones are discovered unless they are relatively close to Earth mass or orbit in a possible habitable zone. The ancients vaguely suspected. With thousands to be discovered and characterized over the next decade, finally yielding estimates for terrestrial planets in the hundreds of billions, to us other planets have become a yawn.

The most subversive of all is the multiverse point of view: this universe that we see is only one of the 10 raised to the 500th power possible universes. Because there is a finite number of quantum states in a universe, with a sufficiently large number of universes, the patterns statistically repeat. Everything that can happen has happened, is happening, and will happen again.

As Copernicus dethroned us from a special place in the universe, and as Darwin dethroned us from a special place in nature, so we are ultimately dethroned from a special time and reality.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiverse

Small shaded area greatly reduces photovoltaic output

In commonly installed photovoltaic setups, if a small portion of a panel is shaded, this can result in a huge loss in output.

One solution is to have a separate inverter for each panel, sometimes called a microinverter.

Another solution is the National Semiconductor SolarMagicTM power optimizer.
http://www.national.com/news/item/0,1735,1385,00.html

The Herculean efforts directed at getting conversion efficiency up by fractions of a percent could, I suppose, eventually substantially improve on Sanyo's 23 percent, but in the meantime, overall management of the variations in output seems like the most pressing problem.

Where is it going to come from?

The magical printing press!

Deutsche Bank recently predicted that Chinese reserves will rise by only $100 billion this year, compared with $418 billion last year. You don't need a Nobel prize in economics to know that $100 billion won't finance much of a $1.84 trillion deficit.

Vitamin D

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/revealed-the-best-protection-against-cancer-1693138.html

The latest oil production data... and it don't look good

To those who have been insisting there is no problem, we ask, "Well, where is it?"


http://www.theoildrum.com/node/5395

A clue to the collapse of Mayan civilization

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20227104.400-temple-timbers-trace-collapse-of-mayan-culture.html

See post about reading Maya below.

Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn

“What if you want to drive a gas hog? You don’t have the right any longer in this country to spend your money to drive a gas hog?”

Of course you can. Continue to bleed the wealth out of the country. Certain parties will be very pleased.

And by the way, what you pay at the pump is not the true price of gasoline. It is heavily subsidized. If you want to pay the unsubsidized price of, oh, 10 dollars a gallon, go ahead. If not, you are stealing money from the rest of us. It is often amazing just how incapable of thought even the senators are. I mean, they do things like go to a polluted lake, take a handful of water, drink it, and say, "Looks OK to me".

Only GE left

GM, once a rock-solid blue chip, was removed from the Dow Jones industrial average and delisted by the New York Stock Exchange.

"This is proof that GM has failed," said automotive historian Bob Elton. "They have been failing for years but have covered it up. Now they've come to the end of the line."

This is hardly news.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/programs/info/1201.html

And guess who bought up electric rail lines across the country and ripped them out so that people would be forced to buy internal combustion engine cars and cities would be forced to buy internal combustion engine buses? This is what you get when you allow companies to hijack public services so as to manufacture markets so they can make more money. And by the way, they were convicted of this. The fine was 5,000 dollars.

Good news!

Maybe we don't have to move the Earth outward to compensate for the brightening of the Sun. Without this effect, we would have to move the Earth or take other steps to avoid runaway greenhouse effect like on Venus. As a rough approximation, if this is true, over the last 500 million years, the Earth has moved outward about 75,000 km?

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17228-why-is-the-earth-moving-away-from-the-sun.html