Sunday, December 20, 2009
We have been processing and eating grains for a long time
Not 10,000 years, not 25,000 years, but 100,000 years and maybe longer ago.
Liquid lakes on Titan!
When you look at a picture of the Earth, you will see a little bright spot where the sunlight is glinting off the water. This is a sure sign of a liquid. The glint has been spotted on Titan, so we know it is liquid. What a strange world... hundreds of degrees below zero, but with a landscape of ice and raining liquid hydrocarbons that looks like Earth!
Sunday, December 13, 2009
Avatar looks awesome
http://www.avatarmovie.com/
I still haven't seen it, but people I know who have said you should really try to see the 3D version... the 2D version doesn't do it.
Saw the 3D version... Just amazing... and so much life!
This review is hilarious.
The survival of the kindest
And the selfish should be shunned, because if they do it to someone else, what makes you think they won't do it to you?
Tuesday, December 1, 2009
It is cool now
The ginko leaves are bright yellow everywhere, but have not started to really fall yet.
Infantilization
As James Kunstler has said, the infantilization of the nation has become so extreme...
This is The Flower of the Enlightenment? This is what so many gave their lives for?
CNN says it dumped Lou Dobbs because CNN is a "serious news organization"... have you looked at their website recently? Otherwise called:
tabloid
rag
sports news
alien abduction
You get the picture.
Last chance
I think we have one chance to save the US:
cut military expenditures, improve efficiency, and cut nonsense consumption...
If we do not do these things now (we should have started 30 years ago), there will be a very unpleasant downward spiral, rather rapid, like a decade, I think.
The cheap oil really is gone, so the whole model of endless growth that we have become accustomed to over our entire lives needs to be, of necessity, ditched... NOW.
Thursday, November 26, 2009
Sunday, November 22, 2009
The mikan are ripe
One of the joys of autumn in Japan is when the ripe mikans arrive. Thin-skinned, easy to peel, sweet, and at their best, like sugar water, and with a soft citrus smell. I just ate half a bag.
This blog turned three on November 12
Forgot about the date. Amazing how much everything has changed in just three years...
Saturday, November 21, 2009
What if the Earth had rings?
Totally brilliant! Bravo!
Best to go to this link and watch full screen.
Serious economic damage to the US starts at $80 per barrel
... every recession since 1972 has been associated with an oil price surge that took U.S. oil consumption past 4% of gross domestic product. Today, he said, the magic number to get there is $80.
Ongoing controversy in comet blast 13,000 years ago over N America
I find it difficult to understand how something could kill all the megafauna. Something dramatic would have to happen.
What survived were frogs, salamanders, crocodiles, and animals that could hide in the water or underground. Most of the large animals vanished.
Perhaps the blast caused widespread fires. Perhaps there was disease.
Also, perhaps the animals were spooked by the fires and ran until they were exhausted? This is what is done in persistence hunting.
Something must have happened to cause the death so many large animals in North America. It seems difficult to believe that they could all have simply been hunted to extinction because I think the human population was too small... but maybe not.
Gut bacteria can alter digestion dramatically
A high-fat, high-sugar diet can quickly and dramatically change the population of microbes living in the digestive tract...
...
And when this new collection of human microbes was transplanted into germ-free mice, the mice gained an increased amount of fat tissue even when fed low-fat diets, compared to mice that got human microbes from mice fed low-fat diets.
Central Bankers
... central bankers have been exposed as mortals/charlatans (ie pretending to command an exact science, when economics is merely a descriptive branch of anthropology)...
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
Monday, November 16, 2009
Santa and the flying reindeer
Many, many years ago, in Hawaii, just before Christmas, one evening (you were never sure just when), two policemen on motorcycles would ride down the street announcing, "Kids! Santa is coming!"
And right behind them, there he was in his sleigh with nine mechanical reindeer prancing into the air, Rudolf's nose glowing bright red. Santa would throw candy, especially peppermints. Kids ran alongside the float, with big brown paper sacks, trying to get as much candy as possible.
One of my fondest memories of a world that is so very far away now...
In more recent years, a neighbor on the next block would go all out for Christmas. His yard was filled with plywood cutouts he made and painted himself. Every year, he would add popular characters: this year Power Rangers, next year Ewoks. People used to come from far away to drive by to see what the new characters were.
Perhaps decline in oil supply will be even steeper
And one should remember that the oil that remains is much less desirable in quality and much more difficult to access.
The graphs show many interesting aspects of where the supplies will come from.
So, suddenly, there are calls for an urgent review.
Autumn
It is still warm during the day, but fairly cool at night, and the leaves have begun to turn... although the ginko leaves are still green.
Sunday, November 15, 2009
Water on the Moon!
Who knows? There might even be water everywhere if we just dig down into the regolith. Under the dust of Mars, there is water ice.
Saturday, November 14, 2009
More evidence that studying economics makes you blind, deaf, and stupid
Still, the great problem with neoclassical economics is the one has already been discussed in these posts: its models have consistently failed to foresee devastating economic disasters that many people outside the economics profession could readily and accurately predict years in advance.
The implosion of the world economy in 2008 is only the most recent case in point.
One writer who surveyed the economics field in the aftermath of the crash noted with some asperity that fewer than two dozen economists anywhere in the world warned in advance of the gargantuan bubble of securitized debt that exploded that year.
This blog is excellent! The prose, the humor, the clarity.
You have to be in the top 20 out of 50,000
Nationally (US), there are 15,000 professional economists.
So let's say worldwide there are about 50,000 of them.
To outperform the 50,000, you just had to be in the 99.999%ile. Fortunately, this was not difficult.
The occupation is characterized by a low joblessness level. The unemployment rate for employees was 4% in 2006.
Hmm, I wonder what the rate is now.
Tuesday, November 3, 2009
Who needs cable
It's going to happen, the only question is when. The cable TV industry's monopolistic, anti-consumer practice of offering bloated, overpriced programming packages is coming mercifully to an end, brought down by a slew of more affordable options made possible by broadband Internet.
Years ago, I tried to get cable, but the landlord wouldn't allow it. Now, in a panic, they have installed it in the building because it is pretty standard these days. Too bad I hardly ever watch TV now... maybe an hour or two per month... because the Net is just so much more interesting and is on demand.
I really hate Time-Warner cable Road Runner internet service though, because they put up all kinds of bizarre hurdles. With Yahoo Broadband Japan, I just plugged in and that was it. With Time-Warner, I had to spend 6 hours trying to figure out what was wrong, then 2 hours on the phone (one hour on hold) and set a dozen fields with long nonsense strings just to access my email, and things still, to this day, that are perfectly normal in the rest of the world, are blocked by Time Warner. Personally, I think the IT people make it difficult because they think they will have jobs, but what they did in my case is waste my time, so as soon as I can ditch them, I will. More incompetent than Microsoft, and that is saying a lot.
Monday, November 2, 2009
Happy 40th Birthday, Internet!
The first message sent over the Internet:
LO
They wanted to type LOGIN; then it crashed, then they tried again.
So the first word was LO, and with the next L, it became LOL...
Nasca plain was turned to desert by cutting down all the trees
Then a very severe El Nino came, flooding washed away the soil...
Monday, October 26, 2009
Fall leaves as warning coloration
So, to sort of show whether this theory about whether this
coloration was some sort of warning to insects, the scientists actually put aphids on these
two different types of trees. They put aphids, which are sort of a pest of apple trees, on
trees with leaves that really didn’t change colors, so leaves were mostly green, and they
put the aphids on trees which have a lot of these really bright red leaves. And what they
found was that – come Spring – 60% of the aphids in the green trees survived versus only
29% of those in the red trees. So, even though the scientists didn’t show it specifically, it
seems to argue that maybe there is something poisonous about these red leaves or just
something undesirable about these leaves that’s harmful to the insects, so when the trees
get, you know, bright red, when the leaves get bright red in the Autumn, they’re saying to
insects, “Hey, you’d better stay away.”
My TV just died, and I will not be replacing it
A small but apparently growing number of people are cutting the television service connections from cable satellite and telephone companies in favor of viewing their picks over the computer.
A computer, a digital TV decoder, an iPod, a scanner, and a printer, and broadband
now render unnecessary
the TV, fax machine, stereo, and telephone-answering machine, and cable TV.
Excellent video showing how a virus infects you
Terrific animation. This used to take hours and hours to learn. Now you can see the overall action, and then when you read about the steps, it is so simple.
Sunday, October 25, 2009
Saturday, October 24, 2009
A profound deflation that is difficult to see
My big HiDef TV, finally, after 16 years, has died. I threw out the fax machine since I have not received or sent a fax in years. I gave away the stereo. I don't really need the telephone-answering machine because I make almost all calls through the computer, so when it dies, I will not buy a new one.
They will all be replaced by a 27-inch iMac and a digital TV decoder ($200); I already have a printer ($200) and scanner ($60).
$3,000 TV
$700 fax machine
$500 stereo
$100 telephone-answering machine
All unnecessary, a savings of more than $4,000.
All of these were energy vampires, silently using small amounts of energy even when not obviously on... if a device is warm to the touch or is instant-on, then it is using a little electricity whenever it is plugged in.
And it frees up a lot of space in the apartment to boot!
The implication of having a "universal machine" is that it makes a lot of other devices unnecessary... the abilities are similar or superior, but the cost of those other devices falls to zero.
A window on behavior
The financial crisis has proved to be a wonderful window on behavior and acid test. It is also, unfortunately, an indication of behavior in general.
Far and away the most common response has been "Got no clue what the Hell you are talking about. I don't like it... so it's not true!" Fingers in the ears... "La, la, la... I can't hear you!"
They will stay the way they are until they die and will never become what they could become, all for this simple reaction to what is unpleasant.
If you can't get the small, simple things straight, you will never get the big, complicated, emotionally loaded things straight.
Friday, October 23, 2009
Why the frogs are dying
Frogs an amphibians around the world have been mysteriously dying.
The cause seems to be a fungal infection.
The fungus was transported around the world decades ago when frogs were used in pregnancy tests.
A good example of why you should not move living things around unnecessarily... you move their diseases too...
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
Google Books is getting better and better
When I looked at this page, they were featuring a few issues of Life Magazine. It was great to flip through an old issue.
Saturday, October 17, 2009
You can tell who the incompetent ones are
They tense up, have no clue what is going on even in their own field of "expertise", and find tiny faults so they can say "See, there is nothing wrong with me!"
George Eliot
http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=317
...for the growing good of the world is partly dependant on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.
Contrast with item below.
Windows 7 is Vista 2 in disguise
They couldn't possibly sell it if it were called "Vista 2", so they changed the name back to "Windows".
For one of the richest men in the world to produce such shoddy products year after year... well, I would be embarrassed... but then, the goal is to make money; if the product were good and easy to understand, there wouldn't be all those lucrative seminars and service calls.
And what profiteth a man, if he win all the world, and waste billions of hours of other people's time because he just cannot be bothered to get stuff to work before he sells it?
The clearest example of "They are not doing it for you; they are doing it for themselves" I have ever seen... except for the banksters. What we do in life echoes through Eternity... and is being broadcast throughout the entire Universe, so any extraterrestrial civilizations will be having a good laugh for the next several trillion years.
One of the best african violets ever
I lost this in a move 15 years ago, which was really too bad. Very charming. Proof that more is not necessarily better. Bought at Takashimaya near Tokyo Station.
FHA rule changes make condos effectively worthless?
Many people are chomping at the bit to buy foreclosed condos and houses because they are "cheap".
But even if you diligently check that everything is OK before closing, completely unforeseeable things can happen...
They can change the rules.
The bank might not be able to prove it actually owned the house it sold you because they were just making it all up to begin with, so there may be a chain of title problem.
Dollar drop by half within a year or two?
Those still in the denial stage or the scared stage are missing the greatest comedy of all time! I got over it three years ago and have been laughing ever since.
First, the denial. If you tell someone that the dollar will drop by half, they say it is impossible. Someone said that to me again yesterday (without even reading the article in front of him... how typical). But of course, the dollar dropped by half during the Reagan Administration, etc., and over the course of the last 7 years, it has dropped another 40%, so this is nothing new.
Second, the scared stage. Paralyzed like a deer in headlights is no way to figure out how to dodge problems.
On October 6, 2009, the top story at The Independent was the report of meetings by Russia, China, Japan, France, and the Gulf States, to end the use of dollars for oil and gas by 2018 and to move to a basket of currencies and gold.
"These plans will change the face of international financial transactions," one Chinese banker said. "America and Britain must be very worried. You will know how worried by the thunder of denials this news will generate."
The reaction was indeed furious.
On one side, "Don't be ridiculous. This is some stupid conspiracy theory."
On the other side, "Well of course they are meeting. Why is this 'news'?"
The official reactions were things like: "I don't know anything about that", and "Only God knows the future".
Ha ha ha ha ha...
The timeline of 2018 to transition out of the dollar just seemed too long to me... a veil to make the problem seem less urgent.
Then, on Wednesday, this:
Russia is ready to consider using the Russian and Chinese national currencies instead of the dollar in bilateral oil and gas dealings, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said.
...
We are ready to examine the possibility of selling energy resources for rubles, but our Chinese partners need rubles for that. We are also ready to sell for yuans," Putin said.
And then, this:
Oct. 15 (Bloomberg) -- The dollar may drop to 50 yen next year and eventually lose its role as the global reserve currency, Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corp.’s chief strategist said.
Story in Japanese
See? A divine comedy being staged, with some pretty rough props, effects, and stage management...
Thursday, October 15, 2009
Kirk and Spock's mothers
Kirk's mother is named Winona Kirk...
Winona Ryder played Spock's mother...
so are they Twin Sons of Different Mothers?
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
Monday, October 12, 2009
We will be saved... by natural gas?
If true, this is great news, but that is if it is true. These things have a way of being much less spectacular in the end.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/ambroseevans_pritchard/6299291/Energy-crisis-is-postponed-as-new-gas-rescues-the-world.html
Reasons the picture may be too rosy.
This is a sales pitch to investors. (Houses only go up, they never go down.)
Fracking is not new. The techniques may be greatly improved. But we have seen this story before. Horizontal drilling will solve all our problems... lend us money... and after 20 years, Shell is forced to admit that horizontal drilling at most produces modest increases in yield and does get the oil out faster, but oops, we have to cut our reserve estimates by 20% and our stock crashed.
A new oil field is discovered. The geologists and engineers say it has between 1 billion and 100 billion barrels. In the end, the reality was 10 billion. Which figure does the owner of the field tell to the banks? The 100 billion barrel figure. Why? Because they can borrow more money at a lower interest rate. By the time the field goes into its terminal decline decades later, the original people who made the deals are long retired.
If the improved technique is really so good, why try to drastically expand the deployment? That would only depress the price.
Fracking can cause problems like cause small earthquakes (which, in most cases are just minor and not really a problem, except for the hysteria).
More serious is the potential to change the hydrology and contaminate wells. That could be a major fly in the ointment.
Sunday, October 11, 2009
The last time carbon dioxide levels were this high: 15,000,000 years ago
And it was a lot hotter.
The way the Earth has been for the last 10,000 years has been unusually pleasant.
Dark and cloudy
It has been so dark and cloudy for a year that a lot of plants didn't flower, shrank, or just up and died.
The summer was unusually cool.
It has been sunny for three days in a row now!
Select for tameness and all else follows
The answer to one of The Questions of the Ages: Why are humans capable of total self-sacrifice and unspeakable cruelty, that is, why are there Angels and Demons in us?
Simply select for tameness, and within four to ten generations, a cluster of visible traits beings to appear in rats, foxes, and minks. Aggression decreases, amenability to physical contact increases, brain size decreases, tooth size decreases, jaw size decreases, ears become floppy, tails become shorter, novel fur patterns appear, body shape changes, breeding becomes year round, and a generally juvenile appearance is retained throughout adulthood. These features can all be obtained simultaneously by a simple mechanism: alter the timing of gene expression so that juvenile genes are expressed for a much longer time and the expression of adult genes is greatly delayed.
I speculate that this could also automatically increase lifespan since the expression of genes that are the causes of disease in late life might be put off for even longer.
This also suggests that, absent some trauma during youth, the way people are is largely genetic and their behavior is very difficult to change.
Is this why horrible selfish people in general stay that way until they die?
Saturday, October 10, 2009
A Christmas Carol
There was a trailer at the theater for a new animated A Christmas Carol that looked quite interesting.
It will, however, have to go a long way to outdo the 1951 Alastair Sim version.
For most people like this, Marley's ghost and the three Spirits will never come. The scariest scene in all of storytelling at 6:25.
Astro Boy
I saw Astro Boy on opening day. Great eye candy. Faithful to the original story mostly. Very distinctive animation. The scene in which he is animated had brilliant visual references to the Borg Queen, and most especially to Pinocchio. I finally understand how much AI is patterned on Astro Boy, as is Caprica. Oddly disjointed in some reel transitions. When Toby is killed and when his robot is being constructed, I wondered if the projectionist had somehow skipped a reel...
With Osamu Tezuka cameos! Ha ha! And wait until you see what Astro Boy has in his butt!
He was "born" on April 7, 2003, in Takadanobaba in Tokyo. There was a huge mural and a lot of festivities around that time. To this day, the music playing when the doors are closing on the Yamanote Line Takadonobaba Station is the Astro Boy theme song.
Retrofit your house for net zero energy use
This is not as difficult as it might sound... and it might even be free...
How to read your DNA for $1000
This is brilliant, if they can get it to work.
IBM scientists have developed what they call a "DNA transistor". The transistor is a tube only a couple of atoms in diameter that pulls the DNA through, while sensors in the walls of the tube read the base pairs. This process simulates natural protein pores in cells that evolve specifically to read DNA strands. By running an entire genome through the tube, IBM hopes to lower the cost of sequencing an entire genome down to $1,000.
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
The practical LED bulb is here!
Toshiba apparently will unveil an LED bulb with the light output of a 100 watt bulb that uses about 9 watts of electricity.
The only stumbling block is the price: about $100 dollars.
That should start dropping fast.
We will have to learn a measurement of brightness: the lumen (abbreviated lm)
These new bulbs do sound like you can get reasonable brightness for under 9 watts... perhaps even more efficient than compact fluorescents, which although they start off bright, lose about 20% light output after a year or so of heavy use. The LED bulbs seem to degrade much more slowly.
In practice, then, you would have to buy 4 compact fluorescents to equal the service life of one LED bulb. The 100 W compact fluorescent output would be good for a year, then be 80% for the last 4 years of its service life, let's say light output would be like an 80 W incandescent bulb but using 20 W. The new warm white bulbs seem to output about the light of an 80 W incandescent bulb, but uses about 10 watts, approximately halving the electricity use for a comparable amount of warm white light over a compact fluorescent. Good quality compact fluorescents are still about $10 dollars in Japan, 4 of them would cost $40, and therefore the premium would be about $60 if these bulbs go for about $100. Run at 10 hours per day, the compact fluorescent would consume 10 X 20W/day = 200 W/day = 4 cents per day versus 2 cents per day for the LED, over a year saving about $7, for a payback period of about 9 years. If they can just get the price down to about $40, then the payback would start immediately.
Monday, October 5, 2009
Edges of MacBooks are sharp
I have no idea why the edges of MacBooks are so sharp, but I cut my hand the other night while trying to kill a mosquito.
Buddha said
There are two mistakes you can make on the road to Truth:
not going all the way, and not starting.
Maybe this is how meteorites travel from one planet to another
NASA has already rode these currents once--the Genesis probe followed a gravitational channel en-route to collecting solar dust in 2004. By following the gravitational current, Genesis reached its mission point with ten times less fuel than it would have needed otherwise.
Speaking at the British Science Festival at the University of Surrey in Guildford, Ross highlighted the convenience of these gravity tubes, but also noted that they must be utilized in conjunction with regular rockets. For instance, riding a gravity channel from Earth to Mars without any other boosts would take a couple thousand years.
Sunday, October 4, 2009
How complicated the climate is
Many things can affect the climate.
The Sun is still nearly sunspotless for years. Its output has therefore dipped slightly, since the Sun is a variable star.
This plays some part in increased cosmic rays hitting the atmosphere and possibly increasing cloud formation in some places. Hmm, I wonder if the poles are unusually cloudy...
The NASA Administrator
Hallelujah!
Unlike his predecessor, I don't think he will ask why the Space Station doesn't go faster (Hint: It will fly out of orbit. Some truly stupid people were in charge of things under Stupid.)
Phineas Gage
Fantastic details have come to light recently about Phineas Gage. A perfect example of how the Internet can bring alive the past.
To have and to have not
The real "haves" are they who can acquire freedom, self-confidence, and even riches without depriving others of them. They acquire all of these by developing and applying their potentialities.
On the other hand, the real "have nots" are they who cannot have aught except by depriving others of it. They can feel free only by diminishing the freedom of others, self-confident by spreading fear and dependence among others, and rich by making others poor.
Eric Hoffer
Or, I might add, the know-nothings who, when they encounter something they don't know, insist it must be a lie, otherwise they would know it.
Quotes
Podcasts greatly increase retention
This agrees with my experience. Listening to a podcast twice more or less fixes the entirety of it in memory, especially for foreign languages and really complicated cell biology or astrophysics.
One group attended the live class, the other listened via podcast. When given a test on the subject a week later, the podcast group scored 71 per cent while the in-class group scored 62 per cent. Within the podcast group, those who took notes and listened to the lecture more than once came away with an average test score of 77 per cent.
Properties of black bodies and white bodies
Duh!
Black bodies are perfect absorbers of radiation and perfect emitters of radiation;
white bodies are perfect reflectors of radiation and perfect retainers of radiation.
The filament in a light bulb is shiny. If you treat it with a laser to make it black, not only does it become a better absorber, but it becomes a better emitter!
This still does not bring it anywhere near to LED efficiency, however.
I wonder if the process could be used to improve light emission from LEDs or heat dissipation from the bulb stem. The stems do get quite hot. It is puzzling to me why the stems of LED light bulbs are silver. Shouldn't they be black or at least a dark color? Perhaps it is maximally transparent in the infrared already. That would seem to be obviously desirable.
Perhaps the aluminum used in the stem could be made black, or another metal could be used that could be made black.
http://www.rochester.edu/news/show.php?id=3106
Feed-in tariff approved by PUC in Hawaii
Let's hope it really works out, especially for residential.
Solar energy advocates in particular are pleased that the new feed-in tariff policy preserves the existing net energy metering incentive currently available for home power producers, such as those who use photovoltaic systems. After the decision new feed-in tariff rates are determined, home power producers can decide to either run their meter backward to eliminate their power bill, or become a power producer and actually receive compensation from the utility for their clean energy.
LED light bulbs make sense now
If used an average of five and a half hours per day, the new bulbs can last up to 19 years, according to Panasonic. That's 40 times longer than incandescent bulbs.
Since you would have to buy 40 regular incandescents to do that, the price of the bulb (around $40) is about the same (40 incandescents at $1 each)
The bulbs use only an eighth the power of incandescents. That means a 60-watt-equivalent LED bulb would cost only 300 yen (about $3) a year instead of 2,380 yen ($25.80)--a significant savings over a lifetime.
This means $1,000 in electricity for the incandescent versus $100 for the LED.
They make economic sense now, especially for the few lights you leave on all the time, and the price should drop to less than 10 dollars in a few years.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-10350053-1.html
Pneumonia vaccine and swine flu
Many of those with serious complications or who have died from the current swine flu H1N1 seem to have had coinfections.
One common coinfection has been with pneumococcal bacteria.
There is a vaccine available for this. It has been available for 20 years and is standard for those 65 or over and for those with health problems.
Thursday, October 1, 2009
John Sutter
In the spring of '47
So the story, it is told
Old John Sutter went to the mill site
Found a piece of shinin' gold
Well, he took it to the city
Where the word like wildfire spread
And old John Sutter soon came to wish he'd
Left that stone in the river bed
So the story, it is told
Old John Sutter went to the mill site
Found a piece of shinin' gold
Well, he took it to the city
Where the word like wildfire spread
And old John Sutter soon came to wish he'd
Left that stone in the river bed
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
glutinous is different from gluten
Glutinous rice does not contain dietary gluten (i.e. does not contain glutenin and gliadin), and thus should be safe for gluten-free diets. What distinguishes it from other types of rice is having no (or negligible amounts of) amylose, and high amounts of amylopectin (those are the two components of starch). Amylopectin is responsible for the sticky quality of glutinous rice.
glutinous rice = sticky rice (that does not contain gluten)
gluten = elastic protein material, especially of wheat flour, that gives cohesiveness to dough
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
Newark, N.J., Mayor Cory Booker says
That's funny. I said exactly the same thing 25 years ago, and people said, "No, this is normal. Everywhere is like this."
Having lived elsewhere for 40 years, I can now assure them that, no, it is not normal.
Resource depletion as a predator-prey interaction
This is a really interesting idea.
There is also the increasing energy necessary to extract the oil, which was 1 : 1,000,000 in 1860 and is now 1 : 15.
Let's go back to whaling in 19th century; at that time the main problem related to killing whales was finding one. Once it was found, killing it and making whale oil out of it was a relatively quick process. In the case of crude oil, instead, the length of delay between discovering a field and getting oil out of it often amounts to several years. But, the main point is discovery: once a field is discovered, it will be put into production at some point--that's almost automatic. So, prospecting for oil is the main "predation" activity, and also the most expensive one. So, the production parameter in the model is the amount of oil found , not the produced oil. At that point, you can think that a measure of the effort (the capital) placed into prospection is the number of wildcats drilled. Once we found this idea, it was bingo again. The relationship of predator to prey was there, although it was not as good as for whaling. Here are the results for the US 48 lower states (the case studied by Hubbert).
Maybe I am seeing ghosts created by my own mind, but I tend to see many things that I have done in my life in these terms. I see it even with the research grants for my lab, at the university of Florence. Despite having stepped up our efforts, we are getting less and less money to run the lab. "Peak grants" has taken place a few years ago and my lab is being destroyed by the same mechanism that, long ago, brought down the Roman Empire.
1. There exists a non renewable or slowly renewable resource which is limited in amount and "graded" in costs of extraction/production.
2. People will extract/produce first the low cost resource and will re-invest an approximately constant fraction of their profits in more facilities for extraction/production. This is the positive feedback that generates the rapid initial growth of the curve
3. As the resource is consumed, increasing costs of production reduce profits and - as a consequence - investments in extraction/production. This is the negative feedback that generates the decline.
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
Everything most people "know" about Columbine is wrong
It wasn't supposed to be a shooting; it was supposed to be a bombing.
"The book gained considerable media attention for dispelling the Columbine myths ... the massacre had nothing to do with jocks, Goths, Marilyn Manson or the Trench Coat Mafia. In fact, it was not intended primarily as a school shooting, but as a bombing. Cullen reports that Harris and Klebold intended to perpetrate the worst terrorist attack in American history. The book garnered glowing reviews from Time, Newsweek, People, The New York Observer, and The New York Times Book Review. One of the few dissenting views came from Janet Maslin."
The miracle of compound interest
$100 compounded at 7% for 200 years is more than $100 million, by which time it will be worth nothing.
We were so absorbed in our own problems that we did not even notice this
Absolute must-see.
After a few minutes, you will say to yourself: Hmm... huge foreign debt, bank collapse... why does this sound familiar?
How the crash is rewriting investment rules
They said we would get 8% return on investment in our pension plans... Ha! Madoff level returns.
Now they say 4%.
I think we will be lucky to get 1% because the last 30 years of "normal" growth required 10 dollar a barrel oil, and we will never see that again.
Term of the day: EROEI
Energy Return On Energy Invested
1859
1 unit of energy invested returns 1,000,000 units of energy (wells were shallow and were gushers)
1950
1 unit of energy invested returns 100 units of energy
2010
1 unit of energy invested returns 15 units of energy
Clearly, when 1 unit of energy must be invested to return 1 unit of energy, it no longer makes sense to try to extract the energy.
Unfortunately, we may run into problems even sooner: when 1 unit of energy invested returns only 8 units of energy. We are almost there.
So it is not a matter of whether or not the oil exists, but rather whether it can be extracted and delivered for a reasonable price.
Rush says "There is 700 years of oil in the ground! There is no oil problem!"
Ayn Rand said, one can evade reality, but one cannot evade the consequences of evading reality.
I would say, "Everything seems simple to the simpleminded".
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
The crater Cabeus A1
NASA plans to crash a rocket into the Lunar crater Cabeus A1 on October 9.
The floor of the crater is in perpetual darkness, and so over the eons, some water ice may have condensed there.
The crash should shoot a plume up, and the plume will be examined to see if there is water ice.
If there is, this will be a huge discovery because it would mean we would not have to launch so much water from the Earth for a base on the Moon.
Parasite eats fish tongue and takes the place of the tongue
This is so strange, I thought it was a joke from Cracked or The Onion or something.
Monday, September 14, 2009
Where would the world be without the extraordinary growth in Russian oil supply this decade? Not in a good place... Russia’s near 50% oil production increase since the year 2000 did a lot of heavy lifting. And it’s concerning that this very fast growth rate has now topped out.
North American crude oil production (Canada + US + Mexico) saw, during the current decade, its highest levels in 2003 at an annual average of 11.358 Mb/day. The high month of production that year was in September, at 11.450 Mb/day. In that year, 2003, the average price of oil was 31.08. But by 2008, North American crude oil production had fallen to 10.338 Mb/day. Thus, as the price of oil went from 31.08 in 2003 to the 2008 average of 99.67, North American crude oil production lost over a million bbls a day.
Russia... has become the world's biggest exporter of oil.
Russia toppled Saudi Arabia from the number one spot. It is already the world's largest exporter of gas, and supplies around a third of the European Union's consumption.
The many missions NASA is running now
People think NASA spends a huge amount of money, but it is a drop in the bucket, and they think it only does the shuttle, but see how many missions are currently running... you never hear about them, but they are fascinating.
Saturday, August 29, 2009
Physical goods replaced by representations
“The next killer app for the Internet is dematerialization.”
Bill St. Arnaud
I think this is the endgame
China now produces about 90% of the rare earth metals necessary for producing computer chips, electronics, batteries, etc.
Figure 1. Global rare earth element production (1 kt=106 kg) from 1950 through 2000, in four categories: United States, almost entirely from Mountain Pass, California; China, from several deposits; all other countries combined, largely from monazite-bearing placers; and global total. Four periods of production are evident: the monazite-placer era, starting in the late 1800s and ending abruptly in 1964; the Mountain Pass era, starting in 1965 and ending about 1984; a transitional period from about 1984 to 1991; and the Chinese era, beginning about 1991.
http://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/2002/fs087-02/
They have suddenly announced that they will cease exports.
This is an endgame move.
Honey bees may have been killed by virus infections
Colony collapse disorder may have been due to infection by one or more viruses.
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
Hell is the impossibility of reason
How do they train themselves to be so impervious to reality? It begins, I suspect, with religion. They are taught from a young age that it is good to have "faith" – which is, by definition, a belief without any evidence to back it up. You don't have "faith" that Australia exists, or that fire burns: you have evidence. You only need "faith" to believe the untrue or unprovable. Indeed, they are taught that faith is the highest aspiration and most noble cause. Is it any surprise this then percolates into their political views? Faith-based thinking spreads and contaminates the rational.
Saturday, August 8, 2009
Confabulation getting worse
As things become more complicated by the day, one unanticipated effect that I am noticing with increasing frequency is an explosion of confabulation.
People do not actually bother to read a book or magazine article, but can go on for hours making up a plausible story about things they have never seen, people they have never met, and situations in which they have never been.
Saving energy can be be better than free
The perfect is the enemy of the good.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124959929532112633.html
There are times when saving energy seems like a pie-in-the-sky expensive burden, but it really need not be so. In fact, it can be the best investment you can make.
In 1981, we installed a solar water heater for a total cost in current dollars of about 5,000 dollars. That has saved 30,000 dollars in electricity so far, and the unit is still working.
When it came time to reroof four years ago, instead of the usual tar paper shingle job that would have cost 25,000 dollars, we had an elastomeric coating applied that cost 12,000. That did not cost more money, it cost less... for something that had to be done.
The elastomeric coating has titanium oxide ceramic particles in it that reflect heat, so the roof does heat up, and the house is cool and comfortable without air conditioning. The test: If it is uncomfortably hot inside your house, but it is comfortable outside your house, the problem is the house... it is heating up. All you need to do is block the heat from entering to begin with.
Yes, LED lights are way too expensive and are not quite ready for prime time, but the warm white compact fluorescents are only a few dollars and work well. A 60 watt incandescent spotlight was replaced with an 11 watt compact fluorescent spotlight. Buy one and try it.
The point is, none of this cost more money, it cost less.
The solar water heater cuts about 1,000 dollars per year off the electric bill, for a return on the original 5,000 dollar investment of 20% per year.
The elastomeric roof saves 600 dollars per year.
A conventional roof would be 25,000 twice over 50 years, which would be 50,000 dollars over 50 years.
An elastomeric one is 12,000 the first time, and 2,000 every ten years for a pressure washing and touch up coat, which would be 20,000 dollars over 50 years. And that is not even taking into account the energy savings in reduced air conditioning costs. You would need a smaller air conditioning system, or none at all, and would use less electricity running it.
The difference is 30,000 dollars.
Over 50 years, doing these two things basically costs 80,000 dollars less to get the same thing... actually, something better. You would have to earn 160,000 dollars, and pay taxes of let's say about half, if you had an electric water heater and a regular roof instead of a solar water heater and an elastomeric roof, just to get the same thing.
So while I hope the Rocky Mountain Institute continues to make cutting edge breakthroughs in energy efficiency, and I am sure those advances will slowly trickle down to us all, in the meantime, there is a lot that can be done that is not unbelievably expensive but is in fact much cheaper.
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