If you are thinking about buying a TV, wait just a little while if you can

They are about to get a whole lot thinner, cheaper, and more energy efficient by switching to LED backlighting.

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-led-tv30-2009jul30,0,4224051.story

Resveratrol is a powerful antiinflammatory

In this study, researchers administered an inflammatory agent to two groups of mice. One group was pretreated with resveratrol and the other group was not. The mice that were not pretreated with resveratrol experienced a strong inflammatory response, simulating disease in humans, while the group pretreated with resveratrol was protected from the inflammation. The scientists then examined the tissues of the mice to determine exactly how resveratrol was able to protect the mice from inflammation. They found that resveratrol used a one-two punch to stop inflammation in the mice by preventing the body from creating two different molecules known to trigger inflammation, sphingosine kinase and phospholipase D.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-07/foas-sua073009.php

The Antikythera Mechanism

http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/shortsharpscience/2009/07/jo-marchant-consultant-from-sw.html

Drive microfluidics with sound

Brilliant!

http://www.popsci.com/gear-amp-gadgets/article/2009-07/musical-chip-means-portable-flu-kits-are-just-around-corner

Blue dye Brilliant Blue G may minimize spinal cord damage

http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2009-07/good-news-animal-lovers-and-folks-spinal-injuries

500% desired product increase in 3 days!

A sudden 1,000-fold speed up in lifeform design.

They generated 15 billion genetic variants in three days and increased the yield of the desired product by 500 percent; with traditional cloning techniques, it would have taken years.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-07/hms-rr072209.php

A few inches of topsoil and the fact that it rains

The meteoric rise of the Incan empire between 1400 and 1532 was driven by a sustained period of warmer weather, new research on Peruvian lake sediments suggests.

The higher temperatures, starting around 1150, ended thousands of years of cold aridity, and enabled Incan farmers to build mountainside terraces for growing crops at altitudes previously too cold to support agriculture.

The extra warmth, lasting around 400 years, also supplied extra water for irrigation in the shape of melt-water from Andean glaciers at higher altitudes.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17516-hotter-weather-fed-growth-of-incan-empire.html

"I need a companion dog for people who live in urban areas"

So, many people buy work dogs, retrievers, and other breeds with totally different genetically controlled behaviors, and then try to force the behaviors to be those of a companion dog for people who live in urban areas. Or they buy chimpanzees, or alligators, or tigers, or any one of a huge number of inappropriate undomesticated animals, and they try to force them to behave.

The researchers found that gun dogs and sheep dogs were better than hunting hounds, earth dogs (dogs used for underground hunting), livestock guard dogs and sled dogs at following a pointing finger. They also out-performed mongrels. Moreover, breeds with short noses and centrally placed eyes were better at interpreting the gesture than those with long noses and widely spaced eyes, which can probably be connected to a more optimal retinal location of greatest visual acuity, that might help focus their attention. According to Gácsi, "Although these results may appear to be unsurprising, there is a common tendency to make assumptions about genetic explanations for differences in comprehension between 'dogs' and wolves. Our results show that researchers must be careful to control for animal breed when carrying out behavioral experiments."

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-07/bc-hc072209.php

Rain

RAIN

One of the most hilarious This American Life episodes of all time

Nielson Families, Xings, Misled, Quesadilla, Unicorns, Chicken, and the best of all: Tissue boxes at Christmas.

This American Life is truly one of our Living Treasures.

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?sched=1090

Eliot Spitzer: "The Federal Reserve Is A Ponzi Scheme"

http://dealbreaker.com/2009/07/eliot-spitzer-the-federal-rese.php

Concept of the day: Jevons Paradox

This Jevons Paradox is fascinating, and the video presents aspects I hadn't thought about.

As I said before, I think the Japanese have been downsizing in anticipation of 2010 to 2020 when we will have serious energy problems.
The Europeans have been doing the same by cutting the hours they work (in the video, the French Minister has a graph of peak oil behind him on the wall, so they are very conscious of that happening).
The US responded to the increased efficiency by buying more stuff we didn't need with money we didn't have.

This is well worth the 10 minutes because this concept is crucial to where we go from here. It is a trap that we must not fall into.

http://www.workersoftheworldrelax.org/combined7.swf


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

On the other hand, we may get ourselves out of the hole

Unfortunately, I think this is too utopian. I don't think it is going to be so easy to replace the great Gift of Oil that we have squandered.

We really have to drastically cut down on oil use, say by half, by 2020, because the amount of oil on the world market for sale will drop by half. Mexico will cease exporting say by 2012, Iran by 2014, and many of the major exporters will follow. That is bad enough, but then they will turn into net importers. We could easily have price spikes into the several hundreds of dollars a barrel. This puts some fairly hard deadlines on when we have to really transition to the replacements.

I do agree that several decades from now, many people may wonder what all the fuss was about, but we could also have a titanic crash that takes a lot longer to recover from because the population has tripled. And over the next decade, we have a big problem.

One disturbing thing about all these replacement sources of fuel is that they don't actually exist yet... or exist in prototype form. In other words, these things should work, but we have never actually made them work. That is usually a huge red flag. Things can appear to be simple but take much longer than anticipated. After all, some of the first cars were electric with batteries, but a century later, we still can't quite get them to work. Then we will have to get the cost down.

Another problem is that the arguments appear to be directed to the 6,000,000,000 on Vulcan, not to the 6,000,000,000 on Earth. Do we really expect rational choices to be made by humans after the nonsense we just witnessed? I installed a solar water heater 30 years ago. It saved me 30,000 dollars. Therefore, everyone in Hawaii has done the same thing. Yeah, right. Only 25% of residential hot water is by solar in Hawaii. That is pitiful.

An don't forget Jevons Paradox: the proposition that technological progress that increases the efficiency with which a resource is used, tends to increase (rather than decrease) the rate of consumption of that resource.

So I think the author is making some very serious errors in estimates by assuming that almost all people will instantaneously make rational long term decisions. They can't control how much they spend and how much they eat. Read the comments on any publication and see the posts about how "I don't drive a Toyota because I don't drive an appliance... My SUV makes a statement about who I am..." They are not going to undergo the Vulcan Kohlinar ritual and become rational overnight.

What is being asserted is that the oil available to oil importing countries will say drop by half over the next decade and the price will go to hundreds of dollars a barrel, but that the so far nonexistent replacement technologies will scale up properly on schedule to fill the gap, when some of the oil importing countries are bankrupt.

I hope so, but past performance is not reassuring.

http://www.forbes.com/2009/07/24/energy-effeciency-biofuels-business-energy-lovins.html?feed=rss_news

What a strange bug

Have no idea why the text below is so large. It appears normal in the editing window. Will leave it like that as a curiosity.

What is this? An Ebay auction?*

The Miami Herald said that publicly available data on the website of the Miami Dade Property Appraiser seem to show properties being bought out of foreclosure not listed at the current sales price but the date and price of the previous sale.

Whoa, way to go! Why not just make up the prices? That would be easier.

*In an Ebay auction, the bid shown is not the current highest bid, but the previous highest bid.

It clouded up during the eclipse

As usual, since as the Sun is more eclipsed the more the temperature drops, the cloud layer really thickened up at peak, and then when the eclipse was over, the cloud layer got thinner and you could see the Sun.

Of course the model was wrong

It didn't give the desired answer that the issuer paid for, damn it!

Actually, what was wrong with the model was not that it downgraded three bonds to near junk, but that it didn't downgrade all the rest of the garbage to junk.

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2009/07/s-shoots-self-and-investors-in-foot.html

July 22, 2009

Tokyo midday
no wind no sound mideclipse
cloud sees embrace

Andy Kaufman goes for psychic surgery in the Philippines

In Man on the Moon, Jim Carrey plays Andy Kaufman, who spent his whole life putting people on.

Andy has cancer, and after healing stones and modern medicine fail, he goes to the Philippines for psychic surgery. The surgeon reaches into your body with fingers and pulls the cancer out.

Andy knows a sleight-of-hand magic trick when he sees it, and he realizes that he, the ultimate trickster has been had. He lies back laughing at the irony of it all.

Not entertaining in the usual sense, but Man on the Moon is well worth watching at least once. A kind of documentary about what was going on behind the scenes at Saturday Night Live and Taxi and how difficult and painful the human condition is even with, or perhaps because of, fame and fortune. And in the end, the joke is on us.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0125664/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xy53Un2AXpU&feature=related

Cracked Magazine is an absolute riot these days

http://www.cracked.com/

What took so long

In 1931, just months before he died, Edison said to Henry Ford: 'I'd put my money on the Sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don't have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that.'

Little did he know that people are so clueless that they would wait until the oil obviously started to run out before they would stop the "I don' wanna drive 55, I wanna drive an SUV, I don' wanna walk anywhere... " to the point of crashing the entire empire in a sudden stop.

Decades ago, the head of the Hawaiian Electric Company said

At the dedication of the first windfarm, that that would be the last windfarm ever constructed in Hawaii.

How do incompetents like this get paid hundreds of thousands of dollars when they haven't the slightest trace of common sense? He thought a prototype didn't work and therefore it would never work?

So now, after working out all the kinks, major windfarms are going to be constructed on Lanai and Molokai, and the power sent to Oahu by undersea cable. This and other alternative energy may eventually supply the state with 70% of its energy.

I mean, did he think that the first car ever built was a Prius? Doesn't he understand that the Model T was a stage you had to go through to get to the Prius? The world is full of morons like this who can eventually bankrupt and destroy the country and actually wind up killing people.

New Toshiba E-CORE LED lights are great

I just bought one that gives the light of a 60 watt spotlight for 6.7 watts... indistinguishable from an incandescent... and $35 dollars... with prices expected to fall to $5 in a few years.

Solar thermal gas turbine hybrids are the major solution

Unless we can get geothermal to work in more places... and ironically, improvements in drilling for oil are allowing us to drill really deep to where there might be exploitable geothermal... the real solution in sunny areas will probably turn out to be solar thermal with gas turbine back up. The solar thermal can produce a huge amount of heat and store that heat, for example, underground... a kind of geothermal, I suppose, but storing the heat from the Sun in the Earth rather than extracting heat from the Earth... which has the advantage of being able to provide power in the evenings and for several days when it is cloudy... with a gas turbine backup for when it is cloudy for too long.

Jupiter seems to have been struck by an asteroid

As when Comet Shoemaker-Levy hit Jupiter, there is a large black splotch on Jupiter that looks like it was struck by something.

When the Japanese have funerals, they have two useful customs

First, they give koden, funeral money. This can be modest, maybe $20 dollars or so, but the amount can be highly variable depending on the relationship and the need. In most cases, people now have prepaid funerals, so they do not actually need the cash, but in general, the family at least does not have to worry about money at that moment. Of course, if there are survivors in need, one would up the amount.

Second, someone not too closely related to the family, perhaps a neighbor or acquaintance, will stay in the house during the funeral. Acquaintances may also stay in the houses of immediate family members who will obviously be at the funeral. The idea is, well, the houses should not be empty and dark, and these days, with obituaries and addresses immediately googleable, you do not want to be burglarized while at a funeral, as happened to this poor family.

http://www.wlwt.com/news/20086876/detail.html

NPR says Wired said "never BCC anyone"

But that does not seem to appear in the Wired article... maybe it was deleted?

I think the rule "never blind carbon copy" anyone is strange. If you had to send an email to people who didn't know each other, why would you disclose their email addresses to all the recipients? The only reason to CC people is so that the recipients can see who else received the email.

Karen Armstrong's arguments for God are nonsensical

She says God is something beyond human comprehension. But isn't this exactly the problem that each organized religion pretends that it, and it alone, knows what God wants?

Just because you "need" something to be true, doesn't mean it is.

Just because sometimes organized religion makes people behave, doesn't mean it is true. With emphasis on "sometimes".

Does she not know that most aspects are copied from Egyptian and Indian religions hundreds or thousands of years before? Priests have told me that they study this in seminary, so they are well aware of it. So they must know what they are teaching is not true, but rationalize it in one way or another.

The entire idea that The Dead Shall be Raised came from the Egyptians salting fish... and then salting the dead... and burying them with food, drinks, and gifts for the afterlife. Warm and wonderful and loving, but hardly a basis for how to make this life better.

And if God is going to resurrect people, why is it necessary to embalm them? Why can't you cremate? Surely if God can put flesh on bones, He can reconstitute ashes... or are you saying that is beyond his abilities? And how are the dead going to get out of the sealed lead box 6 feet under?

If God exists, He surely does not need intercessors. The baptisms, weddings, funerals, and services are a business so that humans can make money.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/jul/19/armstrong-case-god-alain-de-botton

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2009/jul/16/daniel-dennett-belief-atheism
Although I disagree with one point: It is not the gold standard that is a belief system, it is the fiat currency systems that are belief systems. A silver standard or copper standard would certainly not be belief systems since they are widely used industrial metals, gold less so, but the point being that they cannot be easily manufactured nor obtained. Certainly if the fiat currencies were kept in proportion to the economy, there would not be much problem within the country, but with transnational funds flowing the way they are, that won't work either.

Harry Potter and the Half-blood Prince

The Quidditch matches were out of this world, but the movie seemed strangely disjointed... as if a little too much ended up on the cutting room floor? Fans who have read the book are upset that so many things were left out.

The great ability of humans is to associate unrelated things

Kary Mullis sees
1. progressive antibiotic resistance in disease-causing bacteria
2. molecules on nonprimate mammal cells that cause immediate ferocious immune response in humans

So, he figures out a way to take the molecules that elicit the immune response and attach them to the disease-causing bacteria, triggering a tremendous immune response.

http://www.ted.com/talks/kary_mullis_next_gen_cure_for_killer_infections.html

http://www.amazon.co.jp/alpha-Gal-Anti-Gal-3-Galactosyltransferase-Subcellular-Biochemistry/dp/030646103X

The first music video was...

by The Three Stooges!

The cause of aging

Progressively disordered gene expression.

If this is what they really think...

We should ask them if they mean Mauna Kea or Mauna Loa. If they say yes, then we can prove just how stupid they are because if this is 75 million years ago, they are talking about one of the seamounts near Alaska... because the island of Hawaii is only a few million years old.

When we make First Contact, they are going to be mighty embarrassing...

http://www.southparkstudios.com/clips/104274

Bill Gates wants to control the weather OMG

But he can't even make software that does not crash every single time you use it.
I paid $500 for MS Office, I did all the updates. Every single time (hundreds) I close a file, I get this:


And this is the Japanese version of Office! And the menus are mixed up Japanese and English! Way to go!

What if his weather control net works like his software!

Full retard. Now I understand why some people pirate this stuff on principle.

Maybe I need to try to imagine more impulses

Hmm, maybe many people just have these impulses that I don't have, so that is why I can't understand why they can't control themselves and behave in plain strange ways.

http://scienceblogs.com/notrocketscience/2009/07/will_vs_grace_-_are_people_honest_because_they_resist_tempta.php

Apollo 11 landing as reported by Walter Cronkite 40 years ago

The Oil Curse and the Seigniorage Curse

Some are born with a silver spoon and make terrific use of the gift they have been given (Darwin).

Others are destroyed by the free money, the sense of entitlement, the inability to find any purpose other than having a great party.

One would think that having oil would be a good thing. It turns out to be a disaster.

Being able to print money with impunity sounds like a great scam, but it, too, winds up a disaster.

http://gregor.us/oil/the-seigniorage-curse/

This is what happens

When you have a bubble, and bean counters with no idea about engineering get a hold of "the next big idea", this is usually what you get.

http://www.starbulletin.com/business/20090711_Hoku_Scientific_looks_at_options_for_survival.html

Word of the day: Astroturfing

On the Guardian's environment site in particular, and to a lesser extent on threads across the Guardian's output, considered discussion is being drowned in a tide of vituperative gibberish. A few hundred commenters appear to be engaged in a competition to reach the outer limits of stupidity. They post so often and shout so loudly that intelligent debate appears to have fled from many threads, as other posters have simply given up in disgust. I've now reached the point at which I can't be bothered to read beyond the first page or so of comments. It is simply too depressing.

The pattern, where environmental issues are concerned, is always the same. You can raise any issue you like, introduce a dossier of new information, deploy a novel argument, drop a shocking revelation. The comments which follow appear almost to have been pre-written. Whether or not you mentioned it, large numbers will concentrate on climate change – or rather on denying its existence. Another tranche will concentrate on attacking the parentage and lifestyle of the author. Very few address the substance of the article.

I believe that much of this is native idiocy: the infantile blathering of people who have no idea how to engage in debate. Many of the posters appear to have fallen for the nonsense produced by professional climate change deniers, and to have adopted their rhetoric and methods. But it is implausible to suppose that this is all that's going on. As I documented extensively in my book Heat, and as sites like DeSmogBlog and Exxonsecrets show, there is a large and well-funded campaign by oil, coal and electricity companies to insert their views into the media.

They have two main modes of operating: paying people to masquerade as independent experts, and paying people to masquerade as members of the public. These fake "concerned citizens" claim to be worried about a conspiracy by governments and scientists to raise taxes and restrict their freedoms in the name of tackling a non-existent issue. This tactic is called astroturfing. It's a well-trodden technique, also deployed extensively by the tobacco industry. You pay a public relations company to create a fake grassroots (astroturf) movement, composed of people who are paid for their services. They lobby against government attempts to regulate the industry and seek to drown out and discredit people who draw attention to the issues the corporations want the public to ignore.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/georgemonbiot/2009/jul/08/climate-denial-astroturfers-pseudonyms

We are about to be matched... and then exceeded

IBM promises a computer at 20,000 trillion calculations per second by 2011, which is estimated to be the speed of the human brain.

We oppose them! Cuba no!

We oppose... oh, wait, they discovered oil!?
Oh, we must stop this embargo now! Mi amigos!
http://www.energycurrent.com/index.php?id=2&storyid=19261

If we don't become their friends, they will sell the oil to the Chinese!

I don't want to pay more taxes...

... therefore global warming is a lie.

This would be funny if stupidity did not have serious, sometimes fatal, consequences...

Cause of Alzheimer's, diabetes, Parkinson's due to huge increases in dietary nitrate exposure?

Strong relationships were found in the death rates from Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and diabetes and increases in human exposure to nitrates, nitrites and nitrosamines in processed and preserved foods.

When the researchers compared mortality from Parkinson's and Alzheimer's disease among 75 to 84 year olds from 1968 to 2005, the death rates increased much more dramatically than for cerebrovascular and cardiovascular disease, which are also aging-associated. For example, in Alzheimer's patients, the death rate increased 150-fold, from 0 deaths to more than 150 deaths per 100,000. Parkinson's disease death rates also increased across all age groups.

Nitrogen-containing fertilizer usage doubled between 1960 and 1980, which just precedes the insulin-resistance epidemic.

Nitrosamines are highly reactive and alter gene expression and cause DNA damage. The researchers note that the role of nitrosamines has been well-studied, and their roles as carcinogens have been fully documented. The investigators propose that the cellular alterations that occur as a result of nitrosamine exposure are fundamentally similar to those that occur with aging, as well as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and Type 2 diabetes mellitus.

All of these diseases are associated with increased insulin resistance and DNA damage.

Fried bacon, cured meats and cheese products, and beer contain large amounts.

Sodium nitrite is deliberately added to meat and fish to prevent toxin production; it is also used to preserve, color and flavor meats. Ground beef, cured meats and bacon in particular contain large amounts.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-07/l-rfp070109.php

Nitrates and nitrites not only help kill bacteria, but also produce a characteristic flavor, and give meat a pink or red color. Nitrate (NO₃⁻), supplied by e.g. sodium nitrate or potassium nitrate, is used as a source for nitrite (NO₂⁻). The nitrite further breaks down in the meat into nitric oxide (NO), which then binds to the iron atom in the center of myoglobin's heme group, reducing oxidation and causing the characteristic pink color (nitrosohemochrome).

The presence of nitrates and nitrites in food is controversial due to the development of nitrosamines when the food, primarily bacon, is cooked at high temperatures.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cured_meat

Hmm, maybe all that cheap oil and gas just made nitrogen fertilizer too cheap, and this had a completely unintended consequence: nitrosamine poisoning.

I'm the Alaska Blogger!

Did you see and read that speech? Drunk? Illiterate? Genetically stupid? Not really the mother? I voted for her, because, in a democracy, the people should get the government they deserve... and they should get it good and hard.

Forget the financial crisis... the real problem is collapse of oil for sale on world markets

If you are an oil producer, you may not have a problem for some time.

However, if you are an oil importer (US, Japan, etc.) you have a very big problem. In order for you to be able to buy oil, there must be someone willing to sell it. The time an oil producer has "extra" oil to sell on the world market is surprisingly short... typically a few decades at most. Once oil exports start to decline, they generally go to zero exports in about a decade.

The UK exported a million barrels per day; exports fell to zero within 10 years.
Indonesia exported a million barrels per day; exports fell to zero within 10 years.
Mexico exported 2 million barrels per day; exports to fall to zero within 10 years (falls to zero around 2011).
This is even worse than it sounds because their exports do not just fall to zero; they become net importers.

Five exporting countries now account for half of the oil on the world market. They are Saudi Arabia, Russia, Norway, Iran, and United Arab Emirates. For all of them, their exports are expected to drop to near zero in 10 to 20 years.

I think this implies, even without a collapse of the dollar, at least $300 a barrel oil, with gasoline well above $10 a gallon, and a totally paralyzed economy.

That will trump any kind of financial instability annoying us now. The rich countries of the world will have to drastically cut energy consumption, and their GDPs will shrink accordingly. Unfortunately, we will have triple the population we had a century ago, so this will be highly asymmetrical.

It is worthwhile reviewing these graphs carefully, particularly Fig. 1 and Figs. 11 on.
http://www.energybulletin.net/node/38948

Word of the day: Indeflation

= inflation (food, gasoline) AND deflation (house prices, rents, luxury goods and services) AT THE SAME TIME.

This is unfortunately what will dominate the rest of our lives... unless it triggers war, in which case we will think indeflation was great.

Age-related Macular Degeneration treated with light!

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2009/jul/05/blindness-laser-cure-amd

The choice

Let the entire economic system totally collapse immediately last year, or bail out the banks and postpone the collapse for a few months or years.

"There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as the result of a voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion, or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved."
Ludwig von Mise
http://mises.org/story/3146

First the Chinese and Russians...

Now the Indians also want to diversify away from the dollar.

iMac video graphics card problems

About a year ago, I started to get artifacts on the screen of my iMac. There would be strange horizontal lines of randomly colored pixels, sections of screen would turn strange colors, and text and pictures would become really distorted. The worst thing is that the computer would freeze.

The above suggested that the video graphics card was overheating.

I poked around on the net, concluded the following, and seem to have solved the problem easily.

I noticed that this problem first started shortly after I upgraded the OS to Leopard. From some comments I have found on the net, it seems that makes graphics chip run hotter. That was clue number 1.

I also noticed that this problem has been getting worse as the weather warmed up. That was clue number 2.

Although the air intakes seemed to be clear from a casual inspection, they were in fact pretty clogged up with dust. There was also a small air intake in the center of the back, about the size of a quarter, that I didn't notice before, and it was completely clogged with dust. I vacuumed out the dust and sprayed compressed air inside, and voila, the problems seem to have disappeared.

If there is anyone who still thinks this is a regular recession...

I hope you are right, but I think this is an empire-ending once-in-300-year crash.

When it is over, we will, if we are lucky, have to go back to living the way we did in the 60s, which really was not all that bad. If we are not lucky, it will be the early 1900s, only with computers.