Yes, maybe it is!
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...
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