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.
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