Chile and the Quake
First off, Chile had an 8.x quake and 16 foot or so tsunami. One hopes folks there are OK. IIRC Adolfo was from near there. Hopefully all is well… This would be Big News if it didn’t seem to happen about once a year…
There are Tsunami Warnings but news is reporting it to be measured in inches in California and Hawaii. I note in passing that we are near a major lunar apogee.
http://www.fourmilab.ch/earthview/pacalc.html
The first line is from the apogee column, the second line from the perigee column. The ‘–‘ indicating a major (furthest) distance from moon to earth (that 406,465 km) and with a fast approaching major perigee (the line with ‘++’ and 356,876 km distance.
Sep 14 11:29 406465 km — N+1d 4h
Sep 28 1:47 356876 km ++ F- 1h
So we’ve got a real sling fest of shift of lunar distance going on right now.
BTW, I really like that whole site at fourmilab.ch and you can spend hours there. I have sort of a kindred spirit feeling about some of the things of interest (ranging from trading issues to nuclear stuff to lunar to computing to Science Fiction to..)
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The Debate
Then, in the debate last night, Carly scored a few direct hits on The Donald. Jeb found he can have a little bit of spine and admits he tried Marijuana once for that ‘cool factor wannabe’ vote, while Dr. Carson continued his low key and smart style. Rubio woke folks up enough to remind us he is still worth considering, and the long list of Senators and Governors tied to convince everyone they were not politicians. If you missed the first round ( what they are calling the “happy hour” debate) Jindal was pretty good on policies while Lindsey Graham got in a lot of zingers. His “drink more” line being just one of many, but the one making the news.
Washington Post has video of Graham’s highlights (guess they figured out paper based news is fading fast).
All in all, I’m still of the mindset that any combo of {Carly | Carson | Rubio} makes for a good GOP “ticket”. Just try to play the race or gender card against that mix. Frankly, my biggest “issue” is trying to pick one of them to leave out.
The Fed
And, in the “no news is news” department: The Fed did nothing today, and that’s big news.
Yawn…
The implication being the world is so financially fragile right now that 0.125 % interest rates would bring down the whole house of cards. One really must wonder if things are that bad, or The Fed is that timid, or it is all just kabuki theatre.
In Other Non-News news
Oh, and the Middle East is a mess of wars, Evil Bastards, murders, intrigue, destruction of history, and violence. I.e. no news either, just the same as it has been for 1000 years. Just the weapons get bigger. Watch that space in about a half dozen years…
Sometimes I wonder why I bother tracking the ‘news’ when so much of it is utterly predictable. And much of the rest is manufactured drama (aka ‘infotainment’). Oh Well, beats re-runs.
Musings from the Chiefio 
Think I’d rather not Carly, Doesn’t work well with others or take advice from underlings. At least that is my take over the last 20 years of my knowledge of her activities…pg
I’m still for the Trump, it was a hit piece last night with everyone gunning for him. He did well considering the environment. No Carly for me, i know her and will not vote for her.
If one of the non-establishment candidates gets the GOP nomination I will definitely show up at the voting booth next year.
While watching Trump it appeared to me he was deliberately prodding the others to improve THEIR GAMES. As well as acting as a Stalking Horse to draw fire from the press and give the others cover. I doubt he actually WANTS to be president…pg
Lunar orbit gravity stress should peak as it shifts to outbound. 10 more days! 8-( …pg
Maybe the Fed Governors know that the economic data books are cooked and that things are not not as rosy as they project. …pg
Chile and the Quake
“First off, Chile had an 8.x quake and 16 foot or so tsunami. One hopes folks there are OK. IIRC Adolfo was from near there. Hopefully all is well… ”
I was just thinking of Adolfo, the last few days. Hope he is well.
I apologize to him for being so rude about Planet X / ufo cult issues. He was a fun and wonderful commenter. I read what he wrote for years.
I gave up watching the news, then gave up watching television, then dumped the television about 4 years ago. Don’t miss it. If I stay in a hotel, I sometimes turn it on, but it isn’t long before I turn it off again. In shops I sometimes look at the 4k televisions, but somehow think it’d hang on the wall but I’d never actually turn it on. Maybe I’ll buy one when I retire if I ever get that far.
@p.g.sharrow
Yes, they know the books are cooked. Professor Curry posted this copy of a letter from twenty climate “scientists” trying to end the debate they failed to win:
Click to access LetterPresidentAG.pdf
What a sad, sad state of affairs for science and all of society, worldwide.
Conclusion: Big Brother cannot accept REALITY – The pulsar-centered Sun is the Creator & Sustainer of every atom, life and planet in the solar system and still controls many events in our everyday life, like your next heartbeat!</
The remarkable thing about the Chilean earthquake is how low the casualty toll is.
Reuters is reporting 12 dead. And of course the personal tragedy of the loss of individuals, property, injury and distress is to be regretted. It is a remarkably low toll though for such a large quake.
Again Reuters:
“Waves of up to 4.5 meters (15 feet) slammed into Coquimbo’s shoreline, flinging large fishing boats and shipping containers onto the streets and sending floodwaters pouring into downtown.
The quake was the strongest recorded in the world this year, but the swift evacuation of coastal zones and strict building regulations appeared to help keep the death toll low.”
http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/09/18/us-chile-quake-idUSKCN0RI1PG20150918
A credit to a prosperous economy and good planning. There is a lesson here.
And on being a news ‘hog’ – count me in too. However, these days the frustration is in relying on only one or two mainstream sources, given the products of the world’s finest journalism schools ( /sarc ) can be reliably counted upon to create internal monocultures and generally look at the world from the left-of-centre.
There is a wealth of news sources, blogs and commentary out there, like our esteemed host runs here, and a lot can be gained by following searches on particular topics.
In what I hope is a relevant case in point, I like to scan the Middle East news section on Lebanon’s Daily Star. English language, in the heart of the ME, local and agency sources and a flow of smallish, tasting-plate stories on a lot of well, frankly, battle fronts in the Great Sunni-Shia Civil War. ( Arguably, everything else in the MENA is now eclipsed by the Great Civil War – even the oil price ).
From the Daily Star, we learn in the chaos of Yemen that:
“At least 14 pro-government troops were killed when a Saudi-led coalition air raid targeted their position “by mistake”, tribal and military sources said Friday.”
http://www.dailystar.com.lb/News/Middle-East/2015/Sep-18/315763-air-strike-kills-14-yemen-pro-govt-fighters-by-mistake.ashx
So – 12 dead in Chile in the biggest quake of 2015 ( so far ), and 14 dead in Yemen because oops !
So, again – by contrast to all sorts of other ‘human caused’ events, a remarkably low toll in Chile and a commendation to their disaster prep. Let’s see how they go on rescue and recovery ?
@omanuel; A RICO investigation of AGW deniers! They should be careful about what they wish for. They might just get their wish and find that sword is sharpest on the reverse side. The proof of conspiracy is strongest from their camp. Maybe we should wish them success in starting this prosecution of miscreants…pg
omanuel,
Thanks for linking that pathetic letter.
None of those self serving academics will engage in public debate except for Kevin Trenberth who comes across as arrogant and obnoxious.
They want the Obama regime to silence anyone who disagrees with them. The only thing that surprises me is that the regime took no action.
pg,
We can dream! It is long past time that academics be held liable for the consequences of their bad advice.
Too bad we have failed to follow the lead of the Italians who jailed scientists who gave bad advice that caused death and injury.
@omanuel & pgsharrow;
My question to the authors of the letter:
Why, if the vast majority of their colleagues agree with them, can they muster only 20 co-signatures?
(And how many of their colleagues were forwarded the letter in hopes of a signature?)
Have these people ever acknowledged a mistake? When was the last time any one of them looked in the mirror and said “wow, I really blew it”, rather than rationalizing and blaming someone else. It is a scary reflection on our current society that people like these have any position of influence at all.
This appears to me to be an effort of a team with circular thinking. There is a full court press action underway to pave the way for the Paris get together. This is just one small group contributing their efforts to gather PRESS attention for their cause. Likely one or two thought up this and log rolled it to their “team” members…pg
@gallopingcamel
Neither Trenberth nor any National Academy of Sciences member has been willing to address irrefutable evidence that two falsehoods, inserted into the foundations of solar and nuclear physics, are still obvious for any serious physicist to verify or deny today:
I. False changes were made in the internal composition of the Sun from:
_ a.) Mostly iron (Fe) in 1945 to
_ b.) Mostly hydrogen (H) in 1946
II. False changes were made in the definition of nuclear stability from:
_ c.) Minimum value of Aston’s nuclear packing fraction before WWII to
_ d.) Maximum value of Weizsacker’s nuclear binding energy per nucleon after WWII.
These two lies immediately destroyed the integrity of solar and nuclear physics after nations and national academies of sciences united on October 24, 1945.
Today these same falsehoods have destroyed the integrity of astronomy, astro-physics, climatology, cosmology, particle, planetary and theoretical physics.
This information is documented and available for comment and debate on ResearchGate, Public Dropbox & BritiusWordpress. See “Stalin’s Science.”
Click to access STALINS_SCIENCE.pdf
https://www.researchgate.net/…/281017812_STALIN’S_SCIENCE
Click to access STALINS_SCIENCE.pdf
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/281017812_STALIN'S_SCIENCE
p.g. Sharrow
Disappointed to hear that Carly is off your list. Is your judgement based on tangibles ? I ask because I value your opinion.
@Bruce Ryan; Never met her personally. I did work with people in the Bay area electronic industry for over 20 years. Carly has had high profile positions for many years so there were lots of “Rumors” about her activities. She also ran for high office in this states political system. Lost what should have been an victory. She is very good at selling her arguments, but her judgement sucks. It is her way or the hiway mentality. A female version of Trump, only she wasted other peoples money, where as Trump often risked his own. I’m not sure I would care for ether as president and leader of the western world…pg
On Carly I give her a lot of leeway regarding the discussion about her history with HP. First every single IT company has had huge layoffs since 2001, some of them like IBM multiple waves of staff cuts her in the US while outsourcing those jobs over seas. A complete shift of manufacturing of IT hardware over seas, companies like Storage Tech etc. who used to manufacture here all pushed production to Thiland Singapore, Korea and Taiwan etc. More importantly HP I believe, has a board of directors problem, not a leadership problem since she left in 2005 they have had 5 CEO’s the longest staying for 5 years, and a couple only staying in the position for months. That reeks of internal problems and infighting as different groups battle for supremacy.
At IBM we saw a similar destruction of work place value, as they sold off divisions and proceeded to turn it into a place that people hated to work for. When you have created a work place where your employees attempt suicide because of the way they are treated by managers or simply leave for lunch and never come back you know the system is broken. The entire IT industry got hit by a truck in 2001 by the IT crash and then has had a very bumpy road for years after as the market completely changed faster than they could adapt as desktops started to disappear, being replaced by personal devices and lap tops and large main frame systems getting thrashed by new generation systems and distributed computing and cloud based systems where companies did not even house their own IT infrastructure.
Not to mention that while she was running her campaign in California she was also battling cancer, I think she gets some benefit of the doubt there as well.
That said more importantly in my mind is that she is a good communicator and I think it is very valuable for the system to have her out there as a counter point to the Democratic message and their captive media. She gets people’s attention and she can say things about Hillary that the male candidates simply cannot say in today’s PC culture.
Maybe she is not the right person for the top slot or maybe she is exactly the right person for the top slot, only time will tell but I think it is important for her to be in the game right now, if nothing else to slap Trump up side the head.
@PG:
The Pizza Buddy old college roomie worked at HP during the Carly years (and took a layoff package then). I asked his opinion on Carly and he said she was OK. Not great, but no worse than others. She has to be The Tough Bitch sometimes to get the Big Boys to pay attention. Less now than in the 80s, but women still have to show the can be tough to be believed.
IMHO, having seen many of my prior employers go out of business in Silicon Valley, that HP is still around is testimony to having done something right. Who is gone? Names like Compaq (bought by HP, but still gone, like Tandem and DEC) while Amdahl just evaporated into Japanese vapor, and Sun, direct competitor of HP, got sold out to Oracle mostly so Ellison could could make dedicated database engines (and put a rival CEO founder nose in the dirt ending one rivalry). So just who is left selling “minicomputers” and “miniframes”? Well HP has a big chunk of the market that is left… with a server rack that is widely used for virtual machine farms and cloud infrastructure. (I worked with systems using a lot of them at The Mouse company in Fl.) IBM has offerings (that are OK but not great IMHO, and as noted by others, largely moving to selling services from hordes of folks in India… That I also worked with / coordinated in doing buildout PM work. Good folks but working 1/2 a world away with language and culture issues is, er, challenging).
Somehow being the survivor in a sea of sunk ships doesn’t look so much like failure.
Could it have been done better? Likely. I don’t agree with the “company rollup” approach, but that it is often done by the survivor implies I’m more likely the wrong one.
Could Carly have done as well without sharp elbows? Ask Ellison about Silicon Valley… and remember Jobs was often called a mean bastard by folks inside the company as he squashed them. His replacements (The Pepsi Salesman and Herr Spindler of Spindler’s List where I impemented the account closures for thousands at Apple during the massacre layoff, then laid off myself in a later round) almost killed the company… It was a very rough time, and HP was less messy than most in the valley.
So I understand how Carly looks to you, but it looks like most sharp elbowed CEOs to me. So I’d like some other POV on her character and persona before I start dissing her; and I expect the process will bring that up in the next couple of months. I just don’t know what else she has done that could be illuminating…
An added comment to the above lists on Carly:
Fiorina’s up-by-the-bootstraps foundational story — from secretary to CEO — is similarly misleading. In fact, Fiorina is the child of privilege. Her father was a Stanford law professor, Duke Law School dean, deputy attorney general, and federal appeals court judge. and a V.I.P. in the California Republican Party. He is the one that ramrodded her selection by the HP board after she was deposed from Lucent.
But she does do a great job of slapping “The Donald” along side of the head! :-)
It will be awhile before the real Republican candidate stands up and is reveled…pg