This is an “overflow” page from prior Tips pages as they had gotten so large it was taking a long time to load. Same idea, just a new set of space to put pointers to things of interest. The most immediately preceding page is: https://chiefio.wordpress.com/t5/.
I’ve added a generic “T” parent page where older copies of the various “Tips” pages can be found archived.
While I’m mostly interested in things having to do with:
Making money, usually via trading
Weather and climate
Quakes, Volcanoes, and other Earth Sciences
Current economic and political events
(often as those last three have impact on the first one…)
And just about any ‘way cool’ interesting science or technology
If something else is interesting you put a “tip” here.
You can also look at the list of “Categories” on the right hand side and get an idea of any other broad area of interest.
This ought not to be seen as a “limit” on what is “interesting”, more as a “focus list” with other things that are interesting being fair game as well.
Musings from the Chiefio 
TechRepublic has a Raspberry Pi review:
http://www.techrepublic.com/photos/raspberry-pi-review/6360787?tag=nl.e019
Is this the east Pacific rise firing up? http://www.sott.net/articles/show/245079-Peru-pelican-and-dolphin-deaths-prompt-warning-to-stay-off-beaches
I noticed in pics from Canary island volcano a lot of dead fish were around
http://www.streaming-planet.de/video/vulkan-tv/el-hierro.html
Click to access Leybourne_Oceans_Fin.pdf
Kuwait as well http://news.kuwaittimes.net/2012/05/06/fish-kill-scare-along-kuwait-bay/
FWIW ;-)
Is it ME or is it THEM? Am I paranoid or is there something out there that’s e-eating me alive? I need help guys? I used to be able to stay on line all day and have ~25M of junk in iExplorer at shutdown. Then it got to be around noon when I had to shut down, and restart. Now I’ve got 21.4M and it’s only midmorning. AND it takes forever to open a stupid regular page (imagine what it was like a day or two ago on T5;-).
Blood Suckers on the WWW? Ever get the feeling that someone is sucking your blood? And sucking more and more of it each day? When I open and start surfing I usually go to a number of places first to see what’s happened in the universe since the last time I was on, then I go to certain blogs that keep my mind from hardening like a block of concrete. During the course of blogging, I meander around looking up this and that so I don’t seem too stupid if/when I make a comment on those blogs. That’s it! That’s all I do.
Who do I suspect is sucking my blood (aka- using my computer without my permission) and slowing me down to a decrepit, weak, frail crawl on the web as I try to get through another day without new purchase or upgrade on a 12 year old HP? Let’s see if you can guess who I suspect from the list below-
ISP
DrudgeReport
Iris.Edu/Seismon
Kamala.Cod.Edu/Svr
Radar.Weather.Gov/Conus
Sohowww.Nascom.Nasa.Gov/Sunspots
Solen.Info/Solar
Blogs
GoogleSearch
Frankly, I suspect all of them; Google more than most is my BIG suspect, and of course BIG BROTHER via and GOV links. The others I have a feeling are being just as used as I am and don’t even know they’re being used and using me in the process. Back Channel Web Based Computer Use and there’s nothing I can do? Am I being paranoid? Am I wrong? If you know and tell me “It’s just your old PC!” I have a feeling I’ll jump for joy. What really frightens me is that I might be right. Can you imagine what this means? Orwell was right, a little late, but RIGHT!
Think maybe it’s all that youtube and myspace crap I’ve tried to block but can’t?
@Pascvaks: DO NOT USE ANYMORE WINDOWS INTERNET EXPLORER ANYMORE. Use Safari or any other. I guess MS it is not to blame but those who force them to collect information. Also you have to stop MS windows automatic updating.
@Pascvaks:
You left out “code bloat” and “feature creep”.
Those two are most of it. (And many of the ‘features’ are ‘mis-features’ IMHO).
So, code bloat. Many web pages started off as just text. Then added some graphics. Now they include whole programs with “active-X” and “Flash” widgets and more. This is termed “page weight” in the business. Growing Page Weight used to be a concern in the days of 56 kb dial ups, then “the industry” decided everyone would have 4G Wi-Fi and Broadband and page weight could go “way high”. Add in that Marketing got in on the page design process and wanted a load of “glitz”, so pages grew all sorts of animated dancing crap and snooping / tracking mis-features. All that makes pages much larger.
You actually can see that here, in my pages. Originally “text only” with tables of data. Then some graphs from Open Office. Now embedded videos.
At the same time that “feature creep” has brought us video, flash, and more, “Feature Creap” (my term ;-) has brought us all sorts of marketing driven cookies, click trackers, etc. Some browsers facilitate this more than others. IMHO, worst at this is Internet Exploder and Chrome. Google uses Chrome to track all sorts of things about you (very intrusive) and it’s nearly impossible to shut off the tracking and auto-updating. Internet Exploder is almost as. bad. ( Self updating software is convenient, but it also means your computer is constantly checking in with somewhere on the internet and babbling about you, sometimes downloading chunks of stuff and installing it. I turn off ‘auto-update’ on everything I can. I.E. also now defaults to sending many things you type to Bing! (where it, too, can be tracked…) More code bloat, more network traffic, more tracking. Internet Exploder, just say No!
FWIW I find the control of ‘snooping’ and mis-features better in Firefox and Opera. I only use Safari on the Mac and like it too. The “popup blocker” alone is worth it. (Speaking of “feature creap” and mis-features code bloat…) Opera has a nice caching feature “turbo something…” that speeds up loading on slow network links. You would likely find it helps your experience a lot.
http://www.opera.com/download/
Oh, and a lot of the advertizing driven tracking is done via various kinds of cookies. Being able to set the browser to ask about cookies “by site” is a nice feature. That way you can answer once “no, don’t accept cookies from ad.spy.bot” and never have to deal with it again… while saying “yes, accept cookies from my.bank.com”. Takes a while to decline the crap, but then a lot of cookie swapping load gets automatically shed in the future.
So, in short, it isn’t just you. It isn’t just your computer. It is them, and they are trying to spy on you. BUT, you can do things to lighten the load and you can do things to cut back on the spying.
FWIW, one of my favorite tricks is a bit geeky but highly valuable. Set up your own DNS server and then you can override the DNS lookup on malware and advertizing sites. Send their attempts at communication to your own web server (i.e. no internet traffic) that then responds with a null. Lets you block any and all kinds of unwanted traffic and there is nothing they can do to change / override it. Takes some maintenance and technical skill, though. Make it a caching server and it will fetch and cache most IP lookups locally, reducing the amount of internet traffic and time delay on each DNS lookup (of which there may be a dozen in one web page…) and it, too, speeds things up (while thwarting the snoops and advertizers…)
Oh, and one thing is Quite Certain: It has nothing to do with the water ;-)
@E.M. You say it is them , but they are but kids playing some imaginary war against everybody, allucinating themselves as super-heroes….However reality is very cruel, and history teaches a lot about similar childish games. Can´t help laughing imagining those grown up kids punished to wear a “Gurka” (Goorka) by friendly Talibans. LOL!
http://greenlivingideas.com/2009/09/09/74-years-henry-ford-predicted-hemp-cars-powered-biofuels/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemp_plastic
Hemp banned as it was a direct competition to Oil ?
[ Reply: Not really. BTW, I saw that same picture of someone whacking the rear panel on a FORD in a show about George Washington Carver. Said he worked with Ford to develop SOYBEAN based plastics. So I’m left wondering how much of this is hemp hype stealing soybean thunder and / or if they used both. Ethanol fuel (made from anything fermentable, not just hemp) was the first fuel of automobiles, gasoline not being invented yet. It lost out to the incredibly cheap gasoline that was a waste product from making the (then) valuable kerosene for lamps. Nothing mysterious about it. Just price. Ford even made a duel fuel carburettor for ethanol / gasoline during the transition. Ethanol was always realized as the superior fuel, but cost beat it. Interesting pictures of cars and hemp, though. BTW even as late as W.W.II the US Government grew fields of hemp for ropes. They maintain a strategic stockpile of seeds ‘just in case’. Old hemp could get you high (though it took a lot). Only recently have very low THC variations been promoted. The ban, near as I can tell, was directly related to the M.J. laws and “Refer Madness” craze. Something else that ought to be scrapped… FWIW, the history of G.W.Carver is fascinating and his work with Ford on bioplastics was stellar. Take a look at it… -E.M.Smith ]
John Slayton has run into an interesting problem with the metadata for the thermometer at Cal Poly Slo:
https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2010/02/15/thermometer-zombie-walk/#comment-34796
has details. Seems they were reading the wrong thermometer for a few years and it isn’t clearly flagged in the record. If anyone has clue how to find that in the metadata, he’s looking for some help sorting it out.
@Panther77:
IIRC the show on G.W. Carver said he used soybean oil to make a resin. Add that to your hemp reference and you have the fiber reinforcing being hemp and the resin being soybeans. Plus some misc chemicals to make it all set up and preserve it.
There really isn’t any problem making any plastic out of any plant. It just comes down to cost. “Synthesis Gas” is called that as you can synthesis just about anything from it, given enough steps and money. CO + H2 and it can be made from just about any carbon source plus water and heat. Hemp isn’t “special”, just cheap and with strong natural fibers in it. Bamboo is about the same (though makes better wood like finishes and is hard to pulp). You can even make plastics out of corn cobs and stalks if you like. Or make fuel out of old potatoes.
It really does all just come down to oil being incredibly cheap (until recently)… As coal has run around $10 to $20 / ton for most of the time I’ve watched it, at this point it is cheap coal and dirt cheap natural gas that prevent plant based chemicals and polymers being interesting. US chemical companies mostly use Nat Gas, though EMN Eastman Chemical still uses coal, as it has for many decades. No conspiracy, just low price.
Melissa Chan will be leaving China soon- they are not happy with her reporting.
http://www.aljazeera.com/video/asia-pacific/2012/03/201231343650917522.html
Actually, this is the first link…
http://chovanec.wordpress.com/2012/05/10/chinas-pulitzer-prize/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/10/mars-volcano-atmosphere-water_n_1506095.html Mars used to have a thick atmosphere. I remember your article on pressure of air on earth decreasing with time. Will we end up like Mars, and did we used to be like Venus?
Yeah funny, we build more dams and when Fossil fuels are burnt, isn’t it 2 more molecules of water are burnt for every CO2 coming out, so there should be more free water on earth. Water is more of a greenhouse gas. So are we measuring the free water at all? There must be plenty out there if the CO2 is supposedly so high. The sea must have rose too from the extra H2O in the system lol ;)
16 CO2 molecules produced, 18 H2O. If the CO2 is the highest in 200million years or whatever they say, then the water will also be higher…
2C8H18(l) +25O2(g)= 16CO2(g) +18H20(l)
[ Reply: Not had your caffeine today? News Flash: Water condenses. News Flash: Total volume of oil trivial compared to volume of oceans. Heck, it’s trivial compared to the mass of the air that is orders of magnitude less than the oceans. Suggestion: Before getting rampantly enthused with an idea: Do a search on it. Get some numbers. Compare sizes. Homework: Look up total oil. Just assume that it turns, ton for ton, to water. (Each C has 2 H for most things, H2O is mass 18 while C2H is mass 14, so close enough). Now look up mass of the ocean in tons. Compare. Please take 30 seconds to THINK and do such simple cross checks before posting. Thanks. -E.M.Smith ]
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2142886/The-outer-limits-Nasa-probe-sees-edge-solar-time–completely-different-thought.html Interesting about Heliosphere and wind coming in
They worked out the real danger http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2012/05/one-million-year-cycle-major-asteroid-or-comet-impacts-todays-most-popular.html
[ Reply: Gee, asteroids hit the earth. Who knew? This is a “tip”? The article is mostly rampant speculation mixed with some old information. Yes, we get hit with rocks. But we know the frequency for major ones, and it isn’t 1 million years. More like 70 million. Then at the end the article says Jupiter protects us. Well duh. -E.M.Smith ]
Helium 3 energy source moon http://io9.com/5908499/could-helium+3-really-solve-earths-energy-problems
[ Reply: Not until costs of space travel come down a couple of orders of magnitude AND we get hot fusion working. So don’t hold your breath. -E.M.Smith ]
E.M.
Think you have a “Must read” at the top of Jo Nova’s today!
E.M.
After that comment I get a WordPress email inviting me to subscribe!
No way if I can’t paste!
Not that I would – I like to do my reading for me.
This p21 is pretty interesting
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/7448557/Humans-could-regrow-body-parts-like-some-amphibians.html
http://historicmysteries.com/can-we-achieve-immortality
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com.au/2012/05/abc-news-us-has-oil-reserves-greater.html Peak oil lol
Lately WordPress has changed the ‘options’ next to comments such that “Notify me of follow-ups via email’ is automatically checked. I keep un-checking it, but… I’m also going to explore the “options” to see if there’s some way I can change the default for here. Look at the lower left corner when filling in a comment…
I seem to have encountered the same problem. had to log onto wordpress to stop the clogging my email. One more annoyance from helpful busy bodies.
Well, since I ‘Unchecked” the box (lower left) this last time, it seems to have “stuck”. Now I’ll get to find out if I need to do that on every wordpress blog I visit… Sigh…
Did the moon crash into earth and seed life, maybe it was a free floating planet? http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2142948/Could-billions-billions-free-floating-nomadic-planets-Milky-Way-seeding-galaxy-life.html
Looks like those 1million + volcanoes under the sea might be letting out more CO2 then we think
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/47405195/ns/technology_and_science-science/#.T7AyhOtSTpg
Obama wants another trillion dollars stolen from our children and grandchildren to divvy out to his political supporters in an election year under the name “stimulus”. http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/may/12/obama-pushes-billion-dollar-stimulus-plan/
Gravity and Climate Change http://www.scribd.com/doc/27343303/Gravity-Causes-Climate-Change
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-180406584
As many as 32,000 underwater mountains have been identified around the world and the majority are believed to be volcanic in origin. Several thousand of these may be active but a combination of ocean depth and remoteness means that very few have been studied.
Ring of fire
This research into the Monowai volcano provides a fascinating insight into the little-known world of submarine geology.
Monowai was first spotted from an aircraft in 1944. Surveys over following years found evidence of significant change – with the sea discoloured and seismic activity detected. Studies between 1978 and 2007 showed the summit repeatedly rising and falling
http://youtu.be/LRRsFsUj7PQ Egypt DNA
[/b> Reply: Would be better if they bothered to mention that what they are all excited about is just R1b haplogroup. We already knew that and did a posting on it some time ago. Red Headed R1b pharaoh and Celts as mercenaries in Egypt. Then they compound it with confounding “descendant of King Tut” with “descended from a common ancestor near 10,000 years ago”. At the end they go off the deep end into conspiracy theory to ‘suppress information’ that is widely published. Sheesh… -E.M.Smith ]
Solar forcings https://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2012/05/13/solar-forcing-of-climate-c-de-jager/
E.M.
Check out Coyoteblog on European “austerity”
[ Reply: I presume you mean this one: http://www.coyoteblog.com/coyote_blog/2012/05/myth-making-by-the-left-on-europe-continues.html -E.M.Smith ]
@Another Ian:
And would the JoanneNova “today” link be:
http://joannenova.com.au/2012/03/conspiracy-theorist-just-another-form-of-namecalling-from-the-class-who-want-to-be-global-rulers/
http://joannenova.com.au/2012/05/bloggers-speech-to-the-ny-fed-tells-it-like-it-is/
Talking about:
http://www.economicpolicyjournal.com/2012/04/my-speech-delivered-at-new-york-federal.html
Which is rather like the Ayatollah asking the Pope over to explain to him where he’s got things wrong ;-)
http://joannenova.com.au/2012/05/want-climate-resistant-oysters-or-climate-justice-the-arc-has-millions-to-help-but-no-money-for-skeptics/
Or?….
(Just “oysters” or “namecalling” or “NY Fed” or…. just a tiny hint! ;-)
(I’m reading them all, but would like to know which one caught your eye ….)
I have a staging site set up for the proofing of my new website format http://staging.aerology.com/ if you would be interested in previewing what is up there so far and adding any critique to what others have done to help me improve the overall look and performance.
Currently adding 600+ new maps a day as I get the time line extended out toward two years of forecast minimum. Local search features will be added similar to the original site asap a software package can be located for Canada and Australian postal codes.
@Richard Holle:
Looks nice! I’ll take more time to wander around in coming days, but the precipitation map already has me hooked! I’m always looking at The Weather Chanel to get some idea what is happening with precipitation patterns, and this is a lot faster and easier.
10 seconds of Gamma Ray burst can significantly damage the ozone layer http://truththeory.com/2012/05/15/most-dinosaur-bones-discovered-are-radioactive/
http://youtu.be/Ntv4ZMvUSWI Plants and feelings lol
[ Reply: A bit ‘quick’ with the ‘lol’… Plants DO communicate and they DO have responses to predation. Acacias IIRC release a pheromone when ‘nibbled’ that tells near by plants to make more toxic materials. It’s a chemical communication, but communication all the same. So can they also detect the pheromones issued by a predator as it prepares to eat them? It would be a reasonable possibility. Not all communications need be visual or auditory and not all “thinking” needs to be electrical. -E.M.Smith ]
Fleeting thoughts-
– Fog this morning, not so unusual, but unusual enough to make you wonder. ‘London Fog’ (not the coats;-), wonder if the incidence rate is inching up a little (probably more so in the glens and moors and West Coast, before the Beefeaters see anything in Town at the Tower;-). Just thinking about fog, low level clouds, water, air, temperatures, ice, snow, and sunspots…
– A cartoon worth a few billion words about many things beginning with “Student Loans and politics…” –
http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2012/05/weekend-feature-saturns-weird-voice-radio-waves-vary-at-its-north-and-south-hemispheres.html “The rain of electrons into the atmosphere that produces the auroras also produces the radio emissions and affects the magnetic field, so scientists think that all these variations we see are related to the sun’s changing influence on the planet,” said Stanley Cowley, co-investigator on Cassini’s magnetometer instrument.
The moon going up to the northern hemisphere: movement in the atmosphere up there.
Looks like the sun pretty much controls most of the temperature on earth and cooling coming http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364682612000417
E.M.
FYI. A review of the Raspberry Pi at http://www.theaustralia.com.au/australian-it
[ Reply:
Was this the link you meant?:
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/australian-it/exec-tech/raspberry-pi-computer-is-very-tasty-and-selling-like-hot-cakes/story-e6frgazf-1226355152874
-E.M.Smith ]
E.M.
Yes.
Still can’t paste – funny it is only seems to be happening on N Hemisphere WordPress sites.
When things slow down I’ll try another browser.
@Another Ian:
Well, maybe if you post in Spanish it will think it’s in the Southern Hemisphere and work ;-)
Liquid CO2 http://youtu.be/aRYgeOMBlmQ
[ Reply: Do you not remember my using that clip in an article about liquid CO2 on the ocean bottom? -E.M.Smith ]
Sumatra more active then thought http://www.asianscientist.com/in-the-lab/deep-sea-ash-volcanic-activity-sumatra-indonesia-2012/
E.M.
The answer from a tip at Verity Jones – use Control C and Control V.!
https://chiefio.wordpress.com/t6/
Don’t ask why!
Does anyone think Ephesus being 5km from the sea (with a harbor) has anything to do with the warming at the time? Basically proving how much warmer it was then compared to now?
http://www.ephesus.us/ephesus/ephesus_location.htm
WWF: Only global poverty can save us.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/05/16/wwf_living_planet_report/
Asteroids, the biggest danger to man http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2012/05/the-10-most-likely-cities-to-be-crushed-by-an-asteroid-nasa-tracks-potentially-hazardous-objects.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TheDailyGalaxyNewsFromPlanetEarthBeyond+%28The+Daily+Galaxy+–Great+Discoveries+Channel%3A+Sci%2C+Space%2C+Tech.%29
The shadow world government:
http://vaticproject.blogspot.com.au/2012/05/can-dna-send-electromagnetic-imprints.html DNA can teleport itself?
http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2009/09/the-dna-mystery-scientists-baffled-by-telepathic-abilities.html
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/01/080124103151.htm
[ Reply: I would expect this “amazing” ability is just due to the property of water we saw in an earlier posting; where it has molecules line up in quazi-crystal like structures at the surface. Simply having water forming a sheath around a DNA molecule would extend the ‘shape’ of it and perhaps some of the charge into a significant surrounding area. The rest would just be electrical attractions. Interesting, yes. Mystical telepathic DNA, no. -E.M.Smith ]
Casimir force http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2007/08/physicists-use-.html
[ Reply: So? Yes, the Casimir force exists…. -E.M.Smith ]
Saw something interesting in the neutron counter graphs at the solar reference page over at Anthony’s website. A very odd very sharp spike UPWARD in neutron counts at every counter. Solar flares and active sunspot generate a downward spike in neutron counts as the solar wind pushes GCRs out of the inner solar system. It is normal in those cases to see the neutron counts make a brief spike up to the “normal” range but this one is different. It is a huge spike upward seen at all stations that goes to the top of the scale at the South Pole monitor. I’m not speculating anything by it, just pointing it out as curious. Scroll down to: Neutron Monitor Count Graphs:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/reference-pages/solar/
Another interesting puzzle piece related to a comment I posted a while back RE: Uranium. I was looking at this article about the impending demise of 30% of the world’s helium supply:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/18/us/legislation-proposed-to-extend-texas-helium-sales-deadline.html?_r=1
When I noticed this near the end of the article:
So where, exactly, did the “new” Uranium come from? Nothing that I am aware of decays into uranium. Uranium is formed in supernovae explosions. The uranium came from space and is “relatively new” which means it came after the “old” uranium and apparently significantly so. We have apparently been bombarded by significant quantities of uranium. This must have happened AFTER the “late heavy bombardment”. It would seem to me that this “new” uranium would suggest arrival as early as 2 billion years ago.
“New Uranium” brings a smile to my face. Some day real scientists will realize that the earths’ core is powered by “cold” fusion. and not solely by fission decay. While O. Manual is not totally right about the suns’ power supply, he is not totally wrong either. A. Rossis’ device points the way to the way GOD powers the universe. 8-) pg
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/ancient-life-millions-of-years-old-and-barely-alive-found-beneath-ocean-floor/2012/05/17/gIQA3zIRWU_story.html Slow motion bacteria could be millions of years old
@George:
Odd with the neutron count. X-Ray spike in the 17th too…
Wonder what happened.
Per Uranium:
I think the point is that the Uranium deposit is new (but the Uranium is old). It’s a sedimentary deposit, so the U washed in from somewhere else, and lost the He along the way:
http://econgeol.geoscienceworld.org/content/77/3/557.abstract
(Short form: It’s moving with the sulphur…)
Not only that, but the “new” uranium would have had to have come from a DIFFERENT supernova than the one that created the “old” uranium because uranium from the same supernova would be the same “age” no matter when it fell to Earth. In other words, the ratio of uranium to lead would be the same if it were created at the same time no matter when it fell to Earth.
So now the question is … has Earth been pummeled in the past from debris flying through the solar system from different supernovae? Does our solar system sometimes sail through such debris fields? It is one thing to imagine rocks flying down from space but can you imagine huge chunks of metals like silver, gold, lead, and uranium? Silver is pretty reactive. In places in Arizona in the 19th century they were digging out silver “so pure you could cut it with a knife”.
Need to know the actual origin of super-novas in http://www.holoscience.com
Just stumbled on this BBC article on new memory device “Memoristor” technology;
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-18103772
very fast and small. pg
Some interesting videos on dinosaurs and what might have happened :PPPP
http://beforeitsnews.com/story/2156/157/Why_Dinosaurs_May_Still_Rule_The_Earth.html
[ Reply: Amusing, but rather strongly ‘speculative’ and fantasy… Not supported by the ‘facts in the ground’. -E.M.Smith ]
Can these effect climate? http://www.universetoday.com/30594/blazars/
Still, they soon felt the effects of Tesla’s apparatus. Sparks leapt from the ground as people walked the streets, singeing their feet through their shoes. The grass around the Tesla building glowed with a faint blue light. Metal objects held near fire hydrants would draw miniature lightning bolts from several inches away. Switched-off light bulbs within 100 feet of the tower spontaneously lit.
And Tesla was only tuning up his equipment. These were the side effects of adjusting the magnifying transformer into perfect resonance with the earth. Once it was properly calibrated, Tesla was ready to conduct his career’s boldest symphony, using the entire planet as his orchestra.
Late one night in the fall of 1899, Tesla fired up his machine at full blast, in hopes of producing a phenomenon he called resonant rise. His tower pumped ten million volts into the earth’s surface. The current raced through the earth at the speed of light, powerful enough to keep from dying out over the course of its journey. When it reached the opposite side of the planet, it bounced back, like ripples of water returning to their origin. Upon returning, the current was greatly weakened; but Tesla was sending out a series of pulses which reinforced one another, resulting in a tremendous cumulative effect. http://www.corrosion-doctors.org/Biographies/TeslaBio-2.htm
I’m crying! Well nearly;-( Not for joy, but in pain. I visited Pielke Sr. a few minutes ago and opened his latest post, a guest article from a Japanese Psychologist on why there are two key attitudes about ‘global warming’– 1.) CO2 is the Be All AND End All of global warming, and 2) There’s a lot of things that make up the reasons for global warming. (link below) It’s short and sweet, won’t take long, Pielke Sr. doesn’t do Comments from the Peanut Gallery. Why am I hurting, nearly bawling my eyes out? Please read it, tell me I’m wrong, he didn’t say what he said, he didn’t actually say what he said, please!!!! I keep saying there something in the plipping water, I’m telling you it’s global too. We are, all of us, about to take a bath (the figurative kind, the kind where we lose everything and have to start all over again from scratch and fig leaves). We’re toast! There really is something in the @#$#% water! Please… someone, anyone, tell me I’m wrong. Tell me it IS some EAST WEST THINKING THING, say it’s GENETIC.
http://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com/2012/05/18/guest-post-by-kiminori-itoh-what-is-the-psychological-origin-of-the-narrow-view-of-the-ipcc-socio-psychological-aspect-of-the-climate-change/
PS: Ref above. I thought the IPCC was run by an Indian Climate Guru who writes sexy detective novels.
http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/water-use-may-be-to-blame-for-rising-seas/story-e6freuy9-1226361545596 TOO much water now. This is what I was thinking, if they were worried about the CO2, more H20 is produced when Octane is burnt LOL
Looks like the biosphere goes up 100,000, maybe there is some truth in Comets spreading things to earth? http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/05/microbes-at-the-edge-of-space/
@E.M. Something very important:
http://vimeo.com/42033257
Behind all this there is : electromagnetism, charges. Iron, Nickel and Cobalt share the particularity of having jumping oxidation states +2,+3. For example, at the root of the electromagnetic phenomena we have Magnetite (Fe3O4=FeO+Fe2O3) where there is a current, a phenomenon of oxidation-reduction, reduction-oxidation between the two, which generates a magnetic field.
http://www.presstv.ir.junk/detail/241632.html DNA modified like a hard drive
[ Reply: As someone already under Moderation Watch due to the anti-semitic posting, this one puts you on the edge of a ban. Why? False Description. You get ONE of those per (moderate ill defined time period) as a possible “fumbled paste”. The link given is in fact an Anti-US Screed where the sidebar of the page is substantially anti-USA propaganda. Nothing about DNA to be seen… “‘Bin Laden died of natural causes’ ‘NATO military arm of US imperialism'” and the like. Note the “.ir” in the link (to which I’ve appended a .junk so as to break it. No need giving them a link and no need risking cyber attacks from Iran to guests here.) So you want to try again? -E.M.Smith ]
http://phys.org/news/2012-05-totally-rad-scientists-rewritable-digital.html DNA modified like a hard drive
PS I didn’t do any antisemitic posts.
Don’t worry the head of NASA is watching imaginary sea rise and Ice that always melts http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2012/05/-ecoalert-nasa-updates-hazardous-asteroid-count-only-20-30-of-4700-objects-found.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TheDailyGalaxyNewsFromPlanetEarthBeyond+%28The+Daily+Galaxy+–Great+Discoveries+Channel%3A+Sci%2C+Space%2C+Tech.%29
EM-
Looks like “Ethical Questions…” didn’t post on the list of RECENT POSTS sidebar, though the recent comments do show up to some ‘hidden’ place, what evil lurks in the hearts of computer programs?…. The Shadow knows;-)
https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2012/05/22/ethical-questions-with-no-room-for-climategate/
What Rasberry pi?
http://www.reghardware.com/2012/05/22/chip_maker_via_outs_49_dollar_raspberry_pi_alike/
This is why I have been fairly scathing and dismissive of the fake charity types behind the rasberry thingie. They had a marketing window all their own…
Not any more, much easier to give ones money to people who know what business is.
@ Pascvaks
I just read the article you recommended at Pielke’s site, http://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com/2012/05/18/guest-post-by-kiminori-itoh-what-is-the-psychological-origin-of-the-narrow-view-of-the-ipcc-socio-psychological-aspect-of-the-climate-change/
The author’s conclusion is a new high point in the art of irony. sigh…
THIS absolutely needs wider exposure. I really do not believe people fully appreciate the impact that Obama’s policies are going to have on their pocketbooks. There was a capacity auction for 2015 power by a grid operator back East. Power will jump 8x in 2015 due to Obama regulations. If people have a $100 home electric bill now, they may well have a $800 or more electric bill in 2015 depending on where they live. This is the biggest corruption scandal ever in the history of the US. The “Global Warming” scam is created, then they use that to justify pumping literally billions of dollars to political cronies who invest in “renewable” power, then they use regulations cutting of access to conventional power forcing people to buy the renewable power FOR NO REASON. There is NO REASON to cut off conventional power sources:
http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2012/05/22/obamas-war-on-coal-hits-your-electric-bill/
http://freebeacon.com/bundler-of-sunshine/
I am absolutely livid.
E.M.
Seen this?
“cleanwater2 says:
May 22, 2012 at 11:33 am
ALAN SIDDONS HEADLINE STORY JOHN O’SULLIVAN NASA
NASA in Shock New Controversy: Two Global Warming Reasons Why by John O’Sullivan, guest post at Climate Realists
NASA covered up for forty years proof that the greenhouse gas theory was bogus. But even worse, did the U.S. space agency fudge its numbers on Earth’s energy budget to cover up the facts?
As per my article this week, forty years ago the space agency, NASA, proved there was no such thing as a greenhouse gas effect because the ‘blackbody’ numbers supporting the theory didn’t add up in a 3-dimensional universe:
“During lunar day, the lunar regolith absorbs the radiation from the sun and transports it inward and is stored in a layer approximately 50cm thick….in contrast with a precipitous drop in temperature if it was a simple black body, the regolith then proceeds to transport the stored heat back onto the surface, thus warming it up significantly over the black body approximation…”
Thus, the ‘blackbody approximations’ were proven to be as useful as a chocolate space helmet; the guesswork of using the Stefan-Boltzmann equations underpinning the man-made global warming theory was long ago debunked. If NASA had made known that Stefan-Boltzmann’s numbers were an irrelevant red-herring then the taxpayers of the world would have been spared the $50 billion wasted on global warming research; because it would have removed the only credible scientific basis to support the theory that human emissions of carbon dioxide changed Earth’s climate.
But, until May 24, 2010 these facts remained swept under the carpet. For the Apollo missions NASA had successfully devised new calculations to safely put astronauts on the Moon-based on actual measured temperatures of the lunar surface. But no one appears to have told government climatologists who, to this day, insist their junk science is ‘settled’ based on their bogus ‘blackbody’ guesswork.
NASA’s Confusion over Earth’s Energy Budget
But it gets worse: compounding such disarray, NASA, now apparently acting more like a politicized mouthpiece for a socialist one world government, cannot even provide consistent numbers on Earth’s actual energy budget.
Thanks to further discussion with scientist, Alan Siddons, a co-author of the paper, ‘A Greenhouse Effect on the Moon,’ it appears I inadvertently stumbled on a NASA graph that shows the U.S. space agency is unable to tally up the numbers on the supposed greenhouse gas “backradiation.” Why would this be?
In its graphic representation of the energy budget of the Earth the agency has conspicuously contradicted itself in its depiction of back-radiation based on its various graphs on Earth’s radiation budget.
As Siddons sagely advised me, “This opens the question as to WHICH budget NASA actually endorses, because the one you show is consistent with physics: 70 units of sunlight go in, 70 units of infrared go out, and there’s no back-flow of some ridiculous other magnitude. Interesting.”
Climate Sceptic Scientists’ Growing Confidence
Thanks to Siddons and his co-authors of ‘A Greenhouse Effect on the Moon,’ the world now has scientific evidence to show the greenhouse gas theory (GHG) was junk all along.
As the truth now spreads, an increasing number of scientists refute the greenhouse gas theory, many have been prompted by the shocking revelations since the Climategate scandal. The public have also grown more aware of how a clique of government climatologists were deliberately ‘hiding the decline’ in the reliability of their proxy temperature data all along.
But NASA’s lunar temperature readings prove that behind that smoke was real fire. Some experts now boldly go so far as to say the entire global warming theory contravenes the established laws of physics.
How NASA responds to these astonishing revelations may well tell us how politicized the American space agency really is.
http://www.suite101.com/profile.cfm/johnosullivan”
From comments at http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/05/22/nasa-astronauts-announce-second-letter-to-nasa-at-heartland-conference/#more-64104
@Chuckles:
Not all folks doing “barn raising” type efforts are “fake charities”. I worked for one for a year or so. We gave away the software (now the C compiler tool chain inside Red Hat and most other Linux releases) and you could pay us for support contracts if you needed them. All of Linux is pretty much a “charity” in that mode.
A great deal of good comes from folks “doing the most possible for the least money”.
So some other company thinks that they can make a $50 board and compete. That’s a GOOD thing in that it means even more benefit for more folks. Those who can’t wait, can pay the double price. Those than can’t pay, can wait a little while. I see no way that make the Pi folks “fake”.
@George:
One can only hope… at 8x for bills, there will be a complete economic collapse and revolution with the expulsion of the ObamaNation for the rest of our lifetime. The EPA would be a fire seen for miles…
At present I can make power for about 1.5 x the cost of it from PG&E. With very little effort I can get that down to parity. IF it jumps to 4 x my neighbors will need to get used to my generator ;-)
Then again, they might be interested in a piece of the action ;-)
@Pascvaks:
Stop bawling, get a nice soothing beverage (NOT water! You seem to have a phobia about water…) and a deep breath. Read the article again.
What they are saying is that reality is a lot of complicated things make up the “Global Warming Issue” (some of which might be various kinds of fraud and deception IMHO) but that lazy minds want ONE SIMPLE ANSWER (and they do) and this is wrapped up in an “East vs West mind set” kimono that largely is just hiding the question of “lazy” vs “detail” thinking styles.
Yes, most folks in the western TV generation are lazy simple answer unidimensional thinkers.
Yes, many folks in the eastern work your butt off or you die generations are more multidimensional thinkers (think “Chinese Puzzle”…)
That has nothing to do with the water, OK?
So all he said, really, was that simpletons want the CO2 answer so they can be lazy and stop thinking as they don’t like it. I’ve already observed that.
It’s an unforgivable sin with most folks to “Force them to think against their will” and it is essential if you wish to get them to question the CO2 Mantra.
There really isn’t much more to it than that. It has been that way for as long as I can tell. Even the Romans used “bread and circuses” to distract the masses and let them not think and be happy.
@Another Ian:
Hadn’t seen it, but had seen the lunar issue ( I think at WUWT).
Interesting stuff…
EM-
(YourSlap- “”Whack!!!””)
Thanks I needed that! Don’t know what got into me!
(Ok, it’s not always the water;-)
(But it really is the fastest way to
get a lot of people around the
world psyched out and claiming
the sky is falling or the air they
exhale is going to melt the poles
and kill us all;-)
Just found it so hard to believe anyone with half an education would clam there’s an East-West ‘thing’ about people who consider all factors and those who are morons and prefer only one. It was ‘that’ claim that sent me reeling, and I couldn’t believe the Old Man let it get on his blog. Wonder what he was drinking?;-)
@Pascvaks:
I did not interpret it as a genetic or racial claim, rather as a cultural claim. In that context it is true. The Oriental history and experience values the complex, intricate, and multi-threded a lot while the western history and experience values the “direct action” and the “straight talk” answer.
Basically, I think what he said is true. Just a cultural bias is all it takes. Confucius contributed a lot to it, as does Buddhism. It is also reflected in how we each conduct wars. While we were still doing “marching in ranks strait into volley fire” Sun Tsu was ancient history there…
And no, not the water…
Well, maybe the western fire water… and the tea. Drink enough oriental green tea and you can get really energized and focused on complex problems… It’s a pretty good stimulant with … oh, darn it, now I’m making your case that it IS something in the water ;-)
E.M. FYI
A criticism of renewables in the Guardian?
http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2012/5/23/the-despair-of-energy-policy.html
Interesting talk at Stanford last night by “Andy” Bechtolsheim (co-founder of Sun, current company is Arista Networks)
I found the Q and A very interesting.
http://blog.wolfram.com/2012/05/23/announcing-wolfram-systemmodeler/
.I spent a lot of time in my life being a sheepdog, and a father, so I know it doesn’t take much to decimate people, we’re a very soft target.
Ref.
a. Bird Kills (hundreds of birds litter the ground; here, there, etc.)
b. Flesh Eating Bacteria (fourth case reported recently via Drudge)
http://milledgeville.13wmaz.com/news/news/70992-son-flesh-eating-bacteria-struck-milledgeville-man
http://www.webmd.com/a-to-z-guides/necrotizing-fasciitis-flesh-eating-bacteria-topic-overview
Thoughts:
Much as we ‘assume’ that our own government would not do anything so stupid as to endanger our economy, etc., etc., we ‘assume’ that collectively we can overcome any difficulty with our superior brain cells and mighty all-capable government, NGO‘s, faith-based this-and-that, educational system, and Chinese banks and industries.
People are their own worst enemies. They really are! And ‘successful’ people(?) seem to be worse than most to themselves and their own. Really! They assume facts, capabilities, sensitivities, and knowledge not in evidence. We (Americans especially) ‘assume’ that we are invincible, that given our tremendous ‘superior’ (decaying) culture and ‘state-of-the-art’ (decaying) scientific base there is nothing we can’t do, if we so choose.
I know I sound like a broken record about certain things, one in particular may be because I buy 24 bottle plastic wraps of ’water’ for Herself (I drink tap water) and every time I carry or see that ’case’ on the floor I think ’Hummmm, is it really better OR worse????’. And then I wunder, and wander, and think…
@ Pascvacs “Just found it so hard to believe anyone with half an education would clam there’s an East-West ‘thing’ about people who consider all factors and those who are morons and prefer only one.”
I admire the irony. A Japanese Professor at a Japanese University examines a problem and concludes that Westerners are strongly biased toward simplified, idealized, analysis and solution, and that Asians are more prone to incorporate detail, complexity and nuance — while at the same time he is apparently oblivious to the painfully obvious fact that his examination and conclusion is such an extreme simplification and idealization.
@Another Ian:
I especially like one of the comments from down in that posting:
To quote Tallbloke IIRC “It’s models all the way down!”.
I think it was a mistake to teach so many people how to write programs and so few about why they ought not (and how horribly broken software can be…).
“Models can never prove anything. Models can not show reality. At best a model can ‘inform our ignorance’ when it goes wrong and illustrates what parts we still do not understand. -E.M.Smith”
The can be useful, but must never be trusted.
UPDATE / ADDITION:
For your amusement.. I posted this reply and “nothing”. I had gone to the SPAM queue. Never mind that I am the block owner, was logged in, and had management windows open. Never mind that I can’t figure a single thing in it that would cause it to go to SPAM. No, WordPress has its own way about things.
So for folks occasionally caught by the same, here is an existence proof of “it isn’t me!”… Perhaps someone can figure out what in the above would cause a flag to rise, but I sure can’t…
@Chuckles:
Looks like fun… the only “bad thing” is yet more people making models and not understanding their limitations…
@George:
Perhaps later tonight when I get a free hour ;-)
@Pascvaks:
Per the ‘flesh eating bacteria’ realize that it isn’t ONE bacteria. There are a half dozen that can cause necrotizing fasciitis. There have been many many cases throughout history. In most cases there is some underlying compromised nature to the immune system. As ever more people are NOT dying from other things and are kept around via antibiotics, and as more folks are being fed immunity suppressing drugs (for transplants and inflammatory diseases) and have compromised immunity from things like AIDS; there will be more cases.
Occasionally it hits folks with apparently normal immunity, but “why” is not understood. Who knows how many cases of historical “gangrene” were in fact these bugs.
Per bottle water: The Spousal Unit also drinks it. I like to point out “plasticizers leaching” ;-) and I just drink the tap water. We get an annual report on it (who knows why…) and it is rather clean.
Given that we evolved drinking crap water in Africa and Eurasia, full of all sorts of bugs and stuff, I’m not very worried…
But to your main point: Yes, vanity and arrogance are the worst risks to our selves and our nations.
@Jason Calley:
Yeah, that’s a nice touch… and the point that he’s being obviously self aggrandizing of his own culture… But I’m sure he’s sure he’s more right ;-)
@E.M. Do you know some ‘flesh eating bacteria’ out there in the political arena?
@Adolfo there is a brain eating affliction that is endemic to politicians, generally takes 24 months to become full blown. The only known cure is to get out of causation and become a quiet private citizen. ;-) pg
@Adolfo:
Sadly, no. I know of nothing that can stop or even slow down a politician in full rut…
@P.G.Sharrow:
I think you are talking about PSE Political spongiform encephalothopy…
It is spread by close physical contact. While the causal agent has not been identified, it is suspected to be transmitted by ‘wet contact’, particularly the application of the lips to the posterior orifice of those possessed of great wealth, who seem to act as carriers of the disease but are largely unaffected by it.
There is no known cure and the disease seems to run it’s course in about 10 years in most people. Occasionally some will have a slower course of affliction and, while showing extreme symptoms, will continue to act in public life; apparently unaware of the deep compromise of their faculties that is obvious to everyone (except, it would seem, to carriers of the illness.)
While the illness is terribly damaging to those around the afflicted, who are often more injured than the ‘afflicted yet unaware’, the good news is that persons so afflicted can function, at a marginal level, in society. They may be prone to extreme elation, egotism, a sense of entitlement and superiority, and have a “Little Hitler” affect; but are blissfully unaware of this. Those around them can best help by not supporting these delusions, but attempts to dissuade the patient from their delusions are likely to cause a violent response and ought to be avoided.
Drug therapy is recommended, but, sadly, most of the afflicted tend to heavily self-medicate with inappropriate substances.
With ongoing research we are hopeful that some effective treatment can be found, though at present the prognosis is not good and there is no effective treatment.
E.M.
Brilliant!
Interesting and well reasoned biological evidence of higher atmospheric pressure in Jurassic Period, based on necessary power to weight of flying animals applied to Quetzalcoatlus.
http://levenspiel.com/octave/dinosaurs.htm
Continues over several pages, and suggests that pressure was likely 2-3x what it is today. That would make a huge different to temperature, lifting it by 10’s of K (on average) and greatly reducing temp variation between tropics and poles due to stronger atmospheric energy circulation.
@RobL-
Sounds like Florida on a hot summer day. Imagine Florida temps and humidity in Nome Alaska, and no Kool-Aid;-)
@RobL-
I still think that the variations in the solar ‘neighborhood’ as we orbit the galexy, which causes/effects solar output changes, (AND the arrangements and locations of the various continental landmasses) have a heck of a lot more to do with temps and humidity in Nome, AK, and sealevels than CO2, don’t you? See link for graph-
@Pascvaks: Well yes, continental distribution has a massive effect, CO2 pretty small (perhaps a degree or two), but solar neighbourhood seems pretty weak at best – sun must be dominant both for the large flux of solar wind, magnetic field and variations in spectral output (total solar output will be largely constant with increase over millions of years and some cyclic variations over 100’s-1000’s of years).
Having investigated paleoclimate further air bubbles in amber apparently show oxygen levels up to 35% 100million years ago. With same Nitrogen mass as today that would lead to an increase in atmospheric pressure of 23%, or about 15-20K of temperature increase relative to today (2000m worth of 0.7-1°C lapse rate), but distributed globally – ie less in tropics more in polar regions.
Still doesn’t explain how pterosaurs managed to stay aloft, unless the slightly thicker atmosphere and greater rate of thermal transport/convection from equator to poles led to consistently stronger winds.
E.M. FYI
“EU Carbon trading crashes: German bourse closes and Irish end carbon rort
More signs Australia is leaping onto a burning ship as it starts carbon taxing, just as the largest carbon markets are winding up:
(Reuters) – Bavaria’s stock exchange will abandon its carbon emissions certificate trading operations in the EU-traded CO2 market on June 30 after volumes in Europe “plunged to practically zero” in recent months, it said on Tuesday.
The EU’s emissions trading scheme (EU ETS) limits the carbon dioxide emissions of the 27-nation bloc’s factories and power plants and covers nearly half of EU emissions.
EU prices are down 60% over the last 12 months”
More at http://joannenova.com.au/2012/05/eu-carbon-trading-crashes-german-bourse-closes-and-irish-end-carbon-rort/
Update – the window does strange things when it gets bigger than the lines ending in rort. And I can “copy” from other windows but have to “control v” here to paste. The WordPress Wonders!
@Another Ian:
You might want to just try another browser. I use all of Safari, Opera, Firefox (and a couple of derivatives of it) with no problems. (on Windows, Mac, and Linux… so it’s not an OS thing.)
The problem with the “Carbon trading schemes” is pretty simple.
They try to create a captive market in a geography with high prices. Just a cheap boat ride away is a non-captive market with a zero price. The inevitable result is industry will pack up and leave the high price area for the zero price area until the market price drops to… near zero.
Which is a fancy way of saying what we’ve all said before: Industry will pack up and move to China. (Or more accurately: “Industry HAS packed up and moved to China”.) Along with the corollary: “Some industry just packs up and quits”. I.e. we get a prolonged recession with occasional bouts of stagflation.
I long ago gave up hope of explaining economics to politicians. They are too superficial and too focused on “what gets me money / votes today; tomorrow be damned.” so they only hear the parts they want to hear and flush the rest. You can’t do that and have things work for more than a year or two… which is about all they care about…
At any rate, you will have BMW still working and making money (as little direct CO2 costs) while the iron smelter packs up and moves to China and the plastics maker packs up and goes out of business (replaced by Indian plastics) and the rubber tires are made in Brazil instead and… the “Carbon Price” plunges toward equilibrium at zero.
@E.M…………….so, it would seem, the best of the best for making money: To be a politician. The only trouble is that there is an unseen ugly side of it: You have to be a SERVANT, a butler without any rights whatsoever…. all the time, but not of your voters but of your hidden bosses and such a servitude must be the worst of all possible servitudes.
@Adolfo:
What “hidden”? Folks who donate $Millions are well identified. They expect to be know to assure they have proper delivery of what was bought…
E.M.
Yes, I could change browser, but won’t for the moment as I have other things wanting the time to ” become accustomed” and learn how to move things.
And, though you advise against asking “Why?”, I’m (maybe obstinately) asking why kluges like the control codes work and why all these oddities happen with some WordPress blogs and not the ones I frequent in Australia.
Maybe a WordPressite might read your blog by accident?
@E.M. Time tu turn on earthquakes: Something bad is happening in Italy:
http://translate.google.com.pe/translate?sl=it&tl=en&js=n&prev=_t&hl=es&ie=UTF-8&layout=2&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fdaltonsminima.altervista.org%2F%3Fp%3D21093%26cpage%3D9%23comment-98266
EUROGEDDON
You may find this interesting in a schadenfreude way….
http://hat4uk.wordpress.com/2012/05/29/crash-2-why-has-the-treasury-revoked-debt-trading-sections-of-a-1939-act-without-telling-parliament/
The UK is convinced Eurogeddon is just around the corner
E.M.
I’ve just looked over at WUWT blog and he has a list of words that cause the authorities to start monitoring you.
I think this blog of yours must have hit rate in the high 90% score.
Here’s WUWT’s link to the Department of Homeland Security Analyst’s Desktop Binder and the word list of Key Words and Search Terms starts on page 20.
@Adolfo:
Yes, just aftershocks so far. (They turn, magically, into fore-shocks once something bigger comes along ;-0
I’m expecting a pretty good volcano in Italy some time in the next decade or two. But it could be a wait…
@Tckev:
When the phone monitoring software first came out, a friend and I started to end every cell phone conversation with “Assassinate bomb USSR Russia comrade President spy nuclear infiltration” or some such. Just to give them something to listen too….
At one point I put a similar set of words in my email “signature block”.
I could add something like that to the “about” block at the bottom of each posting. It would give the guys in the back room a reason to read the blog. “Honest, sir, the ‘Babes and Violins’ posting had ‘nuclear bomb al quada DC assassination’ in it! I had to watch it 4 times to make sure there wasn’t a coded message in it! Here, you see {turns on youtube} ;-)
The problem with automated filters is that all it takes is some folks deliberately adding all the filter key words and you are back at square one. Real criminals just use code words to bypass it. SO “the gadget” gets “cooked” and “delivered for the BBQ”… It’s what I and my friends do when we wish to “speak privately in plane sight” as a code book can not be broken, only captured.
@Ian W:
The Brits are sometimes a bit too slow as they are busy being polite and waiting their turn and not wanting to say “You bugger, that’s idiotic!” in polite company; but stupid they are not…
Were I running things in the UK, I’d be flushing Euros out of the system and loading up on $US / Yen / Yuan (tied to the $US) / Swiss Francs / Swedish & Norwegian Kroner / Canadian / Australian … By spreading it around, nobody ought to notice until it is a done deal…
Oh, and I’d be quietly selling off contracts denominated in payment to me in Euro, but keeping those where I have debt to others in Euros…
The Euro is toast. Just a question of how many years for the Political Classes to realize it and admit it; or for the economy to collapse.
Choices:
1) PIIGS Leave Euro. That works, but Political Unity and the path to One World (of Europe) Government takes a dive. How can you force political unity when each economic zone has a different currency and different needs?
2) Germany accepts that Euro is the new Lira. Inflation Here We Come! “Euro” survives as a name, but the actual currency is a New Inflating Euro-lira.
3) Germany refuses. PIIGS don’t leave. Political strife builds on the back of the persistent disconnect between German Austerity and Work Ethic vs the Mediterranean C’est La Vie! / La dolce vita. Southern economies in ruins, political chaos. Euro plunging on ROW fears. Eventual end likely some kind of wars (civil or otherwise). The simple demographic facts force a failure to meet retirement payments in the PIIGS zone. ROW vacationers ‘stay away in droves’ causing failure of another economic sector. etc.
The notion that with enough bank bailouts and enough German Money being given to enough Mediterranean Government Retirees everything will turn out just fine is what is daft.
But we need to let them pretend that it isn’t daft for another year or two (depending on the size of the German Taxpayer Wallet and the stupidity of the German Politicians) before we come to the interesting bit of the movie…
@Another Ian:
Well, took me about 30 minutes all told to get Opera downloaded and installed. Moving bookmarks is about a 2 minute operation. (export / import). You get more time than that back from the cache feature of Opera and what it saves on internet bandwidth. But suit yourself.
There is a wordpress discussion area. Don’t know if it’s open to folks who read but do not have a blog. It will take several hours longer to find it, read it, and just ask the questions (never mind the answers) than it takes to install another browser. FWIW, I’ve often benefited from being able to swap from one to the other on various sites, so I always have at least 2, and preferably 3 browser installed. Opera, Firefox, {Safari / I.Exploder} in that order. Others from time to time if they look interesting to play with .
For Opera and Firefox it was “click download”, then “click install”. That was pretty much it…
Enjoy playing with “Why?”…
E.M. FYI
http://jennifermarohasy.com/2012/05/using-artificial-intelligence-to-forecast-rainfall/
@E.M.FYI
A wet finger works better than that.
Just wonderful to see tax dollars being spent for the national good –
http://notrickszone.com/2012/05/30/the-usas-imelda-marcos-president/
@tckev:
OMG. You would think after the flap over holding up traffic at the airport for a haircut that folks would be more “aware” of the political cost of such things… but I guess the air is thin at that level…
@Another Ian:
Nice article. AI to predict rainfall… I also notice that there was a mention of lower rain in the SW of Australia while Queensland was flooding. Same pattern of More / Less offset by a “loop” spacing. I’d speculate that the same “loopy jet stream” effect that’s giving the USA a cold California and a Hot East shows up as wet / dry in Australia. California goes dry when it get hot while the East looks to get wetter when it gets hot.. Texas takes a big swing, so it has had very strong droughts during this “cold swap” of the PDO. ( I suspect that Texas is more timed to the inflection than the actual state… so a drought in the ’30s dust bowl on a cold to hot swap and now a drought on the hot to cold swap; but I’ve not looked at it much deeper than that and it could just be a false first impression).
Still, interesting stuff… That they could predict rainfall using only past rainfall patterns and ocean / climate states ( like PDO and IOD ) implies a lot about what is a ‘driver’ and what is irrelevant. i.e. CO2 doesn’t count for squat.
E.M. and friends,
i just invented something for my garden and I wanted to share. We have had an incredible amount of wind lately. It blows all the time. Yesterday it was blowing the water out of my birdbath. My transplanted peppers and tomatoes have been battered and torn, until I didn’t know what to do with them. I finally came up with an idea, to help shield them from the wind.
I had a number of those inexpensive wire tomato cages that can be purchased at local garden centers, which I put up around the tomatoes. Then I got some of that plastic wrap that is used to wrap pallets, which I purchased at Home Depot. It comes in various widths and I got the 5 or 6 inch width, because it came on a roller handle and I thought that the narrow width would be easier to work with. The roll of 1,000 linear feet cost about $8.00. Then I wrapped the bottoms of the tomato cages with the plastic, about 12 to 14 inches high. I taped the end of the wrap with some wide packaging tape. I ran into a problem, because through the years I had splayed out the legs of the wire cages for more stability, so the plastic wrap wanted to slide up to the narrowest point. There were some gaps at the bottom, but I used mulch to keep the wind from entering at the bottom. The top is open, so I don’t think I will have an overheating problem, and I use a drip system so watering is easy.
To help shield the peppers, i got some electric wire fence posts, so I can make a “box” around the peppers and wrap the plastic around them. ( The posts are 5/16 inch metal rods about 3 1/2 feet high, with a flange about 8 inches from the bottom of the post so that the post is stabile when it is pounded into the ground). I haven’t done the peppers yet, but maybe will get them done after lunch.
I just did the tomatoes yesterday, so I will have to see if the plastic holds up to the wind. The plastic doesn’t need to stay on all season, just until the little plants can take the wind. If anyone can think of any improvements, I’m open for suggestions.
@Judy F.:
What a neat idea!
Yes, in the “loopy jet stream” cold phase with low UV and low atmospheric height, we get more wind (and what worries me more, it is a more gusty or bursty wind – so more airplane turbulence issues and crashes).
I’ve noticed more of my garden “dealing with wind” but didn’t think it through like you did. Bravo!
With tops open, overheating ought not to be a problem. Heck, for tomatoes folks put black plastic under them to raise the temperature for earlier fruit set and higher yields, quicker ripen. You may have also found a solution to my “too cold for tomatoes reliably” problem! (On cold nights, I could just “put a hat on it” and keep above 50 F over night, needed for fruit set and we don’t reliably get that here until very late in the season.)
If the Pallet Wrap doesn’t stand up, then thicker polythene sheeting is available cheap. FWIW, I’ve used regular old grocery store plastic wrap for wrapping a shelf full of “small stuff” we were moving (just to avoid all the unload / reload work) and it held up OK for the use. In a pinch it might be ‘just enough’ if the wind is kicking up and the stores are closed…
So I can see making a little Polythene Hat out of thicker material that could be clothes pinned on at night in colder places. That’s about all I can see to improve it. Looks to me like a “keeper” of an idea.
As I have “bunny cages” around my squares made of fencing with about 3 inch holes, I could just wrap them for the start of the season. Heck, I could wrap the top, too, for an ersatz “cold frame” at the very start and end of season (i.e. Winter, here).
Thanks!
E.M.
Interesting!
http://joannenova.com.au/2012/06/spot-the-conflict-ge-owns-nbc-the-weather-channel-and-lots-and-lots-of-wind-turbine-factories/#more-19520
This may actually fall in the category of “Stupid Questions” – I’m NOT trying, it seems to come more naturaly now, really!
Q’s: Are you over 50? Are you Right Handed or Left Handed? Do you have Liver Spots (that’s what my Clan always called them;-) on the back of your hands? Do you have more on your Right or Left hand? Are the ones on one hand larger than those on the other hand? Which hand has larger spots? If you wear a ring, do you have one or two under the ring? Do you have any in the same place on the ring finger of your other hand (assuming of course that you don’t wear a ring on that hand)?
What am I getting at? I really don’t know. I’m over 50. Right Handed. Have spots on the back of hands. More on Left. Yes. Left hand spots bigger than Right hand spots. Wear ring on Left and have two spots under ring. No ring on Right and no spots. OK, now it just seems to me that (SarcOn) this is vitally important and we need to do a full scientific survey to determine why we have these very curious and potentially dangerous things happening to the Seniors in the developed World (SarcOff).
Think it might be worth a few billion Euro’s or Dollar’s to find out about this?
@Pascvaks: Those chloasmas or melanomas are the end product of radiation. That is why we do not last but about ONE Gleissberg Cycle.” It´s the Sun!” and CRR also.
@ Pascvacs OK, I am over fifty, am right handed, have some spots, more and larger on left hand. Why? How about this for a theory; I live in the US and we have left hand drive automobiles, which means that my left hand gets more sun than my right for about an hour a day. It would be interesting to see if folk who drive right hand drive autos get more spots on their right. Should be simple to falsify…
E.M.
Popocatepetl Volcano in Mexico is widely reported – BBC, Reuters, etc., as having an eruption.
The volcano fire is also in Guatemala.
http://latino.foxnews.com/latino/news/2012/05/20/guatemala-fuego-volcano-belches-ash-lava/
But for really spectacular volcano/lightning photos see the Chile link on this foxnews page.
@Pascvacs; ok I’ll add. I am over 65, am very right handed, and have spent most of my life out in the sun. Hand spotting is very even. pg
@Tckev:
This one:
http://latino.foxnews.com/slideshow/latino/news/2011/06/06/chile-volcano-erupts/#slide=1
Yeah, nice!
I’ll get back to volcanoes ‘soon’. They tend to be slow cycle anyway ;-)
Right now I’m working on BBQ Polish Sausage and doing hemispheric GHCN v1 vs v3 plus figuring out the best way to ‘write it up’…
But nice pictures!
(BTW: Ambidextrous, exactly equal verbal and non-verbal PSAT, SAT, etc scores and verbal / non-verbal IQ of about 2 points difference on a test with 20 point error bars… Approaching 60 but not there yet and with so many freckles that trying to figure out which is a “spot” and not a freckle is a waste of time. Had a “freckelectomy” once for a large spot that was not what the doctor thought once it got to the lab… As I generally avoid the sun since I burn in 20 minutes or less, pattern is not very evident nor useful. Most sun even in the garden as car is always buttoned up.)
Re: Liver Spots & Freckels v Big Bucks- OK, I give up, but mark my words, UCLA or Stanford Climatologists are going to make a bundle off this idea and it was in our hands first — well, on the back of our hands first;-) (@Jason – The thought came to mind that those in the Northern Hemisphere had larger spots on their Left Hand and those in the Southern Hemisphere had larger spots on their Right Hand, something to do with the Coriolis Effect, mind you it was just a thought, bet if we got a lot of money to check it out we could;-)
Re: Bubba-Q — a yes, I remember it well…
@Pascvaks: About those “spots”(chloasma) in the southern hemisphere people: As it is because of radiation, they are the same as in the northern hemisphere. I´m just seeing my both hands evenly spotted.
@Adolfo: LOL (SarcOn;-)Thanks, I didn’t need that;-) I’m sure we can make $Billions$ off this one, please check the Old Timers you encounter and check the Climate of Chloasma in the Southern Hemisphere for me, I know I’m on to something, this is BIG, we’ll all be famous, don’t turn on me Adolfo, don’t be a @$#$%#@ “Denier”, please?, I really need your help (SarcOff;-)
All you need to make money in this old World is a little immagination and some help from your friends. Taxpayers are like fools, there’s one born every minute.
While looking up something else, I ran into this rather nicely done page:
http://janderson99.hubpages.com/hub/Floods-Blizzards-Cold-Snaps-Derail-the-Climate-Change-Debate
It’s mostly about Australia and the recent heavy rains, but also some other bits about patterns of snow and rain and the Southern Oscillation.
Take a moment and visit the page. There were no comments on it when I looked and I think they ought to have the traffic. The work the page took to create deserves it…
@E.M. I know you like it but climate has no “rating” anymore, it´s just “peanuts” if compared with real issues.
E.M.
Have you read James Delingpole’s “Killing the Earth to Save It”?
Seems to fit a lot of pieces into a jigsaw – recommended IMO
@Adolfo –
You’re absolutely correct! On the “Human Paranoia Scale” it barely seems to register a’tall anymore; unless we’re talking politics and money and ‘climate’, where it’s still very much a worry –our ‘elected’ are still spending money we ain’t got on it, and many other stupid things, and that’s NOT peanuts. Remember too, on the general subjects of Climate and Weather, things that have been linked to our genes since we were single celled little whatevers, they are still the MOST important subjects when we have a lull in the conversation. We just never grow tired of them; there’s so much we really don’t know; and, we really do have a very narrow environmental niche. Remember, S.T.P. is more than a gas additive;-)
Venus tail will be brushing the US, from Florida to California:
@Adolfo –
Can you elaborate on the significance of the Tail Bump, other than a wiggle on some very sensitive instrument’s printout, is this transit expected to have any other effects, that is any other effects that will be ‘felt’ by us Carbon Units (ie: tectonic, temperature, atmospheric pressure, humidity, long term magnetic field change)?
E.M. FYI
In a prior post I drew your attention to our state government’s cutting in a new payroll system without running it in parallel with the existing one to see if it worked. It didn’t!
And the cost – see
http://www.couriermail.com.au/news/queensland/kpmg-audit-recommends-newman-government-act-swiftly-and-take-multi-pronged-approach-to-fix-queensland-health/story-e6freoof-1226386770287
Jim just pointed me at aerogel, something I hadn’t thought was available to normal people. In the process of looking I found this article from 6 years ago:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.06/chemistry.html?pg=1&topic=chemistry&topic_set= which points to the craziness of Chemistry education now, amongst other things. Science is not without risk – it has ever been so from the time someone worked how rubbing sticks together makes fire. Our kids maybe need to do more risky things, and we may need to accept that every so often there’ll be some kid hurt. I was one of those kids who made bangs and nasty smells, and also got into photography young (lots of dangerous/poisonous chemicals there). No risk, no gain, and if kids are forced to only watch someone else do the dangerous experiments such as handling a dilute acid and bicarb of soda they’re going to lose interest in the whole thing and go back to writing stupid notes on social media.
Oh yes – thanks Jim, aerogel does sound pretty cool, now I know I can get it.
@Simon:
What a sad story. But at least I know now why I can’t get any useful DIY chemicals or labware and have to resort to making things from scratch…
The folks who want to ban all that stuff because it could be used to make drugs or explosives need to realize that Potassium Nitrate originally came from horse piss and there’s a dozen plants growing wild around here that are far stronger than anything I could make. ( Not the least of which is Jimsonweed that is a strong hallucinogen and can kill you… My Dad made sure I could identify it so as not to suffer the accidental poisoning that caused the British to lose a major battle early in the history of our country… that made it into a pot herb dinner and were out of service for a week…)
It simply is not possible to legislate safety nor force people to be chaste.
Oh Well…
Heck, I can make an explosive using nothing but salt and electricity (though it takes a while and a few steps)… oh, and a similar process can make a couple of poison gasses too…. Another fun one uses copper and a common gas (name withheld to protect me from idiots and government agents) to make a contact explosive. Heck, if you want to kill somebody, just feed them enough Advil washed down with booze – as we just accidentally almost discovered… Ignorance does NOT increase safety…
And banning glassware is just stupid. At University, one of the things we had to learn was how to make basic glassware ourselves (since specialized research gear might not be available OTC). We didn’t make anything too fancy, but we had to be able to make a pipette and join tubing to test tubes. And the only difference between a beaker and a Pyrex Brand Measuring Cup is one is more precise than the other and the measuring cup as taper to it. So put it on a scale and measure by weight. Modern digital scales make eyeballing the meniscus kind of pointless anyway.
So much control freak idiocy in government, so little practical effect, and nearly none of it beneficial.
No wonder anyone making anything is moving to China. They probably have real chemistry classes there… We’re going to end up with a generation of technical idiots who couldn’t make paint with a bucket of linseed oil and pound of powdered Titanium Dioxide…
EM and Jim – Again following that aerogel idea, I sent a message to Bob Lazar. The reply was pretty quick and comprehensive:
Hi Simon,
Yes, FeTi Hydride is readily available – you can even buy it in tanks ready to go.
The problem is that a full size tank only holds about 700 to 900 liters of Hydrogen gas – and costs over $1,500.00.
That will run a car for about 4 minutes.
It also can only be recharged only so many times before you have to throw it all away.
At about $1500 per tank, it will cost a fortune for enough tanks – you’d have to haul a trailer full of 100 tanks to get a typical 350 to 400 mile range.
Worse is that after only a few months, it will no longer recharge and you have to throw your $150,000.00 worth of FeTi hydride away.
Our Hydride holds over 50,000 liters of Hydrogen in the same size tank, and we’ve cycled it for over 12 years with only a 12% loss in storage capacity.
They are very different materials.
-United Nuclear Scientific
9607 E. Price Rd.
Laingsburg, MI. 48848
517-651-5635
website: http://www.unitednuclear.com
Customer Service: customerservice@unitednuclear.com
Technical Support: sales@unitednuclear.com
—–Original Message—–
From: simon derricutt
Sent: Thursday, June 07, 2012 9:59 AM
To: sales@unitednuclear.com
Subject: Hydrogen storage
Hi Mr. Lazar,
If this suggestion is one you’ve already thought of and discarded, please excuse the ignorance.
I’ve seen data on Hydrogen storage using a Titanium/Iron alloy (made mechanically in a ball-mill) that would certainly be cheaper and more easily available than Lithium. It’s going to be heavier for the same capacity, but otherwise would seem to be as good. The main advantage would be cost, thus making the conversion kits more affordable – back to your original price-point. Keeping the Lithium version available would also be good, as an option.
If you need the files I can email them, but you should be able to find enough details on the net.
Best regards, Simon Derricutt
******************************************************************
Since he’s been working with the materials and technology for a while, with a response like that I’d say this is mature technology. For those of you in California, with enough sun to drive things and crazy regulations, it looks like instead of a car you could use just one tank and run a genny on it. No pollution, it can utilise wind/solar/anything else to get the electricity to get the Hydrogen – you can even use off-peak utility power. As a solution to the problem of getting kerosene etc. when the Big One hits, it may just carry on providing the solar cells are rugged enough.
It may be worth considering. You may even get a subsidy to install it.
On the subject of buying chemicals and glassware, a lot of easily-available cleaning products are the sort of thing that, in the lab, would be handled with gloves and safety-wear, and in a fume-cupboard. Nutrasweet (aspartame) was developed as ant-poison, (it seems to work well) and should really be handled as a poison rather than spooned into coffee. Making glassware hard-to-get won’t stop those with criminal intent, but only makes it more difficult for amateurs to play with chemistry. Instant silicone gasket material is good to seal joints and make multiple connection gas/water tight up to 250°C – adequate for most things. If the professional labware is not available, you just have to be a bit more creative to get the same function.
@E.M. : They probably have real chemistry classes there… LOL!
This is true. In our countries it is not longer taught real chemistry, at least for kids at schools.
FYI – Interesting
“The Anthropologist and the Kurgans”
Wed, 2012-06-06 15:39 — John Hawks
“There are many stories from my travels last summer that I haven’t yet told here. I’ve been thinking that I need to get them written down, so that I’ll have more time to write about my upcoming travel this summer. I have copious notes about the time in Denisova itself, and I’ll be returning to those. In the meantime I’d like to share some other experiences. Here I want to turn to the subject of kurgans…” (With Pics;-)
http://johnhawks.net/weblog/hawks/travel/anthropologist-and-the-kurgans-2012.html
Official (and “settled”) science vs. common sense:
Next country to circle the bowl: Argentina. Their prez is really screwing things up. Reports tonight out of Argentina (not included in the following link) is that all people leaving the country now must report where they are going and why and are then searched for dollars.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/06/08/argentina-dollar-idUSL1E8H8EJA20120608
@George: Same “trick” applied everywhere until all the “steps” have been fulfilled: In Argentine there still has not been a “land reform”, which at the beginning removes property from the hand of locals to supposedly be given to poor farmers, but which in the end, removes property from local people to give it to the international finance banking elite. That´s the next step to be taken in Argentine.
adolfogiurfa says:
2 June 2012 at 9:31 pm
@E.M. I know you like it but climate has no “rating” anymore, it´s just “peanuts” if compared with real issues.————————————————————————————–
Unfortunately (because the CAGW scam is a real issue) it appears so. However the many large flaws in CAGW are ignored, and the EPA shuts down other forms of enregy and causes prices of energy to skyrocket. So, although CAGW is no longer as publicly supported, the many institutions and govts (EPA, CARB, Obama adminst, Austrailia, Europe etc) they all continue with CAGW inspired policy and regulation, using ongoing bogus studies to justify asset destruction.
Thoughts:
Local Law (the ‘rather common’ kind of Law, to use a pun) and National Law: this collection of news items on a certain Language Professor at the University of Georgia (US Georgia;-) got me to thinking about how modern societies are deterorating from the Top Down these days. We’ve had a number of comments on how civilizations kind’a collapse like a house of cards, this is a little more of the same I guess. The link to the headlines:
http://news.google.com/news/story?q=University+of+Georgia+professor+arrested+on+prostitution+charges&hl=en&rls=GGLG,GGLG:2008-21,GGLG:en&um=1&ie=UTF-8&ncl=dTfA0iSIf_pml_M7PiCLF8C0e7gOM&ei=vVPTT83IHoO42wWc9pCPDw&sa=X&oi=news_result&ct=more-results&resnum=1&ved=0CBsQqgIwAA
Soooo.. looking over this idiots little after-class activities and choice of wig and makeup, it occures to me that BIG governments have a way of killing their own countries by making laws that try to make everyone the same, and in the process, they kill off the range of freedom that locals need to deal with block heads, J-walkers, and —for want of a legal term- perverts that ruin things for decent folks in a small town, or even a Big City like Atlanta Ga.
Yes, we still have some local ordinances, some state laws, but for the most part we have this National BE ALL END ALL legal system that tries to make everything the same everywhere. It seems to me that’s not only stupid but wrong, at least if you want to keep a healthy system.
Consider, when all you have is a National Law System telling everyone how to suck eggs and peel bananas, you’re missing the rope, planking, nails, and glue that holds the whole damn Ship of State together from the keel to the crowsnest. A national system can’t cover everything that needs to be covered. And when every sleezy lawyer in town is trying to sue your pants off just to get enough money to buy a 40′ Cabin Cruiser and Beach House, you can bet that the locals are only going to do what the Feds say, and maybe do a Kalifornia Stop or two.
Hanging rapists, cop killers, and ‘strange’ college professors from a tall oak in the town square is a no-no, so I’m told. Why should anyone in Pea Pickin, Ga, give a flying fig what someone in Kaliforniastan, or Washington DC, thinks about teaching a college professor in their town a lesson? But they do, don’t they? And there’s a problem there, or it sure seems to be;-)
@Pascvaks: A hundred years ago, those now “professors” accused of prostitution would not have arrived even to be students of a university.
That is the consequence of the such idiocy of “equality of opportunities”. You just made me remember of a relative, now an MD, a gastroenterologist nothing less, who would his parents not interfered, he would have been a remarkable good and happy blue collar technician…..
Damn! just when I was thinking we were reasonably OK, it seems the world may and in 2025!
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-18339905
Simon:
Just the Agenda 21 folks bitching that they are not winning fast enough…
@Adolfo:
All that focus on the “impossible cuts” evaporates if you presume it was “liquid stone” instead and just poured in place as a paste and finished while soft… Part of what sent me off into geopolymers. The other implicit assumption made is that the stones are cut unmodified. I’ve got a reference somewhere to using crushed plants as oxalic acid sources to accelerate rock cutting speeds. Were the ancients so dumb as to not figure out that some crushed plant ‘lubricants’ made the cutting go drastically faster? IMHO, no. (But were were / are…)
http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?35579-Were-Stones-Softened-To-Build-Peru-s-Ancient-Structures
So maybe they just watched the local birds and learned something:
http://www.davidpratt.info/andes2.htm
I’ve been watching this for a couple of weeks now: http://www.itv.com/news/story/2012-06-05/fatal-outbreak-of-legionnaires/
One thing worth mentioning, as electricity costs begin to skyrocket, we are going to see increases in cases of both legionnaires and Pontiac fever (less serious case of same disease) caused by people turning the temperature of their water heater too low.
George – I’d suspect that it wasn’t the cost of the electricity, but the cost of the chemicals needed and the maintenance. Water-evaporation is the cheapest to run, but produces the ideal conditions for bacterial and algae growth unless you treat the water to stop it. Possibly this outbreak was the result of a cost-cutting exercise, by reducing maintenance/testing to minimum levels.
@David:
If you recall, I had an article about my journey of discovery that AGW was just one battle in the broader war of Agenda 21… IMHO it’s not “peanuts”, but it also isn’t the whole deal…
===================================================================
True, but without enviromental activism (The world will end if we dont go full world govt now) as an
excuse, what other major tool do they have? (The old merssages are no longer as effective)
Agenda 21 appeas to me to be based on enviromental disaster memes. Many policies are now operational and therfore as long as there is some false “consensous” to refer to, CAGW maintains its purpose simply via momentum. CAGW is so past tense for the general public, and many aquaintances I know consider it false, but have no idea of the policies being driven by it, and I live in Calif. One no longer needs most of the tools after the house is built.
The liberal media can create an issue whole cloth out of nothing, ( the war on women, racism via the trevor martin incident, etc, etc) If the classic liberal conservative thoughts had similar reach they could create a hughe backlash against the laws and govt organizations that are driving such nonsense, yet, lacking such media ability (although through the web it s slowly growing) public policy continues it truly disastourous course. Wcko socialist policy is itself, “unsubstainable” but as
de-industrialization is one of their major goals, perhaps in failure they succeed.
FYI – Found this little link this a.m. and thought I’d pass it on for those who’ve bounced around the US. Make your own map of where ya been, visited, vacationed, lived.
http://www.defocus.net/visitedstates
PS: This link lets you do countries too –
http://douweosinga.com/projects/visited?region=world
This a link to an article about super condenser research and nano partial creation,
http://www.nanowerk.com/spotlight/spotid=25066.php
self creating nano wires. pg
Slices of the pi, and baking a larger one
http://apc.io/about/
@P.G.: When a group of particles is Nanosized, they tend to attract one other, like this:
Alabama outlaws Agenda 21: http://joannenova.com.au/2012/06/agenda-21-alabama-may-have-outfoxed-it-why-you-should-care/
@George: “Land…cannot be treated as an ordinary asset, controlled by individuals and subject to the pressures and inefficiencies of the market,” Agenda 21 says. “Private land ownership is also a principal instrument of accumulation and concentration of wealth and therefore contributes to social injustice; if unchecked, it may become a major obstacle in the planning and implementation of development schemes. The provision of decent dwellings and healthy conditions for the people can only be achieved if land is used in the interest of the society as a whole.”
Don´t think it is about “social justice” it is about removing local people from land property and replace them by the finance banking elite, in which case you will find the owners, if you dig in, in some “finance paradise”. In many countries it has already been issued a “Land Reform” bill, which in a 20-30 years span has this result. This was announced many years ago in a known book:
Anti-Semitic screed deleted. -E.M.Smith
EM
You may be interested in this report on energy subsidies for energy.
http://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/2011/08/03/eia-releases-new-subsidy-report-subsidies-for-renewables-increase-186-percent/
It’s a old but give a clue as to where you taxes are going. This database link though shows how much goes to each state.
http://www.dsireusa.org/
California will give you 50% of the cost of running a residential ‘green’ power plant that is over 30kW.
California residential self generation rebates –
http://www.dsireusa.org/incentives/incentive.cfm?Incentive_Code=CA23F&State=federal¤tpageid=1&ee=1&re=1
(They’ve been running it since 2010 so the money is probably all squandered by now.)
@Adolfo:
After a couple of your other anti-Semitic grazing comments I’ve growled that it is not acceptable here.
I don’t know if you have failed to see those comments, can not control your urges, or just “don’t get it”; but it doesn’t matter.
If you continue to advocate for the notion of an international Jewish Conspiracy I’m going to put you on moderation.
It is just not acceptable.
Why?
First off there has been a horrific ongoing persecution of Jews globally throughout history. It is important to be sensitive to that. Inflaming antisemitism leads to deaths.
Secondly, I have a fairly large number of family and friends who are Jews. The stereotypical “Jewish Uncle” and a load of Jewish cousins. But more importantly, I have a lifetime of working with, and for, Jews. I have found them to be more honorable and more trustworthy (and frankly, better people) than many of the non-Jews with whom I’ve worked.
So those folks who are likely to be killed, the ones who are the targets of the antisemitism you are pushing, are my family and friends.
I can’t be any more clear than that.
You want to push some kind of crazy international banking conspiracy, fine. Go right ahead. Just leave the antisemitism in the spittoon by the door when you come here. If not, I will delete it and you will go on moderation.
On racial issues, none of us can really absolutely state their racial origins with any certainty. You do know who your mother was, but that’s it. I remember a study a while back (no links) where they checked the DNA of prisoners, and found that 30% of their children were not actually related to them. (Aside point – how do you tell a convicted murderer that they are not the genetic father of their son/daughter? Answer, you don’t, and state that anonymity is scientifically important. Vitally important….) Go back far enough, we’ll all have White, Black, Brown, Yellow, Arab and Jewish ancestors. Probably quite a lot of Mongol (Ghengis Khan seems particularly prolific) and Celtic as well. People travelled a lot more in the distant past than previously thought, and we’re all mutts racially.
Since Jews were persecuted for a long time, and were banned from owning land in Britain at least during the Middle Ages, money-lending was the only business open to them. This also caused social problems – no-one likes paying money back and will try various ways to get round it, as dramatised by Shakespeare. The social side of Jewishness, which continues, is that family is important, and it’s normal for a rich Jew to lend money at low rates to his relatives and also to give business advice. It is unthinkable to not pay these loans back, so their relatives work really hard at the business to pay back. The business thrives since it’s well-funded and they work hard, but of course others don’t see the hard work involved, just the profits.
I’ve noticed the same system in Pakistani families, and the corner-shops where they are open long hours and the family all pitches in. They are generally successful for the same reasons – family funding and hard work, plus a sense of honour.
These old-fashioned values seem likely to diminish in a world where Jews are not persecuted for being Jewish. Given time, they’ll need to borrow business-money from the banks like the rest of us, and the playing-field will be a bit more even. You can help this along, Adolpho, by lending your money to your family to start a business venture that seems good, so at least your family has the same advantages. It’s not Jewishness that matters but attitudes to work and family.
For the record here, I’m not Jewish (as far as I know) but have friends who are, as well as friends from all sorts of ethnic/social backgrounds. As far as I’ve noticed, they are all individuals and the groupings forced on them by their backgrounds make very little difference.
One other thing I should have said is that Jews also consider education to be very important. My friend David told me he was spending about the same as my year’s salary at the time just to send one of his kids through college. He borrowed money to do that, and worked hard till he’d paid it off. As noted on other threads here, a good education is important, and together with the work-ethic makes a lot of difference. This is likely the reason you’ll find them in well-paid jobs more often than not. It’s not a racial thing, but a result of the social values. If you apply the same values in your life, you’ll get the same results.
A picture came to mind: People are like crude oil and the more heat you apply to the mix the more you seperate folks into their true kind. (It seems appropriate to add, from my own limited 64 years of experience, we wrongly blame groups for the sins of a few high rollers who really aren’t even in the groups we blame, these may have a old connection or a similar name, or even call themselves by a certain title that glumps people together, but they are not the same as the people we or they deal with; and that applies to all people, heat seperates us into the common groups, and religion and race and nationality have very little to do with the type of people we really are;-)
PS: Heat can be many things.
@E.M. I am NOT by any means speaking about a supposed jewish conspiracy, not at all, but it happens that a very small group of people believe themselves to be the chosen ones, an elite to govern upon the rest of the world. The current mistake is to generalize and include in such an elite millions of common people who are normal and not crazy as to believe themselves immortals as to wish to possess all the assets of the world and all the power of the world. The elite, if it exists, it is just that, an elite, a few people. The error is to generalize their purposes to a whole group of human beings, which I do not.
@ Simon Derricutt “Go back far enough, we’ll all have White, Black, Brown, Yellow, Arab and Jewish ancestors. ”
Some years back I started being creatively honest whenever needing to fill out some bureaucratic form demanding that I list my race.I do in fact have Caucasian ancestry, so that is one answer. On the other hand I have native American as well. But of course native Americans, they tell us, walked across the Bearing land bridge, so I must be Asian. And of course we ALL (according to experts) came out of Africa. I am still trying to figure out how to justify Australian Aborigine…
Typo: make that Bering. Unless the walked across while hunting bears. Of course if they were Jomon predecessors, maybe they WERE hunting bears.
Jason – after my dad died we found out he’d been adopted, so although I am part Welsh and English on my mother’s side, I really don’t know the other side. I suspect one of my uncles (now also dead) of actually being my grandfather, but such things are shrouded in secrecy. If I were honest, I couldn’t fill in those forms. I hope you find a way to claim Australian Aborigine too – that would be really neat. DNA test??
The main thing that seems to define us is culture, and when people from different cultures meet they have to be careful not to misinterpret the words or mannerisms. I think the main problems have always been caused by misinterpretations, since the built-in response to “other” is to fight. Civilisation has tamed that somewhat, but it’s still just under the skin.
@ Jason Calley
Usually when a bureaucratic form demands, for no good reason, that I list my race I usually put the word ‘human’.
@ tckev “human”
I live in the US South; maybe I’ll start putting “NASCAR.”
@ Simon Derricutt “I hope you find a way to claim Australian Aborigine too – that would be really neat.”
Australian Aubergine would be nice too. I wonder if any of the bureaucrats would even notice?
Yes, about culture being more important than race. Way back when the internet was first opened for public access, I was speculating that it would allow us to form “synthetic nationalities,” groupings of people based more on commonality of interests, beliefs and principles rather than on geographic or political location. I still think it would be a good thing, and I think that it is coming; slowly perhaps, but the old habits of nationalism are fading somewhat. Notice that I am not supporting the idea of a global government, but rather the idea of small scale and dispersed allegiances. There is nothing wrong with folk deciding what rules and customs will be the norm for whatever group they wish to self-associate with. Global governance, on the other hand, is like a giant ship with no bulkheads, a certain recipe for disaster.
Jason – those groupings do exist. On the net I “belong” to this group and also Nickelpower.org, since they both have people who seem to have the same general attitudes and the shared experience of all these others helps me in various ways. I also have a “family” group dispersed around the globe. There’s also the “ex-Xerox” group (I used to be in FAL and then electronics design, but the work moved to Hungary and the people didn’t – cost saving measure) which is still important 10 years after. The “college friends” group is still there after almost 40 years and the “music” group is still good, too. All these people are spread around the place, and I couldn’t keep contact without the net.
With the people I’ve met on the net, generally I have no idea what colour they are and can’t be certain of their sex either. It doesn’t matter if what they say is solid. These sorts of groupings are based on mutual respect.
I think some sort of World Government is pretty inevitable, and maybe in what’s left of my lifetime. Judging by what I’ve seen of the way governments work, the EU works, and the UN works it’s going to try very hard to restrict freedom of thought. Not good. These informal net groupings will probably be really important then, providing we can still keep the net free of censorship. Censorship of porn (“it’s for your own safety and that of your kids”) is just the start. I’ve been using the net pretty well since it started (with the Mosaic browser) and I’ve only found porn when I’ve gone looking for it (no fun, so didn’t bother later). If there’s a market for something, people will find a way to sell it, though, so those sorts of “bad” things will simply go somewhere you can’t find them quite as easily. I didn’t mean to start a rant here, it just led on from your comment….
@Adolfo:
Let me make it PERFECTLY clear: ANY use of “Jew” and a negative connotation is forbidden. Got it?
I don’t care if it’s part of the tribe, only “international bankers”, whatever.
Yes, I know there are some bad Jews. Not going to discuss it here. Period.
There is absolutely no good than can come from it, and a whole lot of bad.
(BTW, if you want to denigrate people for thinking themselves “special”, it’s a very long list. Start with La Raza and end with the Slavs. Add in ALL Oriental groups, and season with Black Pride…. So just “don’t go there”…)
@Simon:
It is a mathematical inevitability that we all end up related to each other in fairly short order. Even with just a 1% outcrossing, in not too many generations everyone is related.
Per “Purity”, if you look at Europe, it’s a complete mess. You had the Goths run from Asia across the whole place. You had the Huns start in Asia and end up in Hungary. Swedes started out down near the Mediterranean. Russians and other Slavs came from down near Turkey. And then the Roman Empire mixed them all up. Followed by an Arab overlay from just outside Austria around to just outside France. Now that than mess of mutts and import a load of them to the USA. Stir. Wait. You end up with folks like me.
I’m one of the “more pure”, and best I can do is say there’s some Irish (that might have Vikings, British, Romans, whatever in it – and originated from the Iberian Peninsula a few hundred years earlier, so might have some Phoenician or Gothic in it too…) and some English (more Vikings, Britons, Angles, Saxons,…) and a German layer (Amish that wandered from near Holland to Switzerland before coming over here…) and then there’s about 1/8 of “Misc.” that includes some unknown percentage of French (where are themselves a mix of Celts and Romans and Germanic Franks, and…)
My wife is about like me. However, look at my sisters kids, and THEIR kids, and you pick up some Native America and Hispanic blended in… ( Who are themselves mixes …)
My mother’s sister married a guy who’s Dad was a Russian Jew who jumped off a ship as it passed in the international waters 3 miles from Florida and swam ashore… So my cousins are a mix of English and Russian Jew…
In all of 3 or 4 generations we’ve got a mix that covers ALL of Europe, including Russian Europe, and has roots back into Asia from both the Europeans from the Steppes and Native Americans via the land bridge… Along with a Jewish line back into the Levant.
So go back 5 or 6 generations and…
It’s a mess.
There is no ‘racial purity’, so there can only be bigotry masquerading as otherwise.
@Jason Calley:
The Aborigines have Denisovan DNA and that links back to an Asian origin. Most likely some of that Asian DNA ended up in the Native Americans. So if you have Native American, you likely share a little Denisovan and Neanderthal DNA with Aboriginals…
Hope that helps ;-)
http://johnhawks.net/weblog/reviews/denisova/reich-2011-denisova-asia.html
@Tckev:
When peeved at a form, I’ll list my race as “Spotted” or sometimes “Freckled” if only a little peeved. Here we are, a unique type, and all those “Uniformitarians” deny us our own racial class. We are NOT just one color, we are TWO! (And sometimes three… I’ve had both darker brown and light yellowish freckles at the same time as white surrounds… sometimes pink surrounds… hhhmmmm make that 4 colors!)
Such horrible oppression. My race of spotted folks isn’t even recognized…
;-)
I’ve also sometimes thought of just putting “Mixed Race” and then filling in Neanderthal 5%, Alpine / Spotted 30%, Caucasian 35%, Geek 20%, unknown 10% …
The reality is that in the 1700’s (early) a guy got off a boat in Virginia and worked iron as the village Blacksmith. That’s about all we know. His name was “Smith” as this is what he did. We speculate that he was likely Germanic and perhaps via an Anglo Saxon route, but he could just as easily have been Hungarian or Italian for that matter. He was “white”, however that would be interpreted then. We think. (Though the Hispanic “light brown” had not been pulled out as a distinct category then). A couple of generations later, his line married an Amish Girl from Ohio… and moved over the river into Iowa to start a new farm… My known history picks up there…. Oh, and we know that THAT Smith had picked up a bit of French by the time his parents had him, though the details are sketchy. Heck, could have been “French Canadian” with some Canadian Indian mixed in for all anyone knows. Or cares…
FWIW, “Mom’s Dad” was a sailor in HM Merchant Marine as was his brother and father (and we think his Grandpa too). One brother ended up in Australia (so a load of “Sumners” in Australia are my relatives, and likely by now some of them have blended with a bit of Aboriginals… so I likely have Australian Aborigine relatives by now). How many other “ports of call” have, um, “less formal” relatives is a forever mystery… One of Mom’s sisters ended up in Canada (Nova Scotia I think). IIRC, 6 other siblings stayed in the UK. So Mom’s side of things are spread all over the UK, USA, Canada and Australia. Dad’s side over Ireland, Germany, Switzerland, and probably Holland, some France, and a bit of “Who Knows”. BUT, as one of 13 kids (Good Irish Catholics…) his siblings spread all over the USA and who knows where the Cousins went. ( I once figured that I had about 400 first and second cousins… I have no idea where all they have gone, but they did disburse over at least all of North America and Australia and a lot of Europe.).
Oh, and just to make it fun, when the Amish and their Mennonite cousins split from Europe, a load of THEM went to Latin America ( Argentina was popular). So just about 4 generations removed, I’ve got relatives in South America. Call it 4th cousins….
To the best of my knowledge, we don’t have any relatives in Asia… Though given the British Empire and all, there’s likely some connection into India and parts of Africa.
In short: Toss ethnic insults at just about anyone and they are likely family or friends….
BTW; there can never be Global Governance for the simple reason that I refuse to participate. I have a country, that is enough. And if you don’t have everyone “buying in” then it isn’t really Global, now is it…
@Simon:
If you have ANY connectivity, you can tunnel data through it in an encrypted manner. From steganographic pictures to ‘one use codes’.
https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2012/02/19/queen-darknet/
So if they let me show ads for cars, or send cookie recipes, I can send anything…
it is just not possible to truly censor the internet, all you can do is force it to be underground.
Up until rather recently in history, it was against Christian and Muslim religion to charge interest on loans (considered usary). So there was little financial incentive for the Christians and Muslims to lend money to the king when he needed to fight some war or another. The Jewish people, on the other hand, had no problem with charging a reasonable fee for financial services and so would lend money to the state (king). What would often happen, though, is the king would soon find himself loaded with more debt than he could service and the country ran into serious financial trouble. At this point the king could not afford new adventures and the Jewish lenders were getting “rich”. So what traditionally happened is that the Jewish people were vilified and banished (or slaughtered) which was a middle ages way of defaulting on sovereign debt. Since it was mainly Jewish lenders who provided the money, it was easy to vilify the Jews when things went wrong and blame them for the economic crisis as being greedy or something.
We see the same thing today with the vilification of the Wall Street financial institution. It is really no different.
In fact, it might do people some good to read this, it kind of explains WHY we had the financial bubble and points out the next one that is just around the corner and why it will be even worse:
http://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/economic-intelligence/2012/06/12/the-government-shouldnt-subsidize-higher-education
George – very good link. “The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.” I’ve often used the words “He/she meant well” as a sort of insult.
@Simon Derricutt: “The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.” . That is precisely the origin of the problem : When people have enough money as not to need to work for a living, some begin thinking how to improve other peoples´lives, how to fix everything: from child´s obesity to stop “global warming”, and, if they can make a few bucks more out of it, that´s great, like selling “carbon credits” or AH1N1 vaccines. Just great!.
As an example, in my country it has become mandatory to add ethanol to gasoline, but it happens that there is only ONE company providing that ethanol, and we cannot get gasoline without ethanol, though car engines are not prepared for that. (Ethanol always has a % of water, which is heavier than gasoline and, during the night, it goes to the bottom of fuel tank, just to be pumped to the engine in the morning…among other problems)
Can you imagine how many more “businesses” like this will appear after the 2012 Rio de Janeiro Earth´s summit?, then…is it chemically pure “good will” or it is just a totally new kind of businesses, where there is no free competition anymore but compulsory buying?.
You are now complaining about obligatory buying of health insurances, however you must pay attention what is happening in other countries, where many of these “new businesses” have been already implemented, I think as a “test” before applying them in your country and other countries. We already also have an obligatory third party car accidents´insurance and a brand new ID coming with an e-chip in it which will replace all credit cards, including all personal data about you, etc.etc.
The liberal dream of such a “Brave New World” in a “New World Order” under UN´s Global Governance, it is coming rapidly.
Are we going so easily to allow our grandchildren being chip implanted or we will fight against that? . This is not fantasy, our grandchildren are being already brainwashed with “climate change”/”sustainability” in every school.
Adolfo – How can you complain about putting chips in your kids? You’ll be able to know when they are somewhere you don’t want them to be, and thus protect them from any harm coming to them /sarcoff.
This regulation “for our own benefit” is getting more intrusive. Apart from the problem I have with travel sickness, if I fly I now have a couple of hours in a queue whilst waiting to be checked for explosives or sharp objects hidden on my person. They aren’t checking me for my benefit – I know I’m not a terrorist (though I do tend to be short-tempered after waiting a couple of hours, and then when I get there it’s another couple of hours queueing to have my passport checked) and all I want to do is get through the airports as fast as possible. At times I wonder if the “terrorist” problem has simply been encouraged and hyped in order to have ever more draconian security measures in all aspects of life “to keep me safe”.
Obligatory health insurance is a “regressive tax” in that theoretically everyone pays the same. It could be much cheaper if the practice of suing for malpractice, with large payouts, was curbed, so that medical practitioners did not have to pass such a large part of their fees straight to the insurance companies. If you go to a medical person, you’re by definition needing it and should make up your own mind on the chances of getting fixed up or that something goes wrong – nothing is risk-free. With the cost of medical insurance in the States being so high, is it any wonder that poor people just can’t pay for it?
Sustainability is actually a good thing. Don’t waste resources and tread lightly on the planet. We only have one at the moment, and we really don’t know enough about how it runs to go fiddling with the details. Up until a year ago I hadn’t really thought too hard about the AGW debate – I’ve seen the climate changes in my lifetime and note that over the last decade or so we’ve had hot/cold/wet/dry spells that exceed records for the last century. As such, I sort of accepted it till I started really looking at the figures, and now EM has done his analysis I’m pretty well certain it’s simply related to the Sun’s output. There are hints that governments now know this too, but can’t tell the people since otherwise they’ll look like fools. Also that nice carbon-tax money would stop flowing, and people would be out of a job.
The problem with a sustainable lifestyle is that pretty well by definition you’re not going to earn or spend much money, so there is a taxing problem. It is difficult in a city situation anyway, and only a small percentage could be allowed to really go for it – note the Agenda 21 emphasis on stopping people owning their own land. You may be able to do it now, but you’ll be dispossessed later on to stop you getting too rich. Oops – define “rich”….
@Simon. No SARC here: I have just found that “biometrics” (chip implantation) has been ALREADY approved in your country, in one of the thousands of pages of your health-care law. Surprised?
Here it is:
http://www.newscastmedia.com/biometrics.htm
Adolfo – a small carp – I’m British and live in France, but I also have relatives (by marriage) in the States.
If the hospital has access to your bank records by scanning the RFID chip, so they see how much they can get away with charging you, then think what anyone else with a scanner can do without you knowing. This gets a little scary. Computer hackers are somewhat bright, and breaking the codes is not going to take that long since the machines that do it will be there for looking at. Expect a massive increase in fraud, much the same as with credit-cards (around 10% losses on the total moved, if I recall correctly) but on an industrial scale. Suddenly you’re wiped of credit.
Several places in the UK now have “local currency” which is basically untaxable – much the same as IOUs. You give me some food for free, and I’ll come do some wiring for you for free. Some people in the Forest of Dean where I used to live have very low visible incomes. This sort of tit-for-tat has always existed in families and small groups of friends, but as it grows it tends to threaten the tax-revenues since it’s difficult to check. If currency becomes all-electronic, you can bet that this sort of response will increase and effectively the old barter systems will be used much more, leaving the government money only used where it’s necessary to do so. Rendering to Caesar….
Nobody will be capable of surviving without having a chip implanted…but there is an older barter system: For every action there will be a correspondent and equal reaction.
E.M. FYI
“Stakeholder Forum, readers may recall, is the body that is hoping to get a World Environmental Organisation put in place at the Rio+20 conference, thus putting environmental questions beyond the reach of the democratic process. Black’s Whitewash blog has managed to get hold of what appears to be their budget for the conference.
It’s very, very big.
”
More at http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2012/6/14/stakeholder-forums-budget.html
@ Another Ian: A “Rio Summit-Gate” urgently needed!
Someone’s been making a bunch of these and putting them on cars:
Yet another interesting (well to me) posting about what happens to taxes.
http://blog.heritage.org/2012/06/11/politically-connected-vc-firms-double-down-on-taxpayer-backed-companies/
“Oh what a tangled web you weave when first you practice to deceive?”
tckev – let’s see if I got that right. The VCs who were also advisors to the government first bought in to the companies, and then advised that they were a good target for DOE investments. Because the VCs were advisors, the DOE put the money in and thus increased the value of the VC’s investment, and the taxpayer paid for it. Have I got that right?
@Simon: Correct! Welcome to government 101. This is how things are always done when secrecy and closed doors prevail. It’s called crony capitalism now days, but it is the way government has always been operated. Small towns and large, local and national, the quickest and easiest way to wealth is through the public trough or toll gate. George Washington and some partners got the brand new US government to pass a law that only Federally licensed distillers could make whiskey. They had one of the few licenses and largest operation. And then used the government and army to put all the small independents out of business. In the history books it is called the “Wiskey Rebellion”.
The new thing is that you know about these cozy connections due to the Internet. The old ways are ending and a new way is being created due to the “Net that covers the World” The era of Centralized governance, that works in secret, is ending. Just as the Centralizers think that they are about to take over the world, people are finding out and the push is being impeded. Just like the case of AGW being discredited in spite of central control of the “message” . pg
@P.G: The old ways are ending and a new way is being created due to the “Net that covers the World” The era of Centralized governance, that works in secret, is ending. Just as the Centralizers think that they are about to take over the world, people are finding out and the push is being impeded. Just like the case of AGW being discredited in spite of central control of the “message”.
An apocalypse (Greek: ἀποκάλυψις apokálypsis; “lifting of the veil” or “revelation”) is a disclosure of something hidden from the majority of mankind in an era dominated by falsehood and misconception, i.e. the veil to be lifted.
“They” even invented “consensual science” based on wrong principles, to alienate men from the possibility of knowing the simple laws of nature, which explain how the universe works, something that is perfectly possible to men to access. This way they promoted false “wise” men, false “gods” of a secular “olympus” like those who contend the supposed “chaotic” nature of the cosmos or the indetermination principle.
Let us revisit those old ideas about which is the principal characteristic of a Devil: To cheat us using pseudo-truths, fallacies, which not only seem true but which seem “good” for good hearted and naive people.
If we consider the human society, our world, like a living organism, “they” are the cancer cells which need to be irradiated with gamma rays or to be subjected to a globalized “chemo”.
Let us wait and wee what happens with that “Rio de Janeiro 2012 Earth Summit”, GAIA is on our side…. :-)
pg – I had never heard that about George Washington. This sounds like one of those “it’s for your own good” deals. A decade or so ago a BBC reporter went to Ireland to investigate the poteen distilling, and brought a bottle back with him for analysis. They had thought it would be high in methanol, but found that it was in fact better than a well-known brand of American Bourbon Whiskey. One of the reasons home distilling is illegal is that the methanol content would be too high – maybe this is a continuation of GW’s leadership.
There’s a lot more information floating in the net, but it is difficult to decide what is true and what is not. A “heads up” is only the start of a real investigation that takes a lot of time, as EM has found. Most people do not have the time. Since EM is publishing both his data and his programs, and on top of that states his hunches about why things have been done that way and why it’s wrong, I feel I can trust what he says. More importantly, I can check it myself if I think that there’s a fault in the logic, and can state that if I find one (I haven’t, but I never got into FORTRAN so it would take me a few weeks to feel happy with it). Since on other things EM’s logic is impeccable, and he uses useful commenting, I don’t feel the need to tooth-comb the logic.
Most of the other data I get has to be accepted “on authority” which is less than satisfactory. From a historical viewpoint, “authority” is often wrong. I used to accept AGW on authority, but didn’t spend the time researching the data. Now I know it’s just bad data-processing, it annoys me that scientists have forgotten their integrity – it’s having a very real effect on peoples’ lives.
Adolfo – various New Age quasi-religions have been talking about new knowledge arriving at around this time. It’s based on astrology (Age of Aquarius) but since it’s somewhat difficult to pin down the exact date of this it will probably be fixed once it has well and truly passed. The idea of prophesies being truth, though it’s something that many people believe, does not sit happily with the chaotic world we actually see. Asimov’s invention of Psychohistory has a bit more substance – you can’t predict for one person (or one particle) but given enough people (or particles) then the probabilities become fairly certain. Send one photon through a double slit and you can predict nothing except probabilities about where it will end up, but send a stream of them through it and you have a nice diffraction pattern which shows those probabilities.
The net has given a lot more information to a lot more people. Most times this is good, though as noted above it’s difficult to tell what is truth, what is exaggerated, what is slanted and what is outright lies or scams. Maybe this is situation normal in human relations, but it’s a lot faster than things used to be. Given the rapid development of the net, and thus the possibility of collaborations between people in different countries and who may not necessarily understand the same languages, the apocalypse seems pretty certain to be soon. Not a bad thing, as such, but certainly disruptive to our previous way of life. I choose to view this as a benefit, once the dust has settled. Not too long ago I came across the books by Vernor Vinge, which could give a picture of how an all-pervasive net may change the way we live. Sci-fi really is a genre where clever people project current trends into the future and explore the effects on people and society, so it’s helpful when you reach that future sooner than you expected.
@Simon:
Thanks for the compliments. I try to “keep a tidy mind” and I’m also a bit compulsive about having things “fit” ( It’s an Aspe thing…)
I do make errors, but I try to keep them minimal and contained in potential scope of damage. I like to think they are fairly rare. Often they are made when I say something like “Well, my rules say do A, but I think The Story about B sounds good…” part of why one of my Rules is “NEVER believe The Story, especially about stocks.”
I also spent a lot of time as a paid computer consultant. You always had to “show your work” and it’s a bit of a habit now. One of the rules of computer programming is called “The Law of Mutual Superiority” and says “Anything I program you can improve, anything you program I can improve.” It’s why good programming shops of “Code Review” sessions where folks look over each others code, why the emphasis is on ‘egoless programming’, and why I never trust anyone’s code, even my own. So I publish the code partly so folks can look it over and see if I screwed the pooch somewhere. You all are my “desk check and code review” session…
@George:
Nice…
@Tckev:
Does seem to be the modern way… and “thus has it always been”… That, btw, is a large part of why I think the only real answer is incredibly limited government. It will be corrupted and it will be abused for personal gain, so the best that can be done is keep the percent small enough it doesn’t damage things too much.
EM – I learnt the hard way how valuable the “reasoning” comments are pretty early in my programming career. I had to rework something I’d written in a programming binge (not well-commented) a year or so earlier and it took a while to retrace the reasoning. Most programmers’ comments are simply what they are doing, but this is pretty damned obvious. The reasons why are the important ones. I’d not heard of that Law of Mutual Superiority, but it makes a lot of sense.
As such, the comments I made are not just compliments – you’ve made it easy for people to challenge the code by laying bare the assumptions built-in. Optimising for speed is not normally important with modern boxes, but optimising for clarity is always important.
Simon Derricutt says:
16 June 2012 at 10:08 pm
“The net has given a lot more information to a lot more people. Most times this is good, though as noted above it’s difficult to tell what is truth, what is exaggerated, what is slanted and what is outright lies or scams.”
I reckon the net is like a bad wheat crop – there’s grains there in a hell of a lot of chaff
@Another Ian: That is why in England it has been proposed the regulation of the net: Big Brother.
FYI – Came by a little blog post on a paper about the Sahara and Climate over the past few thousand years at NoTricksZone –
Sahara Climate Fluctuations Study Shows That Blaming Man For Climate Change Is “Completely Unscientific”
By P Gosselin on 16. Juni 2012
http://notrickszone.com/2012/06/16/sahara-climate-fluctuations-study-shows-that-blaming-man-for-climate-change-is-completely-unscientific/
E.M.
Enjoy!
http://joannenova.com.au/2012/06/rupert-wyndhams-excellent-prose-to-bishop-langrish-the-26-ethical-flaws-of-propagandists/
And some notes on a site crash below that one
I’ve added an index page to the version 1 vs version 3 postings here:
https://chiefio.wordpress.com/v1vsv3/
(It is in the top line of the blog as a ‘page’ not as a posting).
E.M. More FYI
http://diggingintheclay.wordpress.com/2012/06/18/lead-them-not-into-temptation/
E.M. Might be a duplicate
FYI
http://diggingintheclay.wordpress.com/2012/06/18/lead-them-not-into-temptation/
E.M.
Second post also doesn’t show.
I’ll ask WTF in the morning
Happened to see this at Fox today (AOL article) http://www.foxnews.com/us/2012/06/20/predicted-buggy-summer-across-us/ and wondered why it never occurred to them that the wholesale slaughter of bats by wind turbines might be at least in part the cause for the increase in insect populations.
E.M.
See Jo Nova’s questioning of Nature’s denier
http://joannenova.com.au/2012/06/nature-and-that-problem-of-defining-homo-sapiens-denier-is-it-english-or-newspeak/#comments
@George:
It’s not just bat kills. I’ve got a couple of little sparrow like birds nesting under the metal awning… They stuff a couple of bugs per 10 minutes or so into the mouths in the nest…
When I sit on the patio, the parents fly up and sit on the fence, bug in beak, and just look at me with this “You? On the patio AGAIN?” look… So I’m persona non grata on the patio during daylight hours. (They go to bed at sundown, so I’m “allowed” on the patio then…)
I figure it’s about 1 bug per 5 minutes x 12 hours. Call it 144 bugs / day. About 4320 per month.
So take that pile of bird bodies and multiply by 4320 x 4 or so for the summer bug increase, not counting reproduction of said bugs.
Also as I’ve noted, the prior smog levels chased out mosquitoes. Rather like the old “smoke trucks” of my youth. (Jeeps that put a fog of what I think was vaporized Diesel with some pesticide in it into the air, driving out the mosquitoes from my home town.) I’ve watched the mosquito population ebb and flow with the smoggy vs clear days. It was most obvious about the 1970s/80s when a trip into ‘the woods’ just a bit ‘up wind’ from the city was an exercise in bug bombs while downwind was not bad at all… Now all over is pretty bad and even in downtown there are issues.
Nothing to do with warmth, as it has been a very cold spring this year and the mosquitoes are the worst I’ve ever had in the back yard.
But the fantasy will be that it’s all due to Global Warming, I’m sure…
@Another Ian:
I think one of the behaviours of WordPress and its SPAM filter is that if a given site operator flags something as SPAM, that site gets a ‘vote’ of SPAM. When enough show up, WP just by defaults marks those links as SPAM. Then, folks like me, need to fish them back out of the SPAM bucket (which likely tallies a ‘not SPAM’) and eventually they get resurrected. My suspicion is that Diggingintheclay has likely had some Warmistas tossing any posting with links to it in a vendetta against reason… and WP is too stupid to realize that this can be an issue in how the SPAM filtering can be used as a political warfare tool…
At any rate, keep posting links to http://diggingintheclay.wordpress.com and I’ll keep fishing them back until the “Not SPAM” count gets fixed…
Just saw this nice quote: “It’s as if the socialists discovered that their plan creates poverty, so they decided to change their name to environmentalist to make poverty the goal.” – Lew Rockwell
We are done:
16. We reaffirm our commitment to fully implement the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development, Agenda 21, the Programme for the Further Implementation of Agenda 21, the Plan of Implementation of the World Summit on Sustainable Development (Johannesburg Declaration on Sustainable Development and the Plan of Implementation) of the World Summit on Sustainable Development, the Barbados Programme of Action and the Mauritius Strategy for Implementation. We also reaffirm our commitment to the full implementation of the Istanbul Programme of Action for Least Developed Countries (IPOA), the Almaty Programme of Action for Landlocked Developing Countries, the Political declaration on Africa’s development needs, and the New Partnership for Africa’s Development. We recall as well our commitments in the outcomes of all the major United Nations conferences and summits in the economic, social and environmental fields, including the UN Millennium Declaration and the 2005 World Summit outcome, the Monterrey Consensus and the Doha Declaration on Financing for Development, the outcome document of the High-Level Plenary Meeting of the UN General Assembly on the MDGs, the Programme of Action of the International Conference on Population and Development, the Key Actions for Further Implementation of the Programme of Action, and the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/jun/19/rio-20-future-we-want-draft-text
@Adolfo:
We are only “done” if they actually act on the words. There’s a long history of signing things and then ignoring them… Worrisome, yes. Doom? Not yet…
@Jason:
Oooh! Good one!
@E.M….Well I didn´t mean WE but YOU, because here in 3rd.world countries we do not obey anything that we do not like, we just forget it….
A few years ago I attended a conference of a hindu “Swami” ( a physicist by profession) who told us that having more than 25,000 years of history makes people to inherit their principles and it is very, really very hard to change these effectively, it doesn´t matter how many McDonalds or PHD´s are built around. I think what it is transmitted from generation to generation is from mother to child, and if things get troublesome these are set into action.
It is the same with the chinese people (sharing the same mongolian race roots): They seem to accept anything….until they decide time is due to cut some heads off…and keep on living the same as they did for thousand of years.
See these:
The mythical first emperor Fu-Hi taught to his people “knot-writing” (the peruvian Quipu -kee-poo-).
This is the direction in which the Barack Milhous Obama would want to move 20% of our energy production:
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/story/2012/06/19/north-rankin-windmill-failure.html
Key graf: “The single windmill was installed in 2000 as a pilot project. Similar wind turbines were installed in Cambridge Bay and Kugluktuk in the 1990s, none of which is still functioning.”
@George:
Politicians don’t really care a fig about energy or what makes it. They want money and adulation and political power. The question is who is supplying the money, the adulation, and how do they get political power out of it?
Once they have those, things like failure way short of promised life is just not interesting to them…
Part of why governments have projects that fail and private industry has projects that work…
@Adolfo:
That is how governments fail and civilizations adapt. Similar things are happening here.
When I was a kid, laws were very sacred and folks just felt bound by social norms and laws.
Now, folks are more selective about what laws they follow and just blow off social norms they don’t like. The “why” is rather interesting, but IMHO, indicates that we’re becoming more callous about our “leadership” and more willing to say “That’s what YOU say, me not so much…”
The “war on drugs” was a big push that way, but even prohibition a generation earlier started us down the path.
As the government “grip” gets tighter, more folks just say “nope”…
Eventually either things collapse and reset, or we end up with the “Formal and Informal” systems like Latin America where “gifts” to officials are the norm and were laws are ‘flexible’…
We’re not there yet, but headed that way.
@Jason Calley:
Love that Rockwell quote. It’s a keeper ;-)
(Yes, that’s a repeat compliment on it …)
I believe fortune tellers are very popular in California
http://glendora.patch.com/articles/study-region-heating-up-over-next-50-years
VERY FWIW:
Some links to abstracts on a recent search into Orbital Positions and Geo-Activity –
Multidimensional analysis and probabilistic model of volcanic and seismic activities
Author: Fedorov, V.
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2009EGUGA..11.2255F#feedback
“A search for space and time regularities in volcanic and seismic events for the purpose of forecast method development seems to be of current concern, both scientifically and practically. The seismic and volcanic processes take place in the Earth’s field of gravity which in turn is closely related to gravitational fields of the Moon, the Sun, and the planets of the Solar System. It is mostly gravity and tidal forces that exercise control over the Earth’s configuration and relief. Dynamic gravitational interaction between the Earth and other celestial bodies makes itself evident in tidal phenomena and other effects in the geospheres…”
The interannual earthquake distributions and its peculiarity.
Boris Levin and Elena Sasorova
Click to access EGU2010-6849-1.pdf
“The study of the periodicity of seismic process activation at different energy levels represents a topical problem in seismology, and it might help to illuminate the physical mechanisms that govern the processes of preparation and generation of earthquakes. It was observed during written history, that the seismic events occur in various regions of the Earth in some months of a year significantly more often than in another. In the last decade, there has been growing interest in problems related to searching for global spatiotemporal regularities in the distribution of seismic events on the Earth…”
Solar-terrestrial effect controls seismic activity to a large extent (Invited)
Author: Duma, G.
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2010AGUFMNH13A1139D
” Several observational results and corresponding publications in the 20 century indicate that earthquakes in many regions happen systematically in dependence on the time of day and on the season as well. In the recent decade, studies on this topic have also been intensively performed at the Central Institute for Meteorology and Geodynamics (ZAMG), Vienna. Any natural effect on Earth which systematically appears at certain hours of the day or at a special season can solely be caused by a solar or lunar influence. And actually, statistic results on seismic activity reveal a correlation with the solar cycles. Examples of this seismic performance are shown. To gain more clarity about these effects, the three-hour magnetic index Kp, which characterizes the magnetic field disturbances, mainly caused by the solar particle radiation, the solar wind, was correlated with the seismic energy released by earthquakes over decades. Kp is determined from magnetic records of 13 observatories worldwide and continuously published by ISGI, France. It is demonstrated that a highly significant correlation between the geomagnetic index Kp and the annual seismic energy release in regions at latitudes between 35 and 60° N exists…”
Decadal variations in geophysical processes and asymmetries in the solar motion about the Solar System’s barycentre
Authors: Sidorenkov, Nikolay; Wilson, Ian; Khlystov, Anatoly
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2010EGUGA..12.9559S
“It is well known that many geophysical processes vary on inter-annual to decadal timescales. These variations are usually attributed to terrestrial causes that include: the Earth’s core-mantle coupling, the effects of internal driven stochastic oscillations in the climatic system, the effects of the global conveyer belt in World Ocean and so on. However, we contend that the empirical evidences and facts demand that this generally accepted assumption should be revised and modified. We find that the observed changes in the specific mass of the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets closely correspond to the specific mass variations that are needed to explain the “decadal-long” fluctuations in LOD (Sidorenkov, 2009). Since the mass of the ice sheets in Antarctic and Greenland depend on long-term climate variations, it is reasonable to assume that the decadal fluctuations in the Earth’s rotation may also correlate with the fluctuations in the major climatic indices. Following this line of reasoning, we have found that the atmospheric circulation regimes and the ten-year running mean of the anomalies of the Northern Hemisphere air temperature are well correlated with the changes in the Earth’s rotation rate. Stanislav Perov and Nikolay Sidorenkov (2009) found also significant correlation between fluctuations in the Earth’s rotational rate and activity of the India monsoon. Ian Wilson (2009) found a relationship between the deviation of the Earth’s LOD from its long-term trend and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO). Whenever there are large deviations in the Earth’s LOD from its long–term trend, the PDO index transitions to its positive phase. Note that the observed changes in the LOD precede those in the anomalies of the precipitation in India monsoon and in the PDO by about eight years. Ian Wilson shows that the times when Solar/Lunar tides had their greatest impact upon the Earth are closely synchronized with the times of greatest asymmetry in the Solar Inertial Motion (SIM). Over the last 800 years, the Earth has experience exceptionally strong tidal forces in the years 1247, 1433, 1610, 1787 and 1974 (Keeling and Whorf, 1997). He shows that these exceptionally strong tidal forces closely correspond in time to the first peak in the asymmetry of the SIM that occurs just after a period low asymmetry. These first peaks…”
_______
Strictly FYI and FWIW and IYI (if you’re interested;-) – Your own search would probably be more productive than I can do.
Just a quick FYI from reports I’ve seen –
Up to 16 inches of snow for Mt Baker WA
http://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?lat=48.77429274267508&lon=-121.81640625&site=sew&unit=0&lg=en&FcstType=text
Up to 14 inches of snow for Mt Rainier WA
http://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?site=sew&textField1=46.86&textField2=-121.76&smap=1
Up to a foot of snow for Mt Shasta California
http://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?lat=41.41286565600375&lon=-122.1954345703125&site=mfr&smap=1&unit=0&lg=en&FcstType=text
Thankfully it’s still summer.
Solar Max shows virtually no activity which may or may not be connected.
E.M.
Related to the spat you’re in over at WUWT
http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2012/06/23/time-of-gullibility-bias/
@Tckev: Perfectly normal for this kind of MAXIMUM:
and a SFI= 84 !!
Do you remember the good all days (before GW scam) when TSI related with temperatures, and it was the SUN and not CO2?
@ adolfogiurfa “The mythical first emperor Fu-Hi taught to his people “knot-writing” (the peruvian Quipu -kee-poo-).”
Very neat! I found that very intriguing; Chinese quipus! Who knew? When I did a little googling around, I found a second version of the Fu-Hi (also transliterated as Fu Xi or Fu Hsi) story. The others claimed that “knot writing” was known from some indefinite age, and that Fu-Hi actually invented the ideogram form of writing that replaced the knot writing. Fu-Hi’s new form of writing was much more efficient and concise in its transmission of ideas.
http://www.kanjigraphy.com/mainpages/info/history.html
I certainly do not discount trans-Pacific contact. There is some evidence of Chinese/Olmec congruencies in writing around 1500BC to 1000BC. http://www.chinese.tcu.edu/www_chinese3_tcu_edu.htm Anyway, it would be hard to say whether Chinese took quipus to South America or the South Americans passed quipus to the Chinese, or perhaps it was independent. Any idea whether any Chinese quipus still exist? Can they be read?
By the way, I have a theory related to quipus. Many of the megalithic South Americam structures had bumps on the stone. http://www.visualphotos.com/image/2×3867538/close-up_of_a_stone_wall_cuzco_peru Conventional interpretation is that the bumps are just left over knobs used to move the stone in place. I suspect that the bumps may be a form of writing — perhaps related to quipus. After all, if you are building a temple and you have a writing system based on knots, why wouldn’t you put “knots” on the temple to read “All Glory to the Sun God”?
@Adoffo:
Where did you get that picture of a perfect blemish free orange? Are they all like that down south? ;-)
@Jason:
Somewhere long ago I saw a comparison of the basic 12 signs of Chinese and some specific other early characters and the assertion that the Chinese were just the others turned sideways. The comparison was very striking. It would tie Chinese writing to western writing.
Unfortunately, I lost the link to it so can’t give any pointer.
Per the knobs oh the rocks: Neat theory. Didn’t look like enough knobs on the picture to say much, though.
FWIW my thesis is that the softened the rocks chemically to mold them into position and had stretched skins to make the face surface smooth and not saggy. The “bumps” are from skins with ‘arm holes’ in them. Stitched up, but still a protrusion. The other stones covered with whole smooth skins.
@Another Ian:
Thanks. I always wondered about why they did TOBs, but just figured they had a good reason. Now I’m not so sure… Per “spat”: Noting like waking up to find someone has a “You Idiot” hit piece aimed at you. I think I did a credible job of defending my position (even if it did consume most of the day…)
@Tckev:
Still snowing on Shasta? That’s got to be a bit odd. Good thing it’s summer or they would be having a blizzard ;-)
Wonder if there is an available map of mountain snow cover and glacier state anywhere… with recent data. I’d bet the last couple of years things have been growing.
@Pascvaks:
Interesting stuff. Probably a day or two before I can read the links… been a busy day….
@Chuckles:
2500 times more precise? Yeah, right… and it is on a Supercomputer… that must make make it right…
E.M.
Just thought that you would like to know that it is snowing in California in yet another record-breaking hot year.
@adolfogiurfa
Yes I do remember when the activities of the big orb in the sky was deemed very important to what weather happened here. I wonder what happened to all the scientist that studied the phenomenon? They just ran out of money, I suppose, as the new wave of calamity science moved in.
Ref. Colorado(Et Al) Fires: I doubt we’ve had much impact, but maybe I’m very wrong…
Colorado’s in the news, again, today. Yesterday it was someone else. Tomorrow it’s going to be someone else still again. People never have liked BIG wildfires, and until recently all they could do was run. Urban Heat Island effects and fire ‘control’, along with water and air polution on various scales, that’s the impact we’ve had. When it comes to fire control I’m not sure how much real impact we’ve had, my guess is not much. But I can imagine in days of yore great swaths of dry tinder and grass went up in smoke all around the world because we were impotent to do anything, but maybe my imagination is imagining more than the actual impact of such events, they’re not very well documented until recently, and the what do we try to do? Put them out. This is an academic kind’a question for any and all, is it better to put out a fire burning down a National Forest, or National Grassland, or National Outback, or National Jungle, or to stand back and let her rip? (forget for a moment the labor expense, assume no human lives lost, is it better for an awful lot of dry dead/dying vegetation to burn, or not?)
News of a recent fire:
http://news.yahoo.com/colorado-wildfire-erupts-grows-control-083818669.html
Pascvaks – if it weren’t for the potential loss of life, and possibly more importantly money, those fires would be left to burn. They’ve been happening for a long long time, and are a way for the forest/grassland to renew itself. One problem is that since we’re good at stopping little fires, when they get out of control they become really big fires and it takes longer for the ground to recover from the phoenix moment. Some trees need a fire to set their seeds (sorry, no links on this).
A burn-off is needed now and again. As the percentage of Oxygen increases in the air, it will become easier to start a fire and harder to put it out. By not burning Carbon we allow the Oxygen to increase, though I haven’t seen any data on measurements of this. Since it will vary a lot around the globe, maybe the “average” is not really important, and the local concentration is what makes the difference. I would expect large green wildlands (and farmlands) to have a higher Oxygen concentration, though. You might possibly see a negative feedback control here – too many trees -> increased Oxygen -> higher probability of fires to burn down the trees. It seems the world must be full of negative feedback mechanisms, otherwise it would not have remained largely constant.
Racing stocks & Racing Heartbeats.
Retirement concentrates ones focus nearly as much as an imminent hanging. I actually retired a year ago but non-solicited freelancing has postponed the actual event.
Never have had any institutional pensions or plans, nor are there inheritances or lottery wins in the future.
I long long ago decided to select my own stocks, and select those that had good long term prospects and good dividends. I started with four issues, and in about 8 years stabilized at 36-40. I re-evalutae and prun about every six months.
The dividend only yield average of the portfolio over 40 years has been about 3.41% The assets have gone up when the market went up and down when the market went down. The number that are not percentages have shifted upward from the hundreds to the thousands to now, at least temporarily the ten thousands, based on inflation.
For reasons that seemed liked a good ideal at the time, i rejected Government bonds, Gold, Commodities. I tried and kept a small amount of real estate. I have a very few corporate bonds.
The Question is very simple:
Going forward, living off the proceeds and eventually, perhaps, progressive withdrawals, is this still a valid strategy?
There may be a less simple secondary question: are there new features on the financial climate that make this an unlikely good strategy going forward.
I’ve answered “Yes”, and “Probably Not”
The real growth of the portfolio has been about 3.25% compounded
plus the possibly chimerical overall market growth, or minus the shrink, depending on an arbitrary endpoint.
Dividend payout may have been the most consistent market feature over 40 years.
Consistancy is a virtue for one of my status. Probably one could accept higher risk for higher rewards, not worth it if they aren’t necessary.
The point ??
I find your racing stocks and economic commentaries interesting, as use them as one of the periodic touch points for the “Has anything changed in the financial world” question. Trading is a dynamic pulse taken on what I hope will be a relatively static market environment.
An aside….one often hears that the market is where companies go to raise capital. But I have always felt that this is a minor role — once listed and issued, a stock has no capital raising function. It is a share of a company’s earnings and prospects, or a vehicle for speculation, depending almost wholly on the role of the buyer. Assuming that speculation long run cancels out, and there is not over emphasis on market manipulation for executive compensation, a share of existing stock is a really boring thing. Of all the financial instruments you follow, isn’t the large stock market the stodgey backwater? And isn’t it mostly inhabited by large institutions fundamentally funding retirements.
So the “risk” is presented almost entirely by investors who can’t accept real returns in the 3% range for these passive investments, like government pension plans with 8.5% assumptions.??
@Pascvaks:
In the past, due to the fires being frequent, they didn’t have much room to run and didn’t get as strong before running into an ‘already burned patch’ and petering out on the fresh area.
Now, with 1/2 Century of excess fuel on the ground covering giant areas, we get superfires.
The best approach would be to do small burns to re-establish the normal pattern of forest / grassland – meadow patches. THEN let it run unchecked. The worst is to do either of the things we do: Put out all fires and let fuel load build; let monster fires run rampant sterilizing the ground in stead of setting seeds.
Only save way I can see to so that is “controlled burns” just before the rains start; or gather the forest litter into piles with equipment and burn it off from small patches (reduce fuel load without a forest fire). I suppose one could bulldoze the forest litter into a dig and try to let it rot… but that doesn’t do the smoke germination some plants need.
@Simon:
As to how long forest fires have existed: As long as there have been forests and lightning…
FWIW oxygen levels have been dropping for a good chunk of recent geologic time. Too much sequestration as carbonate rocks… Blame it on the shell fish and diatoms ;-)
Germination links:
http://duckduckgo.com/?t=ous&q=smoke+induced+germination
http://duckduckgo.com/?q=fire+seed+germination&t=ous
@Jason Calley: 300 miles north of Lima City, capital of Peru, there is the ancient city of Sechin (Tse-Xing), where the late professor Fernando Llosa Porras found the I-CHING in it:
http://www.caiman.de/grenzfall/sechin/sechindt.shtml
That city has been found (google for “Sechin Bajo” or Lower Sechin) it is more than 5,500 years old; older than Caral pyramids built before the Egyptians pyramids:
http://peruanista.blogspot.com/2008/02/oldest-known-indigenous-structures-of.html
As for the Quipu I can tell you the key of its meaning/translation, as I had an employee in my house, many years ago, who one night I found drank and crying: I asked him why he was crying and he told me he was sorry because he had left his “quipu-camayoc” (teacher of quipu writing) where he had been sent by his parents. As “official science” says that no longer exist such “quipu-camayocs”, and that quipus are not for writing but for accounting, I asked him if he could remember the meaning of some knots. He told me that, for example, a red knot having inside it a stick meant “war”, if that same knot had two sticks, meaning a broken spear, it meant “War end” if it was followed by a light blue knot which meant “sky/peace”.
A mini, tiny spot counted as 13 SSN:
Adolfo-
Two of my daily log-on check links are the ‘Solar Terrestial Activity Report’
http://www.solen.info/solar/
and NASA’s SOHO page for Sunspots
http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/sunspots/
The older I get the less SPOTS I see on the Sun (and the less I trust the ‘Global Network of SunSpot Counters’) they’ve been counting ‘smudges’ as spots, they’ve been counting ‘almost sumdges’ as spots since Cycle 24 started. I guess they all go to the Church of Global Warming. Anyway, now I just look at the F10.7 Solar Flux and the Planatary A Index graphs. The way these guys count we’ll never have another Maunder Minimum;-)
@Pascvaks: I see no spots in the link you just gave, only the number of that “spot” 1511
http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/sunspots/
There is NOTHING, really NOTHING!
@EMSmith; I will call you between 9:00 and 10:00 this evening from Chico to get your address and to communicate on a possible schedule. pg.
@P.G: Hey P.G. Will E.M. be your test pilot, or he will just make the software for you flying machine? :-)
@Adolfo, Who knows, the pilot may well be the software.
Actually I was planning on drinking beer and exchanging lies. ;-) pg
@P.G. & E.M. : Cheers!
E.M.
A “might interest”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/9349291/Clive-James-Im-not-dead-yet.html
E.M.
Might be some more grist for one of your mills?
http://joannenova.com.au/2012/06/has-north-victoria-cooled-not-warmed-and-is-that-a-solar-cycle-signal-we-see/#more-20252
@P.G.Sharrow:
Sorry, I got wrapped up in coding (making a Classical First Differences version of my code to compare it with dT and dP as Mosher had his panties in a bunch over my minor variation) so the phone was off.
It’s 3:30 am now, so likely I won’t be awake until 10 or 11 am… I’ll try to find the phone and turn it one then ;-)
@All:
Let’s see… how much beer will it take te become bold enough to pilot a neon sign charger? ;-)
@ E.M. I will have to look around for some info on congruities between early Chinese and Western writing. It is such a fascinating subject — and almost as strong a marker of cultural cross fertilization as DNA is for biology. As for the rock softening and the knobs, that is an ingenious idea! There are some reports that the knobs cast shadows along the walls on certain specific days. The usual suspects there — solstices, equinoxes, etc. The subject needs more research in my opinion. The thing that strikes me is the incongruity of the knobs. Consider, here is a culture able to carve, shape or somehow form and move stones in the multi-ton range as if they were butter, and yet some of them have fist sized knobs sticking out, seemingly at random. It just does not make esthetic sense! I have to think that there was a reason why the knobs are where they are, something more important that how the stones were shifted into place. My thought that there may be a sort of writing involved is not really even a theory, just more of a wild guess, but a speculation worth considering. As for the rock softening, there are certainly apocryphal stories about it; sure would be nice to know what chemicals were involved! Might make my next home construction more interesting. I know that you have in the past posted thoughts about the “pyramids contain cast stone” idea. Forgive me if this is a double post (I forget if I have put this up elsewhere) but at last we have some real samples of pyramid stone examined with scanning electron microscopes! The verdict? Some of the stone is cut natural stone, but some of it is cast. See this for a really convincing speech on the subject. Note too the report of political threats and infighting of the old guards on the subject.
@ adolfogiurfa Very interesting links — but the story about the quipu meaning is nice! From what I have read, the quipus really were much more able to convey linguistic meaning than past scholars believed. The story of knots with sticks or colors makes sense. IF (big “if”) there was in fact an ancient culture with global span, I would not be surprised to find that there was a “trade language” used globally. Consider the fact that ogham sometimes shows up as hand and finger positions on statues. Apparently some of the Native Americans used a sort of sign language for cross tribal trading as well. If ogham is an outgrowth of an earlier sign language, perhaps the quipu system is a similar outgrowth with knot positions representing hand and finger shapes. Could there be a correlation between ogham and quipus? Gurdjieef claimed that certain ancient dances were a coded alphabet with arms, hands and legs spelling preserved messages from an ancient world.
@E.M. My advice: Better try something stronger….like Pisco, Vodka, or plainly some newly developed green fuel, as pure 96º corn ethanol…
@Jason Calley: Ancient dances Gurdjieff with the music of Hartmann brought to occident, “conveyed” cosmological laws knowledge in them, a non verbalized transmission of it and impossible to be translated into words.
@Jason Calley: You will appreciate this movie:
@Jason:
Look at: https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2011/12/22/liquid-stone/
and look for “geopolymer” and “liquid stone” up thread. Oxalic and citric acids are the suspects.
This is rather huge: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/06/25/antarctic_ice_not_melting/
Turns out that computer models done 20 years ago that forecast significant ice loss in eastern Antarctica were wrong. In fact, VERY wrong. They were COMPLETELY wrong. This is important because hundred of billions of dollars has been taken from productive economic use to “fight” the attendant “sea level rise” that these studies were predicting and it was all false. We have been fleeced. Every dollar spent to “fight” sea level rise or global warming ends up in someone’s pocket after being removed from yours. This SHOULD be enough to get people up in arms but I have a feeling it will pass quietly into obscurity without a mention in the major papers.
People, you are being robbed. Your well-intentioned desire to pass a sustainable ecosystem to future generations is being taken advantage of.
We are being deceived, scared to death, with the “economic crisis”, “climate change”, or whatever, in order to convince us that the only way out is to abandon our nationality, to establish a Brave New World, where THEY will be the owners of everything.
I should like to go back and review all policy decisions that cited this study at any stage of its consideration and strike them down.
“According to the University of Wisconsin, Madison, on June 11, 2012, the South Pole Station measured a new record low temperature.The mercury dropped to -73.8°C (-100.8°F), breaking the previous minimum temperature record of -73.3°C (-99.9°F) set in 1966”.
That’s apparently a record low for that date, by the way, not a record low for all time.
@George & Adolfo –
Not to worry! Nothing’s changed! Not really! It’s a cyclic sort’a thing. Sheepdogs get old. And if/when they chase off all the wolves, their whelps start acting like wolves to fill the void. Remember, Nature hates a vacume! So you have good sheepdogs and bad sheepdogs and, as always, sheep. Now if the bad sheepdogs win, well let’s not go there… Now if the good sheepdogs beat out the bad sheepdogs and chase them away, then overtime the story repeats itself. At present, we have a lot of bad BIG sheepdogs and a lot of good but stupid BIG sheepdogs, and a lot of little bad sheepdogs and little good sheepdogs, and sheep. Something’s going to give, one way or another, but it always does. Sheep have terrible memories. I used to be a sheepdog, a good sheepdog, now I’m retired;-)
@George & Adolfo –
Analogies only go so far… just re-read my last.. NOT calling you sheep, the fact that you’re ‘here’ means you’re a couple of Old Dogs too. Sheep don’t like to think. Dogs are ALWAYS thinking, and watching, and barking, and chewing old bones;-)
@ George “This SHOULD be enough to get people up in arms but I have a feeling it will pass quietly into obscurity without a mention in the major papers.”
I think you are correct, and I think what you say illustrates a more general case. Consider this — someone asks you to estimate the cube root of 2047. Maybe you answer, just off the top of your head, 15. “No,” they respond, “it is more like 12.7.” No, big deal, you were not emotionally vested in the answer; there is no shame, no sorrow, no real emotional response when you find you were wrong. Suppose, on the other hand that the question were about something where you had been specifically programed to feel an emotional response to the subject. We have all seen the “dying polar bear” photos, the vast “soon-to-be-extinct” rookeries of penguins, the visions of flooded cities and streams of refugees — all blamed on YOUR automobile and lifestyle. The average person does not have a cold rational connection to CAGW. The average person automatically, unthinkingly, pulls up a series of visceral, gut level feelings when the subject is broached. Once CAGW is conclusively disproven, the average person will have only two choices: ignore the subject and pretend it never happened, or admit that their beliefs and feelings have been manipulated so that they supported a big lie. Most people would rather ignore the unpleasant truth than face it square on.
PS: “GOOD” OLD DOGS! Damn, I’m getting older and more scatter-brained by the minute!
@ adolfogiurfa Good link, good movie! The world is STILL a mysterious place and not everything that happens is covered by the little bit we know of physics. :)
@ E.M. Maybe I need to go buy some oxalic or citric acid. Thanks for the info!
Jason – Rhubarb leaves and lemons? It may only work on a particular rock-type, maybe bound with calcium salts, so check your rocks against the ancient ones.
The AGW problem has from the start been aimed at getting visceral reactions. This is YOUR fault that the chocolate bunny is dying, you’re eating all the Twinkies. Guilt-trips have a tendency to loosen the wallet-hand, and what should be the slowest draw in the West is suddenly speeded up by all the guilt-tripping phrases. You can put all these things right for just $5 per month….
Given that there do seem to be a lot of these “big lies” around, I’d expect the guilt-trips to be reassigned pretty quickly to something else so that the average person would hardly notice the lack of AGW claims because suddenly something else is really big and important.
For those who have the time to read a book, I’d suggest “State of Fear” by Michael Crichton. It’s a novel, and fiction, but he researched it well and states his research in the back of the book. I’d regard it as a case of “names have been changed, and exact details have been altered so you can’t exactly tie it in to the news stories”.
EPA sustainability:
http://thenewamerican.com/tech/environment/item/11224
@E.M.: What do you think of this?:
http://themodernparableofthematrix.blogspot.it/2012/05/new-paradigm.html
@E.M. Notre Dame Cathedral built by the Celts:
Notre Dame is located on an island situated in the center of the Seine known as Isla de la Cité. It seems that 2000 years ago this island was inhabited by Celtic tribes, is thought to be inhabited by a sort of priestly caste of the Celts known as Druids. There, they had erected a shrine to the ancient Great Mother, the Mother Nature and its elements. The first stone of the cathedral was placed in the year 1163, marking the beginning of a construction job that lasted 170 years. It was a period of high light, Nicolas Flamel was the era of alchemists and sages. On the site of the ancient Celtic shrine, he built a church and later on the same after several years the Cathedral today. In the South Tower is the famous bell that Emmanuel is now rung only on special occasions. In 1631, during its manufacture, the women offered their jewels to the foundry for the construction of this bell, which was the origin of its very special sound.
The inside of the Cathedral, or nave is surrounded by a total of 29 chapels. The main facade, which gives to the west, has three major revenue sculptures, a gallery of statues and a canopy of 10 meters in diameter around the whole “Virgin and Child.” Fulcanelli tells us: “Notre Dame of Paris once raised its majestic size of a staircase of 11 steps. Today, the subsequent accumulation of earth covering the stairs went up gradually to absorb the last of them. “. 11 is the number of our Divine Mother (Notre Dame), persuasion, Priestess, as 11 becomes 1 +1 = 2, and 2 is the priestess, the Divine Mother Kundalini staff.
The main facade of the church facing a large square, called Piazza del Parvis of Notre Dame. In this regard, Fulcanelli, reports that in the middle of this square “once stood a statue of stone, tall and lean, with a book in one hand and a snake in the other. This statue was part of a monumental fountain, where we read:
“Here sitis, hue tendas: desunt Liquores is strong, Pergredere, aeternas paravi diva! aquas. “[1]
Fulcanelli refers always to the people of the country called the prayer of Monsieur Legris, praying the “Seller Of Grey”, the “Great Faster”, or “Faster Of Notre Dame”. The ancients called FEBRIGENO, which means son of the Sun, or gold, or even the son of Apollo, the common people called him later, Maitre Pierre, meaning master stone, stone of power, the cornerstone. It was also called MICER LEGRIS, at a time when the word meant gray fire, and in particular, wisp. “. Everything of course is symbolic: the idea of the cornerstone (the science of sex, sexual alchemy) and dell’abbeverarsi, fire, water, the snake, the book, the woman, etc … The fountain symbolized the waters of life, sexual energy, and the statue in the center, the fire that is hidden in the water, the regenerating fire, the fire of the earth, the divine Daimond, Lucifer internal reflection of Christ in people. Lucifer is the stairs to climb, Lucifer is the stairs to go down, there is the temptation to climb if we succeed, if we do get the following desire. That’s why we say that Lucifer is the Christ in action, is the force that redeems us or condemn us. Nothing moral in all this, all very obvious. He who seeks Consciousness, must win the manifestations of its mechanical nature, animals must overcome the impulse that expresses itself through desire and temptation, the Gargoyles (monstrous figures, animals), the roofs are the representation. If the Christ Consciousness, the temptation becomes the friction that I need to develop it, to generate a Consciousness, Consciousness is a man who has won automatic ego animal demonstrations, which has built its immortality. Consciousness is what remains, and remains in the measure of how we developed.
Rocco Bruno.
@Adolfo:
The EPA article is encouraging as it shows dawning awareness of the problem…
The link to the “what to I think” question: It makes a lot of false dichotomies. The world has far more ‘shades of gray’ tnan A or B and even has a lot of areas that are a whole pallet of colors….
So In find a lot of the “Ego vs non-ego” kind of mindless…. Some Ego is good. Some non-Ego is good. Some “neither ego nor non-ego” is good… So mostly I find that A xOR B!!!! kind of stilted and empty… How can I choose black xOR white when one can not be without the other?
And I’m more found of purple paisley anyway….
The bit about Notre Dame is very intriguing….
@Simon:
Rhubarb has oxalic acid in it. Lemons have citric. The combo is the key and that might work…
Per: http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?35579-Were-Stones-Softened-To-Build-Peru-s-Ancient-Structures
So you might want to add some vinegar too ….
State Of Fear is pretty good (just finished it a few weeks back).
Per “guilt trips” maybe that’s why I’m a Skeptic… I don’t do guilt worth a damn….
@Jason:
Unfortunately, most folks seem to not remember what they were in favor of last week…. They don’t need to “forget it” as it is already gone….
@Pascvaks:
Dogs don’t always think…. Mine used to drink beer with me ;-)
@George:
Interesting stuff….
@All:
Probably time for a T7 soon…
Juggling Jurisdictions:
IMHO, the single largest enemy of the progressive-to-authoritarian statist model is mobility. Progressive statism in a democracy or quasi-democracy requires a permanent underclass whose vote (American Blacks) or thuggish support (‘Arab Street’) may be counted on. The need for Other People Money is much easier to satisfy if neither the people nor the assets suporting both themselves and the underclass can run away from you.
American mobility has been a huge part of our retaining what little freedom we still have. From Stockton to Detroit, the progressives are finding that one can’t raise much public revenue in a ghost town.
If one overlays an inflow-outflow map at the state or country levelm the results correlate highly with the red state-blue state maps one see around election time.
Policies to federalize municipal pensions and debt, or to extend eminent domain, or to require excessive notice on business closings are attempt to frustrate mobility. Liberal judges shoveling money across jurisdictions (see New Jersely schools) to “equitablize” (cousin to canibalize) funding is another.
Self redistribution of people is the direct opposite of statist redistribution of wealth. The end of freedom is when mobility of capital and people is halted.
Watch for it in a progressive legislature near you! And run while you can!
@Richard Progressive statism in a democracy or quasi-democracy requires a permanent underclass whose vote…
Dou you really believe it is real and not “managed”?
@Adolfo:
Things can be BOTH real and managed…
@E.M.: That´s it, that´s what I meant.
Found this interesting:
Anybody want a drone to play with?
http://rt.com/usa/news/texas-1000-us-government-906/
E.M.
sorry if i missed it, i was in uk for 3 weeks and up to my ears in bitter. how did the Benz problems work out?
E.M.
As an Asp how do you cope?
You must have come up with a strategy that stops you feeling like an alien on the planet of strangers. Any good books? How do I convince my boss that it’s not an act or excuse?
@E.M. The following deserves your attention: (from Zeke´s Place)
http://zekeunlimited.wordpress.com/
@Tckev:
Yeah… If the Iranians can hijack a drone, then our high school kids can too… Just a matter of time.
Just shine a bright GPS light into it’s antenna and slowly drift where it thinks it is… Unless they put encryption of the GPS into the sats, it’s a problem…. and I think it would take new sats to fix…
But hey, it’s not like any kid with an interest in radios has access to GPS hardware… not like it is built into every telephone or anything …. /sarcoff;>
@J Ferguson:
The Benz has had a ‘triage’ look that said “likely high cost spun bearing or worse” and is going to sit for (perhaps months) until a slow day when the mechanic will pull some of the oil pans and inspect the lower bearings / bits in the pan.
There is a very very small chance that the oil pump chain broke and started jamming the pump enough that you can’t hand crank the engine, but that I shut it down just at the Magic Moment before oil starvation caused various bearings to fuse…
It’s also possible one oil port got clogged ( though how is unclear unless some other parts were coming to bits) and that one bearing was freezing up. In that case, drop the crank and MAYBE polish a land do a new bearing.
As I have enough cars to not need this one in a hurry, it waits for the “lower price slow day rate”…
I have to put up with driving my old SLC until then ;-)
(Only 16 mpg or so, but I don’t go very far day to day… And the AC has lost its gas, but we’re having cool weather anyway…)
@Tckev:
How do I cope? That’s a long story….
Just bite my tongue and shut up a lot. Learned to put on a plastic smile and peasant face and leave it there (useful for meet and greet…) Think about interesting things while the “recorder” runs in “party talk” environments ( so can play back the last 20 seconds or so of what was said if someone looks at me as actually asks “What do you think?”. “Well, John just said that ‘the new project was behind schedule and likely would stay that way’. Don’t have any reason to disagree.”… Accept that there are some folks who will just not like me very much. Often say “Sorry, don’t know about the Raiders game. I’m not into baseball.” with a grin ;-)
What makes you think I don’t feel like an Alien? I’m almost always feeling like I just stepped out of the saucer and these Clever Monkeys are interesting but a bit dangerous and often explode unexpectedly. ( Especially at ‘sporting’ events, or when away from the most educated of them. Yet even then the Lead Monkey can often get very pissed if you spill the beans on how they are manipulating the others… or if you are not manipulable – my typical state – seen as a competitor / threat despite complete lack of interest in their “game” or “spoils”…)
Just dance between the land mines the best you can… and accept that lying is their norm, that telling them the truth is often a bad idea so it is better to “say nothing” until the person is tested and proven trustworthy with direct truth, know that ANY answer you are requested to give is most likely not actually wanted, so give a cartoon bubble of it. “What is the delivery status?” does not mean they want the delivery status. It means they want “OK” or “Good” or “Let me check” or at most “A week or two”. That it is dependent on parts that are not yet in hand and might be anywhere from 2 days to a month and the PO to the alternate vendor has been sent, but no confirmation yet… well, that’s “status” and not what they want when they ask for “Status”, they want a schedule guess…
Beer helps, but only after hours ;-)
@Adolfo:
Which article? The ‘treaties’ one or the temp reconstruction one or…
As your comment is on the ‘treaties’ one, I assume that’s the one…
I think I kind of dealt with it here: https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2012/06/28/fixing-americas-budget-mess/
where I had a specific statement that treaties could not over ride US Law nor the Constitution.
Adding a bit on “only with countries” might be worth it…
El Hierro volcano in the Canary Islands, again, maybe. Here’s a ground deformation graph from one station on El Hierro: http://www.seis.nagoya-u.ac.jp/sagiya/canary_gps/FRON.pdf
@George:
I’d rather it wasn’t the Canary Islands that blew up… but at least a nice bout of Volcanic Winter might stop some of the warming hysteria …
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/spain/8795750/Volcano-threat-sparks-evacuation-in-Canaries.html
https://theextinctionprotocol.wordpress.com/2012/06/29/intensifying-seismic-and-volcanic-activity-lifts-canary-island/
And here I was just about caught up on technical and climate stuff so I could do a WSW catch up…
I’m not going to cover it until it blows, but it looks like that may not be long.
A water bridge which defies gravity:
If seen closely it is a rotating Birkeland current:
If its cross section is represented, as charges move around, you´ll see my graph:
http://www.giurfa.com/
This is an interesting article pertaining to “going Galt” or at least moving slightly in that direction. http://lfb.org/today/freedom-and-frugality/ I believe that the author is actually Wendy McElroy, not Jeff Tucker.
What is “interesting” (translation: downright scary) about the inflation of that island is that every station on the entire island shows it. The *entire island* is rising by nearly 6cm so far.
http://www.seis.nagoya-u.ac.jp/sagiya/Sagiyas_Page/Canary.html
@E.M. Please explain to us what has happened with the banks and Libor in England..
@George:
Oh Dear!…
@Adolfo:
LIBOR is used to set adjustable mortgage rates all over the world. Barclays was “cooking the books” on what LIBOR really was. (Juicing the values at key times) That raised adjustable mortgage rates out of line with what otherwise would have been the case. That gave them much more income from their home mortgage portfolio (including US loans).
They got caught. They are getting spanked.
Everyone in the regulatory apparatus is frothing…
@Jason:
It now says Wendy is the author.
Oddly ( or perhaps not so oddly…) I went through a very similar transition to the one she describes. It happened on the date I decided to fold my company. I had loads of money, but no time. (And most of the money was tied up in “float”). I just let the contracts run off, and let the folks go as the contracts ended. Eventually all the “float” came home. I lived for a year just on the float ending. ( I had 12 folks with a month of wages for each in “float”, plus receivables …)
I call it “taking my retirement in the middle”. Living each day for what I want from it, not trading it to someone else for what they want. Earning just enough money to “get by” but enjoying it a whole lot more.
I drink more carefully selected $4 to $7 wine, and less $20 wine based on the name (and get about the same utility from it). I do more “cook for myself” and less “dinner out” (and enjoy it more). In short, I’m “Going Galt” via “Voluntary Simplicity”…
So I agree 100% with the author.
FWIW, if the degree of “crap” it took just to keep the company running had not been so high, I’d likely have continued it. But with Quarterly tax payments (often on money I had not yet received) and with all the payments for required insurances et. al. it was just a bureaucratic quagmire at times. Every week I had to do a round of time cards and payroll and then client billings and then paying all the bills and making deliveries to the accountant (which the Government had legally made THEIR cop watching me instead of my representative…) and it all just became too much. Perpetual treadmill so a dozen other folks had nice jobs, the Government got a load of money, and the Clients got their services. And I got the leftovers (often in float for a long time…) It was one day when I deposited $50,000.00 or so of client checks, and wrote an equal number of checks to everyone else, that I think was the day. I was just standing in the bank thinking “WHERE is the little bit for me?”…
Just didn’t see that I wanted to spend my time that way…
Now I don’t get the $100 meals at the fancy restaurant; but I don’t have to put up doing a performance for the client while I “entertain” them either… No deduction for the meals, but no pain for the gain either…
OTOH, I really like the Smoked Salmon I did with the new smoker… About $8 for the whole thing (fish, marinade, fuel, wood, side dishes) and shared with the Spouse. So GDP lost about $92 and I gained more than can be measured.
That’s what happens when the “Takers” get too large a cut. The “Makers” just make for themselves…
@ E.M. “That’s what happens when the “Takers” get too large a cut. The “Makers” just make for themselves…”
Exactly. I think that the PTB underestimate the importance of the small fraction of people who are truly productive and creative. If the ox is not getting adequate feed, it stops plowing. (Rather, American oxen stop plowing; British oxen stop ploughing.) The point being that as regulations, legislation and taxation increase, at some point the division of labor begins to go backwards. The system that creates surplus through implementation of specialized capital and labor unravels. We drift backward to fixing our own roof, repairing our own car, cooking our own meals. Societal death by legal parasites. On the other hand, the good thing is that we get to polish our skills and experience as individuals. I like that part.
@EMSmith: that is REALLY too bad, you and the spouse had to suffer through a smoked fish dinner created on a backyard fire. ;-) reminds me of the time in Alaska when we had to live on Halibut, king crab and rock prawns most of the winter as we could not afford to go to Anchorage and buy hamburger and chichen. 8-) You just make the best of what you have. pg
@E.M.:That’s what happens when the “Takers” get too large a cut. The “Makers” just make for themselves…
And, wonder why the same happens everywhere in the occidental world, if not in the whole world?…A coincidence?.
Hope the day will come when a small or large group of people will procclaim their independence of that Novus Ordo Seclorum, ….however then they would be punished as some countries were in the past. Any ideas?
Interesting article on the BBC:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-fife-18687504
Doggerland, Possible land of Celts origins? pg
@P.G.: The mythical Thule…..
E.M. Found this in comments at http://joannenova.com.au/2012/07/whos-running-the-big-scare-campaign/#more-22535
“spartacusisfree
July 4, 2012 at 5:09 am · Reply
One of the advantages of being an older industrial scientist [originally a Metallurgist, hybrid engineer, chemist physicist], is that I have covered a greater range of science than any academic and have measured real problems. So, here’s why this wazzock* is completely wrong.
1. In the late 1940s, the great chemical engineer Hoyt C. Hottell measure the emissivity of CO2 in air over various path lengths so he could predict the emissivity/absorptivity of GHG-air mixtures of various temperatures. The emissivity levels off at ~200 ppmV in an infinite optical path. All metallurgists know Hottell Charts. The data were confirmed in the 1970s by Leveck. So there can be no CO2-AGW. Full stop, end of argument and the climate sceancists with the fancy models can’t prove any of the predictions except by fiddling data.
2. The models are based on a Perpetual Motion Machine of the 2nd Kind from assuming 238.5 W/m^2 DOWN at TOA forgetting that Kirchhoff’s Law of Radiation only applies at equilibrium, and the transition from convection to radiation is not equilibrium. To balance this, they assume the IR UP from the Earth’s surface is that for a black body in a vacuum, and you have conduction, convection and evapo-transpiration on top. This is nonsense because I have measured it and for 0.9 emissivity, radiation only exceeds the sum of the rest for natural convection at ~100 deg C.
They think they can do this because Houghton used Schwarzchild’s two stream approximation and the meteorologists believe in ‘back radiation’. So, they assume 333 W/m^2 DOWN from the air, more black body radiation which does not exist. This is the returned after ‘being absorbed by the earth’s surface’. Do the sums and it creates 39% more energy than comes in from the Sun.
3. They then claim the extra warming is hidden by assuming twice real low level cloud optical depth and a variable net AIE. These are wrong because Sagan’s aerosol optical physics is wrong. In 2004, NASA put out a fake ‘surface reflection’ claim to justify the idea that clouds with smaller droplets ‘reflect more sunlight’. Ever seen a thundercloud, very dark underneath? It’s dark because rain drops are pushed up by strong convection near the top of the cloud – high albedo is a large drop effect, not small. The same new physics explains the high albedo of Venus, which Sagan got wrong too!
These people haven’t a clue. They are confidence tricksters. Someone needs to put a few people in jail.
*A wazzock is like a gimp but uglier…..”
——————————————————————————–
@P.G.:
Yeah, and tomorrow we’re going to ‘get by’ on a dead bird burned over a fire in the backyard too ;-)
Chicken, soysauce, lemonade, spice; soak. Smoke, patience…. Yummm…..
@Adolfo:
As in the old Russian Soviet saying: “:They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work”….
@Another Ian:
Nice. Real Scientist at work ;-)
@All:
My internet connection has gone out, so I’m going to be “sporadic” in attendance via StarBucks….
Like I’m gonna get the Telco to come out and fix it on the 4th of July….
@ adolfogiurfa “Any ideas?”
I have an idea, but you might not like it.
One of the main reasons why Western Civilization has become so parisitized by the sociopaths among us, is that we could afford to. The combination of industrial revolution and scientific method — especially when wedded to the somewhat free markets promoted because of theories of individual rights — has produced a level of abundance unknown in history. It is only that abundance which has allowed our culture to sleep peacefully while we lost more and more of our goods and labor to a small class of rulers. We now have such a bad case of parasites that our social and fiscal infrastructure is failing. Nature is prescribing a prolonged fast for us as a way to clean the worms from our gut. Luckily, we have digital information technology. This may allow us to reach a new form of human society, a form with both good communication and decentralization. Just as organisms develop antibodies to fight bacteria, we humans may see that our cultures develop a new way of organizing ourselves, a more decentralized way that discourages success by sociopaths, or at least limits their effectiveness to smaller groups.
One idea to Go down there:
New T7 is up, so conversation to continue there:
https://chiefio.wordpress.com/t7/