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/t6/.
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 
The AGW true believers are not content with influencing government, now they are to try some thought-police methods – http://www.springerlink.com/content/b0072m7777772k7r/fulltext.html
Echos of Orwell’s 1984 – “Truth is the new hate speak”
@Tckev: That looks like the product of some dark “Propaganda Ministery”. My hope is that God is the ultimate conspirer and HE will come to throw out the merchants from the Temple.
FWIW – This falls into the category of “What Happens To Your Brain The Older You Get” –
(I’m just making an observation, and a very, very, very, very, small, and indirect cry for help IF you‘re bored and feeling kind;-) Most here have probably noticed this phenom already, I have to, but there’s more to the story.
Something else occurs to me at the moment: “Pride goeth before the fall!” I’m sure you’ll see why I thought of this in a moment or two more.
OK, here goes nothing, please read between the lines all you want. I’m thinking about something someone said somewhen and I go over to Bob Tisdale’s place and ask if he has a page on ocean gyres, he says yes and gives me the link to “SSTs at the Centers of Ocean Gyres and A Predictor (?) of North Atlantic SST”
http://bobtisdale.wordpress.com/2008/07/26/ssts-at-the-centers-of-ocean-gyres-and-a-predictor-of-north-atlantic-sst/
I go there, read, and tinker around. I end up, as the comments show, suggesting some different locations for gyre centers and putting forth some ocean surface temp anomaly charts for Bob’s consideration (and anyone else who wanders by;-).
The other day Bob posts a new article “The Curious Northern Hemisphere Sea Surface Temperature Anomaly Patterns”
http://bobtisdale.wordpress.com/2012/07/02/the-curious-northern-hemisphere-sea-surface-temperature-anomaly-patterns/
I make a NPac gyre related comment about the Bering Sea after producing some chart links for his consideration. He says I should try to combine the data on one chart. Now, enough background, THIS is the BIG point of story: It had been a number of years since I done spreadsheet graphs. I went to the program and sat there dumb and stupid, I couldn’t remember how to use it. I barely got one graph to post. I got a piece of garbage when I added the data for the second graph and tried to display the two together. I couldn’t get my damn hands unstuck from the Tar Baby! I couldn’t get my brain to wrap around the directions. I kept doing the old Clinton thing and getting hung up on what the meaning of “is” is ????
I know my body’s going fast, I know my mind is right behind it, and unlike the days of my youth, I’m getting weaker and dumber by the day. I didn’t notice the latest loss until I tried to use it and it wasn’t there anymore. Time is a silent killer, very silent.
About the Pride-goeth-before-the-fall thing, I’m trying real hard not to be too proud. In fact, to prove it, if any of you kids (who are either younger or older, but who still have more than I am mentally) care to have a stab at Gyres and how oceans change temps, and don’t mind checking over where I thought I was going, and what I might have been trying to say, and can put two graphs on a spread sheet and send it to Bob Tisdale with some kind of “See! There! There! There’s the Thing-A-Ma-Jig!”, then I’ll kindly step aside and let you have the Noble Prize. Really! I’m serious! You can have it, honest; and the money!
@Pascvaks: Nobel Prize is only for leftists……or for those who can afford buy it.
@Adolfo –
Oh! No! No! No! I meant Physics, not the other one they give to idiots, presidents, vice presidents, and terrorists;-)
@Pascvaks: There was a recent Nobel prize in Medicine, allegedly “bought” by a known pharmaceutical laboratory and which motivated a trial in Germany.
As for the “physics”: No Nobel Prize will ever be given to anybody who could defy the “status quo” (consensus)
@Pascvaks; No worries man! It’s called “Old Timers Disease”. Had it most of my life. When you learn too much some of the addressing gets lost. It is still in there, it just needs some refresh, so you can remember where you filed the knowledge. Senility effects recent memories as in “what did I eat for lunch” or “Did I have lunch” Oh damn my lunch is burning! 8-( pg
PG
Take hope.
I recall an after dinner address by Dr W.T. Williams, who knew a thing or three about maths, statistics and computers. In it he compared the human brain to the then efforts in computer hardware. These included vastly more memory capacity, a bit slow on recall and still the only one that can be created entirely by unskilled labour.
“Old Timers” is like going digital on TV – takes longer to select a channel from the more available (or that’s my excuse).
How many months does it take to make “context” ?
http://obamaisntworking.com/press/broken-record-broken-promises/
And apparently we had some sort of disaster that disabled 85,000 Americans last week. I think that “disaster” was Barack Obama:
http://news.investors.com/article/617233/201207060945/disability-climbs-faster-than-jobs-under-obama.htm
Meant “last month”.
Do you remember those toy writing tablets from when you were a child? They had a bottom layer of heavily waxed cardboard with a clear plastic sheet on top. You wrote with a plain stylus and the sheet combined with the pressed wax left visible writing. To erase, you just lifted the plastic sheet. They worked well when new, but as time went by they worked more and more poorly until finally the writings were hardly visible at all. I suspect that our brains are like that… They start out blank and sensitive to the slightest pressures, recording faithfully what is impressed upon them, but over time, the combination of writing overlays writing overlays writing begins to weaken each succeeding impression. Additionally, the lost of malleability and plasticizers in the wax makes the new messages fainter and fainter.
That is what it seems like…
By the way, the tablets were called “Mystic Writing Pads.” I now know this because I could not remember their name, but when I googled it out of the void just now, I found that Freud wrote an essay using the same analogy in 1925. Strange! http://www2.iath.virginia.edu/elab/hfl0257.html
@George; During this time there are prophecies about one called the great deceiver that leads the world astray with his golden tongue, a pathological lier. He will be on the world stage for 7 years and then disappear. The philosophy of Moore will be so discredited at this time that it will also be abandoned.
Looks to me like everything is on scheduled. Buy more popcorn and enjoy the show. pg
E.M
You may not be amused by this – http://thegwpf.org/international-news/6112-californias-green-suicide.html
@PG – Thanks!;-)
@Jason – Hadn’t thought about those things in years. Reading your comment I remembered back in the 50’s as a kid my Dad had to have an operation on/near his vocal cords and afterwards that was the only way we could communicate with him. He must have gone through a couple dozen of those pads before the Doc said he could talk again. (The memory IS still there but cleaning and straightening our my dusty old warehouse is not a very attractive proposition. As Scarlet O used to say, ‘Tomorrow is another day.’;-)
FWIW (an observation I recently made on the ‘Decline of Science’;-)
As incredible as it may seem, people simply have to ‘believe’ in something. It doesn’t matter what the logical, scientific explaination is. Nothing and no one is going to change their mind once they become a ‘believer’. Belief trumps everything. Science and logic have become ‘old fashioned’, it’s a lot like what happened in the 18th Century to ‘The Age of Reason” once a mob stormed the Bastile, reason simply wasn’t ‘In’ anymore and the kids moved on to ‘freedom’, economics, the anti-slavery movement, industrialization, Marx, universal suffrage, monopolies, bigger empires, atheism, etc. Nothing lasts long on this planet. Must be the corrosive effect of oxygen on carbon-based life forms. Money has played a big role in 20th and now 21st Century science, if it’s not selling move on to something that is. The first casualty is always truth.
PS: “Hope is not a strategy!” (EM)
It sure isn’t. But the fact that so many of us use it so often for every aspect of our lives does suggest that humans aren’t very stratigic thinkers, and it does explain why we seem to deteriorate over time and reinvent –and force ourselves to contend with– the same basic problems repeatedly. We do also tend to think that an often used simple solution is the best answer to meltdown and total chaos — the King/Kaiser/Kzar/FirstKomrade/ketc./ketc. (Funny how K’s keep kcreeping kinto kthe kanswers –ok kenough khumor;-)
That ‘k’ thing was all left field humor, no rhyme or reason. EM, hope you got some sleep.
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – Women who are infected with a common parasite may be more likely to hurt themselves or attempt suicide, a new study of over 45,000 new moms in Denmark suggests.
Fri Jul 6, 2012 3:35pm EDT By Genevra Pittman
“The infection, known as toxoplasmosis, is caused by the parasite Toxoplasma gondii. Humans can become chronically infected by eating undercooked meat or unwashed vegetables or by handling cat litter, as the parasite is known to multiply in the gut of infected cats….”
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/07/06/us-parasite-tied-to-self-harm-suicide-at-idUSBRE8650YL20120706
Bet there’s a few more (thousand) little bugs too, not to mention all the GM stuff. Progress is like a FLOOD. We can’t stop it and it’s very dangerous if you’re smack dab in the middle of it when you can’t swim a lick, run like a cheeta, or fly like a helicopter.
@Pascvaks: Science and logic have become ‘old fashioned’, it’s a lot like what happened in the 18th Century to ‘The Age of Reason” once a mob stormed the Bastile…
The problem is that we have forgotten the laws which govern the universe: The Law of Three and the Law of the Octave. The basic laws are everywhere and are represented and transmitted in many ways. Perhaps sometimes in the past history of men we have achieved a more natural and simple way of knowing and living, and, of course, meaning a higher level of knowledge and of civilization (with less toys of course). There are many examples of this. Great matematicians have found this simplicity, like Rene Guenon ( “Symbols of the Sacred Science”). This is why, too, some, like E.M., have remembrances and longings about his Celtic Culture, as it seems that which is now called the Neolithic was the end of such an era. (read John Michell´s The New View over Atlantis)
As for the mod that stormed the Bastile…it was managed to do this, like all mobs in all times. Then it came what we know….being the latest the Barclays´affair.
@Adolfo – I guess my key point, the ‘point’ that stuck me and that I wanted to toss out for consideration, was the idea that much as the “Age of Reason” came to an end, so to has/is/will the “Age of Science”. Now I’m not saying the “Age of Science” (whatever it is) really has ‘ended’, what I realized for the first time was that we may very well have actually had one, that we all lived through it, and that “it” may be dying or even dead as of 7 July 2012. Time will tell. I always thought “Science” was eternal. I thought “Science” was just the top shelf of human progress, that it had always been and always would be. BUT, then I thought, “Reason” is also top shelf, that we even had an ‘Age of Reason’, and that it died. I jumped through a few more mental hoops and I thought, if reason could die, why not science? If science could die, why not now, and maybe… if it could, maybe it is? From all my experience with people I thought, “They could do it!” And then I thought, “Maybe they did, or are, or soon will?”
There is no rhyme or reason to what people do. Just as they can be as kind as angels or as cruel as devils, they can be as smart as or as dumb as they choose. (And, usually, they are;-)
@Pasvacks: Why not thinking there is a E.M. out there trying to format that “Windowze” out of Earth´s hard disk and then change it to an open system?, that would make our program more amenable with those running in other partitions. :-)
A personal WINDOWZE for you?:
Of course all scientist are trained to think critically, aren’t they –
http://refractiveindex.wordpress.com/2012/07/06/hoax-lies-and-videotape/
Maybe sometimes the slip-up.
@EM and others: Another Austrian economics blog you may find interesting is “Coordination Problem” (www.coordinationproblem.org). Latest post over there–“There is No Great Stagnation: External Hard Drive Edition” (http://www.coordinationproblem.org/2012/07/there-is-no-great-stagnation-external-hard-drive-edition.html#comments)–there gives a tech example of how innovation is constantly improving our lives despite the apparent economic stagnation: the rapid decline in physical size and price of external hard drives over the last few years while performance, durability, and capacity have drastically improved. One of the post author’s comments was that when the original iPad was introduced, in inflation-adjusted terms, the low end iPad cost 1/10th as much as the original MacIntosh computer did when that computer was introduced in the 1980’s.
Good discussion in the post and comments about the difference in productivity between the areas of economic activity that are relatively unconstrained by government regulation (like tech stuff) and those that are more regulated.
@ Mike Churchill: how innovation is constantly improving our lives. Sure?… what about an implanted computer connected to UN´s CLOUD ?
Please, do not improve our lives, we need our freedom back, our freedom to be poor or mad if we wish!
@adolfogiurfa: I’m not sure if you missed the point of my post or are trying to make a point I’m not getting.
Liberty: the freedom to think and judge for one’s self, to act upon those thoughts and judgments, and therefore to be what each of us wants–to the extent one is willing and able to earn it, and subject to the basic prohibition of the initiation the using of force against any other person–is essential to human happiness and achievement in the long run. I want true liberty for myself and every other person who isn’t actively trying to use force against me.
The availability of bigger, better, cheaper hard drives is one of thousands of (sometimes very) small improvements in our lives that constantly result from innovations created by people free to act in new ways. Because people invent new things, or better versions of old things, or new or better ways to do old things, we live better than we did before, or better than our ancestors did.
To the extent that governments interfere with economic activity, we don’t live as well as we could, whether we choose to live simple or complex lives. There are many ways to be human, and I don’t presume to know how best to live anyone’s life but my own.
A new paradigm has started,see:
https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2012/06/29/the-star-buck/#comment-37610
A National Geographic article on a non-banking system of money handling through cell phones. No bank account needed just m-pesa digital money system
AND
https://squareup.com
A new system for small merchants and others that uses a smart phone to do credit card transactions at a small fraction of the cost (2.75% of the transaction) of standard credit banking system that can cost the merchant up to 25% of the transaction gross amount.
My wife’s business had to stop the use of the standard credit card system as it was eating up all of the profits. A lot of the small businessmen of late have had to drop standard credit card acceptance because of the huge fees increase. The big kids may be sowing the seeds of their doom. pg
The big kids may be sowing the seeds of their doom. pg
==================================
yep, if the free market is allowed to operate.
p.g.sharrow:
You may want to have a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-Pesa
It’s been going a while and from what I understand, from friends in a church that sends people to Uganda and Nigeria, the system is not quite as the Wiki says. Effectively it is a method of barter and exchange. Most people in Africa are on a version of pay-as-you-go cell phone rates but each of the Telcos let people transfer airtime between users on their networks (for a small percentage cost). The underlying base currency is phone-time credit. Apparently it started a few years when people who wanted to phone relatives abroad would barter a price with owners of cellphones. I’m told it’s used extensively across Africa and India
The Wiki write-up is about only the commercial/donor‐funded version that extends the method across Telco networks.
Neat trick eh, buy a lunch for 5 minutes on the phone, or negotiate any other barter goods with phone airtime as the standard currency.
?is there an echo in here?
?phone credit minute barter?
?stamps anyone?
Pascvaks
sorry I’m a bit over-caffeinated – saw the subject and had to put my 2cents in. I’ll get a grip :)
EM – you may find this a little histrionic but interesting http://hat4uk.wordpress.com/2012/07/08/libor-analysis-the-hints-of-global-fireworks-in-the-fsas-barclays-rationale/ links the current UK bank LIBOR fixing to the 2008 crash
@P.G. That is the same than the RFI Chip, which has an equivalent in the brand new Peruvian Document of Identity, which will replace from credit cards to drivers´licenses,etc.:
http://www.larepublica.pe/21-05-2012/conozca-el-nuevo-dni-electronico-y-sus-principales-caracteristicas
Though, after Google tricky games, “Facebook”, Apple´s “I-photo”, neither new ID´s nor Chips of any sort will be needed, as long as you have an indentifiable face. As for the data associated to a particular face, everything it is ALREADY in the CLOUD (MS, Google, etc. “clouds”).
Fortunately no one still is able to record God´s will…. All these “tricks” are but the product of no so intelligent kids playing the spy´s game.
@Ian: Sillly kids again: They were caught by surprise doing bad things . Time to punish them.
FYI – Another interesting piece from a guy with a very balanced approach, worth the read!
The Bronze Age Indo-European invasion of Europe, 1 Jul 12, “Dieneke’s Anthropology”
“Last summer, I was eagerly awaiting the publication of the genome of the Tyrolean Iceman. It is quite remarkable that only a year later, there is now autosomal DNA from half a dozen prehistoric Europeans. By comparing their DNA to that of modern populations, we are beginning to understand how the current mosaic of European peoples was formed. The ancient samples vary greatly in the number of SNPs tested, and we cannot be sure how well they map to the restricted range of modern populations. Nonetheless, a crystal clear general pattern seems to emerge, at least in its broadest outlines (Sources: Oetzi the Iceman, Neolithic Swedes, Mesolithic Iberians)”..
http://dienekes.blogspot.com/2012/07/bronze-age-indo-european-invasion-of.html
FYI –
“”The main focus of the paper is the modest long-term 0.3°C cooling per thousand years that has taken place over the last 2000 years, likely due to Earth’s orbital factors. Unfortunately the authors did not go into the cause of the wide and obvious temperature variations occuring over the period. The press release quotes the authors: “We found that previous estimates of historical temperatures during the Roman era and the Middle Ages were too low,” says Esper. “Such findings are also significant with regard to climate policy, as they will influence the way today’s climate changes are seen in context of historical warm periods.” That sure blows out of the water Al Gore’s AIT con-job claim that the Medieval Warm Period was a just minor negligible event, doesn’t it?”” (By P Gosselin on 10. Juli 2012, “NoTricksZone”)
http://notrickszone.com/2012/07/10/esper-et-al-2000-year-reconstruction-distinctly-depicts-powerful-natural-factors-shatters-absurd-notion-co2-drives-climate/
Main Article at –
http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nclimate1589.html
Mail online has a version of the above study in it’s ‘Science’ section but hell will freeze over before our yellowstream media touch it. (as in (Yellow Journalism). In the spirit of the new polite rule I wll mention no mann’s name in vain. can this be death by tree ring :)
@Jerry:
Um, being polite does not require suppression of the truth nor omission of names / blame. You just have to say it nicely ;-)
Think of the Senate. ( I know, painful, but try ;-) They don’t say “That fat bastard over there”, no, instead they say “My corpulent un-parented colleague” (or “The Honorable Senator” which is the same thing ;-) It really helps to watch the British Parliament on this. They are masters at it. (I never heard so much derision in one ‘Harrummpfh’ in your life!)
Maybe I need to clarify that the “Polite Rule” is about how we talk with each other….
So it would be perfectly OK to say “I think Mann screwed up the splice on the tree ring data and I just don’t know if he is evil or just stupid.” It would not be OK to say “You like like Mann? You must be evil or stupid!”… One is an inflammatory personal attack and the other is questioning the motivation of the science creation process.
Notice many more comments up thread to read, but need to run off to Fry’s for a bit first… Back after a “Fry’s Run” and coffee… ( In “Valley Speak” it was well understood when bringing up a site or installing new equipment that a “Fry’s Run” was likely to be needed to buy some missing bits of gear and / or just get out of the shop for a while and clear your head with some browsing of the candy bar row… For anyone not familiar with it, Fry’s is a Geek Supermarket with everything from software and routers to candy and soda, along with memory, CPU chips, stereo / TV gear, you name it…)
@EMSmith; You have Fry’s and I have Radio Shaft! I am jealous. pg
@E.M.Smith,
Yeah, I really do understand the polite rule, just throwing in a bit of humor, hence the :). I am in Texas – a concealed carry state – and we Texans are polite by nature anyway. I agree that the Brits do the English language better than Americans (even Texans) can manage and love to watch Monckton happily and politely slice and dice. So far as the Senate: guessing you are talking about the U. S. Senate – cause it is not unheard of for a member of the Texas legislature, in the heat of debate, to see fit to water the Tree of Liberty right here, right now.
@Jerry:
Perhaps that’s because in Texan it’s hard to tell the difference between:
“My Esteamed Colleague” and
“My. Eh? Steamed cull hag.”
;-)
Wonder if that’s why they have a part time legislature… keeps the risk exposure time down ;-)
@E.M. Now that you talk about states, I would like to ask you. In a hundred years, which state do you think would be the most american- in the old style and customs-?.
Not to talk about Kaliphornia, as it will be gone….either because of the Big One or, like the Mayans, who from one way to the other, disappeared to other dimensions, flying on peyote, Kaliphornians would have done the same.
Among the areas or states that became the United States of America there was no one style that was American. At the moment California is most representative of the Eco-progressive way and the most representative of it’s resultant disasters. 60 years ago California was the most advanced place in the world before the progressives began taking over the education system. One can hope that this present result will act as the vaccination against the disease of socialism. pg
E.M. Re your texas reply –
There is the story of the Irish MP in the House of Commoms back when they had these who was called upon to apologise and the apology went
“I called the Honorable Member a bastard it is true” and added “And he can punctuate this as he sees fit”.
Syria breaking their chemical weapons out of storage:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2173148/Syria-begun-moving-chemical-weapons-stockpile-storage-U-S-warns.html
Israel says Syria has world’s largest chemical weapons stockpile.
http://mar15.info/2012/06/syria-has-worlds-biggest-chemical-arsenal-israel/
@Another Ian:
One must love the Irish tongue both sharp and smooth…
@George:
Maybe we’ll find out if Iraq really did ship their nuclear program to Syria after all… and their biological work…
We’ll also likely find out what happens when a Really Large chemical weapons dump gets a bomb on it just prior to being mobilized… Don’t want to be downwind of that one…
@Adolfo:
Alaska.
Texas is second, but being over run with refugees from other States and the culture is shifting. Heck, it isn’t even considered polite anymore to shoot someone for bothering your friends… and they damn near won’t let you hog tie and beat a guy for looking at your daughter wrong…
Basically, it will go inversely with population and distance from the coasts. (That is, the decay will be inverse). So worst / most Euro-Socialist will be the New York / Bos-Wash area and California. then it grades out as you move away from each. (With pockets in places like Palm Beach where a lot of N.E. folks ran to huddle…) By the time you are in Montana or the Dakotas, or even just Oklahoma and Arkansas things don’t change much. And furthest away and most self reliant will be the folks living in the hills in Alaska…
Now if you let me take finer granularity than ‘by State’ the same pattern holds. California major urban centers ( San Francisco Bay Area and L.A. Basin) are toast. But up in the hills, counties like Inyo and Alpine don’t change much. The more rural, the more like it has always been.
In Utah, Salt Lake City is a more or less normal U.S. Big City (though a bit cleaner and a bit more straight laced…) but out away from the city, Utah is very conservative. (In their own Mormon kind of way).
Basically, it’s all the way it has always been. You want things “the old ways”, you head away from the cities and into the hills…
@P.G. Sharrow:
I was blessed with growing up in a rural farm town that was 20 years behind the times AND a Mormon Town. Easily 70% of the population I’d guess. So my public school was not progressive at all. (Probably still isn’t…) Got a darned fine education out of it, though I didn’t recognize it at the time.
Watching what my kids were taught, I was astounded at how much was being left out, skipped over, or just wrong. Math was “mathy stuff” and chemistry was “all books and no bangs”. The teacher derided my question (in open house) about what he did in the way of hands on chemistry experiments as “Oh, you mean demonstrations…” with a verbal sneer… Nothing to tawdry as actually DOING chemistry in his class… I estimated that they were one to 2 whole years behind my school in every subject and all levels. But my kids got through it OK anyway…
When folks talk about the “Early America” not being around any more, I like to point our our diversity then (as opposed to now) with Ohio and Louisiana. Ohio spoke predominantly German and Louisiana was pretty much all French. In Texas it was about even up Spanish and English (with a load of their own Germans too…) Several other States had strong language minorities (sometimes majorities) and very different cultures.
There never was “one America”. In many ways what is wrong with America today is that we are being forced to become “One America”…
I just wish you could do a homestead like they have in Alaska (live on it for a while and it’s your land) in somewhere a bit warmer… Like Florida ;-)
FWIW, in 100 years I expect the place that will be most like Old America will be somewhere in the southern hemisphere… Just not sure exactly where. The northern hemisphere has a very good probability of being a “Glow in the dark” land and overflowing with plague and poison “food” plants “after the fall”… We can still avoid that end; but we’re just not doing any of the right things to avoid it and we are doing many of the wrong ones…
I think the Peru / Chile / Argentina area has a shot at it. IFF they can learn to let go of the Socialism Shiny Thing and stop having a revolution every generation and wobbling between wealth confiscation and Patrons that garner all the wealth to themselves… Australia could do it too, if they get back to what they were 40 years ago, culturally.
But “You can never cross the same river twice”… and some say “even once”… it moves.. and so do cultures. It is more likely we end up with a Global New Rome and a dictatorial Empire for everyone. Don’t want it, but the technological trends are headed to making that the easier and more stable thing to develop while the political cultural forces are strongly pushing that way (and nobody is really doing anything to even slow it down). Unless folks start taking strong positive action to reverse that trend, that’s what we get. I give it about 20 years. Max.
Only thing I see likely to stop is is a global catastrophe. Not seeing much benefit for me in that…
@ E.M. “It is more likely we end up with a Global New Rome and a dictatorial Empire for everyone.”
Yes, it looks that way — but looks can be deceiving. The decentralization of information is a powerful force to counteract that. Even better, the very people who are most insightful, most creative, most curious, and most independent minded are the very ones who will naturally take most advantage of the new access to knowledge. Yes, I know, hope is not a plan, but the more people who are able to pull the blinders from their eyes, the more people who will be thinking and making real plans. Short term, things may get very, uh, interesting… but long term, things may turn out better than you think!
“We’ll also likely find out what happens when a Really Large chemical weapons dump gets a bomb on it just prior to being mobilized… Don’t want to be downwind of that one… ”
That is a “humane” use of nuclear weapons if there ever was one. Nuke the chemical weapons in order to neutralize them before they can be used.
This is totally off-topic, but may be useful to some people here. Since I totally dumped Windoze I’ve been trying to find a good electronics layout system that worked in Linux. Preferably free. I’ve now got one that works well – SeeTrax Designer XL. It needs Wine to run, but works. http://www.seetrax.com/sxldemo.htm . If you can live with the 30 components/50 nets limit for the free version it’s professional-level software – if pushed you can drop off all the decoupling caps and add the pads in the layout. The bundled libraries need checking whenever you take something from them, but this is about par for all layout programs I’ve tried. I’ve just tried out the laser-printer version of board-etching at http://fullnet.com/~tomg/gooteepc.htm and this works even with normal laser-printer paper. I’ll test it again with coated paper and better board, but it’s a lot less messy than photoresist and looks like it will work down to 10 thou track and gap on better paper. I can also iron-on a topside silk-screen ident – that is a plus I hadn’t expected. The etchant mentioned here is good and easily available – Hydrochloric Acid and Hydrogen Peroxide, whereas Ferric Chloride and the other more modern etchants are difficult to get through the post. I’ve tested this also, and am happy with it – may work better in a bubble tank but it’s OK with hand-agitation.
Microcontrollers now come in SOT-23-6 packages which are extremely small, have internal clocking and are surprisingly competent (http://www.microchip.com/pagehandler/en-us/family/8bit/ ) if you need to build control systems. Say for flying-machines….
Simon,
I’ve been building navigation gadgets for our boat with Arduinos and various modules. When I get these things working, it seems a shame to tie up a perfectly good arduino on a fairly simple, but necessary function, which might only use 2% of the arduino’s capabilities. Friend who does this sort of thing, takes the chip out of the arduino, provides a power supply and greatly simplifies his systems. His technique is called “dead bug” in the US, at least, since all the components are glued to a pc board and the connections made by soldering to the leads. they look awful but work.
I use perforated boards for the non – arduino parts of my projects, but designed pc boards would be even better, even for the projects where there will only be one example. I’ve built one project on a shield on an arduino mega2560, but it was difficult because of the goofy way the holes on the shield had been interconnected, clearly designed by someone either for a specific project, or by someone who never had built anything.
I’m very glad you shared this.
john ferguson
How much inflation???
Chubby Checker — “C’mon baby, lets do the twist” …
Money is pouring into an economy whose output is not keeping pace.
Rules on capital are easing to the point of a 19th century frontier bank.
The feds balance sheet is an Alice in Wonderland fantasy. When the
inevitable monetary inflation comes, how bad will it be?
Is a long term 30 year 3.5% mortgage actually a screaming deal for the borrower, and a negative return to the lender? In a Bond at 1.5%?
Does anyone think that the French actually “selling” (coercing the purchase of) bonds at a negative rate is a good thing?
Under the Reagan regime, it took 18-21% rates to break the back of inflation. Will that do it when the damn breaks? Will there be poltical will to do anything, or care.
50% aggregrate inflation, with perhaps 20% recognised in COLAs, would do wonders for the governments nominal position.
Investors have known for years the sickening feeling for paying taxes on investments gains that are really nothing but inflated values.
I think the rest of society is about to learn this lesson about how governments really work.
FWIW –
“5 logical fallacies that make you more wrong than you think”
Posted on July 9, 2012 | 488 Comments
by Judith Curry
Found this interesting, a mini-refresher on human psychology applied somewhat from a climate perspective, not entirely all inclusive but gets the ball rolling. EM’s included many of the same observations in his articles, as have many others in comments. Didn’t delve into the comments, can’t endorse or not going below JC’s finish into them. As I said, FWIW;-)
PS: (Dumb, Dee, Dumb, Dumb, DUMB!) This might help –
http://judithcurry.com/2012/07/09/5-logical-fallacies-that-make-you-more-wrong-than-you-think/
@Simon:
“Tips”: doesn’t really have a topic to be off from… ;-) What you posted is exactly ‘on topic’ in that it is something you find of interest and think we’d likely find interesting too, and for which there is not a currently active thread…
It’s the dawn of a new age.
Well in Bolivia and Dec 21 2012, when capitalism is swept from the world.
http://en.mercopress.com/2012/07/14/bolivia-announces-the-end-of-coca-cola-and-capitalism-for-december-21?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=daily
Looking forward to a happy festive end of the year.
@Pascvaks
WRT http://judithcurry.com/2012/07/09/5-logical-fallacies-that-make-you-more-wrong-than-you-think/ great post but –
Even though I know that you are mostly a nice person, I’m 98.4% sure that you, like all the others, are trying to catch me out. But my truth will prevail in the end, so don’t forget it.
Very Best Wishes
tckev.
:)
@Tckev:-)
(-;I’m about 98.4% sure you’re nice too, but I think you’re also mostly like all the others who’re out to catch me, and prevail over me, and make me forget too. About your “Very Best Wishes”, which meaning of are you using here, and have you been drinking?;-)
PS:-)
Democrats threaten a game of political “chicken” using the taxpayers’ paychecks. If anything stands to get the Democrats throw out of the Senate, it is this move right here. They are soaking so deep in the kool-aid they actually believe this might be a popular move.
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/07/16/democrats-open-door-to-letting-taxes-rise-in-2013-to-reset-debate-with-gop/
@George –
I sure hope Romney is all rehearsed for his angry “I paid for this Microphone!” Reagan-Moment, where he actually looks and sounds like he’s ‘well-endowed’ with a pair of ‘you-know-whats’; but I’m not going to be surprised if he continues to whine, whimper, and sound like a 98 pound wet noodle at the beach; Obama’s been kicking sand is his face for ages and he’s just tears-up, half-smiles, and acts like Someone from on high is going to solve the problem for him. He has to take off his Bishop Ring and let fly or it’s all over but the formal surrender in some Chicago Trolley Car in November. The USof A, 1776-2012, R.I.P. Wonder if Obama’s going to hire some of those professional N.Korean morners for the funeral parade in January? (“Hay Mitt! Get Mad! Act like a man!” … I don’t think he’s got his hearing aid on.)
It’s a mad world with mad leaders:
http://www.eureferendum.com/blogview.aspx?blogno=82922
http://uk.reuters.com/article/2012/07/16/us-germany-environment-idUKBRE86F0R220120716
@Tckev:
I think I’ll have a Coke to celebrate ;-)
@George:
Just Amazing…. Not one of them thinking about what is good or right for the economy or the people…
@Pascvaks:
I think he needs to avoid the “angry” look (or he will be painted as the “Angry White Man” stealing your security – read gov’t check). Go for “Firm and Authoritative”… and call BS BS when tossed at him…. but politely ;-)
@R.de Haan:
Uh, yup…
E.M. FYI
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/07/17/new-paper-blames-about-half-of-global-warming-on-weather-station-data-homgenization/#more-67591
@Tkev:It’s the dawn of a new age. Well in Bolivia and Dec 21 2012, when capitalism is swept from the world. Though I think IT ALREADY HAPPENED A FEW DAYS AGO IN LONDON, when the “LIBOR GATE” was known, and Fox said that your Federal Reserve knew about it :-) … Well, Anyway, this is what it is all about:
@Simon: interesting links to board layout and Laser resists. Once upon a time some partners and I were attempting to set up a proto-board shop. We were providing tanks,containment, fume exhaust and scrubbers to the bay area board plants. We created all of the equipment of welded polypropylene. Your links brought back some memories. Glad to see a solution to the silk screening needs for small scale prototyping of board. Laser printers and an iron, great. 8-) The creation of a good resist paturn on the board has always been problem since the earliest days of circuit boards. pg
pg – although this method isn’t yet perfect, I’ve got better paper for it and have a bit more idea of the parameters for heating, and I’ll see how far I can get the track/gap down and still give a good result – looks like some sort of padding between the paper and the iron may help in getting full contact and thus avoiding pinholes. The iron shouldn’t be at full temperature, either. The iron-on method also works for topside silk, though it’s going to be an alignment problem to make bottomside silk or two-layer boards for anything fine-scale.
For one-offs or small runs this method is much more reliable than the photoresist methods I’ve tried in the past.
E.M.
I know I’ve seen this on here before. Thought this was quite to the point. Short and sweet and speaking volumes. From Lexington Herald-Leader this morning:
Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/2012/07/18/2262084/letters-to-editor-july-18.html#storylink=cpy
John
@ John Michalski “The greatest nation on the planet is to be ruled now by those who live off the labor of those who work and save. ”
And as this pattern becomes more and more intrusive, those who work and save find less and less justification for working and saving. Why spend your hours running your own business when your workers have more rights, more free time and more pay than you do? Where is the line when so many people “go Galt” that the system breaks down?
I do not want to live in a time when our society undergoes major disruptions, but I also do not want to live in a time when a sort of high tech “virtual slavery” becomes the norm for productive citizens.
@Jason: It will stop in the moment that real stocks equals paper: As an example if all gold share holders were to ask for the metallic, less than half of them would receive the metallic gold. This negative creates a “vacuum” which sucks the money you earned with your work, from your pockets. There are too many finance magicians making money out from thin air.
Jason
Having worked under and beside three of five generations of a one hundred +year-old small business, I can tell you that is is currently what is happening. Case in point: A young man was hired to be a delivery driver. He showed up for one day, said the pay was not worth his drive in to work, proceeded to quit before his second day, filed for unemployment and received it after arbitration with the board. At what point in time do people realize that something is going to have to change if we want to maintain our livlihood?
Also, as the operator of a small business, (we are a regional fresh produce wholesaler since 1896) we are struggling to compete with the large interstate suppliers that procure through large buying programs that make it virtually impossible to compete with. If you do get in the door, they want rebates and price contracts that do not factor in “act-of-God” situations. If want to compete, you have to play the game,i.e, “virtual slavery”. In essence, you have turned over control of your business to others.
LOL! then, from “I owe my soul to the company store” it has evolved to “I owe my soul to the government Kommizar”
Collectively, people are like water, they rise to the lowest level. A small percentage do have a way of evaporating away from the majority and getting around in/on/like a breeze. Any body of water, or group or people, will evaporate and even boil eventually; but the larger the body/group the greater the heat and the longer the amount of time required. (Couldn’t Resist;-)
FWIW (Another “Couldn’t Resist” Moment) – It doesn’t matter who’s in the front seat and behind the wheel driving our 1776 Oldsmobile, what matters, and matters most, is how many of the 535 Members of Congress, and Great and Glorious States like Kalifornistan and Newyorkistan, are in the back seat trying to get a Free Ride (and/or Another Good Old Kick-Back). When you have a lot of free loaders in the back seat a 1776 Oldsmobile you don’t have to worry about ‘where’ you’re going, you have to worry about ‘when’ Old Nelly is going to STOP going anywhere at all. (I know, I didn’t mention the 54,618 semi-trailers we’re pulling behind Old Nelly; I didn’t want you to take your eye off the real problem in the back seat;-)
@Pascvaks: Any change will be as surprising as the 1989 Berlin´s wall fall. All your “1776 Oldsmobile passengers” will be in the same position as the former “passengers” of the Democratic Germany, increasing the number of unemployed people….
This is how God works. Time to flee kids!
This phenomenon is absolutely “according to law”: When two vectors of opposite signs add, there is a 180º turn.
The Democratic Party of California has become absolutely rotten to the core. It has completely lost its way. Democrats in the legislature kill a bill designed to make it easier for schools to terminate teachers who sexually abuse students. How any normal, rational human being can align themselves with these animals is absolutely beyond me.
http://www.laweekly.com/2012-07-19/news/betsy-butler-mike-eng-SB-1530-alex-padilla-sex-abuse-teachers/
@George: rotten to the core ????, or just “stoned”?
The marriage of public employes unions and the Democratic Party is a partnership made by the Devil himself. I my experience the teacher unions protect the bad teachers and drive out the good ones, ALWAYS, and they do everything possible to make teachers ineffective at their jobs.
Administrators, Union Bosses and bureaucrats are wasting half of all money spent on education to aggrandize themselves and the student’s education is degrading seriously. Time to close them down and return all control to the parents at the local level. In California, the last 60 years of public schools have been an expensive disaster at all levels. pg
@John Michalski:
Yes, I’ve pointed that out too. Pretty much guaranteed once Senators and the Excutives (Pres. and V.P.) were directly elected by the people. No longer any “countervailing force” to “we the people”. Takes about one lifetime after that point. ( Typically 50 years is the metric used). Let’s see…. FDR and the Progressives changed things in about 1940… add 50… 1990… OK, we’re running a couple of decades late… then again, we had a W.W. or two and a Cold War to slow the rush to “grab for ourselves” all we can get…
The “Greatest Generation” is now passing and their hand in no longer staying the self interest of the “moderns”…
@Jason:
I think it is “now”. For me it was about 2004. In the last year more folks went on “Disability” via the Social Security program than found jobs… (right after the extended unemployment benefits ran out). The Post Office announced that due to Congress not giving them more money, the can’t pay the bill for their retirees and are stiffing the medical insurance payments… (IIRC the news blurb). On another news show was that as of now, over 1/2 of the population gets some kind of government check.
So who is working and making stuff? Well, a lot of it comes from the Chinese… they will only keep loaning us a living for so long…
@George:
And don’t forget that now we’re getting “MoonTrack” as Governor Moonbeam signed the $$$Bullet Train$$$$ bill. $6 Billion to start, projected $68 Billion by the time done building (so with the inevitable over runs??? I’d bet north of $200 Billion…)
This from a bankrupt State that is at least $14 Billion in the hole, has no way to pay the present bills, is asking for a giant tax hike in November (“Tax beatings to continue until business morale imrpoves”…) and has a giant exodus of productivity… Oh, and that $14 Billion does not include the unfunded future shortfalls for mandated programs… like all the retirement packages.
Driving full tilt at a concrete wall, they decide to step on the gas pedal and cut in the turbo boost…
http://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2012/07/18/gov-brown-to-sign-high-speed-rail-funding-bill-at-union-station/
Just amazing…
@P.G.:
Well, they ARE planning to close the schools… just not the way you wanted…
Oh, take $8 Billion and divide by 130 miles, I make that about $61 Million per mile…
I bet all the administrators and state bureaucrats will keep their jobs. Only the students and their teachers will be short changed. The best way to save $8 billion is to close the State Department of Education. IIRC the dept of Ed wastes about $8 billion per year in inhouse expenses. pg
I just found this, a month late:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/9338939/Global-warming-second-thoughts-of-an-environmentalist.html where Fritz Vahrenholt is arguing against AGW.
Following the topic just before that (got diverted) I think that rail travel is probably going to be a white elephant in the future. As LENR takes off (fairly literally) air transport will become much cheaper and more convenient. Rail travel only really works well in an Agenda 21 type world, where all the people are in one place and where they work is in another, so you have predictable travel needs. That isn’t a nice world to contemplate. Humans will want to travel where they want to go to at the time they want to go, so individual /family transport such as cars gives much more freedom of movement. I would reckon in the next couple of decades air cars will be around, with enough AI aboard to autopilot it to where you want to be and avoid crashing into anything else – that technology is now under test for cars. We just need cheaper nonpolluting energy to make such air cars real rather than the current offering which is expensive and needs a pilot’s license as well. Once they proliferate, few people would want to wait for a train to arrive.
Individual transport has a secondary advantage. With the Olympics in the UK, various transport unions have seen an Achilles heel they can attack and are striking for more money, thus disrupting the visitors. One basic rule of life is that, if you start to try to scalp me, I’ll find a different way to do what I want and cut you out of the loop. The people who now think they are essential will be designed out of a job. Automated buses are under test in Germany at the moment. Automated trains have been tested, but have a driver for safety reasons (read that as “we couldn’t remove the driver without an all-out strike”). I’m pretty sure that with the e-readable passports that have been introduced, the Immigration people at the airports could be largely done away with with no loss of security – last time I flew to Bristol (UK) I tried out this way through the queue. Not perfect yet, but give it a few years and it will be.
The main thing that that new rail link supplies is a few thousand jobs, that will run out once the line is built. After that, I suspect it’s not going to be long before rail travel will be regarded in the same way as those little steam-train lines – a quaint way to travel and see what things used to be like.
Re: Guns And Violence
Well another tragic “meltdown’ and more dead via “Guns”. The Mayor of NYC has an answer a couple hours out of the gate; talk about a knee gerk (pun- something that can have 2 or more meanings). Everyone’s pulling their hair out, and all the Polywogs are stumping the issue they’ve had for years that kind’a backs the most recent poll of their constituents feelings five minutes after hearing about Auara CO.
Typical solutions: Outlaw all Guns! Government Control of Everything! Ban the Bomb! Only Good Cops should have guns. Don’t Kill Bambi. We Need More Nut-Houses, na, na-na, na-na… you know, I’ll bet that someone at the ACLU could make a case to fix everything wrong with everyone and everything if they sued the pants off Hollywood for Reckless Endangerment and Conspiracy to Commit Murder. I think it’s only fair that those who incite violence and encourage reckless behaviour ought to pay the piper. Imagine a world without the last 50 years of Hollywood’s Biggest and Bestest Money Makers in each of the alphabetic categories used by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (you know: AAAA to ZZZZ). Talk about a Better World! Why, I’ll bet it’s so fantastic a thought that many of you can’t even imagine such a World.
Guns? Guns ain’t the problem. THE PROBLEM is Hollywood. Anybody got a rope? (We need a Doom Movie where Hollywood is absolutely destroyed and before it goes up in fire and brimstone every producer, director, writer, actor, and special effects man, is blown to pieces by booby traps set in everyday places all over the town. Damn, bet we make a killing! Wouldn’t y’all pay to see that one?)
PS: Before DHS, DOJ, NSC, and DOD types get bent out of shape about what I just said, think about it, please. Hell it might even help win the War On Drugs too;-)
@E.M. How do you interpret this mounstrosity?. You know symbols, though may be silly, have a meaning.
Pascvaks – as far as I’ve heard the film itself is certified 12pg, and there were a fair number of kids there. The film has no sex or bad language, but a lot of violence including forking someone’s eye out – sounds pretty sadistic. Make you wonder why it’s OK for kids to watch ultra-violence but can’t watch people having fun. Bad language they’ll hear anyway all around the ‘hood.
Superheroes are generally good at using a lot of bullets in a non-realistic fashion – my father-in-law was in the French Foreign Legion and he’s pretty dismissive – says if he’d had 6 bullets and more than 1 missed the target he’d have been in jail for a day or two, so that he’d try harder.
Main problem with Hollywood is that it makes killing people seem so easy and of not much consequence generally.
Meantime, if a few of the cinema audience had been carrying guns it’s likely that fewer people would have died and that one of them would have been the guy who started it. The problem is always with the people, not the tools they use.
I’m sad for the people of Aurora, especially since Columbine is just down the road.
@ Simon- “The problem is always with the people, not the tools they use.”
Precisely! OK, we’ll leave the studio property, buildings, and equipment alone. But everything and everyone else in that town has got to go. Deal?;-) You know I’m beginning to rethink my lifelong objection to Forced Conversion, you know that old Christian tactic the Muslims are still practicing? It sure seems that when you have a city full of pagans like they have in Hollywood, you have no other choice. Think of all the wasted energy, un-necessary CO2 pollution, and money! Yep! Convert or Die! That’s the E-Z answer to our problems! (SarcOff – wonder how long before THAT idea gets out and about in the middle of The Heartland? People really are stupid, they think they can let crazies get away with anything, and everything will be hunky-dory; or they think they themselves can get away with anything, and if they get caught all they need is a schiester lawyer, a California Judge, and a hand-picked jury of 12 idiots and 2 alternates.)
@all – A little Humor for your Laid-Back Weekend at the Bubba-Q with a Cool One in Hand
http://oldnfo.blogspot.com/2012/07/more-stuff.html
@Pascvaks. oldnfo gave my wife and I a smile or two this morning! Thanks. pg
In the area of anthropology, some interesting reads (as usual) at “JohnHawk’s” –
“Modern humans in with a whimper”
http://johnhawks.net/weblog/reviews/neandertals/neandertal_dna/alves-2012-selection-admixture.html
“A short, open access review paper by Isabel Alves and colleagues [1] registers two important points: ‘Until recently, the out-of-Africa model of human evolution was favoured by most genetic analyses, but this model collapsed when the sequencing of the Neanderthal genome revealed that 1%–3% of the genome of Eurasians was of Neanderthal origin. At the same time, refined analyses of modern human genomic data [1]–[3] have changed our view of evolutionary forces acting on our genome. While most people assumed that the out-of-Africa expansion had been characterized by a series of adaptations to new environments [4]–[6] leading to recurrent selective sweeps [7], our genome actually contains little trace of recent complete sweeps [2], [3], [8] and the genetic differentiation of human population has been very progressive over time, probably without major adaptive episodes [9].’ I disagree slightly with the latter point about selection — in fact, we have abundant signs of recent positive selection in the genome, but those signs are nearly all very recent partial sweeps in different human populations. Complete sweeps and near-complete sweeps are indeed few, suggesting that there was relatively little directional adaptive evolution associated with the “origin of modern humans.” Measuring by genetic change, agriculture was many times more important than the appearance of modern humans throughout the world. The important point with respect to archaic humans is that there are precious few genetic changes shared by all (or even most) humans today, that are not also shared with Neandertals, Denisovans, or plausible other archaic human groups (such as archaic Africans)….”
“A new approach to the Prisoner’s Dilemma”
http://johnhawks.net/weblog/reviews/behavior/game-theoretic/press-dyson-iterated-prisoners-dilemma-2012.html
“Daniel Lende has described some evolutionary and anthropological import of a recent paper in PNAS on game theory: “Prisoner’s Dilemma and the Evolution of Inequality – Does Unfairness Triumph After All?”. The paper, by William Press and Freeman Dyson [1], proves that a range of strategies exist for the classic “iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma” game that actually allow one player to dominate and determine the payoffs for the other player over the long term. A long history of theory had argued that symmetrical outcomes were stable because one player could always punish another who was trying to impose an unfair outcome. The difference in the current result comes from the mathematical recognition that one player could completely determine the payoffs for the other, over the long term. ‘What is surprising is not that Y can, with X’s connivance, achieve scores in this range, but that X can force any particular score by a fixed strategy p, independent of Y’s strategy q. In other words, there is no need for X to react to Y, except on a timescale of her own choosing. A consequence is that X can simulate or “spoof” any desired fitness landscape for Y that she wants, thereby guiding his evolutionary path. For example, X might condition Y’s score on some arbitrary property of his last 1,000 moves, and thus present him with a simulated fitness landscape that rewards that arbitrary property. (We discuss the issue of timescales further, below.)’ The paper deserves a longer commentary, and Lende has provided an interesting one…”
A Stanford Webinar available on YouTube “How Hidden Biases Sabotage Our Decisions” It’s an hour.
EM- FYI
A “New” little post at “NoTricksZone” on “French Study: Mediterranean Storm Activity Linked To Solar Activity, Has Nothing To Do With CO2”
http://notrickszone.com/2012/07/21/french-study-mediterranean-storm-activity-linked-to-solar-activity-nothing-to-do-with-co2/
By P Gosselin on 21. Juli 2012
“Sebastian Lüning recently wrote a piece on a new study by a French team of scientists. Conclusion: Mediterranean storm activity decreases during warm periods and there appears to be a solar link… “Using various indicators, the French scientists identified seven periods of increased solar activity: 6300-6100 years ago, 5650-5400 years ago, 4400-4050 years ago, 3650-3200 years ago, 2800-2600 years ago, 1950-1400 years ago and 400-50 years ago. Storm activity increased over and over again over the last few thousands of years, and settled down during the times in between. So what could have triggered storm activity at the French Mediterranean? In the search for possible relationships, the French scientists compared storm development with the temperature development of the North Atlantic, which was reconstructed more than 10 years ago by a team led by Gerard Bond who examined cores of ice berg rafted sediment and published the results in the journal Science. The Bond group could show that the temperature cycles were in sync with solar activity.”…”
A theme to meditate: There are two ways of uprooting people out from their homeland:
1. By forcefully expatriate them.
2. By cheating them and taking away their land property.
Thus they are not longer independent and self sufficient and they depend on “them”, the new lords-lenders.
Dear E,M and other posters here, You all are my go to guys when it comes to checking my understanding and logic. If you feel inclined please follow my below pasted post and assist me if my understanding and logic is flawed.
David says:
Your comment is awaiting moderation.
July 23, 2012 at 2:44 am
Eli Rabett says:
July 22, 2012 at 6:59 pm
David asks
So my questions are as follows. How much of the non GHG energy is radiated to space via collision with GHG molecues?
——————————————————————————————————————————-
Eli says…
Essentially all of the IR radiated to space from the atmosphere is a result of collisional excitation of vibrational modes.
———————————————————————————————————-
My response… First thank you for engaging my questions. But, is not some of the energy radiated to space, first recieved, not by conduction, but by radiation in the correct WL?
Question two
If the GHG molecues were not present, how much longer would this energy stay within the atmosphere if it could only be conducted and convected about, but not radiated to space?
=============================================================
The atmosphere would be much colder because the surface would be colder (somewhat technical argument related to the derivation of the adiabatic lapse rate starting with an average surface temperature). If you allow no ghgs, there would be no water vapor or clouds.
You can get an idea from this figure. Everything below the 320 K line is a result of ghgs re-radiating after collisions.
You raise the interesting question of what the energy of such an atmosphere would be. The temperature at each level would be given by the dry adiabatic lapse rate, the energy per unit volume given by CvT. where Cv is the effective specific heat.
===================================================
Thanks again Eli, but I think you did not answer my question. With an equally dense, non GHG atmosphere, would it not be more transparent to incoming, and not just outgoing TSI, and therfore would not the surface insolation be higher? Of couse the non GHG on a water planet would be impossible, becuase the increases surface insolation would clearly lead to increased W/V. but, for the sake of a thought experiment, let us assume no increased W/V., but equally dense atmosphere. Would the surface T not rise higher in relationship to increased surface insolation? Would the surface not lose energy by both conduction to non GHG molecues, as well as through radiation to space, admittedly zipping past the non GHG atmosphere to space? However, any energy which conducts (not radiates past) to a non GHG atmosphere must stay in that atmosphere longer then it would in a GHG atmosphere, as they only way such an atmosphere can lose energy is by conduction to the surface where from there it can radiate to space. So my question remains unanswered, but it appears logical to me that GHG slow the loss of raidated energy from the surface, but accelerate the loss of conducted eneregy from the surface. I was hoping to see the ATMOSPHERIC residence time of CONDUCTED energy from the surface compared to a non GHG atmosphere verses a GHG atmosphere. I inderstand that radiated energy has a shorter residence time in a GHG world, but I suspect that conducted energy has a longer residence time in a non GHG atmosphere. I would like to see this quantified.
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My next question
<i.And, as additional GHG molecues speed the escape of conducted Non GHG energy, would not this reduced residence time of conducted non GHG energy have to be subtracted from the increased residence time of IR energy raqdiating from the surface, and backradiating from the GHG molecues? TSI incoming is a consistent flow, so the energy gained or lost by either radiating conducted non ghg energy out, or keeping surface energy within the atmosphere is porportional to the residence time of the energies affected.
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Eli answers…
This is somewhat backwards. GHGs (and increases in same) SLOW the escape of IR energy from the Earth surface and atmosphere together. Without GHGs the escape of IR energy from the surface is much faster, and if you look at energy balance, the speed up exactly matches the deficit from wiping out the ghgs.
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Thank you, but again I think you are not answering my question. I would like to first correct your above statement. Wherever you say "IR energy" please change that to RADIATED IR energy and we have no problem. However my question concerned the atmospheric residence time of CONDUCTED surface energy. The surface, when it is losing heat, is all the time losing heat by radiation and conduction. The atmosphere can only lose heat to space by radiation. A non GHG atmosphere must therfore have a longer residence time for conducted energy then a GHG atmosphere.
@David; GHG is a construct for argument and not a real thing. So that logical outcomes are based on assumption and not reality.
Radiation travels easily through gasses as there are relative few molecules to absorb and re-emit. As the molecules rarely touch there is little conduction, only convection can move energetic (warm) molecules to low energy areas where they can emit (radiate) energy away. If you prevent convection ( green house effect) energy comes in by radiation readily and leaves by conduction with difficulty. The “Green House Gases” actually enhance convection as they absorb energy easily with a large change in buoyancy.
GHG is a contradiction of terms. Useful only for argument. It is not a real thing. pg
@David: You are speaking about a dead issue: It died on november 19th. 2009, when “Climate-Gate” was known. It´s over kid!, now it survives as “sustainability”, its last name. The trouble is, you know, 2012 and that Apokalypsis thing: An apocalypse (Greek: ἀποκάλυψις apocálypsis, meaning ‘un-covering’) is a revelation of something hidden. In religious contexts it is usually a revelation of hidden meaning – hidden from mankind in an era dominated by falsehood and misconception
So now it happens that everyone can see that the “King is naked”. Sorry, it´s too late now: Time to hide away buddy!
@P.G.Sharrow:
I agree on the Dept of Ed. Near as I can tell ALL the layers above “Principle” don’t contribute much (may net be negative) to the quality of education while sucking down most of the money.
What is the “minimum economic scale” of education? ONE really good teacher.
We’ve known this since Plato.
The spouse has a “One Room School” credential. (Somewhere along the line along with all her other credentials she got that one too). It says she can be dropped into the middle of nowhere, given a school room and a random collection of kids, and educate them. Seems to me the quality of folks we had graduating in the 1700s and 1800s from One Room Schools was not so shabby. They built the place…
You get a small amount of ‘Economies of Scale” as you add grades. While you lose a bit of the internal ‘self tutoring’ of one grade for the next, and you lose a bit of the “bright kids get to look ahead” while “slow kids get built in refresher”; you also can have a broader variety of teachers. (That is, you can hire English teachers with zero math skill… not sure how much of a feature that really is… or Math teachers who can’t spell… also not sure that’s a real feature…) Each student has more total hours “in grade” instruction in each day. Grading work can be a bit more automated (same test key for all tests).
Near as I can tell, that level of “gain” runs out at about 8 teachers. One for each grade. 12 if you include High School. (14 if you include kindergarten and a Principle who can double as substitute if someone is sick – their major benefit other than being the Mean SOB to whom miscreants are sent). At 20 students per, that’s 280 kids. At 30 per (the MAX I think is workable) that’s 420.
So those are the bounds I’d put on schools. From a “One Room” up to 420 or so. Anything beyond that, just make a new “school district” and sprout a new “One Room” that grows until it hits 420. Parents in THAT district attend the “School Board Meeting” (that would consist of the Principle, 3 or 4 elected parents, and any other parents who chose to attend). Everybody else can butt out.
That’s the way I’d do it.
@Simon:
What a remarkable article. He “gets it” that nature has to be incorporated, that the IPCC is writing political dogma and hogwash, and that The Sun matters! There IS hope!
Rail always has some use. It has the lowest cost per ton/mile of anything. Aviation always costs more. Making energy cheaper makes both cheaper. Oh, and the flying car idea has always foundered on Government Regulations. We could have them today if the legal hoops to have a pilot license were not so much a bother. ( For example, I can’t pass the physical due to hearing loss – you have to hear a whisper from the other side of the room. WHY is that a feature in a cockpit with 100 dB noise and noise canceling headphones pretty much standard so you don’t go deaf? Beats me… Stupid Regulation that is often waved if you jump through enough hoops each time… but it is a forest of such things.) So people do not bother.
I could make an airplane that costs about the same as a modern automobile. Were it not for the regulatory burden. First off, the number of pilots is held down to where the market is too small to work. Then you get to spend a few $Million to get air certification for darned near any parts that matter. (So we have private planes powered by engines designed in the 1940s as they have a certification… ) Just incredibly stupid.
None of that is going away in my lifetime.
So flying cars is a nice dream. Might even happen in somewhere like Africa or Arabia where the King can just say “Let them be”…
So rail will carry freight pretty much forever. Land transport will do short haul transport of people (cars, buses, trains). Ships carry lots of freight and do ferry of land transport over small distances. Aviation is pretty much long haul time critical transport and not much else. Shift the energy costs for them en-mass via a new tech that works for all of them, nothing much changes.
@Pascevaks:
Well, when I was a kid folks could carry guns. In my farm town it was not unusual for a farmer to come in with a six gun on their hip. (Rattle Snakes were quite common. A “kit gun” was common in fishing kits so a surprise snake could be dealt with…)
Didn’t have such problems then. Some nut case starts shooting, they would get off ONE shot (maybe!) and be plugged by 20… so they knew enough not to try it.
“An armed society is a polite society”.
But the correct answers to things like the Columbine shootings and this one in Colorado iwe never be approved. It involves some reasonable percentage of average citizens going armed. Like just about any time prior to 1960. (Hell, I remember being about 8 and at a friends house where we were looking at his Derringer… I had a 22 rifle in my room. Dad had a 30-30 Winchester and a .257 Roberts bolt. Just about 100% of the houses had guns in them. Mormon farm town. Near zero crime rate. I put the first door locks on our front door when I was 18 and came home from college. Mom was living alone then and ‘things were changing’. Prior to that we just told the neighbors if we were leaving town for a week and asked them to ‘watch the place’… Everyone in town knew when someone left for a while.)
The other part of it is not drugging up 1/3 to 1/2 of the society on psychoactive drugs. The list of things from Ambien sleeping pills to ADHD drugs to you name it that list various displacements of sense of reality and / or suicidal thoughts and / or violent outbreaks as side effects is astonishing.
So we mandate that 99.9% of the society must be gathered in large groups with zero protection inside 20 minutes to an hour; then drug up 1/3 or so of the population with psychoactive things (even if only a 1% rate, that’s a lot of ‘crazies’), AND turn the hard core crazies out of the loony bins on more drugs. Mix and stir. Wait and let ferment.
Then we’re surprised when one of the crazies goes off the deep end and nobody can stop them?
BTW, ban guns, you get Molotov Cocktails. Same net effect. But more screaming and burning while they die. Banning explosives has not exactly stopped bombings…
Oh Well. “Stupid is as stupid does” and our society has collectively settled on “Feel good about a stupid choice” rather than “Feel dismay at the right choice that requires some bravery.”
@Adolfo:
I have no idea… Looks like a drug induced cartoon character to me. I’ll have to think about it…
@Simon:
My Dad was about 12 during the Great Depression. He was given ONE 22 LR shell and told to bring back a rabbit. If he got one, he got rabbit dinner. If he didn’t get one, he did not get another shell and was told “no food today”… Pretty quick it was one rabbit per day… every day… Farm boy in Iowa winter…
He was in W.W.II with an Carbine initially (that little .30 Cal thing) as he had a truck. Traded it for an M1 Garand (to a ground pounder who wanted something lighter). Said the little carbine was OK at getting meat to add to the rations, but the Garand let him drop deer at longer distances… Dad (and his crew) ate fairly well during the war… Oh, and anything that shot at them “had a bad day”… He could hit a moving rabbit with a .22 (though he preferred that they be stopped) and drop a deer with iron sites at a few hundred yards. One Shot Each.
He wasn’t the only farm kid from the depression in the Army then…
Since then we’ve gone to “Spray and pray” where the infantry is supposed to keep the other guys busy while the air strike does the actual damage. Even just shooting wildly in their direction is “OK”… Called “suppressive fire”. Personally, I like the Marines’ attitude. Everyone is to be a marksman. (Were it up to me, I’d have EVERY single person in every military organization required to go to the range one time per week, load, and empty, their primary weapon at a target (preferably at about 25 yards for handguns to 100 yards for rifles) and score 100 % inside the outer ring or you come back the next day and have to buy the ammo yourself. For every round in the black, a $10 bonus in that paycheck.
IMHO, pretty darned quick nobody would survive an encounter with our crew…
I’d love to see a movie where “spray and pray” gets nailed in the coffin by “aimed fire”. The best gunfight scene was in “Unforgiven” where Clint is taking loads of wild shots from a bar room full of scared scum and patiently works them down, one timed aimed shot at a time… Much more realistic.
My Sensei (Sargent in local PD) told of one of his motorcycle officers who made a stop. Guy gets out with gun and starts to shoot. Officer pulls gun and starts to shoot. One in the ground next to his foot. 2 or 3 more in the ground each closer to the car as he worked the trigger while raising the gun, one or 2 in the trunk of the car, etc. Guy gets in car and speeds off (eventually caught after officer follows and calls in more cars). A dozen or two rounds fired at about 20 feet and nobody hit. Too much watching movies and adrenaline, not enough experience under fire…
One other thing I’d like to see in a movie is somebody getting ‘just a flesh wound’ in, say, the arm; and it becoming a dead weight non-functional lump as the nerves were damaged… Later scenes with them in it, the arm (though healed) IS completely useless… A bit more reality please… A few more folks called “One Eye Jack” and “Stumpy”… and trying to make a living doing something else now…
@Pascvaks:
That’s great! That dog just waiting is SO… so… well, so darned something… You can just hear him thinking “It isn’t fair. He’s so small. I could just swallow him… but.. Oh the Eau du OW!”
Per the other links, I’ll get back on them in a bit…
@George:
That too… perhaps after a beverage refill… or lunch… or both…
@Adolfo:
You sure have a hangup on “land”. Frankly, in most places here, it just gets you a 1% to 10% tax bill for the privilege of ‘ownership’. I’d rather have a $1 Million portfolio of stocks and bonds in a tax free account and a Very Nice motorhome / boat than “land and a tax bill”…
If I want land, I can always rent it. Let the bank pay the tax bill…
@David:
That’s going to be an ‘after lunch’ thing as well… need some more brain food…
@E.M. You are thinking as one of them. Kind of a post-modern Celt having no ties to its motherland. Land is the provider of the highest price good: Food. Can´t figure out how to eat a “derivative” or any other imaginary stock.
@E.M. Have you realized you are having a one room Blog School for elders? :-)
E,M., no worries, I am looking forward to your thoughts.
I do not know, in an non GHG world, how much more insolation would reach the surface, and, in such a world suddenly turned on, the gases, mostly transparent to insolation, would then heat primarily through conduction from the surface until such time as an equilibrium was reached when energy would move back and forth between the surface and the atmosphere. However it seems that the conduction, as well as of course convection, would ever move more easily up the atmosphere until it also reached a local thermal equilibrium.
Adolpho, PG, no worries concerning CAGW from my end, As far as I can tell it does not exist. I just just think it odd the warmist think that the only gas which can radiatively cool the atmosphere,can only be warming, as if the only heat in the atmosphere is radiative and from GHGs.
@E.M. A MUST SEE:
@Adolfo:
Don’t eat fish from the sea, eh?
There are more kinds of capital stock than just dirt. I can get clothing from petroleum and a factory. I can get food from a constructed chamber and electric lighting. I can get energy from the air, water, or light. With energy you can make anything (only relative costs change).
Dirt is ‘nice to have’ but not particularly necessary.
Then again, on my Mom’s side, we have several generations of sailors ( Grand Dad and Great Grand Dad were professional sailors and who knows how many before them…) and I lived on a boat for a year or two. So we’ve a long tradition of not needing dirt.
Many times I’ve had a very nice meal of just ‘things from the water’…
I’ve also played with hydroponics enough to now it works very very well. ( I have a patio covered in pots sitting in tubs with a semi-hydroponic method in use. Essentially very old dirt for the ‘grow medium’ and added chemicals for most of the nutrients; just the trace elements left to chance and whatever rocky stuff is in the pots.) I started with regular hydroponics then started ‘playing’.
If I had my “dream shot”, I’d get an old largish ship and convert it to a mix of sea water mining / uranium extraction and hydroponic gardening as a proof of concept… So while dirt is nice, and I’d not turn down “40 acres and a mule”; it is entirely over rated as a bit of wealth producing capital stock and I’d much rather have a ship than a farm… but that’s likely just me channeling old Grand Dad ;-)
BTW, farm produced food is about as cheap and low profit a commodity as you can make. I’d rather make iPods than potatoes for wealth creation. Lots of folks will trade you food for iPods… and iPhones…
Don’t know why so many folks are fixated on dirt (especially in the 3rd World areas, but also some in parts of Europe) but it’s OK if they are. Muslims especially are really hung up on dirt. Must be a cultural thing. At any rate, if I have a ship, the whole ocean is mine… much more convenient…
I think I’m just a gypsy at heart ;-)
@David:
The basic logic flaw is treating the atmosphere is A thing. It isn’t. The properties are highly variable with pressure.
At high pressure, near the surface, thermal energy moves rapidly both by conduction and convection. The air near the surface is largely heated by conduction from the surroundings (notice that standing in the sun your skin gets MUCH warmer than the air right next to it, and even a small breeze cools you rapidly? ) Hot air does darned near no radiating. It is too busy having collisions between the molecules and convecting away. How can I know this? IR Photography.
IFF the air down low were radiating a lot of IR, any IR photograph would be black. The air would expose the film or sensor. Yet we have lots of IR pictures at all sorts of frequencies. SURFACES radiate a lot of IR, thus the pictures. Also we have a load of military gizmos that hunt down hot objects with IR sensors, shoot down targets with IR lasers (so not be absorbed in transit) and even wonderful satellite pictures of the surface in IR. So while there is some IR being radiated by the air, it just is not a big part of the picture.
Now go to the top of the atmosphere, it is a different story. Up there the space between molecules is rather large. They don’t collide much, so any energy is not spread around much by collisions. It is also already the top of the atmosphere, so not a lot of convection to happen. Here the lone atom or molecule can emit a photon and dump some energy. It gets to sit around a fairly long while at high energy states and can manage to wait for a quantum event to dump a photon. Those that go toward space just leave. Those that go down largely never reach the surface. They are absorbed fairly quickly in the increasingly dense air. (As their quantum energy is an exact match to the absorption band of the same gas that emitted them).
THAT causes a warm molecule or atom to start rising via convection (long before the photon can reach the surface). The net effect of adding more IR radiative gases in that part of the atmosphere is to dump more heat to space faster. Take a quantity of radiation Q, double it to 2Q. If 1/2 was headed out to space, and 1/2 being sent down until it hit denser air and then convecting back up; you would get 1/2 Q of prompt exit and 1/2 Q of slow exit from the base case. Now you double it, you get a full Q of prompt exit AND a full Q of slow exit, for 2 Q total exit. (And even if the ‘downwelling’ portion were never convected back up, you still get one whole Q of net exit so still have more net radiative heat loss to space from added IR absorptive / radiative gases.
At the surface, due to rapid collisions, any absorbed IR rapidly turns into rising hot gases and heat flow is upward to lower pressure areas where it is radiated away. More ‘downwelling’ IR just means more convection and more heat flow up and away. You increase the RATE of mass flow, but not much else.
This is what is seen, BTW. It happens in the order of minutes to hours and there is not much ‘stored heat’ in the air. Ask any hot air balloonist. The air is still and motionless at dawn, so that is when you fly. As soon as the sun is at about the 30 degree mark above the horizon, surface heating starts and convection and thermals begin. Things ‘get bumpy’ fairly fast. At the other end, as the sun sets, thermals die too. During the night the surface cools and convection comes to a near halt. Then at just before dawn you lay out your balloon to fly again in the still air of morning as the sun starts to rise… ( I was ground crew for a few years for some balloonists… saw a lot of it.)
Similarly, meteorologists know this. They know that thunderstorms form blossom and pour during a single day and quiet down at night. Especially in the tropics. “Afternoon showers” is the common theme. Heat, evaporation, convection, condensation (and IR radiation at the top of the thunderhead) and precipitation. In minutes to hours. ( I’ve a link here somewhere to a paper about tests in Africa that used instruments to measure the heating process and found it was a couple of hours lag time from surface heating to thermals taking heat to altitude.)
So your basic “logic flaw” is to play the “surface IR” game at all. It is a game of the form “If we ignore evaporation, conduction, convection, condensation, and precipitation, then radiation dominates”… or “Given these conclusions what assumptions can I draw?” . The only proper answer is to divide the air model into at least 2 layers; with the bottom layer dominated by evaporation, conduction, convection, precipitation, and any radiation happening at the base of the stratosphere or IN the stratosphere (as that air gets sucked into it via the winds aloft, later to descend in the polar vortex as VERY cold air from the stratospheric heat dump). Only in or above the stratosphere does IR radiation dominate. And in that layer, doubling the IR absorptive / radiative gases just increases the rate of heat transfer out (as any ‘downwelling’ just gets rapidly convected back into it…)
So in my view of things, added “GHGs” (that ought to be called IR absorptive AND radiative gases….) just speed up the IR exit in the stratosphere, speed up the top of troposphere to stratosphere convection / induction (from any ‘downwelling’ part) until total IR is again lowered back to stability, and make the cooling side of things work better. That might make the stratosphere move a little more slowly or be a bit less ‘tall’, but beyond that, not much. The lower level Troposphere will be sped up by any added heating (from any source, even from “downwelling IR” if any could reach it) until an equilibrium rate is reestablished. As this happens inside hours at most (as seen in daily swings of 1 KiloWatt / square meter…) a change of a couple of Watts would be literally ‘lost in the noise’ as a trivial change of convection velocity. ( about 2/1000 or 0.2% for 2 Watts out of a kilo Watt of sunshine)
So if you want to find the effect of added IR absorptive / radiative gases, you need to look at stratospheric transport rate and surface convection rates where you will find about a 0.2% change of velocity and not a damn thing else. Net IR leaving at top of stratosphere will still match net heat in from the sun in any case. Just as it does in the daily temperature cycles with sun rise / set at the equator and the seasonal change of sun present / gone at the poles.
It is all about the mass flow and not about the IR, until you are at or above the stratosphere… and at those levels more radiative gases just dump the IR a bit more efficiently so things cool off faster and the heat engine can run more slowly moving mass… In essence, any added IR radiative gases speeds mass flow up just until the added rate of IR dumping to space slows them down again via more efficient cooling at altitude.
IMHO, the lack of a tropospheric “hot spot” (IIRC they found it was a tad cooler) is confirmation of this model.
Hope that helps…
Another reality check on what we think we know and just how much we really don’t a’la anthropology and genes and out of Africa and North America in a few thousand years and what they’ll think we were like then –
July 21, 2012 Dienekes’ Anthropology – (“Admixture matters”)
“Until recently, tree models dominated models of human demography. Under such models, populations split off from each other in a branching pattern. African populations, and especially African hunter-gatherers, which are the most divergent occupy the basal positions in the tree. The story has been repeated many times: Africans are more genetically diverse, Eurasians carry a subset of African genetic variation, a small subset of Africans left the continent and colonized the world after going through a severe bottleneck and so on. It’s a simple and attractive story, but one which is wholly dependent on ignoring admixture. There are two types of admixture that are pertinent: one is admixture between modern human groups. An example of this is Ethiopia. Many studies have presumed to identify a signal of Out-of-East Africa based on diminishing distance from East Africa. But it is completely unclear how this model fares when one takes into account that East Africans are a recently admixed population: their great genetic diversity may be due to the recent intermingling of two very divergent groups of people (Caucasoids and aboriginal East Africans). Or, consider two Englishmen, one with a Nigerian and another with a Chinese grandparent. These two individuals might appear greatly diverged from each other genetically and phenotypically, but this is the aggregate of sharing 3/4 of quite recent common ancestry (from their English grandparents), and not sharing 1/4 each of highly divergent ancestry (from their Chinese and Nigerian ones)…” (Good Read;-)
http://dienekes.blogspot.com/2012/07/admixture-matters.html
Thanks E.M., and it does help. I have, from you primarily, long accepted the …“If we ignore evaporation, conduction, convection, condensation, and precipitation, then radiation dominates”…
I used to surf a bit, and for that sport we love the evening “glass off”, as the wind settles.
I understand, better now, that conduction between the surface and atmospheric molecues dominate heat movement at the surface and lower trophsphere. where conduction between disparte energy gases also dominates, ever seeking a LTE, “local thermal dynamic equalibrium”. I understand that work is done in evaporation and convection, in mass moving all gases all about, and, as energy increases, that movement is mostly up towards a thinner atmosphere where radiation begins to dominate. I understand convection moves far more energy at lower levels.
All in all I still like my basic line of thought…Each wavelength of incoming TSI has a different residence time within the atmosphere, land and ocean. This residence time is of course affected by it own inherent properties as well as all of the material it encounters. David’s law” Only two things can effect the energy content of any system in a radiative balance. Either a change in the input, or a change in the “residence time” of some aspect of those energies within the system.”
In support of the warmist contention, the surface is radiating and conducting energy to the atmosphere. Assume insolation is equall. Assume a flat planet, ALWAYS recieving a steady insolation. In a land only planet with no atmosphere this surface would heat to equalibrium very quickly, radiation and light speed photons being the means of movement.
In a non GHG atmosphere, esentially transparent to radiation, the land would heat almost as quickly as in an earth with no atmosphere, except on intial start up it would heat more slowly, as, until conducted equalibrium is reached with the atmsphere, the land would be losing energy both via radiation and conduction. Tthe air would heat more slowly then in a GHG atmosphere, as conduction and convection from the surface in a non GHG world are the only means of energy moving into the atmosphere. However the atmosphere would eventually reach equalibrium with the land. but, while reaching equalibrium, conduction would always dominate toward heat moving up, convection would strongly assist this process. The individual molecues in the upper atmosphere would eventually reach the same energy state as the lower atmosphere, the lapse rate would be only dependent on the density of the molecues per M2. Individually all molecues would have equall T, allthough a thermometer would, due to more contact with more molecues, record a higher T in the denser lower atmosphere.
Now to this even T non-GHG steady insolation planet add 70 GHG molecues, one at every thousand feet of elevation. The lower GHG molecues mostly act as non-GHG molecues, as conduction is a dominate process here with many collisions. On occasion, the timing being just right, the GHG molecue will intercept the out going radiation, and, depending on even more timing, as normally it will then conduct that energy to a non GHG molecue, it will redirect that energy towards the surface, increasing the residence time of that energy. That GHG molecue however is just as likely to recieve an equall conducted input of energy from a non-GHG molecue, and shoot that photon to space, shortening the residence time of energy within the atmosphere.
Humm, any more thoughts on my strange flat steady insoltion non-GHG world??
Of course adding in a rotating planet with a 70% water world full of clouds and mixed gases, well then, even complex assumtions are very dangerous to make.
@David:
I generally do not like to play the “Toy World” game.
Why?
1) BY DEFINITION you are leaving out a lot of things. With no idea how much those matter, you have no idea how wrong your Toy World behaviours are.
2) People leave off the numbers. Thinking things like “Foo Dominates” is all well and good, but is that 51% vs 49% or 99.999% vs 0.001%? In the real world, that makes a big difference.
3) It is a huge time sink that can never reach an end. For every thing you put in your Toy World the other person puts something else in their Toy World. It ends up being an argument of the “Angels and Pins” sort.
4) Since #1 means things are left out; folks invent all sorts of plausible but non-existent actions or connections between what IS in their Toy World to explain the missing bits. Now you are in a “prove a negative” argument. (You must show that the connection or action is not real). It is nearly impossible to prove a negative in someone’s Toy World.
I’m sure there are more reasons, but those are the big ones.
( I’m just on my first morning cup of tea ;-)
I would much rather just look at the Real World Data and ask: What does this say?
When we do that we find that as soon as surfaces are exposed to sunshine they rapidly heat. Some are in contact with the surfaces pick up that thermal energy and start to rise (causing winds that cause more conduction thermal transfer). Plants and water surfaces evaporate huge quantities of water. Conduction, convection, evaporation.
Both IR meters and our skin report that the surfaces are far hotter than the air. (“Fry an egg” in summer sun in some places while we breath in the air…) We can use various IR instruments to measure huge differences in surface temperatures under solar radiative exposure. These also confirm that the lower atmosphere is simply not doing a lot of radiating ( or we could not see through them in the IR band, which we easily do.) Satellites looking down largely see through the air. (Tops of clouds do show a lot of infrared radiation as water condenses.)
Condensation and precipitation are the giant heat dump at altitude (and we can see / measure the fall of that precipitation; each unit representing a giant energy flow that can be measured…) Condensation and precipitation are orders of magnitude larger than any IR movement in the lower atmosphere. Stand out in a rain storm. Feel it. Measure it. See it.
So what use it is to participate in an Angels and Pins argument over atmospheric warming of the surface via back radiated IR when you have a ton of cold water and snow falling on your head?
Simply put: WHY should I or any one else indulge the AGW Toy World arguments about 2 Watts of IR “downwelling radiation” (per hour) when 25,000 cc of water is falling on me representing a very large heat dump at altitude via evaporation, conduction, convection, condensation in the Spherical Heat Pipe Earth? That is 25 kg of water.
http://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/water-thermal-properties-d_162.html
Latent heat of evaporation – 2,270 kJ/kg
So 25 kg x 2,270,000 Joules = 56,750,000 Joules
Joules / kW-h – 2.78×10^−7 kW·h
So 2.78 x 10^-4 W-h x 56,750 x 10^3 = 157765 x 10^-1 or 15,775.5 Watts in an hour of rain of one inch.
So 2 Watt-hours in an hour of “down welling IR” and 15,775 Watt-hours in a 1 inch rainfall that hour (that was dumped at altitude as condensation in the top of the thunder storm).
Does that make it more clear why it is simply not important to pay any attention at all to the Toy World question of what IR does in the air at the ground?
And that example completely ignores the mass flow of hot AIR upward, the IR it dumps at altitude, and the mass flow of cold air back down at the polar vortex. It ignores the fact that a lot of that water mass flow also has heat of fusion dumped at altitude too as it forms hail, snow, etc. It ignores that those same clouds prevent the solar heating from reaching the surface at all in the first place. Basically, it is a minimum example, and there are a large number of other very large numbers with the same direction ( low surface heat, high energy flow to altitude and dumping heat there via mass flow and phase change).
In essence, arguing about the way the IR moves around is arguing about how much the elephant changed weight when it farted and ignoring the kilograms of elephant poop falling on the floor and the liters of elephant pee… ( Is the methane lighter than air? But it has CO2 in it that is heavier!!! But it is warm! But it has water vapor in it… What about the Sulphur compounds in the smelly gasses?) All great fun, but not answering much as there is the small problem of all that elephant poo to shovel… )
So I’m not going to help analyze your Toy World. Neither the Flat Non-Rotating one, nor the AGW one. Both are just different forms of fantasy worlds and neither one helps to understand what happens in the Real World. For that, you need to look at the Real World. The Real World has rain, and clouds, and rapid heat flow on the order of a couple of hours via convection from the surface to the stratosphere (measured in Africa), and plants evaporating tons of water keeping themselves constant temperature (observed and measured, plants control the stoma opening to maintain about 87 F leaf temperatures). IR just does not matter in that world. Only at or above the Stratosphere is there a role of interest, and that role is ‘dump thermal energy to space’. GHG does NOTHING in the lower atmosphere that matters in any way. 2/15775 is just not important; and I see no reason to worry the issue of “Is it REALLY 1.999/15775 or 2.001/15775 … Sorry.
Watch this:
Sippican notices something interesting.
http://sippicancottage.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/climate-change.html
@Chuckles:
It will be interesting to see if, now that weather.channel has bought wunderground, they too start having ‘history creap’ in the temperatures…
Frankly, the range of values given to any “one place” from a variety of sources, and then the many different values it assumes over time, is enough to cause me to not believe anything more than +/- 2 C or so of precision. Yeah, I’ll go ahead and calculate it and graph it, but the books are just looking sooo cooked…
@E.M. Just wait for the winter time…any graph will freeze
EM-
There’s a great deal of ‘wisdom’ (aka common sense, experience, etc,) and knowledge here, especially between your ears, on a great many subjects, everything from basic survival to the origin of the universe and everything in between, and while over at an anthropology blog I visit at times it struck me that you might consider occassional entries and ‘discussions’ on the progress of humans in the last 50K-100K years. Much of what we know about humans (and a great number of other subjects;-) is conjecture, your ‘Gang’ is rather good at drawing conclusions about anything and offering morsels that others can chew on and reply to.
When, for example a bunch of archeologists get together on something like Neanderthals interacting with other Neanders (and later Cro-Mags), they get so into the ‘evidence’ interpreted by six guys who all had differing opinions that they exclude the ‘common sense’ experience of common everyday uneducated nerds who want to offer an opinion about basic survival and simply want to hear someone tare that idea apart strictly from a ‘common sense’ perspective based on life experience and not based on some French Bozo with a PhD in interpreting skull bones who wrote a paper in 1998.
I guess what I’m saying is I rather hear what EM & Co. say about XYZ and Everyday Life a French Cave in 44K BC, than I would from anyone else. This article on “Archaeometallurgy in the Mediterranean” at
http://dienekes.blogspot.com/2012/07/archaeometallurgy-in-mediterranean.html
was the spark that lit this latest light bulb. It’s interesting and worth a read in itself. But it got me to thinking that the same entry woud have a different exit and bigger impact over at Chiefio;-)
@Pascvaks: History and in special archeology and its fanciful interpretations of the past should be revisited, including dating.
How do you explain, for example, that the Incas had platinum jewlery: It melts at 2041.4 K, 1768.3 °C, 3214.9 °F The metal was used by pre-Columbian Americans near modern-day Esmeraldas, Ecuador to produce artifacts of a white gold-platinum alloy. The first European reference to platinum appears in 1557 in the writings of the Italian humanist Julius Caesar Scaliger as a description of an unknown noble metal found between Darién and Mexico, “which no fire nor any Spanish artifice has yet been able to liquefy.”[35]
How do you explain that the same Incas commonly used an alloy of Copper-Berylium?
Archeologists, as I said, living in a closed box, interpret anything as “cult”, know nothing of any other area of knowledge.
As for Europe, consensus considers all ancient people as “primitive”. If there were or are any “primitive” people at all, we find a lot of them in the “developed world”.
Don’t know how I missed it, pair of M5 quakes near the MTJ (Mendocino Triple Junction) 5 days ago. http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/recenteqscanv/FaultMaps/125-40.html
Adolfo – we’re only going to recognise something if we have an analogue in what we currently know. Archaeologists also can only make inferences on what has survived however many thousand years being buried. A decent civilisation could be built using only bamboo as the steel-equivalent. It fire-hardens nicely, but biodegrades rather well. Recently people have come to think that maybe dinosaurs weren’t all green, but came in other colours too, but there’s really no evidence that I’ve seen for either viewpoint.
Dating relies on things remaining the same going back in time as we measure or infer now. It’s maybe better than it was at the start (Carbon dating) since tree-ring counters have taken us back 4000 years or so, but we really have no gauge before that except to say there’s no visible reason for such a change of C14 percentage in the environment. It’s therefore an assumption, and since it’s made by men with white coats it’s generally accepted. I’ll accept it as the best we know so far, but still uncertain.
Earlier humans were no doubt as intelligent as we are, and had technologies we don’t know about – there’s no remains that have lasted long enough to tell us. If it wasn’t made of stone or had some unusual circumstance preserve it, we just aren’t going to know.
FYI – Antarctic “Really” Freezing? More than Usual?
http://notrickszone.com/2012/07/26/extremely-unusual-cold-deviation-of-20k-now-occurring-over-antarctica/
a better graphic here
http://www.wzforum.de/forum2/read.php?32,2475411
for Current Southern Sea Ice Area see graphic here
of course in the Northern Hemisphere, the MOST IMPORTANT Hemisphere, things aren’t that ‘cool’ and people have a different slant on life so you don’t hear about anything it;-)
“about anything it;-)”??????
MORE TEA!!! MORE TEA!!!
@Pascvaks: It is not the “northern hemisphere” but the english speaking countries the more “hipnotized”, mesmerized by the New World Order. As an example, through TV you see nothing apart from a very few things, all cheating you. I am not saying that the media in the other countries are not managed by the same group of people but there it happens that, as a rule, and by tradition, nobody believes anything. A perfect example of this it is the supposed acceptance by the majority of inidigenous people in SA of the christian religion imposed by the spaniards “conquistadores” while their own religion hiddenly survived, its hierarchy included http://www.tawantin.com/descargas/cv_juan_nunezdelprado_cast.pdf
The first sacerdotal level is made up by “Ayllu Alto Meshayoq”. This is the priest who has had an experience of seeing and being a part of the power of “Ayllu Apu”, spirit of the mountain, protector of a district. For example, for the area of Cusco, Apu Pikol and Apu Pukin are the guardians for the “Ayllus” of San Jeronimo and Santiago.
The second level is made up by “Llaqta Alto Meshayoq”, who has had the experience of seeing and being a part of the power of a “Llaqta Apu”, spirit of the mountain, guardian of a micro-region. For example, for the area of Cusco, Apu Saqsaywaman or Apu Wanakauri are guardians of the whole “Ayllu” of the Cusco Valley.
The third level consists of “Suyu Alto Meshayoq”, who has had an experience of seeing and being part of the power of the “Suyu Apu”, guardian of a region. For example, for the area of Cusco, Apu Ausangate and Apu Salqantay are the guardians of the extensive regions that begins in the South, in La Raya and extends North until the Pampas River, in the West until the Apurimaq River and in the East until the Yavero River.
The fourth level is made up by “Kuraq Akulleq”, who has had an experience of seeing and being a part of the power of the “Apuyaya” of “Taytacha”, alternative names given to Christ, the guardian of the universe. For example, the area of Cusco has the Taytacha Temblores, the Taytacha Qoyllurit’I, the Wanka Taytacha, Torrechayoq Taytacha or the Papak’uchu Taytacha, etc.
These are the four virtual sacerdotal levels, which have a training and an initiation process and also currently have working priests, who are capable of conferring their knowledge to other learners.
@E.M.et Al.: Found something very interesting:
The first stage is called “Dios Yaya Pacha” or the time of the Father God. It was initiated with the founding of the Inca Empire by Manko Qapaq or Inkari, depending on the case, and it expanded during the duration of the Tawantinsuyu, ending with the death of the Incas Waskar and Atawallpa.
The second stage called “Dios Churi Pacha” or the time of the Son of God, began with the conquest and has lasted until our days. The third stage or “Holy Spirit God Pacha” which is also called “Taripay Pacha” is probably starting and it is in this one in which three hierarchies will manifest themselves, through the “Mosoq Karpay” or new initiation, which has to be directly distributed by God to those people he considers appropriate to be carriers of the new capacities. *
According to the Andean scatology, the vehicle which carries this new initiation should be the “Siwar Qenty” or Royal Humming Bird which, according to the Andean System, is the bird that has access to the center of the Hanaq Pacha, where the person of God is found.
Between the first and the second stages, and the second and third stages, there are essential “Pachakuti” or cosmic transmutations, through which the coming of the era is prepared, with a re-ordering of the cosmos.
According to the contemporary instructors, the last Pachakuti has already taken place and was produced between the first of August 1990 and the first of August 1993, so we are already in the initial part of the Taripay Pacha, that has to have an initial period of seven years, followed by another of twelve which will be the maturity stage and afterward, the manifestation of the new age will be produced.
Click to access inca_religion.pdf
We have no idea what “usual” is over any significant length of time. Anything that is reported is simply speculation. We do not have any fine enough resolution data to know the decadal scale natural variation that might be quite normal with the area. It is like riding on a roller coaster on which one has never been and can not see. They know they are on an uphill or downhill slope, but don’t know how high or how low it goes.
What bothers me about the whole thing is that they see a trend and attempt not only to find a “reason” for it, but also attempt to find a reason with a human cause. It is a sort of environmental narcissism where somehow a human cause must be found for every variation noticed. But it is very easy to do this when we are basically ignorant of how much natural variation there is because we don’t have the information. It becomes very easy for these people to create their own religious stories about what causes it.
@Adolfo; interesting read. Must be the reason we live in interesting times! Our group of sensitives/psychics report the veil seems thinner of late. I’m not sure if their abilities have improved or the need for their abilities decreased. At least they no longer need to hide their abilities from righteous people. pg
@P.G.: 1993+7=2000 , 2000+12 =2012.
@Adolfo-
The older I get the more I’ve come to think that people are really dumber than they think they are.
PS: Someone, probably several ‘someones’, once said: “In the midst of great confusion is GREAT OPPORTUNITY!” If people are as dumb as I think they are someone, or several perhaps, may come out with something like: “There’s a sucker born every minute.” or “You can’t fool all the people all the time, but you can fool enough to live like a King!” (Ever since Saul became Paul people have been waiting for the end of the world at every turn of the road; I never liked that guy.)
FYI (a’la The More We Look, The More We Think We Find;-)
Interesting read on “New evidence for archaic admixture in African hunter gatherers (Lachance et al. 2012)”
http://dienekes.blogspot.com/2012/07/new-evidence-for-archaic-admixture-in.html
…”There does seem to have been a Big Bang of modern humans which caused the demographical explosion of a particular subset of genetic variation. This Big Bang is often associated with Out-of-Africa, but there are good reasons to doubt the traditional 60,000-year old Out-of-Africa theory, according to which humans from South or East Africa crossed into Arabia and followed the coast to populate the world. We now have more reasons to doubt this: evidence of archaic admixture in both the postulated homelands: South Africa, often cited as the region where the first signs of behavioral modernity appear, and East Africa, where the earliest anatomically modern human fossils appear. My money continues to be on the “two deserts” theory I have proposed some time ago: A green Sahara pumping the ancestors of modern humans pre-100 thousand years ago, and a deteriorating green Arabia pumping them post-70 thousand years ago, with some back-migration into Africa. This would relate the two regions where no evidence (yet?) for archaic humans exist (North Africa and South West Asia), explain the causes of their dispersal (climate change), and harmonize with the evidence for archaic admixture, since the expanding wave of modern humans would partially absorb pre-existing hominins in both Sub-Saharan Africa and across Eurasia…”
PS: NOTE the reference to “Climate Change”;-)
Interesting Note from WUWT:
Something’s happened. From now until Sunday July 29th, around Noon PST, WUWT will be suspending publishing. At that time, there will be a major announcement that I’m sure will attract a broad global interest due to its controversial and unprecedented nature.
From Anthony Watts,
also says not of a personal nature. pg
E.M. says https://chiefio.wordpress.com/t7/#comment-38389
As always thank you for the time to respond. Yes, thought experiments can be tedious, or, if used to simplify or focus on a thought, they can be ok. At any rate I thought of a much easier way to express my thought /question. (Most of my creative assertions, like “Davids Law” are really questions)
1. CO2 is capable of INCREASING the residence time of ground RADIATED energy, and therfore, minus convection, evaporation, cloud formation, etc, etc, it MAY produce some warming.
2. Via radiation, CO2 is capable of DECREASING the resdence time of CONDUCTED energy in the atmosphere.
I should really just stop there. Number two is NOT acknowldged by ANYONE that I have talked to.
Logically, much of the energy, especially in the lower atmosphere, is conducted. The non GHGs do not radiate much at all at average atmosphere T, but they can conduct energy just fine. As a matter of fact, non GHG can NOT send ANY energy to space, so that energy can conduct and convect around for AS LONG as it wishes, but it will not leave the system except by radiation. That conducted energy is perfectly capable of energizing a CO2 molecue, which is then perfectly capable of radiating away that energy, shortening the residence time of said eneregy, and cooling the atmosphere faster then if it conducted said energy to a non GHG where it could not radiate that energy anywhere.
(I could well be very wrong, but in either case I think I deserve a nobel prize as much as Al Gore.)
(-;
@David; after giving a prize to Al Gore for being totally wrong and Barack Obama for doing nothing, I’m not sure a Nobel is worth much. Now the committee has wasted so much money, they have now cut the funds awarded in half. A Nobel is not much of a prize any more. pg
Have you seen the Olympics´Inaguration…cool, but, who the heck designed this?:
Any kid drawing such a thing would be sent to the psychologist inmediately!
Anyway, as Karl G.Jung said: sometimes a “symbol” constellates, it reveals a “sign of the times”, a grave social illness.
Reaching a strange limit:
Here is a link to what may be an interesting development on the study of Neanderthal genes in modern humans.
http://cofcc.org/2012/07/african-genome-project-shows-unknown-hominid-ancestor/ Note, however, the unfortunate typo “However, humans below the Saharan Desert do have posses any Neanderthal DNA.” I believe that should be “do not have”. Looks like at least some of the sub-Saharan groups do not have Neanderthal, but do have some genes from a previously unknown ancestor.
More info at http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092867412008318 Much of this info is over my head; please correct me if someone has a better understanding of this.
I received an invite to an Independent Institute event you might find of interest-
“I am delighted to invite you to the Milton Friedman Centennial to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Milton Friedman’s birthday.
Milton Friedman received the Nobel Prize in Economics Sciences, and The Economist magazine has designated him as “the greatest economist of the last century.” Celebrations are being held in many important institutions across the United States and around the world, and here is my article on the life and influence of Milton Friedman.
“Milton Friedman (1912-2006),” by David J. Theroux
http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=1853
The Milton Friedman Centennial will be held next Wednesday, August 1st, at 7:30 p.m., in Building 152 at NASA Research Park, in Mountain View, CA 94305.
Click to access 2012-8-1-friedman.pdf
Among the speakers will be the following:
Gregory Rehmke, Program Director for Economic Thinking; Student Programs Consultant, The Independent Institute
Vernor Vinge, Professor of Mathematics Emeritus, San Diego State University; author of A Deepness in the Sky, winner of the Hugo Award and Prometheus Award
John Chisholm, Trustee, Santa Fe Institute
José Cordeiro, Venezuela Director, The Millennium Project
David Friedman, Professor of Law, University of Santa Clara; son of Milton Friedman (by video)
Patri Friedman, Co-Founder, Future Cities Development Corporation; grandson of Milton Friedman (by video)
Registration is FREE and to reserve your ticket(s), please go here:
http://MiltonFriedman2012.EventBrite.com/
We hope that you will join with us and share in a champagne toast for Milton Friedman.
Best regards”
E.M.
This might tickle your interest
http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2012/07/25/cg-filedate-timeline/
@E.M. Very interesting:
Reply: Once it hit the anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic rant it pretty much gets snipped. Now you get time-out too. -E.M.Smith
E.M.
You’ve been suggested as a source
“Joanne Nova
July 30, 2012 at 3:14 pm · Reply
Can anyone help me and find out the percentage of global GHCN sites located at airports?”
More at http://joannenova.com.au/2012/07/blockbuster-anthony-watts-squewers-muller-best-and-the-surface-record-all-in-one-paper/#comment-1097588
Comment #9
——————————————————————————–
adolfogiurfa
Maybe this Olympics symbol design was put together in honor of the 1936 games in which he Olympic Flame was, for the first time, brought to the Olympic Village by a torch relay, with the starting point in Olympia, Greece. There is a certain resemblance to a prevalent political symbol of that era.
(-; Maybe I’m reading too much in to it :-)
@Another Ian:
Thanks, I dropped a comment and some links there…
@Tckev & Adolfo:
You talking about this one?
http://maxkeiser.com/2012/07/12/london-olympic-symbol/ ;-)
Or the one here that looks more like some buildings collapsed in an earthquake?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/hi/other_sports/olympics_2012/6718243.stm
I’ll have to come back a bit later to catch up on the other comments…
@Adolfo:
I’m all for the New World Order of the Masons as reputedly described on the $1 bill. The Masonic movement was to cast off the rule of Kings and Popes and put power into the hands of the people. America IS the New World Order desired by the Masons of 1700… We don’t have a King, aristocracy, etc. and don’t need them.
Oh, and have I reminded you lately that my Father-In-Law was a 3 rd Degree Mason? That I’ve thought of joining them? That they do good works? That every single one I’ve met has been a decent person?
So maybe, just maybe, the paranoia about Masons is not going to go very far with me?
Frankly, I’d rather the Masons were running things than the collection of rent-seekers and socialists in the UN…
The biggest risk facing the world is NOT the New World Order from the Masons, but the resurgence of the Old World Order of un-elected bureaucrats responsible to an aristocracy… as in the UN and EU and China…
The video then goes into an anti-Zionist rant. Have you already forgotten my admonishment to NOT do another anti-semitic posting or even one looking close to it? Welcome to a hiatus…
Let me make it perfectly clear (AGAIN): Attacking, insulting, insinuating, or even HINTING at an anti-semitic message is NOT acceptable here. I have Jewish relatives. I am in favor of the State of Israel (and technically that makes me a Zionist). Rants aimed at Israel and / or Jews and / or Zionism (in the sense of believing Jews belong in Israel) are cause for being banned.
You were warned once. This makes twice. There will not be a third time.
I don’t know why (given how broad range of topics I allow) but for some reason you simply can not stay away from the ONE thing I’ve absolutely forbidden. Oh Well…
E.M. FY sort of I
Interesting local MSM happenings at Jo Nova!
E.M. Addition to above post
http://blogs.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/andrewbolt/index.php/dailytelegraph/comments/fairfax_goes_through_the_floor/
On the London 2012 symbol, IIRC it cost around £500,000 to produce that piece of stupidity. I’m sure that any infant school could have come up with a better one for almost nothing. Still, I did see a government minister being interviewed about it – he said it was good value. Must be true, then….
When contemplating the photograph in “China Daily” of August 1, 2012, page 23 (here: http://pub1.chinadaily.com.cn/cdpdf/cndy/download.shtml?c=58212), I suddenly wondered why I’ve never seen any photograph or footage showing Japanese NBC troops in Fukushima. Moreover, despite I followed this tragedy quite closely, I’ve also never seen any report to that effect.
@HugoM:
At one time the Japanese constitution forbade them from having a military. Over the years they have grown their national police force into a “Defense Force” as a quasi military, but weak on real military. Haven’t kept track of how things have changed lately. But they likely don’t have a large NBC / CBW capable military force to field…
@SImon:
The money is for getting everyone to Believe! it’s a good idea… a very hard job…
@Another Ian:
I presume you mean:
http://joannenova.com.au/2012/08/major-australian-dailies-disappear-the-muller-conversion-article-opps-404-error/
Yeah, fact check after publish then try to fish it back that Muller wasn’t a real skeptic…
Gotta luv Jo… she finds some of the most interesting stuff and presents it in a nice blend of polite with gutting ;-)
Must be a Celt ;-)
E.M.
That’s the one. But did you also check the Fairfax share price in the next post.
Re “Must be a Celt”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sgian-dubh
E.M.
FYI – an ASPE item
http://blogs.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/andrewbolt/index.php/dailytelegraph/comments/understanding_robert/
E.M
Happenings
http://joannenova.com.au/2012/08/site-hacked/
Interesting bit on internal Brit politics –
“Nick Clegg ‘to announce Lords reform being abandoned’ – The government has proposed almost halving the number of people in the House of Lords The proposals faced opposition from many Tory MPs and speculation has been mounting that the plans would be axed. Lords reform has been a key goal for the Lib Dems, and its failure is likely to raise coalition tensions. There has been speculation that the Lib Dems might drop support for boundary changes in response. Last week, Lib Dem sources told the BBC the reforms were a “red line”, adding “there will be consequences” if they are shelved. Liberal Democrats within the coalition government had pushed for reforms which would have seen 80% of peers elected and the total number of members halved to 450. But 91 Conservative MPs rebelled against the government in a vote in July – the largest such act of defiance since the coalition was formed in 2010…”
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-19149212#
If any Brits are up with the internals and ramifications on this, would be interested in hearing more. (Personally, have thought that the Lords could be smaller and do ‘more’, but with ‘total’ control being in the Commons, I’m not sure what the Blue Bloods could do to help improve on the Parlimentary System, essentialy a One House Government. Totally in the dark about why anyone would object to making the proposed changes, don’t see the harm at all. Ergo – ???;-)
Pascvaks – those reforms have been mooted frequently in my lifetime. As it stands, the Lords (being unelected and therefore with only their own interests and Public Good at heart) are one of the checks on a party-political House of Commons getting everything their own way, and thus screwing up the country too quickly. Of course, each government tries to stack this in their favour by adding more Lords who they think agree with them, but since it’s for life rather than a 5-year term they can’t swing things too much. As with your system, there are a few votes for sale but the majority (I think and hope) do tend to stand for principles rather than party politics. The Queen has no official power and must sign into law what the House of Commons say, but she can delay things and make life difficult for things that are too stupid, and thus can embarrass the government – another little check. After 60 years of doing the job and a dozen Prime Ministers she’s probably got a lot more idea of what’s good than most of them.
In order to seem like they are doing a job, governments always want to run reforms and change taxation rules, education, fill in the blanks…. What seems to be missed in this is that what businesses want is stability, what education needs is stability whilst keeping up with new information, and if they change the tax loopholes then lawyers will soon find a new set – rinse and repeat. I heard there were 300,000 accountants in the UK alone – that’s a lot of work being done to keep up with the changing rules, yet in essence that work has no benefit in the way of actually producing something to sell.
My idea here is that, before trying to reform things, it’s necessary to see whether the system is broken first. In the case of parliamentary reforms, I don’t think it’s really broken. The Lords only delay things when it’s not a good idea. The extra time to think and get round things is probably a Good Thing. It’s expensive, maybe, but whereas it’s nice to have a fast car, if the brakes don’t work you’re in trouble – here the Lords are the brakes.
Tongariro erupts?
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/08/possible-eruption-reported-at-new-zealands-tongariro/
@Another Ian:
Nice knife… I have my Father In Law’s Sykes-Fairbairn. Given to him by his Brit squad. (He was 101st Airborne, but ‘went in’ on D-Day as liaison to a British Glider group. They gave him one of “their knives” as a token of appreciation. Yes, it was used. He informed me it was a rather good knife…
He later ended up attached to the 82nd Airborne for a while (as he could not get back to “his unit” after post D-Day events, but was back with the 101st at some point. Made the drop into Arnhem. (He swapped from “glider specialty” to “paratrooper” because they had better boots… Keeping your feet warm mattered rather a lot…)
Eventually ended up at Bastogne. Yeah, that Bastogne. Marching in while everyone else was marching out… Said it was nice of Patton to show up, but they were doing fine keeping the German Army busy… It’s an attitude thing…
So that knife was with him from initial Glider Entry, to wandering the countryside, to 82nd Airborne attachment, to Arnhem, to Bastogne, to…
He’d been told to be on standby for redeploy to the invasion of Japan when we nuked them. I have no qualms at all about the decision to use the nukes. My wife would most likely not exist if we had not used them.
At some point I’d like to find out what British Unit he was attached to as Liaison Officer. ( He was a Drill Sargent for the 101st prior to D-Day…) But I don’t know quite how to proceed.
At any rate, it was an interesting career.
When I met him, he sold cameras at a local camera store. Nice “old guy” with white hair. Sitting over the dinning room table we ‘were talking’ and ‘asked the question’ about what he did in W.W.II. When he told me about the gliders and 101st connection it was, er, “interesting”… Here I am looking at this kindly older guy and realizing he could likely take me down and not break a sweat in the process. He very calmly described the “Rommel’s Asparagus” poles put up to stop glider landings and how they put them in lines (typical German Orderliness); so they just lined up between them and broke the wings off the plane… What kind of person just calmly plans to break their airplane on landing by whacking into poles?…
I didn’t ask enough about what he’d done. I thought we had more time, and he wasn’t all that interested in remembering those times. ( Planning weddings for his twin daughters being more pleasant). Ah, well. It’s largely in the history books. Other than the bit where he ran around with the Brits for a while.
Knives have an interesting tendency to remember history…
Per the Aspe link:
Interesting. I’ve “been there”. Pondering how aerodynamics and wings work while other folks were playing marbles and getting pissed at me for not caring about their chest pounding…
Per Jo getting hacked:
Just dumb. Any major site will just do a ‘roll back’ to prior to the hack and ‘press on’. Lots of logging going on these days, too…
@Pascvaks:
Interesting. So further attempts to “Democratize” (so as to suborn the ability of prudence to prevent raiding the public purse) finally getting a bit of push-back…
FWIW, the purpose of a “House Of Lords” (and what our Senate was supposed to be) is as a counterweight to the “Will of the People”. To prevent the 51% from voting to fleece the 49%.
Anything that acts to remove or diminish that counterweight accelerates the slide into a Welfare State / Socialism / Collapse and the eventual follow-on of Tyranny.
Don’t know how much the House Of Lords has already been hobbled, but hobbling it even more is not a good thing. (And having them be elected is catastrophic to their purpose – much as our move to electing Senators has resulted in steady growth of Nanny State Government and The Welfare State… centralized power and control).
@Simon:
Yup.
@R. de Haan:
Well… Hope it isn’t part of a ‘trend’…
@Simon-
Did what I should have before I asked the question and did a little reading on The House a’Lairds, interesting how time changes things. Doesn’t look like the Blue Bloods have faired well in the last hundred years and the coming century doesn’t look any better. As EM points out, more’s the pitty. I’m only guessing, reading between the lines, but if the upper house has so many members, it sounds like few get together on a regular basis. I guess they use a Time Clock to check in and out in order to get their credit for time served and per deim/travel pay. Seems the Turf War between the Houses has quite a history, little wonder things have changed; would be nice if y’all had a Constitution (on paper, about as long as ours;-) judging from human history One Super House is bad for balance, no checks = no constraints.
Pascvaks – the excuse for the removal of these checks and balances is that it is “more efficient” and saves money. Personally, I feel that the less they actually do the better the country will work, and they should really spend some time repealing superceded laws rather than keep adding to them. As far as I know, it’s still illegal for a London black cab to omit to have a bale of hay in the boot to feed his horse when he’s waiting. I probably break several laws each day without ever knowing about them – have you seen the quantity of the UK and European laws that we’re supposed to keep? It would take a lifetime to learn them all (but at least you’d be pretty certain of being legal whilst doing that).
I think a full-time parliamentarian Lord would not earn a dramatic amount in comparison to what they could earn in the City, so on the whole it’s going to be done through either a feeling of civic duty or political ambitions. Not perfect, but better than an elected upper house where there’s essentially no difference in timescale between the two houses. With both houses elected, any current cock-up can (and will) be blamed on the last administration, and any incipient cock-up can be put off being outed until after the election, so it’s Somebody Else’s Problem.
Occasionally there’s been talk of giving the UK a Constitution. It’s unlikely that this would get passed by the current crop of politicians since it would cramp their style somewhat. We still have the Magna Carta, though.
Slide 5 in a July PG&E report indicates tier 1 electrical prices will be $.173 kwh in 2022.
http://apps.pge.com/regulation/SearchResults.aspx?NewSearch=True&CaseID=1153&DocType=&PartyID=4&fromDate=MM%2FDD%2FYY&toDate=MM%2FDD%2FYY&sortOrder=FileName¤tPage=1&recordsPerPage=100&searchDocuments=Search
E.M.
Re (typical German Orderliness);
I knew a bloke who had been in the first siege of Tobruk. Supplies were tight. German mine laying prescribed mines on an organised layout. Source of mines – work out the layout and dig up. Relaying was also supposed to be on a layout, but if the digging was hard, then the layout was ammended.
They did amazing things with Bren carriers too.
@Another Ian:
Dad was a Combat Engineer in W.W.II and spent a fair amount of time laying mines and taking up mines, building bridges, blowing up bridges, and disarming bridges… I have great respect for folks who can take up mines and redeploy them…
Mom’s family was in Britain. She was, at 17 or so, an air raid warden. Yup, when air raids started, she went out into them to assure everyone else was getting out of them… Had a story of coming home one evening and walking past her friends house… which was gone, just a crater… and her friend with it.
What the Brits did with small tracked vehicles was amazing. Frankly, the sheer inventiveness of the place was totally unexpected by the Germans and likely won the war ( help from Yanks being assumed by me in this scenario). From the Mosquito that was made by furniture makers to the STEN gun made by bicycle and plumbing shops to the Rolls Royce Engine (with the novel valve design of rotary sleeves) that let the P-51 Mustang become a decent fighter… not to mention all the “deception” campaign, the invention of the Jet Engine, the use of computers in code breaking, the…
What the Germans did not appreciate was the value of unpredictability and that “order” can be used against you. “Emergent Behaviour” trumps “Central Planning” every time. Even in war. Yes, you need some central authority ‘giving orders’ ( the Celts learned that one the hard way) but how to implement is best left open. (USSR learned that one the hard way in their economy).
Once Upon A Time I worked at a local semiconductor company as a production planner. They decided to “control phone expenses” via putting passwords on the ability to make long distance phone calls. You had to type in a 5 digit number to activate and then the calls were tracked to your phone and to YOU personally. One evening I was a bit bored. I needed to make a call and a friend let me use his line. I noticed the numbers were “sort of similar” to mine in an ill defined way. Later that evening, after about 2 hours with a note pad, matrix, thinking a bit, and testing a dozen numbers ( on random desk phones so nothing would be tracked to me, my area, or flagged to any one poor random person, if they were tracking ‘fails’ at all) I had cracked the pattern. They had used a mathematical pattern to hand out valid codes…
From that; point onward, I could walk up to any phone, think a moment, and type in a valid code. Different phone each time if I so desired. (Just for fun, I placed a couple of long distance calls to a couple of choice U.S.Military locations… So whoever was auditing phone usage had to wonder who was watching whom ;-) Called the White House once… ) It wasn’t even that hard a formula, either. Something like (Phone# x 3) -2 or some such… It ended up being a regular repeat on a square grid of phone numbers. ( The first two gave me a clue, then I filled in more via some sporadic “directed brute force” trials, then deduced the pattern ‘in a flash’ and tested.)
Have I mentioned lately that it’s a bad idea to annoy the Geek? ;-)
The Brits had a working Radar system during the Battle of Britain. Helped them to vector the few fighters they had to the best effect against the Luftwaffe. The Germans did not and had a very hard time getting fighters up into the Allied bomber squadrons that were at altitude. pg
GOOOD Geek, Nice Geek, Down boy. Have a cooky. Ha, Ha, Ha.
One must be careful. Nice guys are the last to finish. 8-) pg
Annoying a geek is almost as bad as annoying the little smiling monk with the broom.
E.M.
A bit more on British radar (from “Most Secret War” by R.V. Jones). Jones could tell from signal stability whether the radar was British or German – British being less stable. But the motto was “Second best tomorrow”, with field upgrades by soldering iron, not retooling the factory.
Ahhh Yes! Climate and Anthropology, like bread and butter, strawberries and cream, Mutt and Jeff, ya jus’ can’t have one without the other and really be in. FYI fello Anthro Pols –
http://dienekes.blogspot.com/2012/08/climate-history-of-africa-150-30ka.html
Climate History Of Africa (150-30ka)
“This is an extremely important article for anyone wishing to understand the climate history of Africa during the time of the emergence of modern humans. I’m no climatologist, so the arguments about glaciation cycles, currents, monsoons, orbital cycles, etc. go mostly over my head. But, I did manage to glean some useful information from the article:
1. Climate change in Africa was asynchronous; where one region may have experienced a wet phase, another one may have experienced a dry one. Moreover, its variations did not correspond perfectly with Marine Isotope Stages and glaciation cycles.
2. The impact of wet and dry phases may be different by region. A wet phase in the Sahara means more vegetation and game, and more people; by contrast, a wet phase in a tropical region means more and denser rainforest, and more hardship.
3. The middle regions of Africa were more shielded from climate change than either north or south Africa: human occupation appears more even; however, West and East Africa seem to have been following opposite trajectories: “Relative site abundances in tropical Africa increase during one period of aridity (~115-90 ka), and in East Africa decline during the comparable interval of humidity (~110-95 ka).”
“A quote from the paper: “”Hominin dispersals to Eurasia via northern Africa have also been linked to humid intervals (Osbourne et al., 2008; Drake et al., 2011). From ~30-75 ka, North Africa experienced arid climate regimes. The Sahara expanded 65-50 ka and the demographic data imply abandonment of the interior of North Africa during this time (Fig. 15), suggesting that dispersals from North Africa occurred prior to 75 ka. This finding is at odds with hypotheses that posit a dispersal timing of ca. 60 ka (Mellars, 2006), or a dispersal origin in the South African Howiesons Poort industry at 65-60 ka (Marean, 2010), although a ca. 65-60 ka dispersal could well have occurred from East Africa over the Bab el-Mendeb, as humid conditions dominated the latter region between 80 and 65 ka. The timing of the humid intervals in North Africa (~135-115 ka and ~105-75 ka) corresponds with those in the Levant (54a) (Vaks et al., 2007), providing multiple opportunities for one or more earlier hominin dispersals out of Africa via the Sahara, or an early exodus from East Africa to Arabia over the Bab el Mendeb (e.g., Rose et al., 2011). This pattern does not rule out possible migrations from this region during either the earlier or the later interval through the Nile Valley. However, during the ~105-75 ka humid interval in North Africa, East Africa (where the sources of the Nile occur) was largely under an arid climate regime, except for a narrow window ~80 ka when both northern and eastern Africa were experiencing humid climates (Fig. 15), placing a more restricted temporal window on dispersal via the Nile Valley. We note that although only one out of Africa event is recorded in the modern human genome (e.g., Prugnolle et al., 2005), this fact is not inconsistent with earlier multiple migration and extinction events using any of these routes, with only a single lineage surviving to the present.”” It will probably take me a while to digest the information in this paper, but I’m definitely glad that someone thought to write it…”
_______
Enjoy;-)
Two M4+ quakes on the Whittier fault zone near Yorba Linda in the past 24 hours. Worth paying attention to.
Politics is dirty business. There is no comparison to what most people are familiar with and what Chicago politics is like. Think of the difference between making pancakes or french toast at home in a clean kitchen on a Sunday morning and making sausage in a big city water sanitation department cess pool farm and, in this go gound a fella named Romney is the 10% USDA Grade A Prime Meat ingredient (the rest is ‘filler’). I knew it was coming. I could smell it coming. This country has no idea what is going to happen in the next two months; well no one that is except the folks of, in, from Chicago. The dirt and lies, the money and graft, the blood and guts, the sleeze and crap is only just beginning. (War’s hell but Peace can be worse sometimes;-) Say good night Gracie. “Good Night Gracie!”
@Crosspatch:
A double tap of 4.x quakes, near Disneyland / Anaheim has them shut down the park:
http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/recenteqsus/Quakes/ci15189073.html
Heard on Bloomberg about the shutdown of the park.
Wonder if they know something or are just being paranoid…
The whole west coast is more active then usual. Somebody must have slammed the door. pg
E.M.
A tide rising on our local scene
http://joannenova.com.au/2012/08/allegations-about-our-pm-raging-across-the-internet-around-australia/
Check the Pickering links
Ahhhh yes, more on the origin of our species. Remember Darwin and the ‘survival of the fittest’? Well there seems to be a little more twist to it these days in the field of genetics: ‘proximity makes for strange bedfellows’, or ‘survival of the horniest’, or ‘admixture made us who we are today and who we’re likely to be tomorrow’. More details at –
http://dienekes.blogspot.com/2012/08/neandertals-converging-with-modern.html
Neandertals Converging With Modern Humans, Not Evolving Separately
“In my discussion of Di Vincenzo et al. (2012) and Freidline et al. (2012), I noted how Neandertals appeared to be converging towards a modern human form; this seemed to occur both with respect to the ancestral forms usually assigned to the taxon H. heidelbergensis, but also with respect to earlier Neandertals. Some of the most “modern-looking” Neandertals are late specimens such as Vindija (the main source of the Neandertal genome), and these often appear more similar to modern humans than many earlier (pre-100ka) specimens… Neandertals and modern humans do not appear to diverge from each other phenotypically as time goes by: rather they seem to converge; they increasingly become more modern-like as time goes by…. I am strongly leaning towards acceptance of something quite akin to multiregionalism; it is almost certainly true in a sense: the evidence for widespread archaic admixture it irrefutable. On the other hand, there does seem to have been a Big Bang in human evolution, associated with mtDNA haplogroup L3, Y-haplogroup BT, and the reduced genetic diversity observed in Eurasians relative to Africans. But this appears to have been more akin to the success of a particular local population within a widespread species, rather than the emergence of an altogether new species.”
________
People like people and … and … and …;-)
@Pascvaks:
One of the most useful things I learned in my genetics classes was that the GENE has an evolutionary life of its own. It explains so much…
So when a valuable gene evolves, it rapidly spreads to any similar population. Detrimental genes tend to be edited out. Those beneficial genes can end up in “closely related” species too. ( “Horizontal Gene Flow” is much more common than most folks think).
Oddly, by definition we say that a hybridizing event can not create a new species. Even though we can demonstrate with real world examples that hybridizing is exactly the way we get the “big bang” species forming events. (Either as an obvious hybrid or as ‘horizontal gene flow’ of some specific genes).
To take the mustards, cabbages, and turnips. 3 different species families. Those three can all mutually cross, and give us 3 OTHER species families (with chromosome doubling). Not a hypothetical at all; but the foundation of many of our food crops. ( Siberian Kale has even been recreated ‘from scratch’ via hybridizing two specific varieties of the other species).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_of_U
So an article that talks about this related to human evolution is “New!” and “Exciting!” in the context of anthropology, but is “old hat” in terms of what geneticists know about gene flow in other species…
One example:
The “Blue Eyes Gene” is thought to have come into existence near the area of Sweden about 10,000 years ago. (It’s actually a wider range on the guess with the near end something like 6000 years). Yet I have met a lady here in California who is about as “Black African” as you can get, but with bright blue eyes. A very striking look (though she was clearly sensitive about it, sadly). So that particular gene had split off from the rest of the Nordic package and done quite a bit of traveling…
If it confers selective advantage (even just guys ‘noticing’ can be enough) then it will eventually dominate. If it confers selective disadvantage (even just superstitious folks killing blue eyed babies – that was reportedly done some time ago in Africa) then the gene will die out. If the gene is beneficial in one group, and detrimental in another, you get divergent evolution ( like skin color. Nordics need white to make enough Vit-D and avoid rickets, Africans need black to reduce skin cancer. In between needs brown for the best mix of both.)
In the case of Humans, my thesis is just that the African type brought one set of “good things” while the Neanderthal type bought another set of “good things” and when the two mixed, we got the “big bang” into modern humans. The African type was more gracile, but also more violent. The Neanderthals where more robust and likely more quiet / polite / thoughtful (all that time sitting in quiet cold caves in the ice…) Blend the two, you get the very large, tall and relatively flexible / gymnastic moderns, but with a larger brain case and more ‘thought time’… but coupled with a more aggressive war like African behaviour set. And we result. Rapidly dominating the world with our strong / gymnastic set, smarter brains, and aggressive character.
Some individuals retain more of the Neanderthal mix (or have it re-assemble by accident of gene drift) and we get the barrel chested Santa Clause like folks. Longer face with deeper texture to the facial structure. Pleasant and jolly and not gracile. Some get more of the African mix, and we get long legs, slim and athletic; but a bit more aggressive… Shorter / smaller face and softer features.
At any rate, you end up with gene flow any time there are two species close to each other genetically. People are no different.
EM-
Thanks for the look-see and feedback. Interesting stuff. Funny, but the more we think we learn form all our ‘guesswork’ in science these days, the more we seem to be uncovering people just like us. I wonder when God really created Adam & Whatshername, it seems the trick was done farther back than I thought;-) In a related sort of way, and I have no basis for this conclusion, merely a guess: Denisovans were a little more inviting and ‘fun loving’ than Neanderthals. (Just a swag on the basis of current population groups;-)
Thanks Again!
I see that Helen Gurley Brown has gone to her reward. She was the perpetrator of MS Magazine, likely the single most effective external destroyer of marriages in the ’70s.
How can I say a thing like that?
Here is how it worked. MS Magazine published a column which I called the crime of the month, spouse du jour called it something like “The Failings” although I’m sure that I will recall the actual words in the split second after I hit Post Comment.
She would get home before I did, due to the overtime i was working and she wasn’t. The magazine would be there and she would head straight for “The Failing”. The failing would almost always be something that we men do which somehow burdens women – always. It was never made up, although I suspect women with successful marriages wrote it off as cost of doing business – so to speak. And I don’t have any delusions that there aren’t plenty of iniquities in marriage – mostly favoring men.
As you might imagine, i can handle my end of a discussion/argument. Accordingly, the issue of the month was never raised until 3 in the morning. I would be awakened by a heavy thump on my chest, and then groggily attempt to muster some semblance of consciousness. I would hear what could only have been a carefully crafted speech on the presence in my behavior of the “Failing” of the month and its adverse impact on “Our Relationship.”
By the way, if any youngster (younger than 40) is reading this, be advised that if you ever hear the term “Our Relationship” uttered by your main squeeze, it’s over and has been for the month or two it’s taken for her to broach the subject. May I recommend an amicable, but permanent separation . No matter what you may have read in the supermarket cash-register line, it is possible and highly preferable. After all, anyone can make a mistake, even your spouse.
But back to my sad tale. After a series of these episodes, I began to recognize their periodicity. I chose the day after one of these to ask around the office if anyone else had been accused of the “Failing of the Month.” I found two guys. We stopped at the Four Farthings on the way home and eventually identified the source, MS Magazine.
I got into the stored copies, found the articles and recognized the pattern. Spouse was no fool, University of Chicago grad in something difficult and Architect from top school. It took a few more years for “US” to spin down and part – amicably. And now I’m married to the best possible woman for someone like me, and amazingly someone I grew up with.
But as for Helen Gurley Brown, i hope, indeed pray, that her reward includes a fist in the chest at 3:00 AM with a recitation of her “Failings.”
You all may wonder why I’m suddenly so loquacious. It’s easy. We’re anchored in our boat out in Lake Montauk. It is sunny. temp is in the low 80s. AND i have finished a code and hardware project that has consumed my Idle (term of art for retirees) hours for 8 months. Written in C++ which I had no real clue about when I started and running on hardware i built – and it works.
OOPS. Not Helen Gurley Brown. Helen Gurley Brown, forgive me. please forgive me.
I stand by my observations about MS Magazine, but it turns out that was someone else’s product.
Helen Gurley Brown did Cosmopolitan. I have some observations about Cosmo, most of which speak to the thought behind some of the most astonishing questions I was ever asked by a date and which apparently originated in its pages.
i doubt that I could reconstruct any of them within the constraints of propriety in force at E.M.’s
too bad for your prurient interests.
Finally, I do these stupid things like confusing MS and Cosmopolitan magazines and slandering Helen Gurley Brown, who was very definitely NOT one of the enemy, so that the rest of you will feel comfortable that none of you could be the dumbest commenter here as long as ferguson is around.
Fukushima butterflies? http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-19245818
Big One (7.7) in Sea of Okhotsk.
More details from
http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/recenteqsww/Quakes/usc000bz29.php
Earthquake Details
This event has been reviewed by a seismologist.
Magnitude 7.7
Date-Time Tuesday, August 14, 2012 at 02:59:42 UTC
Tuesday, August 14, 2012 at 12:59:42 PM at epicenter
Time of Earthquake in other Time Zones
Location 49.784°N, 145.126°E
Depth 625.9 km (388.9 miles)
Region SEA OF OKHOTSK
Distances 158 km (98 miles) ENE of Poronaysk, Russia
226 km (140 miles) ENE of Shakhtersk, Russia
236 km (146 miles) ENE of Uglegorsk, Russia
243 km (150 miles) ESE of Aleksandrovsk-Sakhalinskiy, Russia
Location Uncertainty horizontal +/- 14.5 km (9.0 miles); depth +/- 6.9 km (4.3 miles)
Parameters NST=999, Nph=999, Dmin=>999 km, Rmss=0.68 sec, Gp= 14°,
M-type=”moment” magnitude from initial P wave (tsuboi method) (Mi/Mwp), Version=B
Source Magnitude: USGS NEIC (WDCS-D)
Location: USGS NEIC (WDCS-D)
Event ID usc000bz29
_____
WEHW42 PHEB 140311
TIBHWX
HIZ001>003-005>009-012>014-016>021-023>026-140511-
TSUNAMI INFORMATION STATEMENT NUMBER 1
NWS PACIFIC TSUNAMI WARNING CENTER EWA BEACH HI
511 PM HST MON AUG 13 2012
TO – CIVIL DEFENSE IN THE STATE OF HAWAII
SUBJECT – TSUNAMI INFORMATION STATEMENT
THIS STATEMENT IS FOR INFORMATION ONLY. NO ACTION REQUIRED.
AN EARTHQUAKE HAS OCCURRED WITH THESE PRELIMINARY PARAMETERS
ORIGIN TIME – 0500 PM HST 13 AUG 2012
COORDINATES – 49.7 NORTH 145.3 EAST DEPTH 582KM
LOCATION – SEA OF OKHOTSK
MAGNITUDE – 7.2 MOMENT
EVALUATION
BASED ON ALL AVAILABLE DATA A DESTRUCTIVE PACIFIC-WIDE TSUNAMI IS
NOT EXPECTED AND THERE IS NO TSUNAMI THREAT TO HAWAII. REPEAT. A
DESTRUCTIVE PACIFIC-WIDE TSUNAMI IS NOT EXPECTED AND THERE IS NO
TSUNAMI THREAT TO HAWAII.
THIS WILL BE THE ONLY STATEMENT ISSUED FOR THIS EVENT UNLESS
ADDITIONAL DATA ARE RECEIVED.
$$
@J. Ferguson;
Maybe I can start a thread on “Is C++ Really Worth if for old non-C++ programmers to learn?”….
I’ve managed product development (all the way through to ship and support) of a software product using C++; but for the life of me still don’t see any real advantage to it over any other method of programming. Large library of ‘methods’ to memorize or you end up re-writing them. Seems a lot like quasi-fancy subroutine calling near as I can tell…
Oh, and prone to built in ‘code-bloat’ as all sorts of things load all sorts of other things until something eventually decides to do something…
Maybe I’m just being old fashioned… (Then again, I’ve always resented that C doesn’t have I/O built in but has it glued on as functions you call… Yes, I know, keeps the compiler smaller… but we’re not running on PDP-11 class machines any more… a big compiler is OK if it makes MY life easier…)
@Pascvaks:
Oh, I just posted a comment with the details on the quake thread… ought to have checked here first…
I came across Martin Roscheisen’s, former CEO of Nanosolar and a few internet companies, web blog recently and you might find his thoughts on Nanosolar’s history of interest. http://blog.rmartinr.com/
J.F.
enjoying your snippets. and envy your sailing.
b
E.M.
You may be interested in this little piece on the last 10,000 years of climate has not been as stable as leading IPCC scientists assume. (No, really)
Plenty of evidence of solar cycles, except that event 8,200 year ago.
http://notrickszone.com/2012/08/15/millennium-cycles-new-paper-reveals-clear-solar-impact-on-the-climate-7000-years-ago/#comment-139118
@Tkev: Perhaps 8,200 years ago there the offices of the UN were in Florida. :-)
@Tckev:
I’m settling in on the notion that there is a solar cycle ( about 179 years) and a Lunar / Tidal cycle (about 1500-1800 years – the Bond Event period) and a Taurid Storm cycle (about 3000 years) with the sporadic “rock fall from space” causing things like the Younger Dryas…
Not sure how the 8.2 kyr even fits with the various cycle… Maybe I need to do a bit of a ‘dig here’ into known causes of the 8.2 kyr event.. IIRC if falls on one of the Bond Event peaks.
I just stumbled across this article on Fox about an attempt to discover the path of billions of dollars that the State Department funneled into combating AGW.
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/08/15/exclusive-state-department-oversight-climate-change-spending-abroad-is-mess/
The “mess” appears to be much more extensive then just the State Department.
In the spending of the stimulus funds, the administration said that they “could not” say where $40 billion of the money went. pg
Here is a quick four minute blast from the past: we have just passed the 41st anniversary of Nixon’s announcement that the US was unilaterally ending the Bretton Woods agreement. http://dailybail.com/home/watch-tricky-dick-end-the-us-gold-standard-1971.html
Jason Calley
Re Breton Woods – a friend sent this
@Another Ian & Jason:
Nixon was (and thought of himself as) a “Progressive Republican”. They usually end up buggering the money… (Along with the 55 mph speed limit and screwing around with the clocks so kids were getting up to go to school in the dark… so much idiocy in just one president…)
In defense of leaving the gold standard:
There were two things going on that were “speculators” but not of the usual financial sort. Both were causing problems. First off, France took us up on the offer to convert the currency to gold. They began hoovering up dollars from around the world and asking for shiploads of gold. A huge amount had already been sent over, we’d ask DeGaul to please not push it, and the response was to say they were going to grab as much as they could…
At the same time, the USSR was “not our friend” and they were one of the major suppliers of gold to the market. So they started “playing games” like having a giant sale once per year. The volatility of gold is high anyway, and that just made it worse. Basically, we put control of the “money supply” in the hands of our arch enemy… Not Good.
With that said, I think the cure was worse than the disease… and AFTER Tricky Dick left the gold standard, inflation ramped up and chewed the dollar down to about 5 cents on the Old Dollar today…
@P.G.Sharrow:
Maybe I need to find a friend in a foreign country to apply for a “Global Warming” grant who can then funnel some of the money to me to support me “research” ;-) With buckets of money as big as they are losing, I could be very happy with a bit of ‘slop’… nothing big. One, two Million Max!
@ Another Ian and E.M.
Verrrrrry interesting video, Ian, and good points, E.M.! I do not think I had ever seen the De Gaul video before. That was from ’65 and Nixon made his announcement in ’71 — six years between them. It would be interesting to know whether France issued the warning before or after they started “hoovering up dollars.” Perhaps, seeing that the US would not stop running up unpayable debts (even after a warning) they felt that they were justified in taking advantage of the terms of the Bretton Woods agreement.
something EVIL this way comes!!!!! again.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/9480372/Genetically-engineering-ethical-babies-is-a-moral-obligation-says-Oxford-professor.html
@Jerry:
Let him start with the children of Politicians, Lawyers, and College Professors. If that works out well, they can get back to the rest of us in a generation or two…
(I clicked the poll in the article. 80% said it was unethical… ;-)
@Jason:
http://goldnews.bullionvault.com/gold_dollar_France_Sarkozy_de_Gaulle_crisis_111020072
That $150 Million worth was at that time measured in Silver Dollars… I make it about 4.28 MILLION ounces of gold at the then common rate while now that would be $7 Billion … in one year… from one country… and others were looking at it thinking “Hmmmm…..”
Basically it was a legal ‘run on the bank’ draining Fort Knox. Over the dozen or so years of the pre-Nixon door slam, I’d guess about (present value) $50 Billion of Bullion was shipped to France.
“France is like an ex-wife, the less you have to do with her the better you like her.” (Anom)
That Anom guy was pretty smart; I see his stuff all over the place.
E.M.
I emailed you a pdf of a write-up I did on my project. I have no idea whether it would be of interest to you, but now that I’ve fallen into deep post-partum enui, I’m rummaging around with what to screw up next.
I would want you to remember if you look at my code that my training per se was one short course in Fortran in 1963. All the rest is self-inflicted.
@J. Ferguson:
FWIW my major requirement of code is that it work right. Everything after that is just preening…. And you do NOT want to look at my C coding… especially the I/O sections. (Every time I do a fixed format file read, I have to re-learn how to do it… God Give Me A FORMAT statement in C!…)
So I’ll take a look, not too critically ;-)
@Pascvaks:
But France is so PRETTY! ;-)
An Anom is almost as good as his cousin, Anonymous …(who wrote some great poetry, BTW)
E.M.
In the area of GM cropping
http://www.coyoteblog.com/coyote_blog/2012/08/things-i-did-not-know-2.html#comments
The comments are interesting too.
@ E.M. “Basically it was a legal ‘run on the bank’ draining Fort Knox. Over the dozen or so years of the pre-Nixon door slam, I’d guess about (present value) $50 Billion of Bullion was shipped to France.”
E.M., your google-fu powers are excellent! Yes, that sounds like a “legal run on the bank.” The motive being, of course, to transfer assets from an inflating dollar to a more stable monetary base (gold). If the dollar had only been inflated enough to match increasing global production, the price of silver and gold would have remained stable in relation to dollars and there would have been no advantage to those making a run. But it wasn’t. Why is it that every inquiry into the nature of monetary policies ends in the conclusion that politicians — whether French, German, Russian or American ought not to be entrusted with the authority to mess with the creation of money?!
Some random links that all seem to point to the Euro being rather sicker than ‘Brussels’ would have people think,
German economy
Europe’s tired engine
As the euro zone goes into another recession, Germany is slowing down
http://www.economist.com/node/21560601?fsrc=scn/fb/wl/pe/europestiredengine
Germany may be the country that brings the euro crashing down
Though largely unnoticed in Britain, a political storm is brewing in Germany
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/9484284/Germany-may-be-the-country-that-brings-the-euro-crashing-down.html
Lord Rothschild takes £130m bet against the euro
Lord Rothschild has taken a near-£130m bet against the euro as fears continue to grow that the single currency will break up.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/financialcrisis/9484435/Lord-Rothschild-takes-130m-bet-against-the-euro.html
And an interesting ‘blast from the past’ that should be required reading for Democrats.
A message from the 1970s on state spending
“We used to think you could spend your way out of recession and increase employment by boosting government spending,”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/liamhalligan/9484414/A-message-from-the-1970s-on-state-spending.html
Jason – dead right. But if we can’t trust the politicians to run the money supply, and we certainly can’t trust the bankers, then who’s going to be a safe pair of hands for this?
Ian W – I suppose we expect the politicians to lie about the state of the economy. The Germans have already been through a period of austerity after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and reunification. The West Germans were heavily taxed in the process of bringing the East up to somewhere close to a reasonable standard, and are understandably weary of being the deep pockets of the EU. The trouble is that they do know that, without the euro, their currency (new DM?) would get strong and they’d lose their markets, so it would be even worse for them. It seems to me that the main problem has been overspending borrowed money, thinking that current conditions will continue for ever (so you pay back in inflated currency less value than you borrowed). One of those things where the centre cannot hold…. I’m expecting, though, that the can will be kicked far enough down the road for some other solution to be found. It does look like they are using hope as a strategy.
Re: “Gordon”
Portugal is a lot like California. Gordon is still an issue in the Eastern Atlantic. Next few days will tell what’s in store for the coast of Western Europe.
http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/graphics_at3.shtml?5-daynl#contents
@E.M. I am sure you know why the Apple OSX Lion does not have the ability to “cut & paste” at the “finder”. I have searched for a solution, there are a few, however if it is not available that posibility it must have a reason.
Re: Neanderthals, Otzi, Moderns, and Greasy Grimey Gopher (Shrew) Guts –
Neandertal Ancestry “Iced”
Wed, 2012-08-15 15:24 — John Hawks
http://johnhawks.net/weblog/reviews/neandertals/neandertal_dna/neandertal-ancestry-iced-2012.html
John Hawks weighs in on recent ‘issues’ with our Caveman Genes. Good Read!
“I’ve been mobbed with e-mails from readers asking about my reaction to the new paper by Anders Eriksson and Andrea Manica in PNAS, titled “Effect of ancient population structure on the degree of polymorphism shared between modern human populations and ancient hominins” [1]. The paper asserts that Neandertal similarity in the genomes of living people outside Africa can be explained only in terms of incomplete lineage sorting from the shared human-Neandertal common ancestral population in Africa. If the paper’s assertions were accurate, we could go back to thinking that all the genetic heritage of people today traces back to Africa, although we would still need to abandon the idea that the African population had undergone a small bottleneck….”
__________
Digestive Evanescence
Sat, 2012-08-18 19:25 — John Hawks
This one is very short but very deep;-)
“”Also in The Guardian, “Strange But True: Science’s Most Improbable Research” includes some taphonomy: “If you like shrews, especially if you like them parboiled, you’ll want to devour a 1994 study published in the Journal of Archaeological Science. Called Human Digestive Effects on a Micromammalian Skeleton, it explains how and why one of its authors – either Brian D Crandall or Peter W Stahl; we are not told which – ate and excreted a 90mm-long (excluding the tail, which added another 24mm) northern short-tailed shrew (Blarina brevicauda).” I’ve always been fascinated by the evidence for hyena digestion on Pleistocene faunal remains — they crunch the bones and their stomachs etch the pieces into all manner of lozenge-like detritus. But I hadn’t thought much about human shrew-eating and the total dissolution of tiny toe bones.
Because who does think about that, really? I mean, besides zooarchaeologists.””
Oooooops…
PS: Link to The Guardian Article (as I said “Digestive Evanescence” was short and I gave you pretty much everthing Hawks said;-)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/aug/19/most-improbable-scientific-research-abrahams
A few posts back today I mentioned Hurricane Gordon and gave a link to NOAA NHC. Another link I look at for the Northern Hemisphere, on occassion, is the following –
http://wxmaps.org/pix/NHanim.html
“The animation shows a sequence of 31 frames representing the state of the 500mb flow at 00Z on successive days. The first 15 frames are past analyses…”
This projection shows Gordon precip, in about 3 days, dumping on the UK, the Benelux, and France. (Doesn’t look too bad on this projection.)
This might be useful during a zombie apocalypse. Here is a report about a bootable linux package for establishing ad-hoc networks. http://mobile.slashdot.org/story/12/08/15/1054246/project-byzantium-zero-to-ad-hoc-mesh-network-in-60-seconds-video
@ Simon Derricutt “But if we can’t trust the politicians to run the money supply, and we certainly can’t trust the bankers, then who’s going to be a safe pair of hands for this?”
If I were Emperor Jason the First, I would do the same thing that was done here in the US for so many similar problems. Decentralize the process. If you cannot trust one man (or small group) to be the only person with weapons, decentralize it, let all men be armed. Can’t trust one person or group to decide on religious matters? Let everyone decide for themselves. Can’t trust one group to create and disseminate all the nation’s money? Decentralize it. End legal tender laws and let anyone who wishes create money. The market will (very quickly, I suspect) decide what standards and format is best for money.
I suspect that many people will immediately react that “but that is anarchy, chaos!” Well, there is no law that says that all computers must use ascii, but in the real world the advantages of standardization were so great that market forces quickly drove the process to wide scale agreement on ascii. From a strictly pragmatic point, it would make sense to implement the change over by starting with a simple end of legal tender laws will still maintaining the current system. Allow the growth of competing monetary systems along side the current system. Market forces would set exchange rates and would decide which type of money is most desired by most people.
While I too would be interested in seeing what the market produced, I suspect that it would be something that was commodity based, or maybe even E.M.’s idea (wasn’t that you, E.M.?) of a unit valued in electric power. Personally, I would probably like something denominated in grams of gold or silver.
Well, here’s an interesting picture:
http://www.imagekind.com/Pig-In-Blue-Turban-art?IMID=cc5d1f86-339e-4ee6-ad6f-08b4a264be77
And these folks are brave enough to reproduce a cartoon:
http://dailycartoonist.com/index.php/2009/06/23/prison-newspaper-featuring-bearded-pig-in-turban-pulled/
At least they didn’t name him Mo’-Ham Ed…
@Mo’-Ham:
Cute, but please assure you do not stray over the line into “offensive”, OK?…
@Ed –
Humor is nearly always offensive to someone. Let’s just say that when a cartoon goes out over the web or in a limited circ newspaper like the NYT (ha, ha;-), the object of the ‘offense’ (s/he who does not laugh or smile) rarely drives into TimesSquare and lights a match to a gas tank, or worse. Freedom of Speech has a grand sounding ring to it does it not? Why in America anyone can walk into a crowded theater and yell FIRE!, right? And it’s OK as long as they say, “Hay! Just Kiddin!”, right?
PS: An old HS teacher said this to me and others a long time ago, I never forgot what he said: “People are telling you how they really feel and think when they joke and kid around, a joke is not a lie.” Nor is a cartoon? Nor the resembelence? Nor the laughter? Nor the anger?
@Pascvaks: Usually “cool” people does not have sense of humor so, most of the time, we are to blame. BTW: Is it a joke or is it something serious? @Mom…, made me think that there is something serious matter behind everything that is blamed on that religion….”Novus Ordo Seclorum?. Perhaps the cause is that the kind of NYT people want us and everybody, from the times of the FR on, to be absolutely atheist-secular-?, then, cool&nice=secular ? :-)
@Adolfo –
There is nothing new under the Sun..
and
All the worlds are stages
and we are merely players
and very few can play more than one part
on more than one stage
in more than one World
at a time
If we can make it a little further around the galexy
I think we may stand half a chance of going all the way
(around the galexy;-)
And I know, as sure as I’m sitting here typing,
that the planet will warm up and all the ice will melt,
and then it will cool down again
and then it will warm up again
and over and over and over
again and again.
This is along the same line as my earlier ‘something EVIL this way comes’ post.
A dilemma for libs.
http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0812/purcell082112.php3
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/research-confirms-gay-gene-discovery-1580244.html
Libs seem to me more consistently concerned with their own convenience than with any ’cause of the day’. So- the question becomes:
In the privacy of the Doctor’s office where no one will ever know does a lib stay true to the tolerant, diverse, inclusive, yada, yada……… line OR with a wink and a nod OK a snip – snip cause deep down who really, really wants a queer kid?
@Pascvaks: Don´t be so humble: Some day you will realize that God created man in His own image, thus: “As above so below”, but that would be quite a resposability.
@Jerry: They want US to be re-engineered as “gammas”(like the same of “A Brave New World”), just don´t entertain the ilussion somebody will make your children better than theirs; theirs won´t be changed at all for sure. All that bio-engineering is not only crazy but foolish. Cancer cells think that way: they allucinate they can oppose universal laws and end up building tumors or chaos, killing themselves in the process.
Just a pointer to a bit of a rant I did here:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/08/21/climate-fail-giss-is-presenting-2012-us-temperature-as-off-the-chart-while-preventing-older-data-from-being-archived/#comment-1062661
and here:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/08/20/us-record-lows-outpace-record-highs-127-to-4-this-weekend/#comment-1062601
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/08/20/us-record-lows-outpace-record-highs-127-to-4-this-weekend/#comment-1062608
so I can find it again tomorrow ;-)
Should make a lot of miserable people even more unhappy –
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/08/22/oceanic_uranium_mining_tech/
@Chuckles:
So my Ultra Large Uranium Mining ship is all that much more practical? Oh Boy! ;-)
https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/05/29/ulum-ultra-large-uranium-miner-ship/
BTW, the article says it’s enough for a few thousand years. That doesn’t allow for erosion. The rate of new U addition to the ocean is more than what we take out to use. It is a solution that “works” as long as there are mountains and erosion… Millions of years…
Yup, crucial thing is the proof of concept, it’s there to be fine tuned if we need it. Now I seem to remember there’s a bit of gold in seawater as well…..:)
It’s probably more likely for a bioengineered algae to be used to concentrate the required minerals. Once you’ve made it once, it makes itself. Slight problem if you let it loose into the sea, though, so you’d need to make sure it couldn’t survive without some special nutrient or lighting etc..
Sounds like there’s really no way of running out of “stuff” if we try.
Nice comparison links of sunshine / water vapor / precipitation globally over the year in this comment:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/08/21/has-trenberths-missing-heat-been-found-southern-oceans-are-losing-heat/#comment-1063250
More on Man (not the Mann but the Man;-) –
More Mutations in Children of Older Fathers, and How It Relates to Human Origins
“Most of the coverage of the new Kong et al. paper has focused on the rising risk for inheritable diseases such as autism and schizophrenia in the children of older fathers. And, indeed, that is is the larger story, and, perhaps, the more useful one for society. But, for those of us interested in the origins of our species, there is another story: We show that in our samples, with an average father’s age of 29.7, the average de novo mutation rate is 1.20 × 10−8 per nucleotide per generation. This mutation rate is in line with other direct measured rates, and is about twice smaller than the widely used 2.5×10^-8 rate used in evolutionary studies. Application of the low rate has led to a much older Human-Chimp divergence than was previously thought. That, in turn, will make mitochondrial Eve much older, because the mtDNA clock is calibrated on the Human-Chimp divergence. Practically every study of the last 10 years that looked at human origins and used the 2.5×10^-8 rate needs to be dusted off and made up to date. But there is yet another story. The beauty of the Langergraber et al. paper is that it inferred the Human-Chimp divergence on the basis of directly observed quantities: mutation rates and generation times. But, there was one quantity which they could not measure directly: the mutation rate in the apes. Thus, they used the mutation rate of humans for the apes as well; that is very reasonable, because presumably the same underlying chemical machinery affects the rate in humans and their simian friends. But, here’s where things get complicated…” (read on please;-)
Link:
http://dienekes.blogspot.com/2012/08/more-mutations-in-children-of-older.html
PS: Ref. my last – wouldn’t you think that location, location, location (and Temperature, Temperature, Temperature;-) has something to do with genetic mutation rates as a young fella’ gets older? How about the difference say, between 16.5 yr old Icelandic male genes that sometimes have a little problem staying ‘warm’ and 16.5 yr old African genes that sometimes have a little problem staying ‘cool’. I think there’s more than age here that will keep this issue alive for another 99 years or so;-)
(You know, when I was 16.5 yrs old I thought I ‘could’ but I also knew I ‘shouldn’t’; if you were a caveman, doesn’t 16.5 seem a little old?;-)
An earthquake M7.3 earthquake struck offshore El Salvador on August 27, 2012 at 04:37:23 UTC. The epicenter was located 118 km (74 miles) S from Usulután, 138 km (86 miles) SSW from San Miguel and 169 km (105 miles) SSE from capital San Salvador (12.279°N, 88.530°W). The depth of epicenter was 52.9 km (32.9 miles).
USGS reports a M7.4 at depth of 53 km, Geofon reports a M7.1 at depth of 10 km and EMSC a M7.3 at depth of 14 km.
Just for interest, the UK weather people said that last night was the coldest August night on record (-2.4°C in Braemar, Scotland). Must be global warming really starting to bite.
@Pascvaks:
As Cavemen lived about 30 years, 16 is ‘middle aged’…
@Tckev:
Thanks!,
I posted the particulars on the Quakes page:
https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2012/08/28/quakes-california-and-central-america/#comment-39658
@Simon:
Yeah, we’ve been cool here, too. But it’s been hot and dry in Texas so that’s “Global”… /sarcoff>
This PDF of the Obama Whitehouse honey beer recipes just was posted on the internet:
Click to access wh_beer_recipe_1.pdf
Freedom of Information act? or just petition signed by 15,000. Some people think it is good. 8-) pg
@P.G.-
Not saying it is and I ain’t saying it ain’t. Jus’ saying: fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me, like the old saying goes. And another thing, about beer, I know you’ve heard it before: The Secret is the Water! (Bet they don’t say where they get the water.) For some reason I just can’t get myself to go to the White House these days, not even for a beer;-)
@Pascvaks; Yeh! I wouldn’t cross the road to shake his hand. But to try a new beer, maybe.
They use Whitehouse water but treat it with gypsum, not shown in recipe. :-( pg
@PG-
(-;Don’t tell anyone, I’ve heard he has it ‘imported’ from Canada, something about the North side of L.Michigan being a little cleaner;-)
E.M., and All,
You might never guess from Pielke’s academic treatment of the topic of guessing in ignorance, but the paper (speech) he refers to (http://kansascityfed.org/publicat/sympos/2012/ah.pdf?sm=jh083112-3) is excellent.
The paper, among other things, describes the growth in effect of regulation, for example Dodd-Franks is 30,000 pages. Haldane says in this regard that compared to that Glass-Steagall was a mere throat clearing.
Haldane compares the filling-out-of-regulatory-forms obligation and its increase in the number of cells to be filled. This increase seems astonishing – truly burdensome- truly an invisible tax. He mentions that we now employ 3 persons in regulatory agencies with overview of bank activity for each bank in the US – that’s 18,500 government employees. And yet banks continue to experiment with financial devices they themselves admittedly don’t understand and expect the Feds to bail them out when the thing goes upside-down. And apparently none of these 18,500 is tasked with threatening the miscreants with visits to the slammer.
All of this leads to some observations of mine, derived from a career in construction with annual doubling of forms to be filed with permitting applications.
1. The questions and data requests will always fill every page, and if they don’t additional data of little apparent use will be collected.
2. In fill-in-the-blank type forms, the space allocated to the address will be the same length as the space for the zip code.
3. If you respond to a particularly intrusive request with something subtly perverse, it won’t be caught. In the professional experience section of one such proposal application, we showed that the proposed project manager had been on George Washington’s Great Dismal Swamp survey team. No one ever asked about it, and we did get the job.
I suspect that form-construction is an art which might respond to a semester course at the Uni, much like some schools have a semester on the graphical display of statistics with the intent either to support a POV or attempt to be honest.
Finally, to the chase. Here is my stupid story about forms.
In our mercifully brief sojourn in sales, we needed a Xerox dealership in order to resell their scanner and associated software which they had somehow obtained the rights to from Ray Kurzweil (a great man). The system was very good. It did the OCR with vector analysis and it could be trained such that if a human helped it with the correct recognition of letters and words it was confused by, it would ultimately “get” them and then gallop thorough a document with (for the time) relatively few errors. It was good enough to be used, by stipulation, in court proceedings.
I loved the thing, although mechanically it was a little dicey.
But the form.
It being Xerox, there as a 50 page form. It arrived via email (this was 1990) and I think was in a FrameMaker format. As it happened, this did not mean it could be filled out on-screen, though. I resisted this limitation, for a day or two and then gave up, printed it and someone typed in the responses with the typewriter we kept for just-in-case.
Toward the end of this thing, we were asked to supply our business address twice on a single page. I thought about the request and couldn’t imagine any circumstance anywhere where the two addresses might be different – for anyone, ever.
I called Boston and after a chase through their personnel chart, found myself talking to the devisor of the form.
“Oh, the two addresses? Those are for two different departments.”
“But they would always be the same. Aren’t you going to photo-copy our application anyway and send copies of the whole thing to the appropriate departments?”
“Yes, but I don’t understand your concern. One address is for billing, and the other VAR marketing”
“But they would always be the same – every time.”
“I don’t understand your problem. How long can it take to fill out each line?”
We did it anyway.
Czar Vladimir Is Hot for Gold!! ( Sept. 5, 2012, 4:16 p.m. EDT)
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/why-is-putin-stockpiling-gold-2012-09-05
Why is Putin stockpiling gold?
Commentary: Russia is bulking up its gold reserve
@ j ferguson “In the professional experience section of one such proposal application, we showed that the proposed project manager had been on George Washington’s Great Dismal Swamp survey team. No one ever asked about it, and we did get the job.”
Ha! I am not surprised. It would be interesting to compare the percentage of “junk DNA” in humans genomes to the percentage of “junk information” in human bureaucracies.
One danger though — if I understand current national laws, putting erroneous information in official federal forms is often a felony these days. Even if there was no actual damage caused, even if the error was accidental, even if the person involved had no way of knowing otherwise, it is still a crime. The presumption is that you SHOULD have known about the error. We are increasingly disconnecting criminal intent from criminal action. Be careful what you fill out!
@Jason,
A felony you say. No doubt. But a likely infrequently prosecuted one. I suppose equal protection doesn’t protect if you bring in bales of other filled out federal forms containing erroneous information. I suppose it’s another one of those things where you have little or no exposure UNLESS you bring yourself to the attention of the authorities and they conduct their version of due diligence and and discover many of your indiscretions over the years.
I’d probably now go to jail for the episode of the faux bomb made with clockwork and a very large capacitor brought to sixth grade show and tell. fortunately it was 1954. although the classroom was cleared, I was let off with a short admonition not to do anything like that again.
@Pascvaks: What would you do instead?…Buying green papers?, that would mean to lend money to the US. . You see, in my country, the rate of exchange a few years ago it was 3.50 Sol per US$ now, in spite our central bank buys dollars every day, it is about 2.50 Sol per US$
a 28.57% devaluation…which means that the whole world is paying for your excesses and wars. Putin simply does not want that for Russia and it is the reason why China has allowed its citizens to buy gold.
But what if all this was planned by some people, just to “homogenize” the world?
Thought this might interest some here:
http://thediplomat.com/2012/09/07/are-chinese-banks-hiding-the-mother-of-all-debt-bombs/
“China’s massive bank financed stimulus was intended to keep the economy moving. It may instead lead to economic disaster. “
E.M.
FYI – I have to email you with a scan on this as I can’t get a link.
So check if interested.
How does this go for corporate computing disasters?
Ref. Anthropology and Genetics and Genetics in General –
FYI – At “Dienekes’ Anthropology Blog” found some generally interesting ‘stuff’ that the host spoke about and linked to more interesting ‘stuff’. If you’re interested in Anthropology stuff with a genetic bent see this link –
http://dienekes.blogspot.com/2012/09/ashg-2012-abstracts-are-online.html
“ASHG 2012 abstracts are online! There is so much good stuff there. This year I decided against posting the full abstracts, so I’ll just link to a few, adding a few sentences on why they strike me as interesting. And, since there are so many interesting ones, I’ll keep updating this entry. “On the Sardinian ancestry of the Tyrolean Iceman” confirms that modern Sardinians are most similar to both the Tyrolean Iceman and the Swedish Neolithic TRB individual (presumably Gok4).”….(etc, etc.)
At this next link you’ll find the schedule and listing of available abstracts for the upcoming American Society of Human Genetics (ASHG) Annual Conference, Nov 6-10, 2012 in San Francisco. Far wider range of things than the link above mentions. You don’t get much out of conference abstracts, but they give a ‘feel’ for what’s hot in the field. And this is a Big Field;-)
http://www.ashg.org/2012meeting/pages/sessionlisting.shtml
That pesky innovation stuff again. The peak oilers will be in a decline when they read this
http://alfin2100.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/shell-oils-gas-to-liquids-plant-in.html
The whole AGW scam is hooked on the CO2 is bad paradigm but the US government is cutting back the atmospheric monitoring by NOAA to save approximately $6million. Is this yet more basic science measurements being cut?
Last year, NOAA sought $5.5 billion but received $600 million less with Congress slashing the agency’s ocean, fisheries and research accounts. Lawmakers also approved legislation that mandates automatic, across-the-board spending cuts beginning in January.
http://www.eenews.net/public/climatewire/2012/09/04/3
Does this move go with –
“After one week of UN climate talks in Thailand, not a single country has made a fresh commitment, and US negotiators stunned delegates by calling for any new treaty to be ‘flexible’ and ‘dynamic’ rather than legally binding, representing a complete U-turn on its previous position.”
Anthropology – ‘something interesting this way comes’..
“Estimating admixture proportions and dates with ADMIXTOOLS (Patterson et al. 2012)
This is a very exciting new paper, both for what it has to say about human history, but also because it is accompanied by a new ADMIXTOOLS software package that contain methods to infer levels of dates of admixture between populations.
Ancient European origins –
There was a tip about this paper in the recent study of Native American origins. It was suggested that northern Europeans have an excess of central/east Eurasian-related ancestry relative to Sardinians. I had noticed over a year ago that northern Europeans tended to be Asian-shifted relative to Mediterranean Europeans, and when the same effect was hinted at in the Native American paper, I set out to explore the issue in a series of posts using the f4 and f3 statistics. So it’s great to finally see the formal treatment of the same subject….If the admixture event was related to admixture between Neolithic and Mesolithic peoples, one might guess that the admixture date would be earlier. On the other hand, the evidence shows that down to 5,000 years ago, there were farmers in Europe who were like modern Sardinians, and hunter-gatherers who were ultra-North European (even more than current north Europeans), so fusion between incoming and resident groups was not a one-time deal when they first met. A recent mtDNA study also suggests that farmers and hunter-gatherers did not completely fuse until 4,000 years BP, after which time their distinctive mtDNA types begin to expand in unison….Another application of the new methodology is to Spain, where many analyses (including some of the Dodecad Project) have shown that the population has both a “Mediterranean” and a “North European” component. The authors date this admixture to 3,600 +/- 400 BP, and they associate it with Bell Beaker-related backflow into Iberia. However, a newer study that probably appeared when this paper was in review showed that Mesolithic Iberians were also North European-like. So, one probably does not need a special explanation for their case: the Neolithic/Mesolithic mix that occurred in Scandinavia, probably also occurred in Spain. The 3.6ky signal for North European/Sardinian-like admixture in Spain is similar to the 4.15ky signal of North Eurasian/Sardinian admixture in northern Europe. Both cases may reflect the same event. The authors point out that these dates are inconsistent with Visigoths and the like contributing a major portion of north European ancestry to Spain, consistent with the Ralph and Coop (2012) study. It might even be tempting to ascribe the small ~0.5k difference in the age of the signal to this later migration, or even to Celtic-related migrations, since the Celts -based on phenotypic descriptions by ancient authors- belonged to a substantial degree to the northern Europeoids…”
Link –
http://dienekes.blogspot.com/2012/09/estimating-admixture-proportions-and.html
FYI
September 9, 2012 Nicaragua’s San Cristobal volcano forces mass evacuation –
The Nicaraguan government says about 3,000 people are being evacuated from areas near the San Cristobal volcano, which is spewing ash and gas.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-19533933
E.M.
Link to the corporate computer item mentioned above
Click to access 338.pdf
@Another Ian:
It’s not that out of line (for a disaster…)
Unfortunately, IMHO, some of the biggest “names” in the business make their money largely out of selling upper management on their name, then raking in ongoing payments over time keeping things barely running. Occasionally they find themselves on the wrong side of barely running and it gets ugly. The old “Arther Anderson Consulting” comes to mind. They sent their “consultants” through “charm school” and their number one job, near as I could tell, was to get any OTHER providers slimed and tossed out and more AA folks loaded in. I worked next to them in a few shops and the pattern was always the same. “Whisper in Managements Ear” until folks were upset and more AA folks brought in to “fix it” which always, somehow, resulted in more things breaking that were attributed to yet more non-AA folks. Rinse and repeat…
At one shop we got them tossed out and had things back to working well in fairly short order. At another shop I took the very recent college grad they assigned as a Senior Consultant aside and suggested that if they stop attacking us I’d help them not look like a turkey. It worked for about 2 months, then their boss got peeved as we were still around; but by then I’d taught the kid enough about the job for them not to screw it up too badly, and it being a Military Contract had lots of money to spread around so the ‘truce’ held.
For those unfamiliar with it, from the wiki:
They would come in all full of attitude and short on technical skill and generally try to divert money flows to them (results be damned) and find any reason possible to accuse someone else of being “the problem”. First couple of times I tried to “play well with others”. By the late ’90s I’d figured it out and just directly told management how they worked and what they would do. When the started doing it, well… that was the one time they were invited to leave early…
So, back at that payroll FUBAR:
Most of the “horror stories” I’ve seen have been due to a very limited number of reasons. One big one is the Head Accountant (often called a CFO) making silly decisions. Either wanting a relatively bizarre accounting system unlike any on the planet and constantly changing the goals (so folks are always trying to improvise a solution). Another is trying to be “to clever by far” in cutting corners.
At one site the CFO tried to get the price down on a Sun 16 processor server via buying it as piece parts… he forgot ‘integration costs’… and I was called in to “install a Sun”. Usually a 1 day software install…. What I found was CPUs in boxes, boards in boxes, empty frame on a pallet. It was Friday, they wanted it running Saturday night… I ‘splained to them that this was NOT a Sun “install” but an assembly. We renegotiated terms… I ran to Fry’s to get some needed tools (the CPUs are installed with a hex Torque Wrench… 6 in-lbs IIRC) and after nearly 24 hour days, had it up and running Monday Morning at start of business. A bloody miracle, IMHO, especially given that rev levels of some of the parts were not compatible – it came up on 12 CPUs and we re-reved the others over following months… Oh, and I did it without the hardware manuals and having never done it before…
At FMC corp, they wanted a cost accounting system to track every single washer and dab of paint. So if you had a scratch in the paint, instead of just having a paint pot and daubing on a touch, you would be filling out forms describing the area of paint to be covered, paint consumed and cost. Spending $Dollars to account for pennies. I made the system, but they kept changing what was wanted, so we kept re-bidding the changes. Company made a bundle off of it, but I was never happy. ( I like to just “make it right and fast the first time”…) We created, from scratch, a full blown accounting system inside a “Fourth Generation Non-Procedural Database Management System and Report Writer”. Something intended to glue together databases and make reports… They would have been far better served with an off the shelf accounting package – but AA was involved and THEY got more “management placements” if there was more to manage.
So, at that link:
First off, they are gluing together two systems that are not intended to work together. As it says, that’s a problem. Then they went ahead and ran on it with not enough testing ( a common place folks decide to cut corners, especially when behind schedule from due to doing something silly (like gluing to incompatible systems together) and believing the ‘underbid’ from the lowest bidder. Now they are committed to it and for logistical reasons can not just roll back and for personal failure reasons can’t admit it is a failure. So they end up in “patch and hope” land… but “Hope is not a strategy. -E.M.Smith”…
What they OUGHT to do is pretty simple. Call up ADP and tell them to take over the payroll. Just outsource the damn thing. Heck, even Wells Fargo Bank does corporate payroll (they did mine for my company and never did screw up even a little bit). All you need is the Who, Rate, Hours and any things like days off or sick leave. One simple report that can be prepared by hand if need be. Timecard, report -> outsource. Ought to take about one week to put in place if you are slow about it… Unfortunately, once a government agency is involved (or worse, a medical agency inside a government program) it takes a few months just to have all the right folks in all the right meetings to decide that there IS a problem (and assure the blame lands on the guy the ‘consensus’ doesn’t like…)
In short: Most systems implementation ‘disasters’ IMHO come from the fact that management is relatively clueless about what is really involved in the technology and “buys in” to “stories” told to them by Big Name Providers; usually delivered with a high price tag, but with the assurance that ‘blame’ will not land on them. Unwilling to trust their own crew (sometimes with cause – especially if they hired the lowest cost they could find…) and unable to correctly decide for themselves, they toss a basket of “wants” and money at someone else and hope they can outsource uncertainty via reputation.
Many companies depend on that dynamic. IBM is one of them. They have been selling FUD for years. ( “Fear Uncertainty and Doubt” ). So now folks hire IBM for services. The “story” is lower costs with IBM quality. To some extent they deliver. IBM folks are generally pretty good. However, much of the actual ‘work’ is now done in India (I’ve worked with them). Again, pretty good folks on the other end of the line. BUT… Now you have two levels of “meetings and management” before anything can be done and few layers of tracking and “systems”; plus a few time zones and the occasional language issues. So you want to, say, reboot a machine as it is “hung”. I’ve had that take 2 management meetings and a whole day (along with sundry forms and database entries in the ‘ticket’ systems… one for us, one for IBM…) All paid for out of the support contract payments…
Now look again at your link ‘failed’ project. IBM is in there, so there will be a load of formal controls. It involves what looks to me like a healthcare system inside a government agency. So a few more levels of “controls” (including various legal mandates on healthcare systems) along with at least 4 agencies / companies to be posturing in management meetings ( Govt, Hospital, 2 x Tech providers). As they try to glue together two systems that don’t talk to each other (because someone ‘higher up’ wanted some feature from each, no doubt…) Just looking at that mess and apply my “usual ossification uplift” of (double the bid and add 10%) as I know it’s going to suck up at least that much more. Oh, and make sure an ‘change order’ is outside the contract and goes on ‘time and materials’ as an automatic addendum…
The really sad thing is that most of the folks doing the work probably know exactly what is wrong, but are powerless of ‘fix it’. Both the management level FUBARs and the technical “issues”. (It is considered bad form to say “The CFO asked for a stupid thing by putting FOO system with BAR system, just use BAR-A and BAR-B together and it will work.” so it can never be said…) A ‘face saving way’ has to be found to ‘fix it’. This often involves bringing in an ‘outside consultant’ to affix blame (to anyone BUT the guy who signs the checks…) which in the past was often Arther Anderson… Rinse and repeat…
So I’d expect that in about 6 months of more patching, a new project will be created with a mandate to ‘find a better solution’ (and affix blame to someone not on the new contract team). In about a year they ought to have a solution. Two years if the budget is large enough…
@tckev:
Central America awakens… seems to me it was just a couple of years ago we had South American volcanoes in the news…. Next stop Mexico, then the Salton Sea? ;-) (Just a tiny one?…)
@Pascvaks:
Matches what I know about movements of peoples over time. Celts, Huns, Hittites, Thracians spreading out from Anatolia / Central Asia over the northern range of Europe, displacing an earlier people ( likely related to the Basques) while in the Mediterranean, there’s more of a Phonetician diaspora along the seaways (wrapping around up toward Britain / Holland)
The linguistic clues also point that way with “Semitic / Hamitic” features showing up in both Irish and the Germanic family along with ancient oral traditions of a Baal god.
Across the top of Europe you get the displacement of the Swedes (that look to be relocated Thracians…) who then spread back down to become all the various forms of Germanic Tribes. Along the way, the Macedonians / Southern Slavs spread north and east back into that Asian area, but with an admixture of Vikings ( the Red or the Rus) to become Russians…
So you get “excess” of those northern / central types all over the norther stripe of Europe, and more of the “Phoenician / middle east” types where they were sailing their boats. Despite the occasional incursion ‘the other way’ ( Moors into France; Visigoths – Germanic – into Spain and then North Africa) never quite enough to shift the dominant type, just to season it a bit.
The Spanish example is an interesting one (and I’ve been trying to make a posting on it, but it’s just soooo complicated…) in that the Visigoths became the ruling class, but didn’t shift the major population types. You see that frequently. Someone takes over and doesn’t kill off the locals, nor mix with them all that much; just stays aloof (probably thinking themselves superior). Same thing in South America. Some countries are 70%+ non-Spanish, preserving a lot of the native type; but adopting a Hispanic language and cultural base. (Argentina is the other way around, mostly European types).
Interesting that someone made a tool to figure that out ;-)
@Tckev:
Interesting…. Looks to me like some folks have realized “This dog won’t hunt.” and are looking for a graceful exit. Keep your eyes open for the next “fad” or “twist”… if a ‘recandle’ is underway, it will pop up somewhere…
Per CO2 monitoring being cut by $Millions out of $Billions: As it OUGHT to cost about $50,000 / year MAX to measure it, I’m not particularly worried… Heck, there’s a few relatively abandoned mountain peaks around here. I’ll set up and monitor CO2 levels as it arrives right off the Pacific Ocean for $50,000 / year plus land access (i.e. somebody else can own it, I just need a fenced area for the gear) and equipment budget. Probably about $150,000 to set it up then the ongoing $50k. Oh, and maybe $100 / month of electricity… (probably a bad idea to have a Diesel Generator to run it ;-)
@Chuckles:
Yeah. I’ve talked about Pearl before in some places. I first got interested in GTL back in the ’70s Arab Oil Embargo. It eventually lead to New Zealand making a GTL plant (later mothballed under lower oil prices as OPEC decided to thin the herd of competitors).
Standard Oil was making a floating one for Nigeria a few years back IIRC. Then there are the astounding amounts of “stranded gas” in Alaska and Russia. Just oil was too cheap for too long and many folks remembered the ‘whipsaw’ OPEC did to crush the alternatives.
That’s why I’ve regularly advocated a ‘landed oil tariff’ for any non-North American oil (i.e. keep Canada and Mexico inside the tent) set be $80/bbl-LandedPrice or $0 if a negative number. Puts a floor under what OPEC can do to since the alternatives with excess supply…
IMHO it is no accident that Pearl is built in an OPEC country …
@Crosspatch:
I’ve been lax in doing financial postings (a bit bummed as it is all really hanging on a couple of political actions now…) and the money metals have kicked up. Why is pretty simple. Absolutely everybody is whistling past the graveyard and thinking that printing more paper will cause real economic changes. It won’t. So yeah, China has joined the “bubble and bust” economy too.
And yes, politicians are exactly the wrong folks to be in charge of the money supply. IMHO anyone ought to be legally allowed to issue money. Then the public can choose to use gold, sliver, platinum, Ford Bond Certificates, Beyonce CD Futures, bags of rice, or anything else that they find stable enough…
@Pascvaks, Jason, Adolfo, J. Ferguson:
Russia was a major gold exporter. Now they are a major oil exporter. All they need is enough foreign exchange to buy things they need from outside Russia. That isn’t a whole lot… so it’s easier to let the gold stack up than the oil… And prepares them for the cold hard times to come. They know they will be needing to buy some wheat in future years…
Per the forms:
Yeah, never ask to skip a box, just duplicate… even writing in ‘same as above’ is not a good idea. It forces someone to actually read it and that makes them mad. If they can just do a quick scan to see all the fields filled out with the right length of data, they can get back to looking busy while working on their retirement plans and novel…
We won’t talk about things I’ve put on forms to ‘test the system’… (It was in my youth and I’m hoping the statute of limitations has run out ;-) But one small one: I once paid my phone bill (during the AT&T monopoly days) with a check made out to “The Phone Company”. One signed by “Mickey Mouse” followed that was also processed to completion… but I think that was pushing it ;-) Near as I could tell, nobody actually looked at the text.
@P.G.Sharrow:
Water processing is so good now you can make any kind of water you need for beer. First take out everything, but then put back in the right hardness. (Personally, I would use dolomite dust…)
Never met a beer I didn’t like (though one 18% “Barley Wine” was over the top…)
The WH recipe looks a bit complicated to me, though. Then again, I like a decent Czech Pilsner and they are pretty straight forward…
@Simon:
I suspect watching the UK though Russia will be very interesting this winter…
@E.M.: (Personally, I would use dolomite dust…) …Dolomite, calcium-magnesium carbonate?. to add it a laxative quality? :-)
Is it just me or has Joanne Nova (Australian skeptic) site been suspended again?
Just wondering if anyone else is having problems with it?
@Adolfo:
Not enough for laxative (spoon full per person) just enough to condition the water ( mg / drink).
@Tckev:
I noted that a few days ago, but nobody said anything (wherever it was that I noted it…).
I don’t think it is suspended so much as “under attack”. Some folks “down under” didn’t like her being right so much of the time… IMHO…
We’ll see…
Top page here: http://joannenova.com.au/
just worked fine, so whatever it is, it is sporadic or ‘per page’…
Joannenova.com.au is back. I had a look earlier today and it was back but very slow to load. Currently it’s loading is back to normal but no acknowledgement of an outage.
Either she has technical problems, or she has really upset someone – I wonder who? :-)
The Bernacke pulled the trigger to send the US on the Zimbabwe train ride:
http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2012/09/13/live-blog-fed-decision-and-bernanke-press-conference-2/
Open ended and Unlimited QEIII! That’s the ticket!
You know how companies that are about to go bust have their stocks plummet and they try and buy all the outstanding stock back in an attempt to stave off the inevitable? If you do, then think of what QEIII really is. The Fed is that company buying that “stock”…in this case bonds back as fast as little Timmy can print the bills.
@Tckev:
I suspect some “locals” are peeved at her being so effective and at the “typical Australian” for starting some “push back” on The Agenda… so trying to do disruptions of her site.
@Boballab:
That’s the way I see it, and that is the way the “talking heads” on many of the financial news shows have been seeing it. Gold and Silver spiking up too…
New T8 is up, so conversation to continue there:
https://chiefio.wordpress.com/t8/