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The Ultimate Meaninglessness of Money
by EmmaZahn 11/21/2011 - 4:40 pm
If you haven't already seen today's xkcd cartoon, I hope you will take a few minutes to look at some interesting, some amusing and some appalling information about how much different things cost in 2011 dollars.
If, like me, you think that dollars or whatever token form money takes represent human time and energy, then xkcd has seriously underestimated the total economic productivity of the human race so far at $2,396,500,000,000,000. [Read more]
Appointment in Samarra?
by EmmaZahn 9/7/2011 - 9:45 pm
In attempting to avert catastrophic climate change and/or replace petroleum as our primary energy source, are we inadvertently hastening it? That is the question that came to mind after studying these images and their accompanying article, Geotimes - April 2008 - Desert Power: A Solar Renaissance: [Read more]
Winning with Smack Talk
by EmmaZahn 8/8/2011 - 12:47 pm
"I've been browsing through conservative websites tonight, and the amount of crowing over the 'Obama downgrade' is really pretty remarkable. S&P made it crystal clear that brinksmanship over the debt ceiling was the reason for the downgrade, and Republicans not only provoked the brinksmanship and bragged about it for months, but have since gleefully promised to repeat their performance at every opportunity. And yet they're now insisting that this is all Obama's fault. It's a display of chutzpah that's shameless even by their standards." [Read more]
Pay Cut Disguised as Tax Cut
by EmmaZahn 6/16/2011 - 11:34 am
My reply to A Better Payroll Tax Cut | ThinkProgress
How can I convince you that what you are considering is in reality a general pay cut.
What is a payroll tax to employers is a form of compensation to employees. In the case of FICA it is deferred compensation in the form of a retirement annuity. Last year's cut letting employees take the compensation now rather deferring to retirement was one thing but now to even consider cutting the employer's portion without requiring that it be passed on to employees is effectively a cut in their pay and a windfall to the employers.
Of course owners and the self-employed will love the idea but don't progressives generally support labor? [Read more]
Quantum computers, Qubits, Entanglements
by EmmaZahn 6/6/2011 - 12:58 pm
World’s first commercial quantum computer sold to Lockheed Martin for $10 million! including service and support, of course.
So what is a quantum computer? From the article:
Unlike computers based on transistors, quantum computers rely on principles of quantum mechanics to conduct operations. The computers take advantage of properties like entanglement — when two particles have the same properties and behave identically while being separate — and storing data with “qubits,” or quantum bits. Typical bits store memory by registering an “on” or “off,” or a one or zero, while qubits can represent information as both memory and the state of entanglement with other particles. [Read more]
Informationally-insensitive debt?
by EmmaZahn 4/16/2011 - 2:10 pm
Felix Salmon asks Is informationally-insensitive debt a good thing?
My own thinking falls somewhere in between the two sides he discusses.
Salmon is correct that the current system masks the risks inherent in holding any security or commodity, including cash. However, there is and always will be a demand for a safe place to stash cash pending reinvestment or distribution. [Read more]
Questionable Finance
by EmmaZahn 4/3/2011 - 12:50 pm
Will someone explain to me why, in light of this U.S. Repo Close: Current 3-Year Note at Lowest Rate, Minus 1.7% - Bloomberg, are we, e.g. the US Treasury, paying positive 1.25% on that same note? That makes its current yield 2.95%. The difference in time to maturity is not a satisfactory answer. The overnight markets are so awash with money fleeing to safety that they are gobbling up anything Treasury issues. A 30-year bond can be rented out as an overnight repo instantly monetizing it. [Read more]
In the News
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WTF, Quebec?
Quebec student protesters find creative ways around controversial new law
Read the article at http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/article/1181357--quebec-student-protesters-find-creative-ways-around-controversial-new-law- Add new comment
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Obamneybush Plans for Afghanistan
Perceptive Dagblog readers know the difference between Obama, Romney and Bush:
Obama NYT today: .how President Obama’s thinking about what he once called “a war of necessity” began to radically change less than a year after he took up residency in the White House....The aide told Mr. Obama that he believed military leaders had agreed to the tight schedule to begin withdrawing those troops just 18 months later only because they thought they could persuade an inexperienced president to grant more time if they demanded it. “Well,” Mr. Obama responded that day, “I’m not going to give them more time.”...Mr. Obama concluded in his first year that the Bush-era dream of remaking Afghanistan was a fantasy...
Mitt Romney, Feb. 2012 : LAS VEGAS -- LAS VEGAS -- Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney on Wednesday night blasted President Obama and his administration for “putting in jeopardy” the nation’s military mission by signaling it hopes to end its combat mission in Afghanistan by the middle of 2013.
Appearing at a campaign rally here shortly after landing in Nevada, Romney said Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta’s statement Wednesday that U.S. forces would transition from a combat mission in Afghanistan next year “makes absolutely no sense.”....George W. Bush, from May, 2003: BBC - "We do not know the day of final victory, but we have seen the turning of the tide... Free nations will press on to victory,"
Bush Afghanistan strategy : Gen. Douglas E. Lute, who had spent the last two years of the Bush administration trying to manage the many trade-offs necessary as the Iraq war consumed troop and intelligence resources needed in Afghanistan, arrived with a PowerPoint presentation. The first slide that General Lute threw onto the screen caught the eye of Thomas E. Donilon, later President Obama’s national security adviser. “It said we do not have a strategy in Afghanistan that you can articulate or achieve,” Mr. Donilon recalled three years later. “We had been at war for eight years, and no one could explain the strategy.”
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Marco Rubio as VP: Bilderberg conspiracy
Mitt Romney isn’t very far into the vice presidential selection process. But according to a dedicated band of conspiracy theorists, the pick is all but a lock: Sen. Marco Rubio.
That’s the current thinking among a worldwide collection of activists who are obsessed with the secretive Bilderberg Group, an alternating roster of global power players who loom as large — if not larger — in the online fever swamps of the fringe as the Trilateral Commission or the Council on Foreign Relations.
Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0512/76518.html#ixzz1vN5egowzRead the article at http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0512/76518.html -
Why science needs wonder
Aristotle and Plato didn’t agree on much, but they were united in identifying wonder as the origin of their profession. As Aristotle said, “It is owing to their wonder that men . . . first began to philosophise.” This idea appeals to scientists, who frequently enlist wonder as a goad to inquiry. “I think everyone in every culture has felt a sense of awe and wonder looking at the sky,” wrote Carl Sagan in 1985, locating in this response the stirrings of a Copernican desire to know who and where we are.
Yet that is not the only direction in which wonder may take us. To Thomas Carlyle, wonder sits at the beginning not of science, but of religion. That is the central tension in forging an alliance of wonder with science: will it make us curious, or induce us to prostrate ourselves in pitiful ignorance? We had better get to grips with this question before we too hastily appropriate wonder to sell science. That is surely what is going on when pictures from the Hubble Space Telescope are (unconsciously?) cropped and coloured to recall the sublime iconography of Romantic landscape painting, or the Human Genome Project is wrapped in biblical rhetoric, or the Large Hadron Collider’s proton-smashing is depicted as “replaying the moment of creation”. The point is not that such things are deceitful or improper, but that if we want to take that path, we should first consider the complex evolution of the relation between science and wonder.
[....]
Pretending that science is performed by people who have undergone a Baconian purification of the emotions only deepens the danger that it will seem alien and odd to outsiders, something carried out by people who do not think as they do. Daston believes that we have inherited a “view of intelligence as neatly detached from emotional, moral and aesthetic impulses, and a related and coeval view of scientific objectivity that brand[s] such impulses as contaminants”. It is easy to understand the historical origins of this attitude: the need to distinguish science from credulous “enthusiasm”, to develop an authoritative voice, to strip away the pretensions of the mystical Renaissance magus who acquired knowledge through personal revelation. We no longer need these defences, however; worse, they become a defensive reflex that exposes scientists to the caricature of the emotionally constipated boffin, hiding within thickets of jargon.
Read the article at http://www.newstatesman.com/sci-tech/sci-tech/2012/05/why-science-needs-wonder -
Craig Venter Wants to Solve the World’s Energy Crisis
... We’re trying to harness photosynthesis. A key part of photosynthesis is what happens when the sun goes down. Cells convert CO2 into sugar and fat molecules. And they store the fat to burn as energy to get them through the night ... We’re trying to coax our synthetic cells to ... store far more fat than they actually were designed to do, so that we can harness it all as an energy source and use it to create gasoline, diesel fuel, and jet fuel straight from carbon dioxide and sunlight. This would shift the carbon equation so we’re recycling CO2 instead of taking new carbon out of the ground and creating still more CO2. But it has to be done on a massive scale to have any real impact on the amount of CO2 we’re putting into the atmosphere, let alone recovering from the atmosphere.
... We envision facilities the size of San Francisco. And 10 or 15 of those in this country. We need sunlight, seawater, and non-agricultural land, but you need a lot of photons to drive this. You need a lot of surface area of sunlight to do that. It’s a great use for Arizona. Lots of sunlight there.
... If we can’t get some key scientific breakthroughs within the next couple of years, it probably won’t happen in 10 years. So it’s something that’s really dependent on fundamental science. But we’re already able to do things that were once seen as impossible.
... I think the new anti-intellectualism that’s showing up in politics today is a symptom of our not discussing these issues enough. We don’t discuss how our society is now 100 percent dependent on science for its future. We need new scientific breakthroughs—sometimes to overcome the scientific breakthroughs of the past. A hundred years ago oil sounded like a great discovery. You could burn it and run engines off it. I don’t think anybody anticipated that it would actually change the atmosphere of our planet. Because of that we have to come up with new approaches. We just passed the 7 billion population mark. In 12 years, we’re going to reach 8 billion. If we let things run their natural course, we’ll have massive pandemics, people starving. Without science I don’t see much hope for humanity.Read the article at http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/05/mf_venter/2/
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