Dr Principe wants to rehabilitate alchemy. He believes that most alchemists were respectable seekers after knowledge and that they were working with well constructed (if ultimately misguided) theories. The reputation of the alchemists, he reckons, was deliberately undermined by gentleman amateurs who were trying to give the emerging science of chemistry the social respectability it needed to sit at the academic high table.

Written By: Matt Carmichael, Peter Francese @ ADAGESTAT 

Grain prices surged last month as North African and Middle East nations bought more shipments to damp a surge in domestic prices that helped spark the protests from Morocco to Bahrain. Speculators including hedge funds last week cut their bets on higher wheat prices by 20 percent, U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission data show.

"Judging by the relative success of Moscow and Beijing in taming the democratic potential of the Web, it seems dictators learn fast and are perfectly capable of mastering the Internet. It's only by anticipating their response that those of us who care about democracy in the West can make their tough methods less effective. After all, these regimes have turned mostly to Western companies and consultants for advice about the technology of repression.

The cause of states' rights has a new flashpoint.   Georgia State Sen. Barry Loudermilk (R) has written an op-ed in support of  SB 61, a bill that declares Georgia’s sovereign authority over incandescent light bulbs that do not cross state lines.  It is a good op-ed that inclines me to support it.  Not that means anything.  Georgia Power proved a couple of years ago that it owns the legislature on anything energy related.  The bill's success will depend on them.   

"Governments worldwide will increase their role in global food markets and may boost stockpiles and subsidies or impose trade curbs to head off the protests that have rippled through the Middle East, commodity traders said."

From the article:

there's a growing trend of employers refusing to consider the unemployed for job openings, according to a number of people who testified before the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission on Wednesday. They say that employers are barring the unemployed from job openings, which is particularly unfair to older workers and African Americans because more of them are unemployed.

If this isn't structural unemployment, what is?

A memorable Seinfeld episode features Kramer and Newman taking thousands of cans and bottles to Michigan so they can get a nickel more per container than they would in New York, but beverage distributors say there's nothing funny when it happens for real.

In Maine, which has a more expansive bottle-redemption law than neighboring states, three people have been accused of illegally cashing in more than 100,000 out-of-state bottles and cans for deposits, the first time criminal charges have been filed in the state over bottle-refund fraud, a prosecutor said.

The World Sugar Committee, which represents big traders, told the ICE Futures US exchange that high-frequency traders "enrich themselves at the expense of traditional market users".

But ICE is said to believe such traders are not the cause of price volatility.

Algorithmic, or high-frequency, traders use computers and advanced mathematics to buy and sell positions in the market, sometimes within seconds, taking advantage of small differences in price to make profits.

The New York-based exchange has said that algorithmic traders help to provide the market with liquidity.

Budget proposal would cut billions from aid program.

By Marc Ambinder

Wednesday, February 9, 2011 | 3:17 p.m.

Best business plan evah!  

Kevin Drum offers insights into the entrepreneurial mind.

A strictly economic interpretation of events in Tunisia and Egypt would be too simplistic – however tempting such an exercise is for an economist. That said, there is no question that the upheavals in both countries – and elsewhere in the Arab world – largely reflect their governments’ failure to share the wealth.

And, finally, the President gave a nod to fiscal restraint by mentioning the freeze in domestic spending and the need to reform entitlements.  Reducing our deficit is essential to bolstering our worldwide competitiveness – but we need a specific plan to get us there.

Under a proposal from the Civil Affairs Ministry, adult children would be required by law to regularly visit their elderly parents. If they do not, parents can sue them.

"Any hobbyist worth his or her salt will, in turn, be admiring the Stuxnet code that shut down the Iranian centrifuges, looking to imitate and improve on it. And non-state players, from digital vandals to terrorists, will be casting an appraising eye, if they haven’t already, at the computers that monitor and control more ordinary but nonetheless critical systems: water treatment and distribution, sewage, oil and gas pipelines, electrical transmission lines, wind farms and nuclear power plants."

"It is with great sadness that we bring you the news that Dr. Alison Snow Jones, aka Maxine Udall, Girl Economist, passed away suddenly on Monday, January 17, 2011. "What Price Microfinance" was her last post."

I saw no mention of this at TPM and the search widget does not work.  I thought some of you might want to know.

Which countries match the GDP and population of America's states?

I usually check comparisons like these from the CIA Factbook or other source whenever a discussion warrants.   The Economist just made it a whole lot easier.  Definitely bookmarked.

Eleven is a good one:

11. Here is an observation. Don't even start writing till you have decided what the one big thing is going to be, and then say it to yourself in just one sentence. Then ask yourself whether you could imagine your mother listening to this sentence for longer than a microsecond before she reaches for the ironing. Should you try to sell an editor an idea for an article, you will get about the same level of attention, so pay attention to this sentence. It is often – not always, but often – the first sentence of your article anyway.

...a recent book by the linguist David Crystal, appropriately called Begat: The King James Bible and the English language, counts 257 phrases from the King James Bible in contemporary English idiom.

...

David Crystal in Begat, however, set out to counter exaggerated claims for the influence of the King James Bible. "I wanted to put a precise number on it," he explains, "because some people have said there are thousands of phrases from the King James Bible in our language, that it is the DNA of the English language. I found 257 examples."

If anyone is going to end the era of personal computing, it seems fitting that it should be one of the guys that started it all.  

Steve Jobs, in the short time he apparently believes he has left, will end the era of personal computing.  That is the logical conclusion to Cringely's ten predictions for 2011.

There is much in them that piqued my curiousity.  Makes me regret dropping him from my reader. Maybe I should put him back.