Okay, I went to MIT back in the 60s-70s. I have no politics. Nobody pays me anymore. Frankly, I think anyone who says they can measure 11 millimeters of global sea-level change over twenty years (1992-2012) is totally full of it.
Outside the British Museum in London is a plex donation box. All the pound & euro coins drop to the bottom and the box appears to be entirely filled with US dollars. I overheard a little boy ask his dad what they were. He answered without editorial. Weird moment, for sure.
I’m a poll worker in Ohio where this kind of bs will be in play. Guaranteed. You can bet that if I hear the word “recalibration” I will be taking photos.
Recalibration, for the uninitiated, is a “smokescreen word”. Most notably, it arises in DUI cases where someone who is not supposed to be caught (e.g., a judge) needs an out. It usually works the other way, however, screwing the innocent. Utility meters also, particularly in urban areas, are routinely recalibrated to benefit certain individuals.
IMHO, voting machines should NEVER be recalibrated in the field.
Get a job you are totally unqualified for. This is easier than it sounds. You will need both: a competent accomplice to provide a list of buzzwords and the ability to lie casually. Of course, you will need “experience”. This is easy to pretend. Creating a fake company is just a matter of a $25 cellphone and $10 activation, the drug-dealer special. Soon you will have a paycheck. Lease a car and apartment that you could not possibly afford without this job. Get a high-maintenance girlfriend. You will learn programming.
I remember exactly when it happened for me. It was right after my first kid was born. In the parking lot of the supermarket where I had gone to buy diapers, I said to myself, “This is just like the scene [in some forgotten movie] where the guy goes out to buy diapers.” Then I realized that this entertainment-ephemera was merely conceptual but buying diapers was real. So I went in, bought diapers, brought the diapers home and quit hacking (for the most part).
Mark-to-Market has a pretty horrible, if generally unknown, history. The American FASB (Financial Accounting Standards Board) had decreed mark-to-market not long before the 2008 global liquidity collapse. The old rule was that assets were kept on the books at cost, until sold or depreciated away. For the most part, in even a slightly inflationary world, this left assets undervalued and income under-reported.
Under mark-to-market, things went swimmingly for a while. Everyone got a boost to earnings, which lifted stock prices.
To understand what happened next, an understanding of Systems Dynamics is helpful. Created by Jay Forrester at MIT in the 1950s, SD models systems in terms of feedback - which comes in two basic flavors.
Negative - where a deviation in one direction is countered with a correction in the opposite direction. If you drift to the left, you steer to the right.
Positive - the response to a deviation is to pile on increasingly more of the same, such as neutrons in a fission bomb.
Then came the disasterous deviation, the reduction in confidence in sub-prime mortgages and their price. Under Mark-to-Market, the asset-reduction had to be taken even though the securities hadn't been sold. Mark-to-Market kicked off a downward spiral in asset values. Banks, because of capitalization requirements, started dumping mortgage-backed securities, driving the values down even more, necessitating more dumping of everything, e.g., corporate bonds, and on and on.
[Note: the FASB did a study of mark-to-market after the fact, absolved themselves of responsibility and quietly neutered it.]
Now, how bad an idea is Mark-to-Market Taxation? If it passes, buy canned goods.
I wrote a program for a software company (cannot name) that automated much of the documentation process. It took specs and replaced the future tense with the present tense as a first rough-cut. Most of it was pretty simple, actually. "X will load Y into Z" became "X loads Y into Z". The programmers actually enjoyed correcting the sometimes garbled English. Most importantly, it sped the process up 5x. I named the program "The Defuturizor" after... well, if you can't figure that out, perhaps you should be defuturized.
Karma. In the early 1990s, MS blew Lotus 1-2-3 out of the sky with Excel by including a "translation" program that worked about as well as a blender with the top off. Funny to hear MS squak now that Google is giving them a taste of the same stinky shaft.
Al Qaeda recruited an Art Major and told her. "Go shoot the President of the United States!" She bought a camera. Al Qaeda recruited a Music Major and asked. "Do you know how to blow up a bridge?" He replied, "No, but if you hum a few bars I can fake it." Al Qaeda recruited a Psychology Major and said "Destroy the Evil One!" He shot himself. Al Qaeda recruited an English Major and told her. "We need a whopper!" She said, "Do you want fries with that?" .
Let's be honest. Kyoto was really just about Europe imposing taxes the United States. The Kyoto Tax excluded Europe by setting the baseline year at 1994, when a whole host of East Germany's inefficient industrial-base was closed. Also excluded was the developing world, basically everyone else including China and India. Except Japan, which was excluded because it uses so much nuclear power. This was a tax on the USA by Eurocrats, who could use the cash-gusher to build a new global headquarters in some swank locale from which further denouncements of America would flow in perpetuity. Notice how all of the talk of a New Kyoto talk about taxing somebody global. Who could that be?
In the source piece, we see oceans loaded with phosphates - which come from laundry detergents. So not only was there life on Mars but they were the worst kind of neat-freaks, ones that are environmentally irresponsible. You want contact with these jerks? Get a life!
If you buy into electronic toiletry, make sure you also get a back-up generator. During a recent power-outage here in Florida, I was quite grateful that, unlike any other appliance in the house except my bed, the toilet was entirely mechanical.
When I was a senior, the most spectacular lab accident of the year was a peroxide explosion. This was not a terrorist attack, of course, but routine stupidity. The faulty plan was to purify the peroxide via evaporation over an open flame. A minor distraction occured as the boiling point was reached and the boil-over hit the asbestos pad, setting-off about a liter of the peroxide. The blast took out a wall of reinforced concrete in the Great Court (infinite corridor) complex. The other side of the wall was shelved with many jars of misc chemicals. When the sprinklers added water to this mess the result was the most amazingly bad odor ever. Okay, that smell was a bit off-topic, but the entire Institute was forced to be impressed with the explosive potential of peroxides. The second most spectacular lab accident that year was... no, that would be too far off-topic, but also cool - an unchained gas-cylinder becoming an inadvertent torpedo.
Europeans have an enduring/mind-altering lust to tax Americans. They have so over-taxed their own capital-base that it resembles a 2CV with a Bentley's options. Thus their quest to tax Americans. But how? Kyoto looked good. They cut themselves out of the tax by dating CO2 emissions to 1994, just before East Germany's old industries collapsed and some coal-fired English power-plants were closed. They let the rest of the world off the hook by calling it "developing". The entire Kyoto tax was meant for the United States. Call George Bush what you will, he put his chin on the line with this and Kyoto is l'histoire.
Now the Europeans are at it again. $2.5 mil does not sound so big, except it is per day, back-dated to 2004. Their inability to find more to tax in Europe - ever gas a car there? - inevitably leads them to want to tax US. We need to tell them to get a life.
I am anosic meaning I have no sense of smell. Well, practically none. Among the lost senses, this is the least discussed. The way I explain this to people is that I'm blind in one nostril and deaf in the other. (Yes, I know how lame that joke is.) We have schools for the blind and deaf, but anosics are pretty much expected to suck it up and play along like we're normal. Recently, my wife and I broke up and I often find myself wondering what sort of odor I am putting off especially if I am to be around women, a notoriously sniffy gender. An amplifier for smells would be very useful.
Sorry, but I'm not in the wacko sector. I majored in biotech at MIT. I know research. It follows the money. Nothing wrong with that. All I'm saying is, if you wake up with sciatica there will be people advising you to have surgery, to take all sorts of pharma, and even tie a special pillow between your knees at night. When I reached for the leci, it was because I knew it was in the same phospholipid zone as myelin. And it worked. If you would rather have someone do your medical thinking for you, I think you are on the right track.
A couple of years ago, I developed sciatica (which presented literally as a pain in the a**). Sciatica is an irritation of the sciatic nerve, which is about as fat as a finger and snakes from the spine through the hip to the leg. While some sciatica comes from collapsed discs, mine was a result of trying to train to quickly for a marathon and so damaging the myelin sheath. After surveying the available options (surgery, drugs, sleeping with a special pillow strapped between my knees) I decided to give lecithin a shot. It's an all-purpose bio-lube good for your heart, hair loss, etc. Also, it is cheap, natural, available over the counter, and non-toxic (your body burns off any excess as food). It worked for me. The science is out there (e.g., http://www.jcb.org/cgi/content/abstract/68/3/480) but don't expect to hear much about it because nobody is going to make money off lecithin. It comes from soy beans. A big bottle is just a couple bucks.
Fiberglass is a good example of the prepared-mind effect. For nearly fifty years, glass scientists knew that this material would be extremely useful (like steel fibers making things like bridge-cables and steel-wool) but the only way know to make the stuff was attenuating glass rods one at a time. Then one day a researcher at Owens-Illinois, the glass bottle company, was trying to figure out an automated way to put a logo, in blue glass, on a milk bottle. He melted some blue glass, directed a gas jet at the flow, and suddenly the air was filled with glass fibers. He knew immediately what he had done - by accident - and a new industry was born.
Here we are again on the seam between science and politics. For someone standing on the science side of the line, the Global Warming issue is far less clear than it is for people who breathe partisanship. That warming is a fact is clear to me. I remember when I was growing up on the New Jersey shore that the Navasink River was home to many ice-boat clubs. They are all closed now because the river doesn't freeze. Likewise, when I was in Durham England, I picked up a photo of ice skaters on the River Wear at an antique shop. It hasn't frozen either in generations.
Jumping from this to say CO2 is the cause, however, is too much. One of the driving forces behind the development of supercomputers was SHORT-term weather forecasting. That's a mighty complex system up there. Science can deal with complexity, but slowly. Politicians, either ignoring or just not recongizing it are much faster. This is the real "inconvenient truth". While we in science hypothesize and test, Bill Clinton is blaming hurricanes on George Bush.
But we can have untested opinions, too. Mine? The strength of the earth's magnetic field has been declining just ahead of the global warming curve for over the past century. In the long run, I think that's the more likely cause because excess CO2 a) encourages plantlife that consumes it and b) combines with water to form H2CO3 which precipitates out of the atmosphere - whereas there is no stopping our long overdue magnetic reversal. But that's just my guess. Not a "truth".
Slashdot Mirror
Okay, I went to MIT back in the 60s-70s. I have no politics. Nobody pays me anymore. Frankly, I think anyone who says they can measure 11 millimeters of global sea-level change over twenty years (1992-2012) is totally full of it.
Outside the British Museum in London is a plex donation box. All the pound & euro coins drop to the bottom and the box appears to be entirely filled with US dollars. I overheard a little boy ask his dad what they were. He answered without editorial. Weird moment, for sure.
I have never really understood why many Americans are so hostile to unionization..
Visit Detroit.
I’m a poll worker in Ohio where this kind of bs will be in play. Guaranteed. You can bet that if I hear the word “recalibration” I will be taking photos. Recalibration, for the uninitiated, is a “smokescreen word”. Most notably, it arises in DUI cases where someone who is not supposed to be caught (e.g., a judge) needs an out. It usually works the other way, however, screwing the innocent. Utility meters also, particularly in urban areas, are routinely recalibrated to benefit certain individuals. IMHO, voting machines should NEVER be recalibrated in the field.
Get a job you are totally unqualified for. This is easier than it sounds. You will need both: a competent accomplice to provide a list of buzzwords and the ability to lie casually. Of course, you will need “experience”. This is easy to pretend. Creating a fake company is just a matter of a $25 cellphone and $10 activation, the drug-dealer special. Soon you will have a paycheck. Lease a car and apartment that you could not possibly afford without this job. Get a high-maintenance girlfriend. You will learn programming.
I remember exactly when it happened for me. It was right after my first kid was born. In the parking lot of the supermarket where I had gone to buy diapers, I said to myself, “This is just like the scene [in some forgotten movie] where the guy goes out to buy diapers.” Then I realized that this entertainment-ephemera was merely conceptual but buying diapers was real. So I went in, bought diapers, brought the diapers home and quit hacking (for the most part).
Microsoft killed the Start button because it was an embarrassment. What other machine is turned-off by pressing Start?
turning a research budget into food. First instance I know of was around 1970: testing the black stuff on a grilled steak for carcinogenicity.
You might catch someone breaking into your house.
Today the Web. Tomorrow the Cloud. This problem has lots of room to grow.
Mark-to-Market has a pretty horrible, if generally unknown, history. The American FASB (Financial Accounting Standards Board) had decreed mark-to-market not long before the 2008 global liquidity collapse. The old rule was that assets were kept on the books at cost, until sold or depreciated away. For the most part, in even a slightly inflationary world, this left assets undervalued and income under-reported.
Under mark-to-market, things went swimmingly for a while. Everyone got a boost to earnings, which lifted stock prices.
To understand what happened next, an understanding of Systems Dynamics is helpful. Created by Jay Forrester at MIT in the 1950s, SD models systems in terms of feedback - which comes in two basic flavors.
Negative - where a deviation in one direction is countered with a correction in the opposite direction. If you drift to the left, you steer to the right.
Positive - the response to a deviation is to pile on increasingly more of the same, such as neutrons in a fission bomb.
Then came the disasterous deviation, the reduction in confidence in sub-prime mortgages and their price. Under Mark-to-Market, the asset-reduction had to be taken even though the securities hadn't been sold. Mark-to-Market kicked off a downward spiral in asset values. Banks, because of capitalization requirements, started dumping mortgage-backed securities, driving the values down even more, necessitating more dumping of everything, e.g., corporate bonds, and on and on.
[Note: the FASB did a study of mark-to-market after the fact, absolved themselves of responsibility and quietly neutered it.]
Now, how bad an idea is Mark-to-Market Taxation? If it passes, buy canned goods.
NASA is going to die. Cold Fusion is like Steve Jobs in Switzerland.
I wrote a program for a software company (cannot name) that automated much of the documentation process. It took specs and replaced the future tense with the present tense as a first rough-cut. Most of it was pretty simple, actually. "X will load Y into Z" became "X loads Y into Z". The programmers actually enjoyed correcting the sometimes garbled English. Most importantly, it sped the process up 5x. I named the program "The Defuturizor" after ... well, if you can't figure that out, perhaps you should be defuturized.
Karma. In the early 1990s, MS blew Lotus 1-2-3 out of the sky with Excel by including a "translation" program that worked about as well as a blender with the top off. Funny to hear MS squak now that Google is giving them a taste of the same stinky shaft.
Al Qaeda recruited an Art Major and told her. "Go shoot the President of the United States!" She bought a camera.
Al Qaeda recruited a Music Major and asked. "Do you know how to blow up a bridge?" He replied, "No, but if you hum a few bars I can fake it."
Al Qaeda recruited a Psychology Major and said "Destroy the Evil One!" He shot himself.
Al Qaeda recruited an English Major and told her. "We need a whopper!" She said, "Do you want fries with that?"
.
Let's be honest. Kyoto was really just about Europe imposing taxes the United States. The Kyoto Tax excluded Europe by setting the baseline year at 1994, when a whole host of East Germany's inefficient industrial-base was closed. Also excluded was the developing world, basically everyone else including China and India. Except Japan, which was excluded because it uses so much nuclear power. This was a tax on the USA by Eurocrats, who could use the cash-gusher to build a new global headquarters in some swank locale from which further denouncements of America would flow in perpetuity. Notice how all of the talk of a New Kyoto talk about taxing somebody global. Who could that be?
In the source piece, we see oceans loaded with phosphates - which come from laundry detergents. So not only was there life on Mars but they were the worst kind of neat-freaks, ones that are environmentally irresponsible. You want contact with these jerks? Get a life!
If you buy into electronic toiletry, make sure you also get a back-up generator. During a recent power-outage here in Florida, I was quite grateful that, unlike any other appliance in the house except my bed, the toilet was entirely mechanical.
When I was a senior, the most spectacular lab accident of the year was a peroxide explosion. This was not a terrorist attack, of course, but routine stupidity. The faulty plan was to purify the peroxide via evaporation over an open flame. A minor distraction occured as the boiling point was reached and the boil-over hit the asbestos pad, setting-off about a liter of the peroxide. The blast took out a wall of reinforced concrete in the Great Court (infinite corridor) complex. The other side of the wall was shelved with many jars of misc chemicals. When the sprinklers added water to this mess the result was the most amazingly bad odor ever. Okay, that smell was a bit off-topic, but the entire Institute was forced to be impressed with the explosive potential of peroxides. The second most spectacular lab accident that year was ... no, that would be too far off-topic, but also cool - an unchained gas-cylinder becoming an inadvertent torpedo.
Europeans have an enduring/mind-altering lust to tax Americans. They have so over-taxed their own capital-base that it resembles a 2CV with a Bentley's options. Thus their quest to tax Americans. But how? Kyoto looked good. They cut themselves out of the tax by dating CO2 emissions to 1994, just before East Germany's old industries collapsed and some coal-fired English power-plants were closed. They let the rest of the world off the hook by calling it "developing". The entire Kyoto tax was meant for the United States. Call George Bush what you will, he put his chin on the line with this and Kyoto is l'histoire. Now the Europeans are at it again. $2.5 mil does not sound so big, except it is per day, back-dated to 2004. Their inability to find more to tax in Europe - ever gas a car there? - inevitably leads them to want to tax US. We need to tell them to get a life.
I am anosic meaning I have no sense of smell. Well, practically none. Among the lost senses, this is the least discussed. The way I explain this to people is that I'm blind in one nostril and deaf in the other. (Yes, I know how lame that joke is.) We have schools for the blind and deaf, but anosics are pretty much expected to suck it up and play along like we're normal. Recently, my wife and I broke up and I often find myself wondering what sort of odor I am putting off especially if I am to be around women, a notoriously sniffy gender. An amplifier for smells would be very useful.
Sorry, but I'm not in the wacko sector. I majored in biotech at MIT. I know research. It follows the money. Nothing wrong with that. All I'm saying is, if you wake up with sciatica there will be people advising you to have surgery, to take all sorts of pharma, and even tie a special pillow between your knees at night. When I reached for the leci, it was because I knew it was in the same phospholipid zone as myelin. And it worked. If you would rather have someone do your medical thinking for you, I think you are on the right track.
A couple of years ago, I developed sciatica (which presented literally as a pain in the a**). Sciatica is an irritation of the sciatic nerve, which is about as fat as a finger and snakes from the spine through the hip to the leg. While some sciatica comes from collapsed discs, mine was a result of trying to train to quickly for a marathon and so damaging the myelin sheath. After surveying the available options (surgery, drugs, sleeping with a special pillow strapped between my knees) I decided to give lecithin a shot. It's an all-purpose bio-lube good for your heart, hair loss, etc. Also, it is cheap, natural, available over the counter, and non-toxic (your body burns off any excess as food). It worked for me. The science is out there (e.g., http://www.jcb.org/cgi/content/abstract/68/3/480) but don't expect to hear much about it because nobody is going to make money off lecithin. It comes from soy beans. A big bottle is just a couple bucks.
Fiberglass is a good example of the prepared-mind effect. For nearly fifty years, glass scientists knew that this material would be extremely useful (like steel fibers making things like bridge-cables and steel-wool) but the only way know to make the stuff was attenuating glass rods one at a time. Then one day a researcher at Owens-Illinois, the glass bottle company, was trying to figure out an automated way to put a logo, in blue glass, on a milk bottle. He melted some blue glass, directed a gas jet at the flow, and suddenly the air was filled with glass fibers. He knew immediately what he had done - by accident - and a new industry was born.
Here we are again on the seam between science and politics. For someone standing on the science side of the line, the Global Warming issue is far less clear than it is for people who breathe partisanship. That warming is a fact is clear to me. I remember when I was growing up on the New Jersey shore that the Navasink River was home to many ice-boat clubs. They are all closed now because the river doesn't freeze. Likewise, when I was in Durham England, I picked up a photo of ice skaters on the River Wear at an antique shop. It hasn't frozen either in generations. Jumping from this to say CO2 is the cause, however, is too much. One of the driving forces behind the development of supercomputers was SHORT-term weather forecasting. That's a mighty complex system up there. Science can deal with complexity, but slowly. Politicians, either ignoring or just not recongizing it are much faster. This is the real "inconvenient truth". While we in science hypothesize and test, Bill Clinton is blaming hurricanes on George Bush. But we can have untested opinions, too. Mine? The strength of the earth's magnetic field has been declining just ahead of the global warming curve for over the past century. In the long run, I think that's the more likely cause because excess CO2 a) encourages plantlife that consumes it and b) combines with water to form H2CO3 which precipitates out of the atmosphere - whereas there is no stopping our long overdue magnetic reversal. But that's just my guess. Not a "truth".