If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.

—  Albert Einstein

Informed Ignorance

Aug. 30, 2012

 

Informed ignorance provides the natural state of mind for research scientists at the ever-shifting frontiers of knowledge.
People who believe themselves ignorant of nothing have neither looked for, nor stumbled upon, the boundary between what is known and unknown in the cosmos.

— Neil deGrasse Tyson, Origins: Fourteen Billion Years of Cosmic Evolution


Conversations about Conversations

John Cusack

John Cusack

Barack Obama

Barack Obama

Jonathan Turley

Jonathan Turley

The following are summarised excerpts from a telephone conversation between John Cusack and Jonathan Turley with comments in blue:

The power of the Executive to cast a man into prison without formulating any charge known to the law,
and particularly to deny him the judgement of his peers,
is in the highest degree odious and is the foundation of all totalitarian government whether Nazi or Communist. — Winston Churchill

Soon after he was elected, President Obama admitted that the waterboarding which certain US officials had authorised WAS torture.  Still, he promised the CIA that they wouldn’t be investigated or prosecuted in regard to it.  Under international law, shielding people from war-crime prosecutions can itself be a form of war crime.  If a government doesn’t investigate and prosecute its own accused war criminals, other countries (in theory) have the right to step in and prosecute the foreign war criminals themselves.  Certainly in the past Americans have prosecuted foreigners being shielded or protected by their own countries — but that’s apparently a one-way street.  When the Spanish government moved to investigate US torture (because Obama had indicated the US didn’t intend to do it), the Obama administration issued threats.
 
Further, defendants at the Nuremberg trials couldn’t base a defense on the fact that they were merely following orders.  Such a defense, if allowed, would shield too many of the guilty — it would shield almost everyone.  Despite this, the Obama administration released a document saying CIA personnel and even some DOJ lawyers were “just following orders” from higher authorities.  Thus, it might help to know why Obama protected CIA officials from prosecution.

“International law” is misleading.  As a general rule, there isn’t such a thing (difficult to enforce).  There is DOMESTIC law, which may (or may not) implement some elements of international law.  Torture is illegal under US law, however whether or not waterboarding is torture is an unanswered question.  Obama cannot “admit” that waterboarding is torture any more than Bush can “admit” that it isn’t.  Neither view is inherently binding.
 
The complexity arises because current Attorney General Eric Holder (apparently) thinks that waterboarding IS torture, and thus that waterboarding in the past WAS a crime.  Holder is also responsible for deciding which crimes will be prosecuted.  He has decided not to prosecute the past administration’s tolerance of waterboarding.  The Justice Department opts against prosecuting apparent crimes every day, and there’s a wide range of legitimate reasons why he might make this decision.  Holder may feel that something as simple as the impact on CIA morale is sufficient.
 
In many ways, Nuremberg represented the purest form of victor’s justice.  Holder and Obama have at various times excoriated the Nuremberg standard as being insufficiently protective of defendent’s rights.  And finally, following orders actually IS a legitmate defence, at Nuremberg and elsewhere.  A meaningful argument hasn’t been advanced here (though that’s not saying there isn’t one).
 
At the end of the day, Obama (through Holder) decided against prosecuting low-level beauracrats acting on the orders of the past administration.  They may have done so because they didn’t believe that what those beauracrats did was actually a crime under US law, or because they thought it would be too hard to prove, or because they thought the risk of losing the case would be too embarrassing, or because they thought it would be a political witch hunt (or appear to be a political witch hunt) or make the possibility of the next administration starting a political witch hunt too likely, or would cost too much money, or would demoralize the CIA, or…who knows?  Under the US system, prosecutors have broad discretion, and need not explain their motives.


[For clarification: A bright-line rule (or bright-line test) is a clearly defined rule or standard, generally used in law, composed of objective factors, which leaves little or no room for varying interpretation.  The purpose of a bright-line rule is to produce predictable and consistent results in its application.  This is in contrast to its opposite, the fine line.]
 
Bright line rules structure relations between branches of government and between government and citizens, protecting freedom and liberty.  The elimination of bright line rules is a slippery slope.  The US denies rights to people at Guantanamo Bay, to foreigners whom they accused of being terrorists, and now even to American citizens by saying they can kill whom of them they choose without court order or review.  This is a nightmare of civil liberties, changing how US citizens relate to government.  Being able to enter the court system has become discretionary because now the president can instead opt to kill even a US citizen if he finds him/her too inconvenient, impractical, or impossible to bring to justice.
 
US Attorney General Eric Holder announced a couple of years ago that the administration would try some defendants in federal court while reserving military tribunals for others.  He began by saying, “We have to believe in our federal courts and our Constitution.  We’ve tried terrorists before, and therefore we’re transferring these individuals to federal court.”  But then he added, “We’re going to transfer these other individuals to Guantanamo Bay.”  Missing was any type of defined principle.  How can we know if these decisions were justified?
 
What evidence is there to support the idea that the court system has “become” discretionary?  What evidence is there that this has not always been the case?
 


Demonization of Osama bin Laden was so intense that Americans were thrilled he was assassinated rather than brought to trial.  If Nuremberg principles are correct, shouldn’t he have been tried before the entire world?  If guilty, he then could have been lethally injected.  But his was an assassination from the beginning — there was no discussion of capturing him and bringing him to justice.  While everyone may feel rightfully loathsome toward bin Laden, principles are not formulated for their convenience.  Adolf Eichmann was captured and tried.  Why not bin Laden?  After all, it is principles which separate man from beasts.
 
The way Americans reacted to Osama bin Laden’s death seems somewhat incidental here.  No evidence is presented in this article that most Americans were thrilled that bin Laden was killed RATHER than brought to trial.  And the reference to Nuremberg is inappropriate; it has nothing to do with whether people need to be taken prisoner in a combat situation.  When people talk about Nuremberg, they are talking about the process for convicting a prisoner of war crimes.  Besides, Former Navy SEAL Mark Bissonnette, writing under the pseudonym Mark Owen in No Easy Day said that during a pre-raid briefing, an administration lawyer told them that they were not on an assassination mission — if bin Laden was “naked with his hands up,” they should not engage him.  If he didn’t pose a threat, they should detain him.


There may be a disconnect between what people say about the US and what the US has become.  The US seems to have lost clarity in the “war on terror.”  They refuse to accept the jurisdictional authority of sovereign countries while forcing other countries to accept American authority.  Are drone attacks in Pakistan even legal?  Does anyone care?  Who is being killed?  Do they deserve due process?  Americans disregard the fact that Pakistan is a sovereign nation (an ally, even); Pakistan insists they haven’t agreed to US operations and accuses them of murder and of violation of sovereign airspace.  Americans disregard this — American exceptionalism means rules apply to everyone else.
 
A Gallup poll released in August shows 49% of Americans, a record since the poll began asking this question in 2003, believe that the federal government poses an immediate threat to individuals’ rights and freedoms.

The question of whether the people who are being killed by drones (whomever they may be) “deserve due process” and whether the attacks are legal seem unrelated to one another.  What would make someone “deserve” due process?  Might someone NOT deserve due process?
 
If 49% of Americans think that the federal fovernment poses an immediate threat to individuals’ rights and freedoms, how can Cusack and Turley state that there may be a disconnect between what people say about the US and what the US has become?  That poll seems to indicate that about half of Americans are scared of their own government.
 
Glossed over is whether a military or law enforcement framework is proper.  Both fit; neither is illegal, nor self-evidently immoral.  One is probably better, but don’t assume there is Only One Possible Answer.  Note that someone else has reached an opposite answer, but don’t conclude from that that they are A Bad Person Who Hates Justice — which is what Cusack and Turley appear to do.  Their conversation is compelling and interesting to everyone convinced that the law enforcement paradigm is the only possible answer — but there are other answers.  Their conversation is relatively meaningless to those equally convinced that a military paradigm is the only possible answer.  This doesn’t help two sides come to a reasoned compromise, which is what is needed.
 
Turley and Cusack mainly preach to the choir.


From Why Do So Many Politicians Have Daddy Issues?, Slate, 22 August 2012:
 
While there are few academic studies on the subject of political daddy issues, the ones that do exist suggest an outsized percentage of prominent politicians have absent or dysfunctional fathers.  The most methodologically credible of these is a British study, which found that the rate of bereavement amongst British prime ministers was exceptionally high — somewhere around half.  That was much higher than the estimated rate for the population as a whole, and the bereavement rates for Cabinet members also ran consistently higher than the general public.  What could be going on here?  Is this simply politics imitating Shakespeare, or is there some causal reason that so many people with father issues make it to the upper reaches of public office?  One possibility is that kids who are immersed in traumatic personal environments early in life become hypersensitive to the feelings of those around them and develop coping mechanisms that also make them better politicians.  Quoting psychology literature, the best biography of Reagan notes that children of alcoholics become perceptive enough that they can “walk into a room, and without even consciously realising it, figure out just what the level of tension is, who is fighting with whom, and whether it is safe or dangerous.”  The same instinct may have fed Reagan’s desire to comfort the nation on the model of FDR’s fireside chats.  Via The Daily Beast.


But on the Other Hand…

Mitt Romney

Mitt Romney

Joseph Smith

Joseph Smith

Park Romney

Park Romney

  • Lying for the Lord refers to the practice of lying to protect the image of and belief in the Mormon religion, a practice which Mormonism fosters.  For the Mormon, loyalty and the welfare of the church are more important than the principle of honesty; plausible denials and deception by omission are warranted by an opportunity to have Mormons seen in the best possible light.  Lying for the lord is part of Mormonism’s larger mainstreaming tactics as conversion numbers may drastically lower if their important beliefs were fully disclosed to the wrong people or at the wrong time.  Shi’a Muslims have a similar practice called taqiyah (meaning “to safeguard or defend”) as a means to protect their faith.  It allows members of the faith to be untruthful when life or religious faith are in danger — their version of Lying for the Lord.
  • When the Mormon church’s image or its leaders need protection it’s okay to fib, deceive, distort, inflate, minimise, exaggerate, prevaricate or lie.  Church leaders admit that deception is a useful tool to protect the church and its leaders “when in a tight spot,” or “to beat the devil at his own game.”  They admit engaging in moral gymnastics: God approves of deception — if done to protect the “Lord’s Church” or “the brethren” (as leaders are called).  D Michael Quinn called this use of deception by LDS church leaders “theocratic ethics.”  Joseph Smith lied to protect himself or his church.  Dan Vogel in his work, Joseph Smith: The Making of a Prophet, described Smith’s viewpoint as “pious deceiver.”  Smith used deception if in his mind it resulted in a good outcome.  Smith had Moroni, ancient American prophet and custodian of the gold plates, declare, “And whatsoever thing persuadeth men to do good is of me; for good cometh of none save it be of me (Moroni 4:11-12).  Translation: if deception is necessary to do good, or bring a soul to Christ, then it’s worth it, if God approves — and Smith believed he knew when God approved.  He also thought God approved murder if for a good cause.  He wrote in the Book of Mormon that Nephi was inspired by God (1 Nephi 4:6) to deceive and capture a servant then murder another man in order to secure an ancient historical record on brass plates.  In Missouri, Smith and his counsellor Sidney Rigdon threatened to kill Mormons who disagreed with official policies and initiatives (Quinn, The Mormon Hierarchy: Origins of Power, Chapter 3, 79-103).  Before becoming a prophet, Smith’s chosen profession relied on deception to earn a living — he assured clients he could see underground treasure using a magic stone in the bottom of his hat; clients paid him to locate gold using this method.  He never did of course.  His arrest, trial and conviction in NY for fraud in 1826 documented this activity.  The modern term for Smith would be con artist (Vogel, 82-86).  Smith was comfortable using deception when it suited him.  He wove it into the fabric of Mormonism as a way of dealing with those who questioned his authority or reported his deceptions or tasteless behaviour.
  • From Park Romney, Mitt Romney’s cousin: “The exposure of the Mormon Book of Abraham as a fraud is not a trivial thing.  The book of Abraham is part of the greater volume of canonized Mormon scripture known as the Pearl of Great Price.  It, in particular, is where one finds the very basis of some of the most significant and fundamental doctrines that differentiate the Mormon faith from other faiths.  It was supposedly translated from Egyptian hieroglyphics that came into the possession of the early Mormon Church in a well-documented story out of the Church’s own history, complemented by authenticated journals of Joseph Smith, original Mormon prophet.  Joseph Smith claimed to translate these Egyptian hieroglyphics (after he had talked Mormon investors into putting up money for their acquisition) on the basis of his representation that they were ancient writings of the Biblical prophets Abraham and Joseph from the Bible, now brought forth by God to the hands of the Church for him to translate with his ‘endowed’ gifts of prophecy and revelation.  The hieroglyphics were acquired on this basis, and a detailed account of the translation process, including mention of specific characters, is documented in Smith’s authenticated journal.  These translations resulted in canonized Mormon scripture now known as the Book of Abraham, published with the standard scriptures of the Mormon Church, complete with a copy of the very hieroglyphics from which they were ‘translated.’  At the time this took place, no known scholars knew how to translate such hieroglyphics.  However, over the years, due to the discovery of the Rosetta stone and other research, considerable scholarly work has been accomplished.  What Joseph Smith ‘translated’ were burial documents commonly found in tombs, whose meaning and interpretation has been unquestionably established to have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with Joseph Smith’s purported translation.  The exposure of this fraud in painstaking detail leaves the Church with no plausible retreat from the inescapable conclusion that the purported scriptures that resulted are fraudulent.  Only the most naïve and uninformed remain with their delusions about their authenticity, propped up by subsequent attempts by Church apologists to reframe history in ways that fly in the face of that which was documented by Smith himself.”


Voters’ racial attitudes can influence candidate preference, sometimes unconsciously.  Research has shown that both blacks and whites show explicit preferences for their own race.
However, when it comes to implicit, or unconscious, preferences, blacks tend not to prefer one race over another, whereas close to 70% of white Americans show an implicit racial bias.


The difference between faith and insanity is that faith is the ability to hold firmly to a conclusion that is incompatible with the evidence,
whereas insanity is the ability to hold firmly to a conclusion that is incompatible with the evidence.

— William Harwood


Not Sure If Candidates Are Getting Worse

I...See

Or If I’m Just Paying More Attention to Politics

Maybe it’s both…..or maybe it’s because I went too long without paying enough attention…

Actually, back in the mid-1900s, you wouldn’t have expected the average person to know anything about anyone in Congress except his own state’s representatives and the Speaker of the House.  Now, every little gaffe and misspeak from every politician is captured on video or in print, then disseminated worldwide in mere minutes.  Also, there are controversies now that weren’t really issues before the 60s.  Today, people may vilify or vote for a candidate based on the candidate’s beliefs with regard to a single topic such as illegal immigration, gun rights, gay rights, or drug legalization.  In the ’50s and before, there was no (or very little serious) debate on those issues at all.  It was much easier to “look good” back then than it is now.


Evan Wright, two-time National Magazine Award-winning journalist, has written an e-book, How to Get Away With Murder in America, which notes that “in the past, the CIA was subject to oversight, however tenuous, from the president and Congress,” but that “President Bush’s 2001 executive order severed this line by transferring to the CIA his unique authority to approve assassinations.  By removing himself from the decision-making cycle, he shielded himself and all elected authority from responsibility should a mission go wrong or be found illegal.  When the CIA transferred the assassination unit to Blackwater, it continued this trend.  CIA officers would no longer participate in the agency’s most violent operations, or even witness them.  If there was any oversight at all, it was the CIA relying on Blackwater’s self-reporting about missions it conducted.  Running operations through Blackwater gave the CIA power to have people abducted or killed, with no one in government being exactly responsible.”  None of this is new information.  Enrique Prado, a high-ranking CIA-officer-turned-Blackwater-employee oversaw assassination units for both CIA and contractors.  To whom was this awesome responsibility being entrusted?  According to Wright’s investigation, a federal organised crime squad run out of the Miami-Dade Police Department produced an investigation allegedly tying Prado to 7 murders carried out while he worked as a bodyguard for a narco crime boss.  The CIA responded by declaring Prado “unavailable for questioning” and the investigation shut down before he could be arrested.  In 2010, the Obama administration intervened on behalf of Blackwater executives indicted for weapons trafficking, filing motions to suppress evidence on grounds that it could compromise national security.  The administration then awarded Blackwater (now called Academi, after first being renamed Xe) a $250 million contract to perform unspecified services for the CIA.  At the same time, Obama has publicly taken responsibility for some lethal operations — the Navy SEALs’ sniper attack on Somali pirates, the raid on bin Laden.  His aides have also claimed he reviews target lists for drone strikes.  The president’s actions give him the appearance of a man who wants the best of both worlds — a tough, resolute leader when he announces his role in killings likely to be popular (pirate, terrorist) while the apparatus for those less-accountable killings grinds quietly on.


Believing Too Hard

  • “Britain-based GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical manufacturers, pled guilty to 3 charges brought by the US Department of Justice: 1.) marketing Paxil, an anti-anxiety drug, for use on children and adolescents when it was only approved for adults; 2.) marketing Wellburtin, an anti-anxiety drug, as a weight loss drug; and 3.) failing to report grave safety issues with Avandia, its diabetes drug.  That’s on top of shoddy manufacturing processes in Puerto Rico resulting in adulterated medicines being distributed around the world (including in the US, for which it had to pay a US$750 million fine).  And there are tens of thousands of product liability cases, about half unresolved.  GSK also agreed to higher scrutiny of its sales group, suggesting bribes and kickbacks were found in the marketing division.  For the next 5 years, if the sales force is naughty, they — gasp — forfeit bonuses.  (The horror.)  And GSK will pay the US $3 billion as a fine; 1/3 criminal and 2/3 civil.  This is serious money — the largest ever levied by the US Food & Drug Administration.  But look at this: for fiscal 2011, GSK reported net profits worldwide of $12.4 billion.  Criminal activity had extended for more than 5 years.  So the fine amounts to something like 5% of company net profits over the period.  (Not much of a tap on the wrist.)
  • From Derek Lowe’s "In the Pipeline" Corante column: There were GSK sales reps who grew concerned about illegal activity more than 10 years ago: “Regardless of what company policy may be, my letters to human resources and my previous complaints of misconduct have been quashed.  My 23-plus-year career with this company has been trashed, and it is obvious I can no longer work with my district manager and friends/counterparts just because I have come forward with the truth, which could save the reputation of GSK and millions of dollars in fines,” wrote Greg Thorpe (one of the whistleblowers on whose claims the US feds based their allegations), in a note to Glaxo officials — who had issued a warning to Thorpe about his unwillingness to be a team player; they refused to address various violations of the False Claims Act, to which he specifically repeatedly referred in numerous communications.  “Team player” is a phrase that should put a person on guard.  It can be innocuous, but can also justify pretty much any behaviour the rest of a group is doing, and on no more basis than, well, the rest of the group is doing it.  Says Lowe, “I reserve my admiration for those who need more justification than that for their actions.  There are some effects that I hope this GSK news will have: making someone think twice about getting caught when they’re planning something that goes over the line, or (on the other side) shoring up the resolve of a person who’s deciding not to go along with something that they’ve realised is wrong.  The world tends to run short of both of those.”  (Eric Holder: Are you listening?)
  • Pfizer, the maker of drugs that help alleviate arthritis and other ailments, has paid almost $3 billion in fines since 2002 and entered into three corporate integrity agreements with the Department of Health and Human Services aimed at preventing future fraud.  It and other companies are fighting attempts by Congress to exclude them from government business because of their history of fraud.  Merck, another pharmaceutical giant, paid $1.6 billion in fines since 2008, Medicare and Justice Department records show, to resolve claims it was not paying proper rebates to the government.  Pfizer’s 2009 settlement was for improperly promoting the use of drugs for purposes other than those for which they were approved by the government.  Merck’s 2008 settlement involved claims the company paid illegal kickbacks to health care providers in exchange for prescribing its drugs.


When planning the Citigroup Center in the early 1970s, architect William Le Messurier had a problem.  The site was already occupied by St Peter’s Lutheran Church and they weren’t willing to move.  Two retail tenants on the Lexington Avenue portion of the site, a Howard Johnson’s coffee shop and Carroll’s Pub wanted to remain for the duration of their leases.  So, the bank’s architect was instructed to make provisions for the building to be erected around them that would take into account the eventual demolition of those buildings, which the bank had already acquired.  (The church was eventually rebuilt at Citigroup’s expense.)  So the architect designed an entire skyscraper that hung above the quaint little church — on stilts.  The end result, completed in 1977, eventually towered 915 feet over NY streets.  In 1978, engineer Joel Weinstein realised something alarming while looking at the blueprints — quartering winds (that strike the corners of buildings rather than flat faces) would cause far more loading force than had been allowed.  Why?  Instead of the wind joints being welded on, as designed, plans were modified during construction to use bolts.  How much difference did that make?  With bolts, not welds, the building would topple in a type of storm that, on average, hit NYC every 55 years.  Should the tuned mass damper inside the building fail, that rate dropped to every 16 years.  Citigroup sent out a press release stating that the building was in no danger at all, then had the Red Cross create secret emergency procedures in the event of its collapse.  Then construction workers — only operating at night (for secrecy) — hastily began welding the joints every evening in a race against the impending hurricane season.  That year, Hurricane Ella was early — and was headed right for New York City, with winds strong enough to topple the partially-welded building.  But the hurricane luckily made a turn back to sea.  What’s the worst that would’ve happened had Ella struck?  Citigroup would be out an expensive building and maybe a few workers?  Actually, the Red Cross estimated the death toll at 200,000 people, with damage to an estimated 156 city blocks.  But don’t worry — it’s all fixed now.


Marginal Utility

Power Outage

Power Outage

Water Outage

Water Outage

Back to Nature: American Bison

Back to Nature: American Bison

  • The majority of power outages in the US are caused by weather, in particular storms blowing trees on the lines, and heat waves that overwhelm the carrying capacity of the system.  Animals, too: in 2011, 130 outages were caused by squirrels, 8 by snakes, 2 by beavers, and one by deer (a fawn which a bald eagle dropped into a substation in Montana).  Since the early 1990s, the number of power outages affecting more than 50,000 people a year has more than doubled, and blackouts now drain between $80-$188 billion from the US economy annually.  The power grid is slipping backward to a time when infrastructure was unreliable.  But it’s not easy to keep 450,000 miles of high voltage lines up and humming.  However, the situation has gotten worse over the years because the US has increased the load on its lines while investing less in the system.  There’s a fair amount of agreement that the US needs to make massive investments in the backbone of the grid, as well as in a self-healing grid that can better handle outages (and hackers), and in information technology to make the grid “smart.”  Creating private, or ultralocal, hedges against failing power without investing in the greater grid is the electric equivalent of creating a gated community.  And America’s grid’s frailties are getting worse as the weather gets weirder.
  • The Ogallala Aquifer is vast, yet shallow; located beneath the Great Plains in the US, it’s one of the world’s largest aquifers, covering an area of 174,000 square miles (450,000 square kilometres) in portions of South Dakota, Nebraska, Wyoming, Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Texas.  About 27% of irrigated land overlies the aquifer, which yields about 30% of groundwater used for irrigation and provides drinking water to 82% of people who live within its boundaries.  Water thickness ranges from a few feet to more than 1,000 (300 metres), generally greater in the north.  Water depth ranges from 400 feet (122 metres) in parts of the north to between 100-200 feet (30-61 metres) throughout the south.  Recharge is exceedingly slow (the water dates back to the last ice age).  Success of large-scale farming in areas with inadequate precipitation depends heavily on groundwater pumping for irrigation.  Regions overlying the Ogallala are some of the most productive for livestock and corn, wheat and soybean growing in the US.  Early settlers of the region were plagued by crop failures due to cycles of drought (culminating in the disastrous Dust Bowl of the 1930s).  Large-scale use of the aquifer for irrigation began in the 1930s when electric power came to rural farming communities as did cheap and efficient electric turbine pumps.  But only after World War II did affordable technology allow substantial water extraction, transforming the High Plains into one of the most agriculturally productive regions in the world.  At first, the water was thought to be inexhaustible (its hydrology was a mystery).  But the water table dropped more than 5 feet (1.5 metres) per year at times of maximum extraction.  In many cases, wells had to be deepened to reach the steadily falling water table (now disappeared in some places in the Texas Panhandle).  Using treated, recycled water in agriculture is one approach to conservation.  Another is changing to crops requiring less water (sunflowers, for example).  Unfortunately, several rivers in the region (such as the Platte) run below the level of the aquifer, causing them to receive its groundwater flow, thus carrying it out of the region instead of supplying recharge.
  • It may be tempting to think that, because the Ogallala does not refill from rainfall, the lack of rainfall will not hurt it.  Would that it were so.  In fact, rainfall is the single most important way to protect the aquifer, as it drastically reduces the need for pumping.  Farmers use about 3 times as much irrigation water in a drought as they do in average times, and during last year’s dry spell some of the monitoring wells in West Texas dropped by 25 feet, 10 times the average annual rate.  With less than 100 feet of aquifer remaining in most parts of the region, one shudders to imagine how many more droughts the farmers of West Texas can take.  The suggestion that residents embrace their own decline and convert their land into a vast national park known as the Buffalo Commons has sparked the enthusiasm of conservationists and the wrath of local farmers in equal measure.  Rural communities across Kansas and Nebraska, Montana and Texas, Oklahoma and the Dakotas have shrunk each decade since the Great Depression.  In Kansas alone, more than 6,000 towns have vanished altogether.  Nearly a million square miles of the American heartland currently meets the definition of “frontier” used by the Census Bureau more than a century ago.  Another possible alternative being suggested: winds farms for hundreds of miles.  Resources for Americans may be plentiful, but they aren’t always located in the right places.


The greatest regulatory problem — far more urgent that the environmental marginalia Mitt Romney has fumed about — is that the giant Wall Street banks remain dangerous quasi-wards of the state and are inexorably prone to speculative abuse of taxpayer-insured deposits and the Fed’s cheap money.  Forget about “too big to fail.”  These banks are too big to exist — too big to manage internally and to regulate externally.  They need to be broken up by regulatory decree. — David Stockman in the New York Times

Former Citi CEO and legendary Wall Street executive Sandy Weill shocked the financial industry while hosting CNBC’s “Squawk Box” when he called for banks to be broken up — for retail banks to be separated from investment banks.  This is all the more surprising when you know something about Weill’s career.  He has been a pillar of Wall Street for the past half century, being involved in some of the biggest mergers and acquisitions in the history of finance.  And the repeal of Glass-Steagall, the legislation that originally separated investment banking from retail banking, can be, in part, credited to him.  “This system is really immobilizing the banking system,” he said.  (I suppose he is acknowledging that his support for the repeal of Glass-Steagall was a mistake — perhaps not an easy admission to make.)

Czech Republic

Czech Republic

Philippines

Philippines

Saudi Arabia

Saudi Arabia

 Price per Gallon    Countries Pain  Price per Gallon    Countries Pain
Premium Gasoline Ranked Highest Rank Premium Gasoline Ranked Lowest Rank
$10.12 Norway #52 $3.55 Pakistan #02
  9.41 Turkey #07  3.24 Mexico #29
  9.28 Israel #31  3.23 Malaysia #28
  8.61 Hong Kong #35  2.80 Iran #20
  8.26 Netherlands #41  2.32 Nigeria #04
  8.20 Denmark #47  1.89 UAE #57
  8.15 Italy #34  1.73 Egypt #14
  8.14 Sweden #48  0.89 Kuwait #59
  7.92 Greece #26  0.61 Saudi Arabia #58
  7.87 United Kingdom #37  0.09 Venezuela #60

 

  • The Czech Republic had the 4th-biggest price decline in the Bloomberg Gas Price Ranking.  The average daily income is $53.  The share of a day’s wages needed to buy a gallon of gas is 12%.  The price per gallon of premium gasoline: $6.46 (down 15% since last quarter).  The Czech Republic has the 28th most expensive gas and the 25th highest pain-at-the-pump rank.
  • Philippines is the world’s 2nd-biggest producer of geothermal energy (after the US) according to the International Geothermal Association.  This nation of 95 million people and 7,100 islands uses this clean-energy source for about 17% of its energy needs.  The Philippines economy is making the transition to more manufacturing and services from one based primarily on agriculture.  Demand for cheap energy is high but wages aren’t.  The average daily income is $6.36; the share of a day’s wages needed to buy a gallon of gas is 70%.  The price per gallon of premium gasoline: $4.42 (no change from last quarter).  The Philippines has the 47th most expensive gas and the 3rd highest pain-at-the-pump rank.
  • While Saudi Arabia holds 20% of the world’s oil reserves, it pursues wind, solar and nuclear power to help halve the crude and natural gas it burns to generate electricity.  The country wishes to generate 1/3 of its electricity from alternate energy sources within two decades.  Persian Gulf oil producers are seeking new ways to generate power because they prefer selling their expensive crude to gas-hungry countries, rather than burning it themselves.  Saudi Arabia is OPEC’s biggest producer and heavily subsidises the price of gasoline.  The average daily income is $62; a gallon of gas costs 1% of a day’s wages.  The price per gallon of premium gasoline: $0.61 (no change from last quarter).  Saudi Arabia has the 2nd least expensive gas and the 3rd least pain-at-the-pump rank.


Aquatic “dead zones” are a tragic illustration of human beings’ negative impact on the world’s oceans — areas so overloaded with pollutants that they have difficulty sustaining any life.  The flow of fertilisers, sewage and industrial pollutants into rivers and seas has overloaded some coastal marine areas with nutrient waste such as nitrogen and phosphorus.  This stimulates excessive growth of plants and algae, using up oxygen dissolved in the water and killing off marine life that depends on it.  There are now more than 530 aquatic dead zones around the world.  Scientists in Sweden are testing an idea to pump oxygen into the Baltic Sea (it separates Scandinavia from mainland Europe, now the world’s largest man-made dead zone) in an attempt to revive its dying ecosystem.  Attempts to reduce waste being dumped into the Baltic have so far failed to stop dead-zone growth, now equivalent to 1½ times the size of Denmark.  A number of Baltic countries are considering technological interventions — so-called “geoengineering” ideas (large-scale environmental solutions), such as pumping oxygen into the water and using chemicals to bind sediment pollutants.  If implemented, the Baltic Deepwater Oxygenation project will require 100 pumping stations built around the Baltic Sea to transport oxygen deep underwater, counteracting declining amounts, thus preventing enlargement of the dead zone.  But others say such action could have a number of “unforeseen” consequences and could allow countries to ignore obligations to reduce waste dumping.  Professor Daniel Conley, Lund University, Sweden, says the oxygen pumping will cost millions and would need to be continued for decades.  That time and money, he believes, would be better directed at reducing land-based sources of nutrients rather than engineering an expensive (and potentially harmful) solution.


Random

Average Floor Space of Newly-Built Homes

Average Floor Space of Newly-Built Homes

Internal Monologue

Internal Monologue

Helping Your Child Understand He May Be a Threat to National Security

He May Be a Threat to National Security


Some Truths Everyone Should know

  • Don’t rush into or through relationships.  Be social, find people to connect with and discover what you’re looking for in a partner.  Never jump into a relationship solely out of fear of being alone.  Once you’re together, don’t hurry into attaining “the next level.”  Just be with each other (especially in the beginning) — savour it.
  • It will come back to haunt you, so document everything.  You may think you can settle every career dispute verbally and casually.  Unfortunately, when someone else’s job is on the line, he/she may sacrifice you.  Have dated written evidence (emails, signed documents) prepared to defend yourself.  You might only need it once, but it could save you.
  • A relationship will not fix your problems.  If you’re unhappy, don’t expect another person to change that.  Often, you’ll only end up spilling those problems onto them.  Make sure you’re content with who you are before trying repair it through someone else.  The only one who can determine your happiness is you.
  • Developing social skills is critical, the foundation on which to build personal, professional, and academic fulfillment.  In the real world, it isn’t what you know but who.  Learn to communicate and relate with others in all aspects of life.  Practice this every day.
  • Being late is no excuse.  Expect the unexpected and allow extra time.  You’re only excused in the rare event of an emergency (flat tire, injury).  Otherwise, you’re at fault and it’s rude to other parties.  Leaving 15 minutes earlier will show that you value other people’s time.
  • Writing well is a priceless asset regardless of your profession.  Understand and use language to your advantage in resumes, professional emails, personal correspondence, and even online dating profiles.  Learn to be engaging and persuasive while giving value to the reader.  The Elements of Style will give you the foundation of good writing.
  • Your word is your bond.  You can be honest 99% of the time but that 1% will discredit everything you worked for.  Gaining back trust is hard.  Nietzsche said, “I’m not upset that you lied to me, I’m upset that from now on I can’t believe you.”
  • The world needs more gratitude.  Saying thanks takes a second and will be appreciated.  You’re built from countless contributors.  You wouldn’t be the person you are without your 5th-grade teacher, father, best friend from high school — even the grocery bagger and bus driver support you, so be grateful to each.


Put All Known Hurricane Tracks Together and What Shape Do You Get?

Hurricane Tracks from 1851 to the Present Day

Hurricane Tracks from 1851 to the Present Day

This is essentially a 2D representation of a 4D object — that is, hurricanes on Earth over time.  And what shape do you get?
Why, what a surprise!


A Dutch company called Mars One plans to colonise Mars by the year 2023.  To finance the venture, they hope to turn the entire process into a (surprise!) reality tv show, saying that the only way to make the mission possible is to fund it commercially.  The most likely feasible business model at this point is to create a “global media spectacle.”  An engaged audience worldwide would vote for potential settler team members, then follow the crew during training and actual space travel.  Donations and sponsors would thus pay expenses (the mission is estimated to cost about US$6 billion).  A habitable settlement would be established that would receive new astronauts every 2 years.  Mars One says that existing technology already makes their plan achievable.  They estimate a trip will take 7 months one way. (See video or visit their site for more.)  NASA scientists say they have also been considering having astronauts make a one-way trip to set up a human colony on Mars or one of its moons by 2030.  They too envision that it will be a one-way mission, since the cost of flying people to and fro would be prohibitive.  Instead, astronauts would establish a colony and be sent regular supplies until self-sufficiency was achieved.  I presume there would be females as well.  Genetically, how many humans would be required to safely populate Mars?  Minimum viable population is a lower bound on the population of a species, such that it can survive in the wild.  An MVP of 500-1,000 has often been given as an average for terrestrial vertebrates when inbreeding or genetic variability is ignored.  When inbreeding effects are included, estimates of MVP for many species are in the 1,000s.  (One meta-analysis gives a median necessary MVP of 4,169 — a lot of humans to hoist up to Mars.)  Did the Dutch company approve the illustration?  They plan to leave settlers in the open, unprotected from fierce radiation?  (There’s no atmosphere to speak of to deflect it.)  Perhaps I don’t want to go after all…


The Beauty and Versatility of Our Solar System

Frozen Martian Sand Dunes

Frozen Martian Sand Dunes

Dry Ocean Bed

Dry Ocean Bed

Inside Valles Marineris

Inside Valles Marineris
Group Shot

Group Shot

The Moon's North Pole

The Moon’s North Pole

A Hole in Mars

A Hole in Mars

What to Expect When You Get to Mars with All Your Worldly Possessions

  • Barchan (crescent-shaped) sand dunes are found within the North Polar erg (desert covered with wind-swept sand with little or no vegetative cover) of Mars.  This type of dune provides a record of the wind environment when they formed and moved: the dunes’ horns point downwind.  It appears possible that these dunes are still active (when not covered in frost) as their crestlines are sharp and slipfaces (the inner curved region between the horns/downwind surface) appear smooth and steep.  This image was taken during the northern spring season; dunes and ground are still covered in seasonal frost.  The speckled appearance is due to warming of the area: as carbon dioxide frost and water ice on the dunes warms, small areas sublimate (turn from solid to gas) faster, creating small jets that expose (and deposit) dark sand and dust onto surfaces.  There are no spots on the ground between the dunes because the ground stays more uniformly cold.  As spring continues, more spots will appear until all frost is gone.
  • Mars Express radar has detected sediments reminiscent of an ocean floor inside previously identified ancient shorelines on the red planet.  The ocean would have covered the northern plains billions of years ago.  The northern plains are covered in low-density material that scientists interpret as sedimentary deposits, maybe ice-rich, a strong indication that there was once an ocean there.  The existence of oceans on ancient Mars has been long been suspected and features reminiscent of shorelines have been tentatively identified in images from various spacecraft.  But it remains a controversial issue.  Two oceans have been proposed: 4 billion years ago, when warmer conditions prevailed, and also 3 billion years ago when subsurface ice melted, possibly as a result of enhanced geothermal activity, creating outflow channels that drained the water into areas of low elevation.
  • West Candor Chasma in central Valles Marineris contains some of the thickest of the fine-grained layered deposits on Mars.  As the material erodes in the wind, it disappears — apparently blown away — so the grains must be small.  The layers may have been deposited from windblown materials, fall of volcanic sediments, or carried in by water, or all of the above and subsequently possibly altered by groundwater to produce hydrated minerals such as sulfates.  The enhanced colours are related to minerals or overlying dust or sand.  The dark blue sharp-crested ridges are sand dunes.

So Many Things Are Round

  • A close encounter of planets and the moon occurred in the predawn skies 15 July 2012.  While many saw bright Jupiter next to the slender, waning crescent, Europeans had the opportunity to watch it pass behind the lunar disk, occulted by the moon.  Clouds threaten in this telescopic view from Montecassiano, Italy, but the frame still captures Jupiter after it emerged from the occultation along with all 4 of its large Galilean moons.  The sunlit crescent is overexposed with the Moon’s night side faintly illuminated by Earthshine.  Lined up left to right beyond the dark lunar limb are Callisto, Ganymede, Jupiter, Io, and Europa.  In fact, Callisto, Ganymede, and Io are larger than Earth’s moon, while Europa is only slightly smaller.
  • This is an image of the moon’s north polar region, made possible by a camera of the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has been orbiting the moon since 2009.  This image is a mosaic, composed of nearly 1,000 images taken over a one-month period during the moon’s northern summer.  Who knew the moon could look so alien and strange?  I find it looks a bit like a vortex.
  • What created this unusual hole in Mars? The hole was discovered by chance on images of the dusty slopes of Mars’ Pavonis Mons volcano taken by the HiRISE instrument aboard the robotic Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter currently encircling the planet.  The hole appears to be an opening to an underground cavern, partly illuminated.  Analysis of this and follow-up images reveal the opening to be about 35 metres across, while the interior shadow angle indicates that the underlying cavern is roughly 20 metres deep.  Why there’s a circular crater surrounding the hole remains a topic of speculation, as is the full extent of the underlying cavern.  Holes such as this are of particular interest because the interiors are relatively protected from the harsh surface of Mars, making them good candidates to contain life.  These pits are therefore prime targets for possible future spacecraft, robots, and even human interplanetary explorers.


The sun is a fusion generator almost 1.4 million kilometres across, so big that you could pack 1.3 million Earths inside it, so massive that even with giant planets like Jupiter and Saturn, it still tips the scale with 99.98% of the mass of the entire solar system.  Sunspots regularly dot its surface and it frequently throws off large flares.  It has a magnetic field so powerful that it extends far beyond the orbit of Pluto, where even at that distance it diverts potentially harmful cosmic particles, similar to how the earth’s magnetic field protects us from the sun’s solar wind.  However, a team of astronomers from the US and Brazil have taken incredibly accurate measurements of the shape of the sun and found it to be almost the roundest object ever measured.  Normally, a rotating object with fluid properties (like the molten mantle under the earth’s surface or the liquid hydrogen inside a gas-giant planet like Jupiter) will bulge at the equator.  The earth’s bulge makes it 42 kilometres wider at the equator than from pole to pole.  This is called an object’s “flattening”, for which the earth has a value of 0.0033528.  By comparison, the sun’s flattening value is 0.000009.  That means that if you shrank the sun to the size of a beach ball, the difference between the diameter at its equator and the diameter between its poles would be less than the width of a human hair.  Wih the sun rotating every 28 days, it was thought that there would be more flattening than that.  This indicates that something else is going on under the surface as a counter to what would be happening from rotation.  Also, since this flattening value is constant with time, this counter would also need to be constant.  That perhaps points toward subsurface turbulence, or possibly the sun’s strong magnetic field is the reason.


Layers and Angles

Anticline in England

Anticline in England

Badlands of South Dakota

Badlands of South Dakota

Geology in Utah

Geology in Utah

Loess Panorama, China

Loess Panorama, China

Quebrada de Humahuaca

Quebrada de Humahuaca

  • Northcott Mouth — A chevron fold anticline in mainly sandstones of the Bude Formation (upper Carboniferous), just south of Northcott Mouth, near Bude, North Cornwall.  The Bude Formation consists sandstones interbedded with shales. The response to earth movements at the end of the Carboniferous was to form slightly asymmetric angular folds.
  • As part of the war effort, the US Army Air Force (USAAF) took possession of 341,726 acres (138,292 hectares) of land on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, home of the Oglala Sioux people, for a gunnery range. Included in this range was 337 acres (136 hectares) from the Badlands National Monument.  This land was used extensively from 1942 through 1945 as an air-to-air and air-to-ground gunnery range including both precision and demolition bombing exercises.  After the war, portions of the bombing range were used as an artillery range by the South Dakota National Guard.  Firing took place within most of the present day Stronghold District.  Land was bought or leased from individual landowners and the Tribe in order to clear the area of human occupation.  Old car bodies and 55 gallon drums painted bright yellow were used as targets.  Bulls-eyes 250 feet (76 metrea) across were plowed into the ground and used as targets by bombardiers.  Small automatic aircraft called “drones” and 60-foot (18-metre) by 8-foot (2-metre) screens dragged behind planes served as mobile targets.  Today, the ground is littered with discarded bullet cases and unexploded ordnance.  125 families were forcibly relocated from their farms and ranches in the 1940s.  Those that remained nearby recall times when they had to dive under tractors while out cutting hay to avoid bombs dropped by planes miles outside of the boundary.  In the town of Interior, both a church and the building housing the current post office were struck by six 6-inch (152 millimetre) shells through the roof.  Pilots operating out of Ellsworth Air Force Base near Rapid City, found it a real challenge to determine the exact boundaries of the range.  Fortunately, there were no civilian casualties.  However, at least a dozen flight crew personnel lost their lives in plane crashes.
  • “Indian blanket” pattern near Mexican Hat, Utah.  As I recall, there are some spectacular formations in this area.  For a rather nice view of one, see Rapley Ridge.


  • The worst erosion on Earth is seen in the deeply gullied hills of the Loess plateau in Shaanxi province of China.  Small fields are all that are left as erosion whittles away at the land available for crops.
  • This spectacular valley of scoured rock in Jujuy province offers tortured formations and an artist’s palette of mineral colours.  This narrow mountain valley is located 1,500 kilometres (932 miles) north of Buenos Aires.  It is about 155 kilometres (96 miles) long, oriented north-south.  The name quebrada (literally “broken”) translates as a deep valley or ravine, receiving its name from Humahuaca, a small city of 11,000 inhabitants.  The Grande River (Río Grande), which is dry in winter, flows copiously through the Quebrada in the summer.  The region has been populated for 10,000 years, since the settlement of the first hunter-gatherers, as evidenced by substantial prehistoric remains.  It was a caravan road for the Inca Empire in the 15th century and next an important link between the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata and the Viceroyalty of Peru, as well as a stage for many battles of the Spanish War of Independence.


Fort Jefferson is an unincorporated community and ghost town in Monroe County, Florida, USA, located on Garden Key in the lower Florida Keys within the Dry Tortugas National Park, about 70 miles (110 kilometres) west of the island of Key West.  It’s a massive but unfinished coastal fortress, the largest masonry structure in the Western Hemisphere, composed of over 16 million bricks.  After Spain sold Florida to the US for $5 million (about 1820), the Dry Tortugas (so-called because they have no sources of fresh water) were investigated by a naval commodore as possible sites for a naval station to help with suppression of piracy in the Carribbean.  The lack of water and the fact that many of the islands were mainly shifting sand argued against that, though it was decided to put a 65-foot lighthouse on Garden Key to assist boats in avoiding the many reefs and small islands.  But soon a different naval Commodore saw Garden Key as a perfect “advance post” for defense of the Gulf Coast.  Fort Jefferson was designed to be a massive gun platform, impervious to assault, and able to destroy any enemy ships foolhardy enough to come within range of its 410 powerful guns.  The Army employed civilian machinists, carpenters, blacksmiths, masons, general labourers, the resident prisoner population, and slaves to help construct the fort. By 1863, during the Civil War, the number of military convicts at Fort Jefferson had increased so significantly that slaves were no longer needed.  Fort Jefferson’s peak military population was 1,729.  In addition, a number of officers brought their families, and a limited number of enlisted personnel brought wives who served as laundresses (typically 4 per company).  There were also lighthouse keepers and their families, cooks, a civilian doctor and his family, and others.  In all, there were close to 2,000 people at Fort Jefferson during its peak years.  In order to support such a large population in an area lacking fresh water, an innovative system of cisterns was built into the walls of the fort.  Sand-filled columns were placed at regular intervals in the inner walls, spanning their height from the roof to the foundation. The columns were intended to filter rainwater from the rooftop for long-term storage in a series of underground chambers.  However, the system was never used in practice, as the enormous weight of the outer walls caused them to subside; this created cracks in the cisterns, allowing seawater to contaminate the fresh water supply.


Behind Frozen Waterfalls

Minnehaha Falls, Hiawatha, Minnesota USA

Minnehaha Falls, Hiawatha, Minnesota USA

River Szinva, Miskolc-Lillafüred, Hungary

River Szinva, Miskolc-Lillafüred, Hungary

Starved Rock, Utica, Illinois, USA

Starved Rock, Utica, Illinois, USA

Glen Onoko Falls, Lehigh River, Pennsylvania USA

Glen Onoko Falls, Lehigh River, Pennsylvania USA
Eben Ice Cave, Upper Peninsula, Michigan USA

Eben Ice Cave, Upper Peninsula, Michigan USA

Eben Junction, Michigan USA

Eben Junction, Michigan USA

Hocking Hills State Park, Ohio USA

Hocking Hills State Park, Ohio USA

  • Minnehaha Falls in Hiawatha, Minnesota, USA.  The ice is up to 3 feet thick in some areas.  Different sediment and thicknesses cause different colours, with some areas pink, yellow, brown, green, purple, and blue.  The photographer says that multiple shots were stitched together to create this.


  • Szinva is a stream in northern Hungary, a tributary to the river Sajó.  It originates in the Bükk Mountains.  It is 30 kilometres long, 20 kilometres of which can be found the city of Miskolc, through which the stream flows from west to east.  More than 70 bridges were built over the stream, and in parts of the city centre it flows underground.  The Szinva was responsible for the great flood of 1878, one of the largest floods of the 19th century.  The flood claimed about 400 lives and almost completely destroyed the downtown of Miskolc.
  • Although you can (technically) see waterfalls in 14 of the park’s 18 canyons, the most scenic waterfalls are in St Louis, French, Wildcat, Tonty, Ottawa and Kaskaskia canyons.  In the winter, several of them become icefalls.  I’m not sure in which canyon this one is found.
  • Pretty waterfalls spill down a cascade of rocks in the Pennsylvania mountains.  The hike to Glen Onoko Falls is a fairly difficult ascent — there have been numerous deaths from falls in the past.


  • The Ice Caves are not true caves at all.  They consist of walls or vertical sheets of ice that form across the face of overhanging rock outcrops.  In the summer, small unimpressive waterfalls and groundwater seeps may be found along the overhangs.  In the winter, however, the water hits the cold air, drips downward under the influence of gravity and freezes, creating spectacular ice caves.  Each winter they look a little different, but typically there are openings in the ice that allow you to walk behind the ice walls.  This photo was taken in 2007.
  • This is a different view of Eben Ice Cave by a different photographer.  I don’t know if there is only one so-called ice cave or many (from photos they look to be at least contiguous, if not joined) — this photo was taken in 2006, so the view inside probably changes drastically from year to year.
  • The hollows and caves of the park complex have long attracted the peoples of Ohio.  Evidence of the ancient Adena culture indicates that man first inhabited the recesses more than 7,000 years ago.  In the mid 1700s several native American tribes travelled through or lived there including the Wyandot, Delaware and Shawnee.  Their name for the river from which the park gets its name was Hockhocking, or “bottle river.”  The name comes from the bottle-shaped valley of the Hocking River whose formation is due to its one-time blockage by glacial ice.  This photo was taken at Old Man’s Cave.  Frozen waterfalls apparently freeze from outside in.  In this shot, it is obvious that a considerable amount of water is still flowing within the ice lume.


Throughout history, constructed languages have been proposed that would become the Earth Standard language, spoken universally.  None have been as popular as natural languages are, and they mostly soon fall into obscurity.  English is spoken as either a first or second languages by 800 million to 1.8 billion people.  If you’re a native English speaker, you’re unlikely to have learned a second language.  English has become a candidate for the modern lingua franca, not because it has the greatest number of native speakers, but because the greatest number of non-native speakers are willing to pick it up.  It has occurred to native and non-native speakers alike that this might not be fair.  The pushiness and ultimate temporariness of dominant languages have caused attempts at creating a simple, common language that the entire world might learn, allowing basic communication everywhere.  These attempts have died on the vine.  Esperanto made its debut in 1887, brain-child of Ludovic Zamenhof, a Polish physician.  Zamenhof was troubled by the language-based conflicts in his homeland and wanted to reintroduce Latin or Greek, but found their idiosyncrasies frustrating.  He identified stumbling blocks — irregular verbs, unusual spelling, gendered nouns — and created a language that eschewed such messiness.  Esperanto is phonetic, regular, grammatically simple.  In some ways the negative reaction to Esperanto fueled its growth.  The Russian Czar banned his people learning it.  But Eastern Europe and China saw Esperanto as a way to promote a common language that didn’t favour any particular nation.  Although it’s the most popular auxiliary language, Esperanto has proved impractical.  Since it’s nobody’s native tongue, it relies on a willingness to learn it as a second language.  Few people are motivated unless lots of others are also willing to learn.  Thus Esperanto appears to be spiraling down, not up.  One good kick from people around the world and it might yet become a common language, but to do that it must overcome its homegrown demons.  Zamenhof proposed changes to make it simpler a few years after he debuted it but regular speakers were slow to adopt the changes, and so dialects have already begun to develop.  The bottom line seems to be that a proposed standard, no matter how logical and well intentioned, will not flourish if it overlooks the practical issues inherent in “real life” systems.  The key for standards committees is to find the narrow line between developing superior but difficult-to-implement standards and exploiting imperfect but functional strategies that build on existing systems.  (This applies to the plight of a lot of small companies launching their flagship product(s) as well.)


The Shape of Things to Come

Kingdom Tower, Saudi Arabia

Kingdom Tower, Saudi Arabia

The Oasis, Taiwan

The Oasis, Taiwan

Zayed National Museum, Abu Dhabi, UAE

Zayed National Museum, Abu Dhabi, UAE
Drive-Thru Airport

Drive-Thru Airport

Kuwait International Airport

Kuwait International Airport

Terminal Hangar, Spaceport America

Terminal Hangar, Spaceport America

  • This futuristic mega-skyscraper will be built in Jeddah, a cosmopolitan, commercially-minded port city on the Red Sea.  The challenger for the world’s tallest building title intends to surpass its closest competition — Dubai’s Burj Khalifa — by at least 568 feet.  The triangular structure will be the focal point of Kingdom City, a sprawling urban development that will cost a reported $20 billion. Kingdom Tower will house a Four Seasons hotel, upscale office space, ultra-luxurious condos, and the world’s tallest observatory.  Residents will be able to ride up on one of the building’s 59 elevators (which travel at 22 miles per hour) to enjoy a private sky terrace on the 157th floor.
  • This design reflects Sou Fujimoto’s philosophy of Primitive Future, as the “21st Century Oasis” aspires to be a model of green architecture for the future generations.  The project is comprised of two main elements — the grand structural frame and the roof-top garden.  Inspired by the Taiwanese banyan tree, the structural frame creates a shaded, semi-outdoor space as it encases the site.  Simultaneously, the roof-top garden floats 300 metres above, representing the beauty and nature of Formosa (Divine Island).  It has a green roof, rainwater harvesting, solar hot water panels, wind turbine, photovoltaic cells, ground source heat pump, desiccant air-handling unit and natural ventilation.  [Of course, nothing says green architecture quite like lifting an existing park hundreds of metres into the air atop thousands of tons of structural steel.]
  • The design comprises 5 wing-shaped solar towers sculpted aerodynamically to work like the feathers of a bird’s wing and draw cooling air currents through the museum.  Conceived as a monument and memorial to the late founding president of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, the wing-shaped design was chosen to reflect his love of falconry.  Fresh air is captured at low levels and drawn through buried ground-cooling pipes, then released into the museum’s lobby.  As the towers heat up, they act as thermal chimneys.  Air vents at the top also take advantage of negative pressure on the lee side of the wing profile to draw hot air out and keep structures vented.  The central lobby of this Saadiyat Island construction is dug into the earth to take advantage of thermal properties, while the interior spaces open to an outdoor arena for live displays with hunting birds and a gallery devoted to falconry.  It is currently under construction.


  • Amsterdam and Vienna-based design studio Büro für MEHR has created a drive-through concept for an airport passenger terminal that could change the way airports process traffic.  The concept offers a significant reduction in the size of an airport’s layout to simplify ground traffic and significantly reduce its environmental impact.  It is anticipated that within next decade aviation traffic could almost double, with many airports already struggling to facilitate increased demand.  The basic idea is to move the aircraft to the passengers, rather than moving the people to their planes; the design focuses around the passenger and aircraft handling processes.  The new concept sends aircraft through a mandatory pathway, much a like a carwash but separated into three3 divisions: arrival, servicing and departure, moving the craft on a linear track.  It can process a maximum of 48 airplanes every 15 minutes.
  • This design is rooted in a sense of place, responsive to the climate of one of the hottest inhabited environments on earth and inspired by local forms and materials.  The new Kuwait terminal will feature a trefoil plan with the departure gates forming 3 symmetrical wings.  The aerodynamic building will include a dramatic 25-metre (82 feet) high central space, with the external walls stretching 1.2 kilometres (0.75 miles) wide.  Glazed windows filter daylight and deflect direct solar radiation, while a canopy supported by concrete columns will shade public exterior spaces and entrances.  The baggage reclaim area will be surrounded by an indoor water feature, and the roof will be fitted with an expanse of photovoltaic panels.  The Kuwait International Airport will annually see 13 million passengers through its doors, with the flexibility to accommodate 25 million passengers, and 50 million with further development.
  • Spaceport America is the first spaceport in the world built-from-the-ground-up to host private enterprise, intended to be the launch-pad of the global commercial spaceflight industry and the second space age.  The project has attracted worldwide attention because of its bold premise, stunning architecture and the fact that it is home to the world’s first commercial passenger spaceline company, Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic.  Designed, built and operated by the New Mexico Spaceport Authority (NMSA), it is nearing completion of the first phase of construction, which includes basic operational infrastructure such as an airfield, launch pads, terminal / hangar facility, emergency response capabilities, utilities and roadways.  It will be capable of accommodating both vertical and horizontal takeoff space launch vehicles, serving as the base for pre- and post-flight activities, and providing a tourism experience for interested visitors and students.


An amateur gunsmith announced recently in online forums that he had successfully printed a serviceable .22 caliber pistol.  Despite predictions of disaster, the pistol worked, successfully firing 200 rounds in testing.  He then decided to push the limits of what was possible and use his printer to make an AR-15 rifle.  To do this, he downloaded plans for an AR-15 and after some small modifications to the design, fed about $30 of ABS plastic feedstock into his late-model Stratasys printer.  The result was a functional AR-15 rifle, which also works, although it has minor feed and extraction problems that still need adjustment.  (The main body of the gun is plastic, while the chamber — where the bullets are actually struck — is solid metal.)  This development makes it clear that a wide range of bans, restrictions and prohibitions on guns are becoming increasingly unenforcable.  Further, scientists at the University of Glasgow have used a relatively low-cost system to synthesise chemical compounds, with the intention of developing the means to create custom drugs.  That may well mean the end of the orphan drug problem around the word, and very real price drops on pharmaceuticals.  It also holds out potential for evading yet another class of legal prohibitions on recreational drugs.


Man-Made

Grow Your Own

Grow Your Own

Rainbow Bridge

Rainbow Bridge

Pathfinders

Pathfinders

  • Man-made supertrees as tall as skyscrapers light up the night sky over Singapore.  The towering structures, stretching 50 metres into the sky, have giant steel and concrete trunks and thousands of thick wire rods for branches.  There are apparently 9 of them.  They form part of the Gardens By The Bay project, a massive £350 million development in the city’s Marina Bay area.
  • The Xiying Rainbow Bridge is an elevated pedestrian walkway located in Magong, Penghu County in Taiwan.  Neon tubes reflect a rainbow onto the water’s surface at night.
  • Pyrénées-Atlantiques, France — Riders in the 15th stage of the Tour de France race between the cities of Samatan and Pau in the country’s south in July 2012.


As anyone who has ever travelled by train in India is more than aware, when one visits the lavatory there is little between oneself and the rattling tracks below.  Not so obvious, perhaps, is the revelation that each time one uses the loo, it makes the railways a little more unsafe.  The acidic content of what gets flushed, it turns out, steadily corrodes the tracks, making them unstable and unreliable.  The finding, and the recommendation that railways in India should be equipped with toilets that do not discharge directly onto the tracks, was among the contents of a report made by experts reviewing safety on the trains.  Every year, around people 15,000 die on the railways.  About 6,000 people die on Mumbai’s crowded suburban rail network alone.  Human excrement, because of the pH content of the toilet discharge, has corroded a significant percentage of the country’s 70,000 miles of tracks.  Maintenance workers often refuse to service the undercarriage of the trains because discharge from toilets makes the undercarriage extremely dirty.  An estimated 20 million people in India travel by train every day.


The Kingdom of Bhutan

Takeshang Gompa, Tiger’s Nest Monastery

Takeshang Gompa, Tiger's Nest Monastery

Stupas

Stupas

Typical Bhutanese Village and Fields

Typical Bhutanese Village and Fields

Bhutan, rooted in the traditions and beliefs of a fast-disappearing Buddhist universe, opened its doors warily to the outside world only little more than 25 years ago.  It’s a place like no other — its mountain landscapes (holy peaks unclimbed to avoid disturbing the gods) are as pristine as its primeval forests.  Roads are few and precipitous, but at almost every turn there is something to see: traditional half-timbered farmhouses in sheltered valleys, arresting fortress monasteries on hilltops, rare animals and birds, and groves of blooming trees and earthbound flowers.  Valleys are colourful, suffused with the scent of butter lamps and enlivened by flocks of unruly novices, disputatious monks, and altars piled high with offerings from the rural poor, who come to spin prayer wheels, finger beads, or seek advice.  Never colonised by Western powers, Bhutan remains deeply independent, the last Tibetan Buddhist monarchy not swallowed up by China, to the north, or India, to the south.  Despite the arrival of the country’s first luxury spa resorts, one visits Bhutan on Bhutanese terms, in limited numbers, for immersion in an encompassing Buddhism that touches everything.


Roosevelt Island is an easily accessible, peaceful Manhattan retreat.  It floats in the East River opposite Manhattan’s East Side, stretching from Midtown north to Gracie Mansion.  In 1841 The Octagon opened as a beautifully designed island retreat.  The building’s signature 5-story octagonal rotunda incorporated stately blue-gray stone quarried on the island.  So beautiful was the rotunda that visiting English novelist Charles Dickens praised the building as “remarkable,” its flying spiral staircase “spacious and elegant” as it rose from an illuminated glass-brick floor.  In 1894 The Octagon was converted into the Metropolitan Hospital, for which a steamer service ferried patients and staff across the East River.
 
When the Metropolitan Hospital closed in 1955, the building fell into neglect.  The two wings extending from the rotunda were demolished, while a series of fires destroyed the domed roof.  It joined the National Register of Historic Places in 1972, but its survival remained in doubt for decades.  It has now been restored into a commercial operation.  The Octagon is within walking distance of all of Roosevelt Island (there are also bike paths) and has its own stop on the main Roosevelt Island Red Bus line.  Trams and subways are frequent.


Roosevelt Island, East River, New York City

Octagon Rotunda

Octagon Rotunda

Roosevelt Tram Shuttle

Roosevelt Tram Shuttle

Manhattan from the Queensboro Bridge, 1938

Manhattan from the Queensboro Bridge, 1938
Downriver at Night

Downriver at Night

Upriver

Upriver

Downriver toward Lower Manhattan

Downriver toward Lower Manhattan


Ukrainian students have created gloves fitted with flex sensors, touch sensors, gyroscopes and accelerometers (as well as some solar cells to increase battery life) that can sense what the hands are signing and a programme that translates the signs into both text and speech.  About 2 to 4 out of 1,000 Americans are completely deaf, and as many as 22 out of 1,000 have severe hearing loss.  For most of the general public, however, sign language is as foreign as ancient Greek, which makes communication with the hearing-impaired difficult.  EnableTalk may be able to bridge that language barrier with a smartphone and a pair of sensitive gloves — “sensitive” in that they can detect fingers’ positions and define the hands’ positions in space.  A smartphone app receives the hands’ movements via Bluetooth, matches them with stored signs, and then displays the written words and says the words aloud.  Users can also add new signs to the system.  And the gloves cost about a third of existing similar systems.


Panama’s Most Noticeable Feature

Isthmus of Panama

Isthmus of Panama

Gatun Lake

Gatun Lake

Fair-Weather Cumulus clouds

Fair-Weather Cumulus clouds

  • Twenty million years ago ocean covered the area where Panama is today.  There was a gap between North and South America through which the waters of the Atlantic and Pacific flowed freely, but beneath the surface, the Pacific Plate was sliding slowly under the Caribbean Plate.  Pressure and heat from the collision led to the formation of underwater volcanoes, some of which eventually broke the surface, forming islands.  More and more volcanic islands filled in the area over the next several million years.  Over time, sediment filled the gaps between these islands.  By about 3 million years ago, an isthmus had formed between North and South America.  This was no small thing, but rather one of the most important geologic events in the last 60 million years.  It had an enormous impact on Earth’s climate.  Shutting down the flow of water between the two oceans rerouted ocean currents.  Atlantic currents were forced northward, and eventually settled into a new current pattern — the Gulf Stream.  Warm Caribbean waters then flowed toward the northeast Atlantic, causing the climate of northwestern Europe to warm by as much as 10°C and the Atlantic grew saltier.  Each of these changes helped establish the current global ocean circulation pattern.  This regulated patterns of rainfall, sculpting landscapes; the resulting warm wet weather over northern Europe caused the formation of a large Arctic ice cap.  The formation of the isthmus also played a major role in biodiversity.  The bridge allowed animals and plants to migrate between the two continents, an event known as the Great American Interchange.  The North American opossum, armadillo, and porcupine ancestors came across the land bridge from South America.  Ancestors of bears, cats, dogs, horses, llamas, and raccoons made the trek south.
  • But wait — not so fast.  The monumental excavations necessary to expand the Panama Canal have given scientists a rare chance to delve into Panama’s ancient history. Geologists have discovered that the isthmus is composed of 20-million-year-old rocks, including fossilised trees.  But according to conventional geologic theory, the Panamanian Isthmus didn’t emerge from the sea until just a few million years ago.  This discrepancy is no small matter.  The 3-million-year time frame neatly accounted for an important sequence of events that began about the same time.  The current global cycle of glaciation dates to this period and might have been triggered by a transformation of the world’s ocean currents, which a slender rib of land separating Atlantic and Pacific would naturally explain.  If the new theory is right, and the oceans were separated much earlier, then what triggered all of those epochal events?  Having ice in the Arctic is the reason we’re in the climate we are right now, and we still don’t have a clear mechanism for it?  How can we even think about modelling Earth’s climate for the next 100 years if we can’t model how to produce such a big feature of our climate today?  Some geologists strongly disagree with the new theory and are preparing rebuttals.  The effect of a new land mass on ocean currents is remarkably tricky to understand.  Supercomputers in France have been examining how close the continents had to be before currents changed.  The preliminary results suggest that with any channel deeper than 200 metres, currents behave as though there’s an entire ocean there.  But at shallower depths currents abruptly hit a wall.  The surprise finding: at less than 50 metres currents arise that have never before been simulated.  Biologists have found a bump in animal migration 3 million years ago, but a spike in flora migration 10 million years ago, in support of the revisionist time frame.
  • The Panama Canal is a 50-mile long engineering wonder connecting the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean.  Completed by the US in 1914, it runs southeastward from Colon, through the man-made Gatun Lake, to Panama City on the Pacific side of the Isthmus of Panama.  The canal is a major artery of international shipping; it uses a series of massive locks, manmade lakes, and water supplied by the copious tropical rainfall of the region to lift and lower transiting ships a height of 85 feet over the continental divide.  Thick rainforests border the canal, and the protected Canal Zone is easily delineated by the dark green band of forest, which contrasts with the lighter green cultivated areas.  The ecologically sensitive Canal Zone supports diverse lowland rainforest crucial for water balance and erosion/siltation control around the canal.


A 9-volt battery in a messy junk drawer was blamed for a house fire in New Hampshire (USA).  The battery was stored in the kitchen junk drawer, inside a plastic bag filled with other batteries.  It rubbed against another battery and ignited the fire.  The drawer, which the homeowner said had just been reorganised, also contained spare keys, a cigarette lighter, paper clips, and eyeglass cleaner along with other miscellany.  The problem: on a regular, rectangular 9-volt battery, both the positive and the negative contact points are on the same end.  If those contact points touch a key or the clip on a pen, it can generate enough heat to cause a fire (a paperclip touching both points was shown to scorch a square of tissue in minutes and a wad of steel wool glowed orange and set paper on fire in seconds when it rubbed across the points.  For safety, secure stored batteries with a small strip of electrical tape across the contact points and keep small things (like pins, pennies, and paperclips) contained in small boxes, plastic bags, and/or drawer dividers.


City Life

Hong Kong from Kowloon

Hong Kong from Kowloon

Dismantle #2

Dismantle #2

Mt Victoria, Wellington, New Zealand

Mt Victoria, Wellington, New Zealand

  • A hyper-claustrophobic view of Hong Kong.  This photographer is into matte painting and produces lovely hyperrealistic photos, often featuring cities and shorelines.
  • When I saw this, I thought it looked like an abstract of Hong Kong.  However, the artist explained that she was trying to strike a balance between abstract concerns and a suggestion of subject matter, which she described in this case as having to do with slave cages and pens and the Middle Passage.  (Thomasos was born in Trinidad and was black.)
  • Old villa houses crowd together like a colourful flock of parrots.  A steep hill rises protectively behind them.  Colours and styles clash like bad 80′s fashion.  Gardens mingle like neighbours, unkempt scramble meeting manicured rose bushes.  Snails trek slowly along window ledges, silvery stories left behind to speak of journeys had, plants to find.


It’s no secret that falling behind on student loan payments can squash a borrower’s hopes of building savings, buying a home or even finding work.  Now, thousands of retirees are learning that defaulting on student debt can threaten something that used to be untouchable: their Social Security benefits.  The federal government is withholding money from a rapidly growing number of Social Security recipients who have fallen behind on federal student loans.  The government reduces the size of roughly 115,000 retirees’ Social Security cheques monthly on those grounds and this figure is growing.  Many of these retirees aren’t in hock for their own educations — in the majority of the cases, borrowers went into debt later in life to help defray education costs for their children or grandchildren.  Unlike other consumer debts, student loans typically can’t be wiped out in bankruptcy.  The Debt Collection Improvement Act of 1996 empowers the federal government to offset Social Security payments of defaulted student-loan borrowers.  An earlier law, the Higher Education Technical Amendments Act, essentially removes any time limits on the government’s ability to collect from defaulters.  Government withholding powers also extend to Social Security disability benefits.  Advocates of the borrowers say many of them have extenuating circumstances.  Often family agreements unravel and adult children who tell their parents they’ll repay the loans end up dropping the ball without informing anyone.  In some cases the Department of Education has lost track of the co-signers, sending debt notices to wrong addresses; sometimes the government can’t track them down until they start receiving Social Security payments.  The repayment period on federal student loans can be extended to 30 years if borrowers owe $60,000 or more.  Another 8 years can be added for borrowers facing unemployment or other economic hardship; during those years, payments aren’t required but interest continues to accrue.  Of recent graduates, 66% have student debt averaging US$28,720.


Adam and God Getting in Touch

Notice God Is Wearing Pink — and Has Cherubs for Pets??

Notice God Is Wearing Pink — and Has Cherubs for Pets??

Adam Is Thirsty

Adam Is Thirsty

Adam Is Hungry

Adam Is Hungry

God Is Tired

God Is Tired


As a person with monocular vision, I’ve often wondered what people see that’s so special when they pay extra to go to a 3D movie.  Curiously, this photo, I thought, more than most gives a real 3D experience using a 2D effect.


Our Friends the Animals

Who's That Knocking at My Door?

Who’s That Knocking at My Door?

Horse Hugger

Horse Hugger

Good Night and Good Luck

Good Night and Good Luck

Hedging Her Bets

Hedging Her Bets

Let Me Help You with That

Let Me Help You with That


Much of the world uses the Celsius scale (°C) for most temperature measurements.  It has the same incremental scaling as the Kelvin scale used by scientists, but fixes its null point, at 0°C = 273.15K, approximately the freezing point of water (under one atmosphere of pressure).  The United States uses the Fahrenheit scale for common purposes, a scale on which water freezes at 32 °F and boils at 212 °F (under one atmosphere of pressure).

The electric eel of South America is not a true eel, but is more closely related to the carp and catfishes.