Wednesday, June 5, 2013

Cab Thoughts 6/5/13

I can calculate the motions of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people.~Isaac Newton


The Code of Federal Regulations, which compiles all federal regulations, grew by more than 4,000 pages last year. The entire document now runs 174,545 pages, spread over 238 volumes. The index alone takes up 1,142 pages. Of those rules, 224 are classified as "economically significant," meaning they each have an economic impact of at least $100 million per year. 224 X $100 million is....

Science fiction and fantasy author Jack Vance died Sunday evening, his son told The Associated Press. He wrote more than 60 books, including The Dying Earth. In 2009, writer Michael Chabon told The New York Times that "Jack Vance is the most painful case of all the writers I love who I feel don't get the credit they deserve. If 'The Last Castle' or 'The Dragon Masters' had the name Italo Calvino on it, or just a foreign name, it would be received as a profound meditation, but because he's Jack Vance and published in Amazing Whatever, there's this insurmountable barrier."


From the same swell guys that brought you acidic drywall:
A review of 30,000 solar panel installations in Europe by the German solar monitoring firm Meteocontrol found 80 percent were under performing with defect rates as high as 34.5 percent.

The sign in front of the Teacher Standards and Practices Commission in Salem, Oregon is misspelled.

Recent media reports "appear to be at odds with your sworn testimony," or so says a letter to the semi-esteemed Eric Holder, astonishingly still head of Justice. This shows a current problem in America: The seeming inability to use direct and honest sentences and statements. "Appear to be at odds with sworn testimony." This is an accusation looking for a transitive verb.

Chinese hackers have compromised the designs of some of America's most sensitive and advanced weapons systems--including vital parts of the nation's missile defenses, fighter aircraft and warships--the Washington Post reported. Our progress with more important topics like global warming and gay marriage continues, however.

A monumental structure, made of boulders and stones with a diameter of 230 feet, has been found with sonar studies in Israel. It apparently is thousands of years old -- a conical, man made behemoth weighing hundreds of tons. And it's at the bottom of the Sea of Galilee.
'The bottom line is we don't know when it's from, we don't know what it's connected to, we don't know its function.'-- Dani Nadel, an archaeologist at the University of Haifa

This week, BBC political editor Nick Robinson had to apologize for saying on the air, as the news in Woolwich broke, that the men who murdered Lee Rigby were "of Muslim appearance." While my first response to this was craven political correctness, it has been suggested it might have been legitimate physical--or, in Britain, legal--fear.

The Nevada state senate just passed--unanimously--a bill that requires the closure of 800 megawatts of coal generation and its replacement by 550 megawatts of natural gas and 350 megawatts of renewable energy capacity. And, presumably in an unrelated event, Warren Buffet bought Nevada Energy, a utility serving Las Vegas, for $5.6 billion.

The French graphic novelist Julie Maroh, whose book Le Bleu Est une Couleur Chaude inspired the film which just took the Palm D'Or at Cannes, said that the film turned the relationship between two women into pornography for men. In a blog post, she called it "a brutal and surgical display, exuberant and cold, of so-called lesbian sex, which turned into porn, and made me feel very ill at ease."

More on the California "exchanges." If you want the federal subsidy available to individuals earning up to $45,960 a year (and households of four with $94,200 combined income), you have to buy on the exchange. The trade-off is limited access. Blue Shield offers care at UCLA Medical Center to its regular customers but not customers with exchange plans. Now the real question is, what does that limited access limit you to?  Now analyst Avik Roy consulted current rates on the eHealthInsurance website and discovered that the cheapest ObamaCare plan for a typical 25-year-old man is roughly 64% to 117% more expensive than the five cheapest policies sold today. For a 40 year old, it's 73% to 146%. 

Golden Oldies:

A short letter from the English author Rudyard Kipling is up for auction. Addressed to an unknown woman, the letter says, referring to a portion of The Jungle Book, that "a little of it is bodily taken from (Southern) Esquimaux rules for the division of spoils. In fact, it is extremely possible that I have helped myself promiscuously but at present cannot remember from whose stories I have stolen."

"Live with a steady superiority over life - don't be afraid of misfortune, and do not yearn after happiness; it is, after all, all the same: the bitter doesn't last forever, and the sweet never fills the cup to overflowing. It is enough if you don't freeze in the cold and if thirst and hunger don't claw at your insides. If your back isn't broken, if your feet can walk, if both arms can bend, if both eyes see, and if both ears hear, then whom should you envy? And why? Our envy of others devours us most of all. Rub your eyes and purify your heart - and prize above all else in the world those who love you and who wish you well. Do not hurt them or scold them, and never part from any of them in anger; after all, you simply do not know: it might be your last act before your arrest, and that will be how you are imprinted in their memory!" Alexander Solzhenitsyn

A new coronavirus infection has killed a man in France after he returned from a trip to Dubai. According to CNN, the World Health Organization has said the disease was first seen in Saudi Arabia last year. The virus is "a threat to the entire world," Dr. Margaret Chan, WHO's general director, told the network.
The Centers for Disease Control explained that coronaviruses can affect people or animals and, in worst-case scenarios, cause SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome). And it notes there's currently no vaccine to protect against human coronavirus infection.

Why would Russia give Assad anti-aircraft weapons? And why would Assad want them? The rebels have no aircraft. (But Israel does. And so will the Americans if they decide to institute their traditionally symbolic no-fly zones.)

Schools are becoming very touchy in their athletic departments and one wonders what it implies about the culture. Rutgers is a case in point. They fired Rice because he was verbally abusing his basketball players, a lacrosse coach was suspended for similar reasons, now the new AD hire has been accused of haranguing her volleyball players nineteen years ago. Probation for a murderer is less. The president of the university, no less, is now dragged into this mess. Robert Barchi, a neuroscientist, is now under fire for the AD hire. Rutgers hired Barchi away from Philadelphia's Thomas Jefferson University Medical School to oversee the transformation of the university into a medical science center and lead the creation of a strategic plan for Rutgers' future. He probably doesn't know what a volleyball is.
But this preoccupation is curious.

There may be safety in numbers but there is no anonymity. Here is a fascinating example of current recognition technology.  http://www.gigapixel.com/image/gigapan-canucks-g7.html

Amazon is beginning to sell fan fiction. The deal would do away with the copyright restrictions that keep writers of fan fiction from selling their work. 65 percent of profits go to Amazon and the original rights holder, and the fan fiction writer hands over ownership of the text and any original elements introduced into the story. And Amazon's rules are strict - there can be no crossovers (i.e., Harry Potter can't join forces with Edward Cullen--from Twilight), and pornography is forbidden.

U.S. prosecutors have filed an indictment against the operators of digital currency exchange Liberty Reserve, accusing the Costa Rica-based company of helping criminals around the world launder more than $6 billion in illicit funds linked to everything from child pornography to software for hacking into banks.

We are seeing, with increasing frequency, an asset class - gold -- that supposedly no one wants is routinely unavailable for delivery and whose price is deviating in certain markets significantly from the quoted price on the COMEX. This can have only a limited number of consequences. One is the price of gold skyrockets as people and organizations try to cover their positions. The other is default. Last week the Hong Kong Mercantile Exchange -HKMex-- closed its doors after just two years of operations. The defunct exchange will not be delivering on any of its gold and silver contracts.

Who was....Alse Young?

Deutsche Bank said its "base case" forecast for global solar PV demand in 2013 was now 40GW - almost one quarter above most forecasts made at the start of the year. Even the prospect of EU import tariffs would only lower this forecast down to around 35GW. It said demand should also improve.
Leading solar stocks have gone up more than three fold in 2013. These include the two biggest US stocks, First Solar and SunPower, which have both risen around 270 per cent since the start of the year.
 
 
Isolato, meaning "a person who is spiritually isolated from or out of sympathy with his or her times or society," was popularized by Herman Melville's novel Moby Dick. The word comes through Italian from the Latin word insulātus meaning "made into an island."
 
 
One in 10 Britons under 25 is now Muslim.

Euripides competed as a boxer at the Isthmian and Nemean Games and was crowned as victor.

AAAAAAnnnnnnddddddd ............a graph!
Chart of the Day

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