Cab Thoughts 7/27/13

"I have not the pleasure of knowing my reader but I would stake ten to one that for six months he has been making Utopias, and if so, that he is looking to Government for the realization of them."--Bastiat


Researchers have determined that mirrors can subtly affect human behavior. Subjects tested in a room with a mirror have been found to work harder, to be more helpful and to be less inclined to cheat, compared with control groups performing the same exercises in non-mirrored settings. Reporting in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, C. Neil Macrae, Galen V. Bodenhausen, and Alan B. Milne found that people in a room with a mirror were comparatively less likely to judge others based on social stereotypes about, for example, sex, race or religion.

 

The EIA says that coal produced electricity at 40% of the U.S. total may be the new normal. The carbon activists are displeased.

 

The IRS wannabee scandal will likely fade away as the Benghazi disaster has but information this week was significant, if unreported. The chain of command over the totally unreasonable and probably felonious behavior in the IRS was extended to the Chief Counsel, William Wilkins. He is one of only two Obama political appointees in the IRS.

It is hard to believe that Mr. Weiner's silliness will not reach a point where his wife, Huma Abedin, will not fear contamination of Hillary's campaign and will not be forced to make a decision between the two. Huma as Hillary, though, is very peculiar.

solecism \SOL-uh-siz-uhm\, noun: A nonstandard usage or grammatical construction; also, a minor blunder in speech. A breach of good manners or etiquette. Any inconsistency, mistake, or impropriety. etymology: Solecism comes from Latin soloecismus, from Greek soloikizein, "to speak incorrectly," from soloikos, "speaking incorrectly," literally, "an inhabitant of Soloi," a city in ancient Cilicia where a dialect regarded as substandard was spoken.

 

The Globe Theater plans to take Hamlet on the road to 200 countries over the next two years.

 

In 1983 the Indiana University historian Robert F. Byrnes collected essays from 35 experts on the Soviet Union -- the cream of American academia -- in a book titled "After Brezhnev." The conclusion of the essays was that any U.S. thought of winning the Cold War was a pipe dream. "The Soviet Union is going to remain a stable state, with a very stable, conservative, immobile government," Byrnes said in an interview, summing up the book. "We don’t see any collapse or weakening of the Soviet system."

Piltdown Man's skull was introduced as evidence for evolution in the Scopes Trial.
 

The historian Stuart Finkel noted that communists have always acted more forcibly to undermine free association than to undermine free enterprise. This is a very provocative idea.

 

Detroit is apparently officially bankrupt. Fifty years ago, Detroit had the highest per capita income in the United States.

 

A very interesting observation by Mary Buffett (Warren's daughter-in-law) in her book about Warren Buffett and his search for companies with an inherent "competitive advantage." He prefers companies with a low R and D budget. Why? A high R and D budget implies the company has a technology or patent that it must defend against innovation. They must divert income and resources to maintain their advantage. More, they must sell their new creations like crazy. For example, Merck. Merck spends 29% of its gross profit on R and D and 49% of its gross profit on selling, general, and administrative costs (SGA), which, when combined, eat up a total 78% of its gross profit. In the background is the threat that their drug patents will expire with replacement.
Her conclusion: "Warren's rule: Companies that have to spend heavily on R and D have an inherent flaw in their competitive advantage that will always put their long-term economics at risk, which means they are not a sure thing." And Mr. Buffett dearly loves a sure thing.

 

The immigration bill states that it is illegal to forge three or more passports. One or two is OK?

 

Who is....Edmund Perry?

Brazil, now home to 194 million people, recorded 51,198 homicides, ranked seventh among the world's most violent nations after El Salvador, the US Virgin Islands, Trinidad and Tobago, Venezuela, Colombia and Guatemala.

Bell Telephone Labs was the site of the assembly of the first crystal clock in 1927. The quartz watch was first developed  by the R and D department in one of the old dominant Swiss clock and watch companies. When management first saw the watch, they openly displayed it at a trade show in 1967 as a novelty, the Beta 1 revealed by the Centre Electronique Horloger (CEH) in Neuchâtel Switzerland. It is said that a Japanese company representative saw the value in it and their innovation stole the technology but Seiko had been working on quartz clocks since 1958. The prototype of the Astron was revealed by Seiko in Japan in 1969.

Golden Oldie:
http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2009/07/upheaval-and-investment.html 

 

Chekhov was dying in a German spa from tuberculosis. The great Russian playwright and short story writer was a doctor and the custom among German and Russian doctors attending a colleague on his deathbed was to order champagne at the very end. Before it arrived, Chekhov sat up and said, in German, "I'm dying." When offered a glass, he drank, said "I haven't had champagne for a long time," lay down on his side and died within seconds. 

Some 4000 escorting the casket on a four-mile procession across Moscow. Part of the throng of mourners became confused by another funeral, that of an army general, and marched off to the strains of a military band.

"Anton who squirmed at anything vile and vulgar" had been transported from Germany in a refrigerated railcar marked, "For Oysters." Among those who made it to the graveyard were many who "climbed trees and laughed, broke crosses and swore as they fought for a place. They asked loudly, 'Which is the wife? And the sister? Look, they're crying...." (Maxim Gorky)

Gorky was indignant but the mixture of tragedy and farce was entirely Chekhovian.

Alan Turing was a scientist instrumental, through his code breaking, of shortening the Second World War. Turing's homosexuality resulted in a criminal prosecution in 1952, when homosexual acts were still illegal in the United Kingdom. He accepted treatment with female hormones (chemical castration) as an alternative to prison. He died in 1954 at 42 from cyanide poisoning

Wind chill: The air immediately surrounding the human body is warmed by body heat and stays around the body as a sort of “air cloak”. This insulating cushion of air actually keeps people warm. When the wind blows on you, the cushion of air is blown away, and you are exposed to the true temperature, which feels much colder. This is the "wind chill" effect. A thermometer won't notice it because it does not produce heat.


AAAAAAaaaaaannnnnndddddd......a graph: