Wednesday, November 6, 2013

Cab Thoughts 11/6/13

Einstein had come up with the light-quantum hypothesis in 1905. But nobody accepted it until 1923. “Not a soul. Einstein was completely alone in his belief in the existence of light as particles—for 18 years. That must have been very lonely.”--Douglas Hofsdadter
 
The London Review of Books says that physicians and nurses are using pseudonyms from Shakespeare while working at Guantanamo Bay's prison in an effort to "avoid being held liable for any mistreatment of the detainees." Dr. Iago. Nurse Macbeth.
 
Tesla Model S weighs as much as a Hummer H3. (You need a lot of batteries to push a lot of batteries.) Tesla outsells BMW, Mercedes and Lexus In America's wealthiest ZIP Codes.

Golden Oldie: 
 
Zadie Smith, on Britain's "lack of a service culture," writes, "[N]o one should be asked to pretend that the intimate satisfaction of her existence is servicing you, the 'guest,' with a shrimp sandwich wrapped in plastic. If the choice is between the antic all-singing, all-dancing employees in New York's Astor Place Pret-A-Manger and the stony-faced contempt of just about everybody behind a food counter in London (including all the Prets), I wholeheartedly opt for the latter. We are subject to enough delusions in this life without adding to them the belief that the girl with the name tag is secretly in love with us."
 
The Defense Department will buy 92,000 electric vehicles, including plug-in hybrids, by 2020. That number is equal to the total number that will be sold in 2013.
 
A merchant ship named “Mary Celeste” with ten people aboard set sail from New York City bound for Genoa, Italy in November, 1872. About a month later a British brig spotted the “Mary Celeste” adrift in the Atlantic Ocean, about 400 miles east of the Azores. A search party investigated and found no one on board. Whatever happened, the crew was never seen again.
 
Who was....Edward Teller?
 
There has been an interesting interrelationship between research and the military. Artificial intelligence, coined by John McCarthy in the mid 1950s, provides a good example. The Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) was a chief underwriter of artificial intelligence research. But in 1969 Congress passed the Mansfield Amendment, requiring that Defense support only projects with “a direct and apparent relationship to a specific military function or operation.” In 1972, ARPA became DARPA, the D for “Defense,” to reflect its emphasis on projects with a military benefit. Favored projects included “command and control” systems, like a computerized in-flight assistant for combat pilots, and programs that would automatically spot roads, bridges, tanks, and silos in aerial photographs. This was very different from the idea of understanding human thought as artificial intelligence had originally started. There are some limits to highly focused research.
 
Geckos can race up a polished glass wall at a meter per second and support their entire body weight from a wall with only a single toe. This was first observed by Aristotle and recently has been attributed to Van der Waal forces, weak molecular forces, from the tiny hairs on the gecko's foot.
 
Now, after NSA, Libya, Iran and Syria and the reemergence of Russia as a power broker in the Middle East, who would you prefer as President of the U.S. if you were Merkel or another of the European leaders, Obama or Bush?
 
Bill Gross from PIMCO, now that he is rich and safe, has reassessed his life and decided that the rest of us are not contributing enough. He writes in his recent letter that the share of GDP we’ve had to pay in wages has dropped from 47% to 43% during the past decade, allowing pre-tax profits to jump from 10% to 14% of GDP. We should pay more. Companies, using cheap credit, have been buying back their shares, over 1 trillion dollars worth since 2008. Has, he asks, our prosperity been based on money printing, credit expansion and cost cutting, instead of honest-to-goodness investment in the real economy? Well, yes, Bill, it has.
And here is the reason (from his own chart):
Growth comes from investment. Investments come from savings. So.........
Gross' letter contains new buzzphrases like "male dominated workforce" and "you did not build that, ...you rode that." He is also, newly, concerned with the dreaded "disparity of income" as if the U.S. can be compared to Zimbabwe and cites the "Gini coefficient" intended to represent the income distribution of a nation's residents. (It was developed by the Italian statistician and sociologist Corrado Gini and published in his 1912 paper "Variability and Mutability.") Stay tuned. More revolutionary talk from the first tee to come.
 
In the late 90s Ford concluded that battery powered electric drive could not make economic sense if the empty vehicle weight was more than 70% of its loaded weight. The only EVs that even come close to meeting that standard are Kandi and electric two-wheelers.
 
AAAAaaaaaaaannnnnddddddd.......a mock-up of China's announced and published nuclear blast radius in the U.S. from their nuclear submarine fleet:
Image for Yu column Inside China 
 Source: Global Times

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