Saturday, November 9, 2013

Cab Thoughts 11/9/13

The White House has issued a clarification. When the president said if you like your insurance plan you can keep it, what he meant was you can keep it if he likes it.--Holman Jenkins

35,000 megawatts of solar will be built around the world in 2013, a new record for annual installation. That is the equivalent of 9 medium sized nuclear plants being built in one year. Deutsche Bank projects that the world will install as much as 50,000 megawatts next year or the equivalent of 12.5 nuclear plants.

In the beginnings of baseball, foul balls caught on the bounce were outs. The pitching mound was only fifty feet from home plate and the pitcher had a small 6x4 rectangle marked off on the ground in which he could get a running start to pitch.

Who is....Arundhati Roy?

Two married women were discussing their dating histories when they were in their twenties. Both were attractive women with accomplishments. Both said they had a lot of marriage proposals, more than they thought their friends had. Both thought the reason was that they did not drink. Drinking, the two thought independently, raised suspicions of instability in women.

The Syrian Electronic Army, a group that supports the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, hacked links on President Barack Obama’s official Twitter and Facebook accounts, redirecting users to a propaganda video about terrorism in Syria.

Al Gore has a fascinating article in the WSJ about the risks of investing in "carbon assets," i.e. oil, gas, coal and other carbon-based energy sources. He believes that global warming anxiety, alternative fuels and political righteousness will "strand" such carbon assets and isolate them as nonproductive and, for the investor, non-yielding. The problem with this logic is that it denies two basics. One, it denies the existing technological gap. There are no storage systems capable of smoothing out the current alternative energy irregular cycles. Nor does it accept any growth curve where such a technology gradually emerges. Second, it denies the appeal of cheap carbon to poor nations who, with good reason, want to catch up with the wealth that cheap carbon has generated in the rich countries.

Mrs. Clinton said of the new federal health plan, "We just think people will be too focused on saving money and they won't get the care for their children and themselves that they need . . . The money has to go to the federal government because the federal government will spend that money better." That, ladies and gentleman, is an honest look at the future of the West.

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) report on the Senate's immigration bill predicts that the legislation would drive down the wages of American workers and make it difficult for Americans to find jobs in an already-damaged economy.

phrenology \fri-NOL-uh-jee, fre-\, noun: a psychological theory or analytical method based on the belief that certain mental faculties and character traits are indicated by the configurations of the skull. This was, for years, taken very seriously. ety: The phren- in phrenology comes from the Greek phreno- referring to the diaphragm and the abdomen. This sense was extended in the writings of Homer to refer to the area around the heart as well as the mind.




For over a thousand years villagers in remote parts of Wales have called an adulteress 'a regular Guinevere.' Lancelot probably never existed, though..


Golden oldie:
http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2011/04/striking-note-but-not-chord.html

The phrase "American Dream" was coined by writer and historian James Truslow Adams in the 1930s. He wrote that in America “life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement.”

There are some certainties in this post-modern world. If you are a rich and famous guy with a felony, you go to rehab, not prison; if you are a struggling business, you start a charity. And apologies in politics, like kissing the boo-boo, seem to make it aaalll better.

In freestyle chess, teams include a computer and a human counterpart. Excelling at freestyle does not require profound skill in chess per se, but rather expertise in working with the computer. The best players are the ones who recognize their limitations and are willing to accept the advice of the computer; those who win most are the ones who design or run the best programs. This is being offered as the template for industry growth and computer/human interaction in America. (Tyler Cowen’s Average Is Over).





The Leidenfrost effect is a phenomenon in which a liquid, in near contact with a mass significantly hotter than the liquid's boiling point, produces an insulating vapor layer which keeps that liquid from boiling rapidly.


AAAAAaaaaaaannnnnddddd.....a picture (a drawing by one of Charles Darwin's kids on his original manuscript of "Origin")
origindrawing1

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