Cab Thoughts 3/15/14

Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.'--E. L. Doctorow 

 

 

Gallup in December had 72% of those polled saying big government is a bigger threat to the future than big business and big labor—a record high.

 

Patrick Moore, a Greenpeace co-founder, was testifying before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee's Subcommittee on Oversight. He said, "There is no scientific proof that human emissions of carbon dioxide are the dominant cause of the minor warming of the Earth's atmosphere over the past 100 years." 

 

The United States has always been a republic. Federalism was the basic concept that drove the creation of the United States.The framers feared a true democracy as much as a royal tyranny; up until 1913 senators were elected indirectly, largely by state legislators, and the president, indirectly, by the electoral college. Direct democratic input--to balance the indirect Senate--was assigned to the House of Representatives.

 

Who is....Horatio Gates and the Conway Cabal? (hint: not a garage band)

 

On MOOCs: On Coursera, the average student retention rate is just four percent. No more than 51 percent of students passed Udacity’s online math program offered at San Jose State University. And according to a study released in May 2013, the average MOOC completion rate was just 6.8 percent, and the six most-completed courses relied on automatic testing, not peer review grading.

 

Audi, Volkswagen, Daimler, BMW "have announced their decision to push for the rapid implementation of 48-volt systems".  Ford, Land Rover, Jaguar, are "exploring the technology". "A huge potential market is possible because of pending global CO2 emission targets that are all converging. Simply put, the auto industry has about a decade to achieve another 30% reduction by 2022."---From an Autoinformed article on the SAE World Congress in April in Detroit.

 

The Spanish bombings at the Atocha train station occurred ten years ago.

 

This Lois Lerner problem is bewildering. She is accused of some serious stuff and there seems to be a suffocating disinterest in resolving the questions. Here an important member of the IRS, a powerful organization, has taken the Fifth and refuses to talk about her involvement in targeting American citizens and nobody seems interested. Recently it has been shown that former acting IRS commissioner Daniel Werfel, in an investigation aimed at explaining the IRS' motives during this problem,  found no intentional wrongdoing and no political motivations behind the agency’s targeting efforts yet never interviewed Lerner during the review process.

 

At a Hong Kong auction by Christie’s International, a winning bid of $474,000 for a case of 1978 Romanee-Conti by a Chinese buyer set a new auction record, far surpassing the previous case record of $345,000.

 

Golden Oldie:

http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2010/08/hold-your-peace.html

 

Records show that, when entertaining the queen in 1577, Lord North ordered 3,996 gallons of beer and 384 gallons of ale. The daily allowance for a man --servant or nobleman -- in many large houses at the time was a gallon of beer.

 

Kim has been reelected in North Korea. Unanimously. Ah, consensus.

 

 From MRI studies of 90 students University College London scientists were able to predict which of those individuals was more likely to be a liberal or a conservative. (Those designations were self-assigned.) The more conservative students had a larger right amygdala; greater liberalism, on the other hand, was associated with a larger anterior cingulate. We are dangerously close to becoming really crazy.

 

70% of all the money the federal government spends will be in the form of direct payments to individuals, an all-time high.

Music: n. The harmonious and rhythmic arraignments of sound. The word is derived from the Muses, goddesses of the arts and sciences.

 

In 1933 the Great Depression was in its fourth year. One in four working Americans -- ten million people -- had no job and no prospects of finding one, and only a quarter of them were receiving any kind of relief. Industrial production had fallen by half in those four years. At least one million, and perhaps as many as two million, were homeless.

 

The venous system communicates with the arterial system through the lung, where the blood is oxygenized. Any other communication mixes venous blood with arterial and is called a fistula. Several such communications occur as residuals of cardiac development, the commonest being patent foramen ovale and atrial septal defect. The former have been found on autopsy in up to 35% of the healthy population. This communication allows for a clot traveling in the venous system to cross into the arterial system and cause an infarct, a small area of tissue which has its blood supply cut off. Such embolisms are usually trapped in the lung. Because it is in the arterial system, such an embolism is called "paradoxical." Embolectomy and closure of an intracardiac communication (eg, a patent foramen ovale [PFO] or an atrial septal defect [ASD]) are the surgical treatments of choice. This is the likely problem with Chris Letang but, as the defect is so common, it will be presumptive, not certain. The next question is whether to repair his heart defect.

Another interesting question is, if this was a paradoxical embolism, how common is venous thrombosis (a clot in the vein which can move to become an embolism) in these men with violent sports.

 

We are terrified of the NSA, which ca n see everything. The satellites can read my license plate. But we do not have any idea where a plane half the size of a football field is? The Malaysian behavior has been particularly creepy. It is much more likely that these nations do not want to reveal the extent of their abilities.

 

In April, 1841, U.S. president William Henry Harrison died in office of pneumonia after serving only thirty-two days as President. The situation had never been faced before. How was the President to be replaced? The Constitution was vague: Was the Vice-President to be President or "Acting President?" The Vice-President, Henry Tyler, was not a particularly popular man--seen as a Virginia slaver by the North--but behaved more forthright than expected. He addressed Harrison's cabinet, announced himself as President and Webster suggested giving him the oath of office.

 

 

AAAAAAaaaaaaannnnnnnddddd.....a picture of North Korea at night. Look hard: