Thursday, June 19, 2014

Cab Thought 6/19/14

"As the saying goes, if you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day, but if you teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime. Community organizers like Huerta don't teach anyone how to fish: they teach activists how to steal their neighbors' fish. This is what Huerta and her ilk call social justice." --Matthew Vadum




A nice summery of the battery problem: Venture capitalists are more comfortable with the expectations of Moore's Law, which states that the density of transistors on a computer chip doubles every other year. That is not how chemistry works. "It's a very, very tough economic problem," battery entrepreneur John Peterson said in an interview. "The reason it can't work is that the battery is a bottle for storing electricity. It is a $500 bottle that you're going to use to store a product that you want to buy for 25 cents. If you have that bottle that you spent $500 on, and you fill it once a day, you're going to get $7.50 a month of energy coming back out of that bottle. It's going to take you forever, at the rate of $7.50 a month, to recover your $500," he said.


A US Interstate road is recommended to have a concrete depth of 11 inches and rock underneath of 21 inches. However its often poured at 8 inches. The autobahn in Germany used to require 18-24 inch depth. 


Pont Neuf in Paris, the New Bridge, was Henri IV's idea. It was the first bridge to cross the Seine in a single span, it was made of stone--to last--, had no houses or businesses on it so the city could be viewed from it, and was the first landmark of urban usefulness rather than a statue or palace. Author Joan DeJean believes it stamped Paris as the first modern city.


"Fear of an animal may be experimentally set up by stimulating the infant with a loud sound just at the moment the animal is presented. Six combined stimulations produced the marked fear of the rat shown next." This is a quote from the renowned Dr. John Watson, the father of behaviorism, that appears on a film where he and his associates terrify a small child with animals and noises in an effort to demonstrate learned response. He eventually lost his position and reputation when it was revealed he was having an affair with Rosalie Rayner, a graduate student and co-author. "Affectionate Letters Said To Have Been Obtained By Wife," read one of the headlines.
Presumably his infidelity had been learned at a young age.


Who was.......Little Albert?


Just as the setting Sun disappears completely from view, a last glimmer appears startlingly green. The effect, the "green flash," is typically visible only from locations with a low, distant horizon, and lasts just a few seconds. A green flash is also visible for a rising Sun, but takes better timing to spot. The effect is caused by layers of the Earth's atmosphere acting like a prism.


At least 15% of American homeowners (or residents of 78 counties across the country) were living in housing markets where the monthly mortgage payment on a median-priced home requires more than 30% of the monthly median household income — long considered the maximum for rent/mortgage repayments.


3D printing can make very complex shapes in single unit volumes, it can only do this using microscopic particles, either resins or powders. The mechanical properties of these materials will almost always be very significantly less in strength, resiliency, smoothness, corrosion resistance, abrasion resistance, etc. The processes of forging, stamping, mechanically polishing, high-pressure extrusion or casting, spinning, and milling creates materials and surfaces cannot be reproduced.


Mad cow disease has caused a fourth death in the United States.


If we accept the idea that hierarchies are a reasonable way to look at income then someone will always have more money than everyone else and someone will always have less than everyone else. And you will always be able to divide that economic group into thirds, or quintiles or whatever. The question is, is that hierarchy unchanging. Are the lower quintile always the same people? It has never been so in the past.


A quick historical summary of the Sikh rebellion and Indira Gandhi:

  • 1982: Armed Sikh militants, led by Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, take up residence in the Golden Temple complex.
  • 3-8 June 1984: The Indian army attacks the Golden Temple, killing Bhindranwale, his supporters and a number of civilians. Codenamed Operation Blue Star the attack, according to the Sikhs, killed 1000.
  • 31 October 1984: Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi who had given the go-ahead to Operation Blue Star, was assassinated by two Sikh bodyguards
  • November 1984: More than 3,000 are killed in anti-Sikh riots across India



  • Ian Graham, a Cambridge graduate who holds a PhD in theoretical physics, between 2005 and 2012  was Decision Technology's head of football research developing "a set of statistical models for the prediction of football matches and the rating of players," according to the company's website for the Liverpool Football Club. He was developing a "sabremetrics" type of approach for football. He was recruited away to another English Premier League club, Tottenham Hotspur.


    There are an estimated 1.2 million homebrewers nationwide, two-thirds of whom began brewing since 2005, according to the American Homebrewers Association.

    The soon-to-be-incarcerated Dinesh D'Souza has an oblique view of America. He says the Left preaches that America has stolen its wealth. He asks, "Who stole it?" The American Indian was displaced by arriving immigrants, slavery benefitted anyone who bought cheap cotton, the Mexicans were fought and defeated by immigrants. The expanders of American wealth and territory were immigrants.

    Golden Oldie:


    Alexander Hamilton as Secretary of the Treasury tried to encourage the manufacturing sector of the country. He encouraged the immigration of technical workers and actually built a city, Paterson, New Jersey, for the purpose of manufacturing. In 1719 Britain banned the emigration of skilled workers in industries including steel, iron, brass, watchmaking, and wool. The law punished suborning, or recruitment, of skilled workers for employment abroad with fines or imprisonment. Skilled immigrants who did not return to Britain within six months of being warned by a British official faced the confiscation of their goods and property and the withdrawal of their citizenship. Britain followed its ban on the emigration of skilled workers with a ban on the export of wool and silk technology in 1750. In 1781 and 1785, the act was enlarged into a comprehensive ban on machinery of all kinds.


    Quality Egg LLC and two top executives admitted to selling substandard eggs containing a “poisonous” substance, and bribing a federal inspector, in a food-safety scandal that sickened tens of thousands.


    Fletcherizing: Horace Fletcher popularized a fad for extremely thorough chewing in the early 20th Century. The idea was to liquefy solid foods. Eating became serious work. An onion would take about ten minutes to chew adequately. Henry James, Franz Kafka, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle--all became Fletcherizing apostles. All sorts of benefits were promised: More nutrition per ounce, more economic use of food, less work for the intestine, and weight loss (which was his original stimulus.) In 1912, around the fad's peak, Oklahoma Senator Robert L. Owen penned a proclamation -- a draft of which resides among the Fletcher papers -- urging the formation of a National Department of Health based on the principles of the Fletcher system. Common sense. It became a virtual consensus.


    AAAAAAaaaaannnnnndddddd......a graph:

    No comments: