Thursday, September 4, 2014

Cab Thoughts 9/4/14

"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       



The early morning quake in Napa on Sunday, August 24, was the strongest in northern California in 25 years and caused more than 200 injuries. Many homes and businesses in the area were damaged; several wineries reported losses as bottles broke, barrels toppled over and storage tanks leaked. Some tasting rooms were forced to close. Other wineries report little or no damage and business as usual.



According to Pennsylvania Sen. Pat Toomey, 275 U.S. teachers have been accused of abuse since Jan. 1. By comparison, the Catholic League estimates seven credible sexual abuse cases each year for 40,000 priests.
The most widely cited study available, conducted in 2004 by the U.S. Education Department, estimated that 1-in-10 students will be sexually abused by a teacher during their years in school. 


More slaves were taken to Brazil from Africa than to any other country. Brazil did not abolish slavery until 1888, the last country in the Western world to do so. Slaves were brought first for the sugar plantations, then for gold and diamond mining, and then for ranching and agricultural products, especially coffee. Between 1525 and 1866, in the entire history of the slave trade to the New World, according to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, 12.5 million Africans were shipped to the New World. 10.7 million survived the dreaded Middle Passage, disembarking in North America, the Caribbean and South America. And how many of these 10.7 million Africans were shipped directly to North America? About 388,000. There may have been more that were moved from the Caribbean to America.


Who is....Mark David Chapman?



Giuseppe Verdi claimed that Alessandro Manzoni’s novel The Betrothed (1827) was “a gift to humanity.” Yet it is not very well read and certainly is not read outside of Italy. Manzoni’s novel promotes a Christian faith whose adherents are rewarded for submitting to God’s providential wisdom. Joseph Luzzi, in a new article in the Paris Review attributes this classic's lack of popularity upon its lack of universality. "Its inability to attract a non-Italian audience isn’t the result of its artistic shortcomings, but of the nature of its questions and themes, which simply don’t appeal to a contemporary audience."  If true, that is quite a change.



Eminent vs. imminent vs. immanent: “eminent,” meaning “prominent, famous.” “Imminent,” in phrases like “facing imminent disaster,” means “threatening.” It comes from Latin minere, meaning “to project or overhang.” Think of a mine threatening to cave in. Positive events can also be imminent: they just need to be coming soon. The rarest of the three is “immanent,” used by philosophers to mean “inherent” and by theologians to mean “present throughout the universe” when referring to God. It comes from Latin manere, “remain.”.


Golden oldie:


The Middle East continues to grow worse than one would expect by chance. One could always default to the French and the British as the originators of all this but it appears that the Americans are making up for lost time. Bush showed what happens when military action against a bad guy leads to a leadership vacuum in Iraq; Obama repeated the error in Libya, and now the administration can not figure out which side to attack in Syria. One wonders what would have happened had the Americans tipped the balance against Assad. Would ISIS have the whole country now? Perhaps it will go down in history as one example of the advantages of dithering.


Mark David Chapman is up for parole again. This is his eighth trip. It is a wonder we do these things. Recently it was Krennwinkle. I hope we are just going through the motions, filling in some bureaucratic checklist, rather than really considering allowing these total lunatics to mingle with average folks. Chapman said to the parole board on August 20 that he had found God and that God loves him. I hope that is true. But it does not mean he should be allowed to get on a bus with you. He also told the parole board that he was "an idiot" for killing John Lennon "and choosing the wrong way to glory." But the "bright light of fame, of infamy, notoriety" was irresistible, he added. So in killing Lennon he chose the wrong path to fame. It was sort of a logistical error.


“It’s an absolute myth that you can send an algorithm over raw data and have insights pop up,” said Jeffrey Heer, a professor of computer science at the University of Washington and a co-founder of Trifacta, a start-up based in San Francisco. This from a NYT article on the problem of organizing raw data and the difficulties of separating the organization of it from the analysis of it.


On July 26, 1941,  Roosevelt responded to the European War and the Japanese membership in the Axis by signing an executive order freezing Japanese assets in the United States, thereby bringing 'all financial and import and export transactions in which Japanese interests are involved under the control of the Government.' This primarily froze energy trade from America to Japan. There has long been a belief that the Americans had a decade-long plan to force the Japanese to retaliate against the U.S. through its oil policy but this one event seemed to have shocked the Japanese and forced them into action they were not entirely prepared for.


Companies who raised a seed round more than 13 months ago (but after Jan 2011) but have not raised money since have been called "orphans." 13 months is the average time between raising seed money and raising Series A money. There are 1686 tech companies who have raised a seed or angel round but who have not yet raised a Series A follow-on round of financing (or seed extension). In total, these 1686 companies have raised total funding greater than $1 billion ($1.06B to be exact).


AAAAaaaaannnnndddddd.........a graph:
Chart of the Day

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