Saturday, December 20, 2014

Cab Thoughts 12/20/14

"The Stone Age didn't end because they ran out of stones; the Oil Age won't end because we run out of oil." - Don Huberts


Six in 10 Americans, including half of all Republicans, said they support regulation of carbon dioxide pollution, although they weren't asked how. Nearly half of Republicans said the U.S. should lead the global fight to curb climate change, even if it means taking action when other countries do not.

Speaking of pollution: Correlation is not causation. But does correlation raise the question of causation? Is correlation the stimulus for experiment? 
Isn't correlation the source of hypothesis? And isn't personal hypothesis often the source of bigotry? So the same drive for truth in science is the source of half-truth.

Ted Kennedy sent a letter to Andropov regarding President Reagan. In it he offered a deal. Kennedy would lend Andropov a hand in dealing with President Reagan. In return, the Soviet leader would lend the Democratic Party a hand in challenging Reagan in the 1984 presidential election.
Truly a great American.

At Runnymede, beside the Thames, King John on 15 June 1215 met aggrieved English barons who had backed his failed war with the French. What resulted was  Magna Carta, a document that established a new relationship between a king and his subjects.
Its clause “to no one will we sell, to no one deny or delay right or justice” – remains a touchstone for civil liberties that emerged later.
Next year the British will hold the  Magna Carta Show which will hold celebrations throughout Britain. One of the stars of the show will be the Melrose Chronicle, a poem written in Latin by Cistercian monks almost 800 years ago.  It is the earliest independent account of the events at Runnymede.
It begins: “A new state of things begun in England; such a strange affair as had never been heard; for the body wishes to rule the head, and the people desired to be masters over the king.” It goes on to explain the anger at King John. “The king, it is true, had perverted the excellent institutions of the realm, and had mismanaged its laws and customs, and misgoverned his subjects. His inclination became his law; he oppressed his own subjects; he placed over them foreign mercenary soldiers, and he put to death the lawful heirs, of whom he had obtained possession as his hostages, while an alien seized their lands.”

On November 4, 2013, astronomers reported, based on Kepler space mission data, that there could be as many as 40 billion Earth-sized planets orbiting in the habitable zones of Sun-like stars and red dwarfs in the Milky Way, 11 billion of which may be orbiting Sun-like stars. This in one galaxy!

Google said it will shut its Google News service in Spain because a new law will require the company to pay publishers for displaying any portion of their work.

Half of women and 43% of men in England are now regularly taking prescription drugs, according to the comprehensive Health Survey for England. Cholesterol-lowering statins, pain relief and anti-depressants were among the most prescribed medicines.
The report, by the Health and Social Care Information Centre (HSCIC), showed an average of 18.7 prescriptions per person in England in 2013. The cost to the NHS was in excess of 15 billion pounds a year.
More than a fifth of men and nearly a quarter of women were taking at least three prescriptions.
All the figures exclude contraceptives and smoking cessation products.

What was....The Kecksburg Incident?

The CIA report from the Senate is difficult to understand. The report was compiled by Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee and said the CIA had misled Americans about what it was doing. It even said they misled Bush. Strangely, they did not talk to anyone involved. The information the CIA collected this way failed to secure information that foiled any threats, the report said. The CIA specifically and publicly has contradicted this. The release of the report is strange. It will infuriate some allies, who thought "covert" meant we would not broadcast it, probably undermines our credibility worldwide and will expose us to an avalanche of righteous abuse. But it does not really indict Bush. If the report is right, the CIA is a group of vicious, mendacious savages, if wrong the Senate is incompetent. Not a great endorsement of the grand government  view of the Progressives in either way.

Golden oldie:
The Telegraph had an article on Bank of America's prediction that oil was going to $50 a barrel and that OPEC was in deep trouble. From that article: "...What is clear is that the world has become addicted to central bank stimulus. Bank of America said 56pc of global GDP is currently supported by zero interest rates, and so are 83pc of the free-floating equities on global bourses. Half of all government bonds in the world yield less that 1pc. Roughly 1.4bn people are experiencing negative rates in one form or another. These are astonishing figures, evidence of a 1930s-style depression, albeit one that is still contained. Nobody knows what will happen as the Fed tries break out of the stimulus trap, including Fed officials themselves."

Ashton Carter looks to be the new Dept. of Defense chief. He was not the President's first choice. It is said that several turned it down. Hopefully that is not the result of a belief that the current administration is difficult to work with.
As worrisome and dangerous these hacks are, sometimes they are really fun. New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd promised to show Sony Pictures co-chair Amy Pascal’s husband, Bernard Weinraub, — a former Times reporter — a version of a column featuring Pascal before publication.

The NYT reports that Peruvian authorities say Greenpeace activists have damaged the fragile--and restricted--landscape near the Nazca lines, ancient man-made designs etched in the Peruvian desert when they placed a large sign that promoted renewable energy near a set of lines that form the shape of a giant hummingbird.

Earlier this month, surgeons at Zhejiang University in China performed surgery to remove two damaged vertebrae from a 21-year-old patient. In their place they inserted a 3D printed titanium implant which was shaped to the exact size needed for the patient's body. The surgery, which took doctors much less time and provided significantly less risk [than conventional surgery] was completely successful and the patient is expected to make a full recovery. This is said to be the first ever surgery involving 3D printing vertebrae in order to replace a patient's thoracic vertebrae. This is remarkable, if true. But one must remember the famous documentaries of Chinese horsemen riding through nuclear explosions and the equally famous lung surgery filmed with the patient under only acupuncture.

The BBC has announced that it plans to adapt two of A.J. Rowling's detective novels for television. Written under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith, The Cuckoo's Calling and The Silkworm pair as an ongoing series, which spotlights the auspiciously named private detective Cormoran Strike.

Douglas Owsley, a physical anthropologist with the Smithsonian Institution has won the rights to investigate the skeleton of Kennewick  Man, found in 1996 in the Columbia River in Kennewick, Washington. He estimates the man died 600 to 7000 B.C.. Dennis Stanford has written a book arguing that people got into the New World on the Atlantic side across the pack ice from Spain and France 17,000 to 20,000 years ago.

Mansuetude: noun: Gentleness; meekness. From Latin mansuescere (to make tame: to accustom to handling), from manus (hand) + suescere (to become accustomed). Ultimately from the Indo-European root man- (hand), which is also the source of manual, manage, maintain, manicure, maneuver, manufacture, manuscript, command, manque, amanuensis and legerdemain. Earliest documented use: 1390.

And the fascination with epics continues. Christopher Nolan did Interstellar. Now his brother and partner Jonathan has announced that his own next project will be to craft -- for HBO -- Asimov's Foundation Trilogy.        
AAAAaaaaannnnnddddd........a picture of the first armed airplane of the Serbian army in 1915.
http://i.imgur.com/h2WTrnE.jpg

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