Wednesday, September 16, 2015

Cab Thoughts 9/16/15

"But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought."- George Orwell, 1984

Birds use or solicit ants to free their bodies of lice and parasitic mites; it is known as "anting." They either use secretions like formic acid which are toxic to parasites or rest in ant nests to promote active ant infestation to kill the parasites. 


"The brain 'only takes in the world little bits and chunks at a time,' says MIT neuroscientist Earl Miller. You may think you have a seamless thread of data coming in about the things going on around you, but the reality is your brain 'picks and chooses and anticipates what it thinks is going to be important, what you should pay attention to.'


"[There are] metabolic costs [for] multitasking, such as reading e-mail and talking on the phone at the same time, or social networking while reading a book. It takes more energy to shift your attention from task to task. It takes less energy to focus. That means that people who organize their time in a way that allows them to focus are not only going to get more done, but they'll be less tired and less neurochemically depleted after doing it. Daydreaming also takes less energy than multitasking. And the natural intuitive see-saw between focusing and daydreaming helps to recalibrate and restore the brain. Multitasking does not.


At the end of the Civil War, Grant set up "contraband camps" to shelter ex-slaves. These camps also became spaces where Union superintendents attempted to help former slaves adjust to, and understand, the meaning of living in freedom. Teaching the fundamentals of formal, legal marriage was one of the first priorities. Slaves had been forbidden to marry. Camp officials were ordered to 'lay the foundations of society' by not only setting up public schools, encouraging religious worship, regulating trade, but also by 'enforcing laws of marriage.'


"No one hired a skywriter and announced crack's arrival. But when it landed in your hood, it was a total takeover.  ... It wasn't a generational shift but a generational split. ... Guys my age, fed up with watching their moms struggle on a single income, were paying utility bills with money from hustling. So how could those same mothers sit them down about a truant report? Outside, in Marcy's courtyards and across the country, teenagers wore automatic weapons like they were sneakers. Broad-daylight shoot-outs had our grandmothers afraid to leave the house, and had neighbors who'd known us since we were toddlers forming Neighborhood Watches against us."--Decoded by Jay-Z.


Who is....Captain Hyman G. Rickover?


This is a paragraph from the Boston Globe on the anxieties over a new gene editing technology, CRISPR-Cas9:
"A truly ethical bioethics should not bog down research in red tape, moratoria, or threats of prosecution based on nebulous but sweeping principles such as “dignity,” “sacredness,” or “social justice.” Nor should it thwart research that has likely benefits now or in the near future by sowing panic about speculative harms in the distant future. These include perverse analogies with nuclear weapons and Nazi atrocities, science-fiction dystopias like “Brave New World’’ and “Gattaca,’’ and freak-show scenarios like armies of cloned Hitlers, people selling their eyeballs on eBay, or warehouses of zombies to supply people with spare organs. Of course, individuals must be protected from identifiable harm, but we already have ample safeguards for the safety and informed consent of patients and research subjects."
This wonderful open-mindedness should be applauded--with a caveat. The experienced researchers in this field of CRISPR-Cas9 is the Chinese Huang group. Their recent paper showed the lack of specificity of the CRISPR-Cas9 with unexpected and wide ranging deletions in the genome. Worse, Huang says that the paper was rejected by Nature and Science, in part because of ethical objections; both journals declined to comment on the claim. But Huang did say this: “If you want to do it in normal embryos, you need to be close to 100%. That’s why we stopped. We still think it’s too immature.”
Which is to say, they were afraid.


Medicare B payments increase will go up 52% this year.



A new report from the U.S. Army War College discusses the use of American troops to quell civil unrest brought about by a worsening economic crisis. The report from the War College’s Strategic Studies Institute warns that the U.S. military must prepare for a “violent, strategic dislocation inside the United States” that could be provoked by “unforeseen economic collapse” or “loss of functioning political and legal order.” (The report also warns of a possible “rapid dissolution of public order in all or significant parts of the US.”)


Golden oldie:


The Sun’s nearest neighbor, Alpha Centauri, is actually a triple-star system —three stars bound together by gravity. Alpha Centauri A and B are two bright, closely orbiting stars with a distant, dim companion, Proxima Centauri. The binary appears to the unaided eye as a single star, the third brightest in the night sky, but it lies 4.37 light years from the Sun — Proxima Centauri claims the honor of being our true nearest neighbor at only 4.24 light years away. They are part of the Centaurus constellation in the Milky Way galaxy. The Milky Way and the Andromeda are the two largest galaxies in what is called the "local group." The Local Group comprises more than 54 galaxies and its gravitational center is located somewhere between the Milky Way and the Andromeda Galaxy.
Over a thousand galaxies are known members of the Virgo Cluster, the closest large cluster of galaxies to our own local group. On average, Virgo Cluster galaxies are measured to be about 48 million light-years away. The Virgo Cluster distance has been used to give an important determination of the Hubble Constant and the scale of the Universe.  (Hubble's Constant is the ratio of the speed of recession of a galaxy, due to the expansion of the universe, to its distance from the observer; the Hubble constant is not actually a constant, but is regarded as measuring the expansion rate today.)


It is generally believed that self-control is a limited resource in humans, that it can be exhausted and can be replenished with rest.


Some may say even if Clinton committed security violations, there is no evidence the material got into the wrong hands – no blood, no foul. Legally that is irrelevant. Failing to safeguard information is the issue. It is not necessary to prove the information reached an adversary, or that an adversary did anything harmful with the information for a crime to have occurred. See the cases of Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, Jeff Sterling, Thomas Drake, John Kiriakou or even David Petraeus. The standard is "failure to protect" by itself.--McClatchy


Using cork to close a bottle of wine allows for a tiny--and unpredictable --amount of oxygen into the bottle every year which creates a small amount of oxygenation of the wine cause some richness and complexity. The downside is fungal infection of the cork leading to "corking." TCA. Trichloroanisole. This flaw ruins between 1 and 2 percent of the wines produced with natural cork closures each year. Through the presence of fungi, a chemical reaction often attributed to the cork causes new compounds to form, imparting a moldy, damp, and generally unpleasant nose and palate that masks intended qualities. An accepted risk, cork continues as a major closure for big wines that spend a long time sleeping in the cellar. 
If you strip energy out of the S&P 500, profits are actually up. Energy earnings are down 64%.


On August 3, 1958, the U.S. nuclear submarine Nautilus completed the first undersea voyage to the geographic North Pole, traveling nearly 1,000 miles under the Arctic ice cap. The USS Nautilus was constructed under the direction of U.S. Navy Captain Hyman G. Rickover, a brilliant Russian-born engineer who joined the U.S. atomic program in 1946. In 1947, he was put in charge of the navy’s nuclear-propulsion program and began work on an atomic submarine.


A liquidity trap is a period when the private sector has too much debt, which fuels a bubble. The dot-com bubble wasn’t debt-financed, so it popped quickly and was over. The housing bubble was worse because it was debt-based as well as based in illiquid assets.


On March 9, 1862, U.S.S. Monitor dueled to a standstill with the C.S.S. Virginia (originally the C.S.S. Merrimack) in one of the most famous moments in naval history–the first time two ironclads faced each other in a naval engagement. During the battle, the two ships circled one another, jockeying for position as they fired their guns. The cannon balls simply deflected off the iron ships. In the early afternoon, the Virginia pulled back to Norfolk. Neither ship was seriously damaged, but the Monitor effectively ended the short reign of terror that the Confederate ironclad had brought to the Union navy.


Metonymy: noun, Rhetoric 1. a figure of speech that consists of the use of the name of one object or concept for that of another to which it is related, or of which it is a part, as “scepter” for “sovereignty,” or “the bottle” for “strong drink,” or “count heads (or noses)” for “count people.” 1540-50; < Late Latin metōnymia < Greek metōnymía change of name;


Puerto Rico bonds are in default. They were yielding 12% so a lot of bond funds raised their interest rate profile by buying them. There may be some negative reaction. There are some really nasty tricks bonds funds use; one thing is they return principle with interest to make the yield looks better.


AAAAAAAaaaaaannnnnddddd: ............a picture of China's Winter Olympics ski site. The Zhangjiakou and Yanqing Zones have minimal annual snowfall and for the Games would rely completely on artificial snow. It looks as if it should be used for mountain climbing, not skiing, and people should descend, hand over hand, with ancillary support, not ski.
 

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