Cab Thoughts 12/24/11

Scientists at MIT have sent small, controlled electric flow across 10 meter space without wire via long wave microwave. Imagine your electric car recharging as it drives down the road. Imagine not needing any wires. (Before we get too John Lennon, imagine not being fried between the source and the receiver.)

The Buffett-owned MidAmerican Energy Holdings Company bought a 49% share of the 290 megawatt, $1.8 billion Agua Caliente solar project in Arizona. He thinks something is good here.

The value of the top 15 companies in Silicon Valley is about 500 Billion dollars.

What would happen if North Korea joined South Korea now that the Dear Leader has moved to another plane? My bet would be on a ten year disaster for the South as it accommodates to the poverty, the unemployed and the lack of infrastructure of the North. It is a characteristic of sloth, stupidity and blind politics to expect rescue from the working world when the fruits of your rotten life or philosophy drop rotten to the ground.

North Korea's economy is 3% of South Korea's annual GDP of $1 trillion. There are some economic laws; if you want to create shortages, freeze the price or let a central planner take over.

From John Southerland's review of Morson's book "The Words of Others:"
"Take, for example (not one of Morson's examples), the indisputably most famous and quoted line in English literature, 'To be, or not to be, that is the question'. Most theatregoers would think the sentence spit new. But should they also go to a performance of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus they would hear the following in the hero's magnificent opening soliloquy, in which he resolves to sell his soul: 'Bid Oncaymæon farewell, Galen come'. The Greek Oncaymæon transliterates as 'being and not being'. Where is Faustus a professor of philosophy? The University of Wittenberg. Where is Hamlet a student of philosophy? The University of - you guessed it. 'To be or not to be' is not a deeply original thought but a hackneyed sophomoric seminar topic. Hamlet is not thinking, he's quoting."
This completely changes the soliloquy. And it recasts the playwright's vision of Hamlet.

Computer science majors increased 7.6% across the country from 2009 to 2010, the most recent available data, according to the Computing Research Association. on the other hand, several engineering schools have discontinued their job fairs.