Axion's Annual Meeting

Axion is a small--and getting smaller--battery company that has replaced the negative lead electrode in the lead-acid battery with a carbon electrode (called a "PbC" battery). During charge and discharge, the positive electrode undergoes the same chemical reaction that occurs in a conventional lead acid battery, i.e. lead dioxide reacts with acid and sulphate ions to form lead sulphate and water. The main difference in the PbC battery is that the replacement  activated carbon electrode does not undergo a chemical reaction at all. Instead, the very high surface area activated carbon electrode stores the protons (H⁺) from the acid in a layer on the surface of the electrode and the protons move to the positive electrode during discharge where they are neutralized to form water. The result is reduced acid concentration swings from the charged to discharged state. This results in considerable less sulfate corrosion and a longer battery life.
Faraday is spinning.

The battery has other characteristics: significantly faster recharge rates and greater charge acceptance, significantly longer cycle lives in deep discharge applications, and minimal required maintenance.

The company has been suffering. They have gone to great lengths to keep up their financing as they continue their march from research and development to commercialization.

This is my take on the annual Axion meeting, a take riddled with my bad science, financial bias and fatigue:

The meeting seemed smaller than last year, less hands-on guys. Mr. Peterson was there and, true to his guru status, wore sandals.

77% of shares voted on the motions.

Mr. Granville, a man with a sleepy, Walter Matthau look, stuck to his guns and reiterated the company would have significant orders by the next earnings call. He said some of the urgency in signing the PIPE financing was anxiety of the financial condition of the company by some potential customers. The discussion with potential manufacturing partners (two) was clarified a bit--at least to me--when he said one manufacturer was itself interested in the technology, another manufacturer had a customer who was. The first patent to expire is in 2022; the plate patent expires in 2027. He feels the technology is difficult to reverse engineer. In Class 8 trucks, much of the advantage of battery replacement comes from allowing the downsizing of the engine (which Ecosystem does not allow.)
Uniform string behavior where the PbC batteries self regulate in a series was a prominent, and to me new, theme.

Subjectively, I felt the technology, which has been worked on so long, had more to yield and this uncertainty might hurt the company with potential customers. Nonetheless, much of the advantages and disadvantages of the technology have been learned and further elaboration is probably the province of small back room labs. The next step here is whether the management can take this company from R and D to commercial.

As complicated as their technology is, their current business problem is no more, or less, complicated than that.

From an investment view, the PIPE financing has pit a few investors against the  price of the stock and created a disjunction between the company value and the stock price behavior. However temporary--and it could be permanent--this disjunction seems to beg for exploitation.

Sunday Sermon 9/29/13

Today's gospel is demanding in its message but it is contained within a very upsetting context. A rich man who has ignored a poor man at his doorstep dies and goes to Hell. He tries to negotiate some relief. When it is revealed relief is not possible, he asks that the poor man he ignored in life return to warn his still-living brothers. He is told his brothers have the wisdom of Moses and the prophets to draw on the man says that is not enough. He is told that a man who will not heed the prophets will not heed a man returned from the dead.

His concern for his brothers is winning. One feels for the man. And it makes the reader think of the man's crime; what has he done to deserve this? Was it his wealth? His lack of charity?

Christ, as always, is drawing a line between the material and spiritual world. Wealth is not the point. Even the accumulation of wealth is not the point. It is the satiation. The fullness. The satisfaction with the rewards of life. The rich man is not doomed because he is rich, he is damned because he is content, content with the material world. His glass is full, filled with the wrong things and the spiritual world is crowded out. Strangely he is content to look no further. The unsuccessful poor must always look for more.

This is a riveting message: We must be intellectually restless to fulfill our lives. The spiritual in us demands some unease, some need to search. Success in the world must be managed to allow for the spiritual.

And then the zinger. The brothers will not head the prophets. Nor will they head a man returned from the dead, so great is the hold of the world.

Christ sounds almost bitter.

Cab Thoughts 9/28/13

“For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple and wrong.”

– H. L. Mencken

An 17th-century English merchant ship, The Merchant Royal, was lost at sea off Land's End, Cornwall in rough weather on September 23, 1641. On board were at least 100,000 pounds of gold (nearly one billion USD in today's money), 400 bars of Mexican silver (another 1 million) and nearly 500,000 pieces of eight and other coins, making it one of the most valuable wrecks of all times.

In 2008, the wind industry said it employed about 85,000 people. Solar employment stood at about 93,000 in 2010. Two years—and a nine fold increase in solar power—later, solar employment had increased just 28%.

Government officials from the Benghazi fiasco have been warned by the government not to make themselves available to Congressional inquiry. CNN obtained one email to CIA employees: "You don't jeopardize yourself, you jeopardize your family as well." What?!

A small group of anti-clerical dissidents from Iran called the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq or MEK has been bombing and assassinating in Iran for years and joined Saddam's war against Iran years ago. They have been a source of good espionage within Iran for the U.S., despite being on the terrorist list until last year. Since the Iraq war they have been in camps in Iraq, one called Camp Ashraf, one Liberty. Now that Shiite presence in Iraq's government is growing, the MEK is less welcome. This month 50 were killed by Iraqi troops at Ashraf--or so the MEK claim. Don't worry, the U.N. is investigating.

Pope Francis likes Dostoevsky! "I love very much Dostoevsky and Hölderlin," he said in an interview in "America." "I remember Hölderlin for that poem written for the birthday of his grandmother that is very beautiful and was spiritually very enriching for me. The poem ends with the verse, 'May the man hold fast to what the child has promised.' "

Who was.....Anna Politkovskaya?

Echidnas belong to the family Tachyglossidae in the monotreme order of egg-laying mammals. The four species, together with the platypus, are the only mammals that lay eggs. The echidnas are named after a monster in ancient Greek mythology. They live in Australia and New Guinea.

Gehad el-Haddad, a top Muslim Brotherhood official and aide to ousted Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi, was employed by the Clintons from August 2007 to August 2012, when he left to work full-time for Morsi's regime.

Winston Churchill's mother, Lady Randolph Churchill, had a snake tattooed across her wrist.

According to the new book "Finding Florida" by T. D. Allman, the story about Ponce de Leon and the Fountain of Youth was entirely fabricated by none other than the fiction writer Washington Irving (who also invented 'Rip Van Winkle' and 'The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.')

Golden Oldie:

http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2012/11/benghazi-and-genovese.html

Equality under attack: Magnetic Resonance Imaging of the brains of men and women show women have far greater capacity for communicating with and evaluating people than men do. Women have between fourteen and sixteen areas of the brain to evaluate others' behavior versus a man's four to six areas. The female brain is organized for multitracking -- the average woman can juggle between two and four unrelated topics at the same time. She can talk about several unrelated topics in the one conversation and use five vocal tones to change the subject or emphasize points. Most men can only identify three of these tones and often lose the plot when women are trying to communicate with them. Vision is a factor too. Most men's close-range and peripheral vision is far poorer than women's.

shibboleth: n. 1. The use of a word or pronunciation that distinguishes a group of people.
2. A slogan, belief, or custom that's now considered outmoded. ETYMOLOGY: According to the Book of Judges in the Bible, the Gileadites used the Hebrew word shibboleth (ear of corn; stream) to identify the fleeing Ephraimites who couldn't pronounce the sh sound. 42,000 Ephraimites were slaughtered. Earliest documented use: 1382. Sometimes language can be really, really important. There are some other savage examples: The Parsley Massacre (Haiti), The Battle of the Golden Spurs (Belgium) and The Sicilian Vespers (Sicily).

Euthanasia carried out by doctors is legal in three European countries, the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg. Medical euthanasia, have more than doubled over the decade to 2012. One explanation for the steep rise of Dutch cases is the introduction last year of mobile euthanasia units allowing patients to be killed by voluntary lethal injection when family doctors refused.

After the First World War, Germany introduced a new currency called the Rentenmark, backed not by gold but by land. When the new currency was introduced on November 15,1923, Germany found itself in the curious position of having two official currencies -- the old Reichsmark and the new Rentenmark -- circulating side by side, issued by two uniquely parallel central banks

AAAAAAaaaaaaaannnnnnddddd....a picture of an echidna

Costco and the Mutability of Business Laws

Costco has a very different take on business, from earnings to wages. The entrepreneur will seek many different ways to succeed.

Sol Price, Costco's founder, once said: "My 'secret' is so simple that I'm reluctant to speak openly about it for fear of appearing stupid. I sell things as cheaply as I can."
Eighty percent of the company's gross profit actually comes from the membership fees (between $55 to $110) from its 64 million members, roughly $1.5 billion annually. Nearly 90% of its customers renew their membership every year. So they sell as cheaply as possible and make money on access to the store!

And wages? With all the talk about the pros and con of the minimum wage? On average, Costco pays its workers about $20.89 an hour (in contrast to Wal-Mart which pays its full-time employees $12.67). 80% Costco employees have company-sponsored health insurance. About 90% of its employees have retirement plans. In 2009, when the recession hit the United States, Costco CEO Jim Senegal approved a $1.50-an-hour wage increase.

As a result, employees rarely leaves. The turnover rate of employees who have been there over a year is 5%. Turnover rate of Costco executives is even lower at 1%. That way, the company saves quite a bit in having to train new employees and its rate of theft by employee is extremely low.

Now the shocker: In 2006, Costco generated $21,805 in operating profit per employee as compared to $11,615 at rival Sam's Club, which paid its employees much lower wages. 21,805 to 11,615! Wayne Cascio of University of Colorado at Denver says ,"Costco’s stable, productive workforce more than offsets its higher costs ... These figures challenge the common assumption that labor rates equal labor costs. Costco’s approach shows that when it comes to wages and benefits, a cost-leadership strategy need not be a race to the bottom."

Social Security and its Discontents

The Social Security system requires that everyone put 7.5% of his paycheck into Social security every year. This is matched by the employer. That is 15% of your income. If you average $30,000.00 a year in your working life of 50 years you will put away about $220,000. The government, importantly, puts no money in.

If you start work at age twenty, invest 4500 dollars at 5% every year, at age 70 your investment fund will be $942,065.98. If you continue to earn 5% and start to withdraw $45,000 a year, you will be able to do that forever. Forever. And none of that money will come from the younger generation; the retiree will not be burdening his children's or grand-children's generation. There will be no "entitlement." The money taken out by the retiree will be the money he put in and what it earned.

There are problems here, of course. Inflation--the decreasing value of the dollar--is not factored. The maximum amount of taxable income has changed over the years. It is now $113,000 but in 1982 was $32,000 so the savings would be erratic. Nor has any inflation of wages been considered which would increase the savings. And the earnings would also change; stock market returns are much more than 5%. Interest rates in the early 1980s were 13%. But that is not the main factor. The main factor is that the money is not there. It has been spent. It has earned nothing and is gone. Now the younger generation will have to make up the difference.

So the two major factors which undermine the system --inflation and the fact the money is spent-- are factors controlled by the government. But, hey, they taught us how to sneeze.

Cab Thoughts 9/25/13

"We human beings always seek happiness. Now there are two ways. You can make yourself happy by making other people unhappy--I call that the logic of robbery. The other way, you make yourself happy by making other people happy--that's the logic of the market. Which way do you prefer?"-- Zhang Weiying,


Vladimir Putin wrote, as so many of these politicians do, an "intellectual piece," a PhD dissertation in “strategic planning” at St. Petersburg’s Mining Institute. Later, this document proved to have been plagiarized from a KGB translation of work by U.S. professors published many years earlier. According to a Mr. Gaddy and fellow Brookings researcher Igor Danchenko, large sections of the dissertation’s central argument were taken almost word-for-word from the 1978 management text “Strategic Planning and Policy,” by University of Pittsburgh professors William R. King and David I. Cleland.

If we could just print all the money we need, why have a budget at all? And why fuss about counterfeiters?

Golden Oldie:
http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2010/03/where-is-uwe-reinhardt.html

A 33-year-old pregnant staffer for the Clinton Global Initiative, Elif Yavuz, a senior vaccines researcher, and her boyfriend, architect Ross Langdon, are among those killed in the Kenya mall shooting, former President Bill Clinton said on Tuesday. Langdon has been on TED.

An asteroid in 66 Million B.C. hit the Yucatan Peninsula in North America. The shock was followed by tsunami and then dust clouds that obscured the sun. It was an "Extinction Event." The dinosaurs disappeared; flora and fauna were gone from most of North America. The ferns came back first.

In one year the Americans have decreased the CO2 emmisions by twice the amount the Europeans agreed to at Koyoto.

Who was.... Samantha Gailey?

Obsidian, the black volcanic glass, was highly prized in both the Stone and Bronze Age. Its trade can be tracked and suggests that the great empire of Sargon, the Twenty Third B.C. conqueror of Mesopotamia, dissolved after his death because of the disruption of trade, not the other way around.

Junot Diaz says in Salon that Seamus Heaney considered himself an "undeceiver" and "the Onion..[the satirical on-line mag]...is the deceiver that undeceives, which is what fiction at its best attempts to do."

The Population Division of the U.N. Department of Economic and Social Affairs released statistics showing that in 2013, 232 million people — 3.2 percent of the world’s population — lived in a different country than where they were born. This represents a drastic increase from the 154 million counted in 1990.

The Cleveland Browns have started 19 quarterbacks since 1999.

inchoate: adj.: just begun; in the early stages; incipient; rudimentary; not yet clearly or completely formed or organized; disordered

Origin: L inchoatus, incohatus, pp. of inchoare, incohare, to begin, orig. rural term “hitch up, harness” < in-, in + cohum, the strap from plow beam to yoke < IE base *kagh-, to hold, enclose > hedge

A typical Costco warehouse store stocks only 4,000 types of items (in contrast, the average supermarket sells 40,000 types items. Wal-Mart stores, on the other hand, stock about 125,000 types of products).

The Pittsburgh Penguins reported that about 12,300 fans — approximately 70 percent of tickets sold — attended the exhibition game Monday night. An exhibition game used to evaluate new players and condition veterans. The game took place at the same time the Pirates played at PNC Park and began about 90 minutes before the Steelers played at Cincinnati.

After the death of his mother Nandi in October 1827, the African leader and warlord Shaka Zulu ordered a period of mourning that included everyone in his sway. According to Donald Morris, in this mourning period, Shaka ordered that no crops should be planted during the following year, no milk (the basis of the Zulu diet at the time) was to be used, and any woman who became pregnant was to be killed along with her husband. At least 7,000 people were executed, although the killing was not restricted to humans: cows were slaughtered so that their calves would know what losing a mother felt like. The Zulu monarch was killed by three assassins sometime in 1828.

1.3% of jobs are filled by Monster.Com.. 60% to 70% of jobs are filled through personal contact.

The Man Booker Prize is now open to any novel written in English and published in the U.K. "regardless of the nationality of the author."

AAAAAaaaaaaannnnnnddddddd...........a graph:

Research is its Own Reward

Sarin--500 times more toxic than cyanide--was named in honor of the people who first discovered it: Schrader, Otto Ambros, Rüdiger and Hermann Van der Linde. Gerhard Schrader was the lead scientist who discovered Sarin while trying to develop an insecticide. His first creation was Tabun (which was accidentally spilled in the lab and almost killed him). The Nazis preempted his research and directed it from insects to humans, the "G-series" of nerve agents. Sarin developed from that program. Schrader became known as "the father of nerve gas." The Nazis developed and stored over 12,000 tons of Tabun (which, after the war, the Russians dumped in the Oder River!)

After the war Schrader returned to Bayer. Ambros, who was Hitler's chief chemical weapons engineer and one of the main driving forces behind the Nazi chemical weapons program, was convicted of war crimes and crimes against humanity at Nuremberg and sentenced to 8 years in prison, but after three years he was removed to advise the American Army on its own Sarin weapons program.

Ricin, the popular poison used by the Bulgarian secret police to murder the Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov (with a modified umbrella using compressed gas to fire a tiny pellet contaminated with ricin into his leg), is not of this class or program. It is from the castor bean plant and is widely available.

The Real Meaning of SWAT Teams

On Aug. 7, Aaron Alexis called police from a Newport, R.I., Marriott. He needed help. He was hearing voices. And three people were following him, sending microwaves through walls, making his skin vibrate and preventing him from sleeping. He had already twice changed hotels in an effort to escape the men and their radiation. And the voices.

Textbook schizophrenia. But do not underestimate it with a mere diagnosis; Alexis was a terrified, haunted man. What was totally nuts to us was very real, as real as our reality, to him. The police visited him, told him to "stay away from the individuals that are following him," and left.

Eventually Alexis does leave. He goes to a gun store in Virginia and buys a shotgun. Then he goes to the Washington Navy Yard and kills twelve strangers before he himself is killed.

Does madness have much to teach us? This is an instance where a total madman, known to the authorities, keeps a security clearance, buys a gun and, acting on his madness, kills twelve and dies himself. One should ask what do authorities do? What justifies their confidence they can help us in anything if not this? If a man as obviously crazy as this guy can wander away from the encounter with the law with nothing more than the moronic advice of  "stay away from the invisible people" what would stimulate their intervention? How crazy do you have to be? Is it just the infrastructure going through the motions waiting for lunch? Is it more, like the callous disregard for anyone or any danger?

One should worry here. It may be the government and its agents have no real idea of the world and their light influence on it. They may care for nothing. Ignoring this suffering man is more than callous, it is cruel. And there is the bigger picture of police disappearing from the daily encounters with life and withdrawing to response teams; this may be a tacit admission of their truth: They have limited impact on our lives and have no confidence in improving or intervening with our problems. Their only place is in counterattack upon a clear and defined problem.

One wonders when the rest of the bureaucracy will catch up with their cynical despair.

Sunday Sermon 9/22/13

Today's is a difficult gospel, the "a man can not have two masters" gospel. In it a wasteful steward is told by his master he is to be fired. He responds by rewriting loans and debts others owe his master in order to create good will among them so there will be a place for him to go after he is fired. The master, strangely, salutes his efforts as practical and prudent.

Christ is always contrasting the material and the spiritual, the worldly and the heavenly. And, of course, the worldly comes in second best. He never dismisses the world; we live in it. He just wants us to put it in perspective and give Caesar what is his and nothing more. The question underlying this is always "Does Caesar have anything, really?"

This is one of those moments where one would love to see Christ's expression as He delivers the parable. He had to be laughing. The master compliments the steward for his plan; but the master knows the plan. The changing of the debts will not work. He is not deceived and the steward's new found friends will not be friends in the end. Still, the master congratulates the steward for playing by his own rules, the rules of the world. At least he is consistent.

But he has thrown his full support behind the contestant that has already lost.

Cab Thoughts 9/21/13

  


 

Carefree, mocking, violent--
That is what Wisdom wants us to be.
She is a woman. She loves
Only a man of war.--Zarathustra

                                                             

Kimberley Strassel has an article on an investigation into Jeffrey Thompson and allegations of national campaign money laundering. It has some significant potential as many big names are involved and Thompson had very high access in Washington. The question is, of course, the seriousness not only of the crime but of the Justice Department.

The famous historian Josephus was, as a young man, a Jewish ascetic who lived in the desert. He became a respected Roman through his efforts to talk the Jews out of rebellion and accompanied Titus, the future emperor, on the final destructive attack on Jerusalem.His histories, including the first autobiography, made him one of the great sources of information of the time and he also wrote specifically about Jesus. He is remembered as a traitor to the Jewish cause but did write a polemic against Jewish prejudice.

A single mother of two in the state of Pennsylvania gets annual benefits of $45,000. Her marginal tax rate on any earnings she might gain up to $69,000 is 100%.

An index made up of companies based on their lobbying expenses outperformed the S&P by 11%.

For the first time ever, the National Book Awards' annual '5 Under 35' list is made up of all women writers.

According to NSA leaker Edward Snowden's classified documents, at least one in five applicants for CIA positions have had significant ties to terror groups Hamas, Hezbollah and al-Qaida. Most were translators. Hezbollah spy Nada Nadim Prouty successfully infiltrated both the CIA and FBI as a linguist working counterterrorism. Fewer than 2,500 Americans currently are studying Arabic at colleges across the country.

Who was....Harold J. Smith?

The "dialectic" is not disorder, in an evolutionary sense. It is a conflict of orders.

Assad is the key link in the anti-Western Shiite crescent stretching from Tehran through Damascus and Beirut to the Mediterranean — on which sits Tartus, Russia's only military base outside the former USSR.

Jon Krakauer's book Into The Wild follows Chris McCandless, a hiker who died after surviving for months in the Alaskan wilderness. Krakauer has written an addendum to the book for The New Yorker defending his theory that McCandless' death was caused by accidental poison with wild potato seeds — a theory that was met with wide derision after the seeds were tested and found to be safe. But Krakauer says new research may prove him right after all: A recent paper suggests the seeds shared a toxin with the grass pea, which killed inmates of Vapniarca, a World War II-era concentration camp in the Ukraine. He says the toxin is most dangerous in young men close to starvation.

Golden oldie:

http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2011/04/non-profit-capitalism.html

A secretive Syrian military unit at the center of the Assad regime's chemical weapons program has been moving stocks of poison gases and munitions to as many as 50 sites to make them harder for the U.S. to track, according to American and Middle Eastern officials.

Dennis Kimbro's new book, "The Wealth Choice: Success Secrets of Black Millionaires," emphasizes the need to save first to build wealth. "If you cannot save money, the seeds of greatness are not in you," he writes. He then gives some statistics to highlight some of the problem.

The median net worth, or wealth, of white households is 20 times that of black households. In 2009, 35% of black households had no wealth or were in debt. Twenty-four percent of black Americans spend more than they earn, compared with 14% of all Americans. Thirty-two percent of blacks do not save at all, compared with less than 25% of all Americans.
To underscore these statistics, Earl Graves Jr., CEO of Black Enterprise magazine, said blacks are six times as likely as whites to buy a Mercedes-Benz and that blacks who purchase Jaguars have an income one-third less than whites who purchase the same vehicles.

There are 60,000 megawatts of hydro projects in 45 states awaiting final approval at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. That's a huge number, nearly as much as all wind capacity. Additionally, last year, the highest number of licenses--25--were issued for new hydro projects since 2005.

crepuscular \kri-PUS-kyuh-lur\, adjective: Of, pertaining to, or resembling twilight; dim. ety: Crepuscular comes from Latin crepusculum, twilight, from creper, dark, obscure; ultimately of Sabine origin. Sabine!

The Internet is, in essence, a Rube Goldberg system in process if not structure. It breaks down each bit of information and sends it along to routers which pick and choose the next route. Each router contains a regularly updated routing table, similar to a local train sched­ule. If the best pathway is blocked, congested, or damaged, the routing table is updated accordingly and the information is diverted along an alternative path­way, where it will meet the next router in its journey, and the process will repeat. A packet containing a typical web search may traverse dozens of Internet routers and links -- and be diverted away from multiple conges­tion points or offline computers. Thus it fills the original requirement of the Net's creation: The military wanted to create a communication system that could resist enemy attack and not be stymied by a strike on any part of the system.

AAAAANNNNDDDddddd.....a map:

Ulysses, Meet Polyphemus

A man recently was diagnosed with prostate cancer. His name was Ulysses. He was an older man and likely would do well but his degree and involvement of tumor were significant and the physicians felt he should be treated. After discussion, they chose radiation therapy and, because of some studies showing an advantage when given concurrently, a pituitary agonist which exhausts pituitary stimulus of male hormone and consequently lowers hormone levels was prescribed to be given with the radiation. The therapy was disallowed by Medicare because of a conflict between the diagnosis and the gender: They did not know that Ulysses--an ancient name of a famous warrior and the name of a famous Civil War general and U.S. President--was a man's name and they thought prostate cancer therapy was being planned for a woman. More, they thought the people taking care of him could make such an error--or a fraud.

These are simply not serious people.

Amleth, Hamlet and a Host of Characters

An 11th-12th century Danish saga entitled "Amleth" tells the tale of Feng murdering his brother, Horwendil, in order to marry Gerutha, Horwendilh's wife and Feng's sister-in-law. This causes Horwendil's son Amleth to pretend to be mad in order to save himself. The suspicious Feng sets woman and spy traps for young Amleth. Amleth eventually is sent to England with two guards carrying an execution letter, which Amleth alters to have them doom themselves. He marries the daughter of the King of England and has a son. He returns home, eventually burns the castle with his uncle's retinue then kills the uncle with his own sword. Wolves, riding horses backward, bigamy, war, an army with corpses tied up beside live men to fill out the ranks, and, most important, opportunistic and treacherous women follow.

Shakespeare had a lot to prune first.
(From Gesta Danorum of Saxo Grammaticus via Folklore and Mythology Texts webpage by D.L. Ashliman.)

Hormuz and Death in the Air

The Strait of Hormuz is a narrow "choke point" in the Persian Gulf's flow to the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean. As the Strait of Hormuz at its narrowest is just 54 kilometers (29 nmi) wide, in order to traverse the Strait, ships stay within sea lanes that pass through the territorial waters of Iran and Oman under the transit passage provisions of customary Law of the Sea. During the Iran–Iraq War the Iranian forces would, as they were entitled to, board and inspect neutral cargo ships in the Strait of Hormuz area in search of contraband destined for Iraq. It is the only sea passage to the open ocean for large areas of the petroleum-exporting Persian Gulf. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, an average of about 15 tankers carrying 16.5 to 17 million barrels of crude oil normally pass through the strait every day. This represents 40% of the world's seaborne oil shipments, and 20% of all world oil shipments

On April 14, 1988 the USS Samuel B. Roberts, a United States Navy's Oliver Hazard Perry class frigate, was struck and badly damaged by a mine in the strait. Ten sailors were evacuated to medical facilities. The crew fought for hours to save the ship. U.S. divers later searched the site for unexploded mines and recovered several whose serial numbers matched the sequence on mines seized the previous September aboard an Iranian mine-layer named Iran Ajr. The Americans responded with Operation Praying Mantis, the largest of the five major U.S. surface engagements since the Second World War. The Americans destroyed the guns and other military facilities on the Sassan and Sirri oil platforms and sank the Joshan, an Iranian fast attack/patrol missile boat. The net results: Iran suffered1 frigate sunk (45 crew killed), 1 gunboat sunk (11 crew killed), 3 speedboats sunk, 1 frigate damaged and 2 platforms damaged. The Americans lost a helicopter and two men.

While this was decisive, it should have been. The Americans fought against several frigates and attack boats with an aircraft carrier, four destroyers, three frigates and a guided missile cruiser. The U.S. naval forces were ordered to stand down and give Iran a way out to avoid further combat. Iran took the offer and combat ceased, though both sides remained on alert, and near-clashes occurred throughout the night and into the next day as the forces steamed within the Gulf.

Three months later on the morning of July 3, 1988, the U.S. Navy's Ticonderoga class guided missile cruiser USS Vincennes, captained by Captain William C. Rogers III, was passing through the Strait of Hormuz as it returned from an escort duty. A helicopter from the USS Vincennes received small arms fire from Iranian patrol vessels. The Vincennes moved to engage the Iranian vessels, in the course of which they all violated Omani waters and left after being challenged and ordered to leave by a Royal Navy of Oman warship. The Vincennes then pursued the Iranian gunboats crossing into Iranian territorial waters to open fire.

Into this zone of conflict, fear and gunfire flew Iran Air Flight 655, a civilian airliner, an Airbus A300B2 operated by Iran Air, flying from Bandar Abbas, Iran, to Dubai, UAE. The Vincennes crew mistakenly identified the Iranian Airbus A300 as an attacking F-14 Tomcat fighter and fired on it, killing all 290 passengers and crew aboard, including 66 children, ranking it seventh among the deadliest airliner fatalities. It was the highest death toll of any aviation incident in the Indian Ocean and the highest death toll of any incident involving an Airbus A300 anywhere in the world.

Arbitrary violence and hostility always breeds arbitrary death. An atmosphere of violence and hostility always is fulfilled. And it is always the unarmed and undefended who suffer.

As an aside, nine months after the downing of Iran Air Flight 655, on March 10, 1989, Captain Rogers' wife Sharon escaped with her life when a pipe bomb attached to her minivan exploded while she was driving to her school where she taught in San Diego.

Sunday Sermon 9/15/13

Today's readings have some eccentric qualities, i.e. God as an eccentric. In the Old Testament reading Moses argues with God's plan for retribution and wins. In the Gospel, three parables are told, one of a shepherd going after a lost sheep, one of a fussy woman who has lost a coin and the doting father who is thrilled with the return of his prodigal son. All of these images are a bit offbeat, a responsible loner in the mountains, an obsessive cleaner/collector and the father in love-- nothing like the fierce and vengeful God so often depicted in Christianity--all devoted to the lost, the separated, the failed.

Only the bitter and jealous older son--the man--in the last story breaks the spell.

Cab Thoughts 9/14/13

Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers. -Alfred, Lord Tennyson, poet (1809-1892)

IG Farben was the largest chemical company in the world and the fourth largest overall industrial in the late 1920s and 30s. It was formed as a conglomeration of companies, including Bayer. The IG Farben factory in Germany produced Zyklon B, the chemical agent used to gas millions of Jews and other "undesirables" to death during the Holocaust, as well as Tabun, the first nerve gas out of the Nazi nerve gas program and the forerunner of Sarin.

It is interesting that Obama, with his philosophical background in moral relativism, is unforgiving in the Middle East and unwilling to see their problems in their religious and historical context. More, he is willing to see the United States as a moral and political leader with Bush-like evangelistic qualities when he has publicly disavowed that attitude in the past.

A look back in history: The October 2002 authorization for Bush's military force in Iraq passed by an easy 77-23 margin in the Senate and a 296-133 margin in the House.

Jesse Jackson, Jr., a 17-year veteran of the US Congress, is going to prison for 2 1/2 years. He got a "mood disorder" about the same time he learned he was to be indicted. His "mood disorder" is so severe, he has become disabled and will receive $8700 per month as a disability payment as well as $45000 a year from his congressional pension, a total of about $150K per year.
Another victory for equality: Iowa is granting permits to acquire or carry guns in public to people who are legally or completely blind.


"Stork detained as spy in Egypt found dead." This is a headline in the press as it ruminates on the chaos and madness that is Egypt. But no headline about Coptics, abuse of the press, abuse of female reporters. Always the sideshow, never the show.

tycoon: noun: A wealthy and powerful person, especially in business or politics. From Japanese taikun (great lord or prince), from Chinese ta (great) + kiun (prince). The word was used as a title for the shogun of Japan. Abraham Lincoln's aides used the word as an affectionate nickname for him.

DC Comics continues to grab far too much attention with the Catwoman controversy. The strip's writers resigned because they said the publishers would not allow the comic strip character to marry her girlfriend. The publisher said: "heroes shouldn't have happy personal lives. They are committed to being that person and committed to defending others at the sacrifice of their own personal interests." This is a comic strip character.

The single largest portion of the university budget is the maintenance of buildings and lands. Sooooo........

Who was ......Jean-François Champollion?

"From 2001–2002 to 2009–2010, the rate of emergency department visits for alcohol-related diagnoses for males increased 38%, from 68 to 94 visits per 10,000 population," reported the Center for Disease Control. "Over the same period, the visit rate for females also increased 38%, from 26 to 36 visits per 10,000 population."

George Will wrote the following about Hilary Clinton: "That contemporary feminism is thin gruel is apparent in the fact that it has found its incarnation in a woman who married her way to the upper reaches of American politics. There her wandering husband rewarded her remarkable loyalty by allowing her the injurious opportunity to produce a health-care proposal so implausible that a Democratic-controlled Congress (56 to 44 in the Senate, 256 to 178 in the House) would not bring it to a vote. Still, the world’s oldest political party might not allow a contest to mar the reverent awarding to her of its next nomination." Is that a reasonable criticism?

Does "The greatest good for the greatest number" justify the torture of an individual to gain information to protect a group?

On September 6 a Minotaur V rocket was launched from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility on Wallops Island, Virginia. It is "LADEE", the Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer, and is moon-bound.

48 million Americans, 20% of the eligible population, are now on food stamps.

According to the CDC, there are 800,000 accidental needle-sticks that occur in the U.S. health system annually.

Golden Oldie:

http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2011/05/what-israel-means.html

AAAAAAAaaaaannnnnnnddddd.....a graph:

On Early Investing

There a number of "Jack and Jill" investment scenarios out there. Here is one on the influence of time and results.

Two twins, Jack and Jill, make a decision at the age of 25. Jill would invest $1200 a year at 6% interest until she is 65. Jack would spend his money without investing it until he is 45. Then he would start to invest at 6% interest, but he will invest twice as much, $2400 a year, to catch up.

On their 65^th birthday Jill will have $185,714 in her portfolio and Jack will have $88,285 even though they each invested $48,000.
By waiting until the age of 45 to start investing, Jack’s portfolio will be $97,429 less than Jill’s portfolio.



(From Kanwal Sarai's Simplyinvesting)

9/11 reflected in Boston's Broken Glass

The mom of the Boston bomber, in the middle of her ridiculously implausible "denial tour," said if her son were executed "I will say Allahu Akbar!“

Somehow this fits. In fact all of this seems a non sequitur. Nothing leads from one point to another.
A family flees to this country and is welcomed and protected. The family goes on welfare support. They become comfortable and the children pursue their educations. One marries a local girl and has a child. Then they blow up countless strangers. Afterwards they go to several social events.

Any of these episodes might be individually coherent, even reasonable. But together they are more like that charming boy on the bus trip from Florida to Washington State, Ted Bundy. Except we know Ted was quite mad and these boys are not. They are just vicious. But purposelessly so to the Western mind. Any connection to the world of politics or religion is more senile than symbolic; there just is no obvious reason, at least to us. Is there a new social madness, like the obscene phone caller, made possible only by some innocent modern circumstance?

So what is going on? Is it really beyond reason?

A great worry is the tremendous variability of social norms. American prisons, as an isolated culture, look nothing like the culture its constituents came from. Pirate ships demonstrated a democratic structure that was not present in any of the cultures the pirates left. The savagery of the western American farmer in the Indian Wars had nothing in common with the east coast of his origin. Shards from shattered societies like the Symbionese Liberation Army or Jonestown or Amish communities look fantastic to the rest of us but are, nonetheless, quite well ordered and often of great integrity.

Solzhenitsyn thought the American inclusiveness was charmingly naive on a local level and blunderingly stupid internationally. At his 1978 Commencement Address at Harvard, Solzhenitsyn said, "Every ancient and deeply rooted self-contained culture .....constitutes a self-contained world, full of riddles and surprises to Western thinking.....But the persisting blindness of (Western) superiority continues to hold the belief that all the vast regions of our planet should develop and mature to the level of contemporary Western systems....such a conception is a fruit of Western comprehension of the essence of other worlds."

George Bush was an evangelist for democracy. Almost all Westerners believe the progress the West has made is towards a preordained ideal. Francis Fukuyama wrote about it as "The End of History." All was fulfilled in us.

Imagine, then, that all the behavior we see as so strange and inconsistent is being viewed through a distorted Western prism, that bombers are not indoctrinated or "brainwashed" but progressing along their cultural norm, that the acceptance of adult-on-children violence is not acceptance at all but rather the norm, that their connection to Western development is tangential, not incremental.

Maybe these cultural "divides" are rather ancient schisms and have more consequence than we ever thought.

(from an old post.)

Cab Thoughts 9/11/13

Few opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not already common. -John Locke, philosopher (1632-1704)

 

 

Owners this year have announced the closing or closed a total of 5 nuclear plants--2 in California, 1 in Florida, and 1 in Wisconsin plus the recent Vermont Yankee closure. That is nearly 5% of the US nuclear fleet and it will have to be replaced by carbon.

 

There is a new book out reevaluating the famous Stanley Milgram shock experiments and questioning their statistical validity. Reviews from professionals in the field have been scornful.

 

A short section of Dodd-Frank requires that all public companies disclose the median pay of its employees and place it side-by-side with the CEO’s pay. Precious.

Golden Oldie:
http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2013/02/divergent-physician-worlds-one-future.html

Sushmita Banerjee, an Indian woman who wrote a bestselling memoir about life under the Taliban, was reportedly dragged from her home in Afghanistan's Paktika province this week and shot dead. 
Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani teenager who was shot by the Taliban because she advocated for girls' education, helped open Europe's largest public library on Tuesday with a speech claiming that "pens and books are the weapons that defeat terrorism." The new library is in Birmingham, England where she now attends school.

 

The beautiful actress, Paulette Goddard, married Charlie Chaplin and Burgess Merideth but also Erich Maria Remarque, the author of "All's Quiet on the Western Front." She then retired from acting until he died. She inherited a fortune from him.

 

Emerging markets are half the world economy, according to IMF data. Cheap money flooded into those countries; what will happen when it floods out?

 

While Tesla accounts for 1% of Ford’s U.S. monthly sales, the electric car company already has nearly a third of Ford’s $64 billion market capitalization.

 

pittance \PIT-ns\, noun: a small amount or share; a small allowance or sum, as of money for living expenses; a scanty income or remuneration. Pittance shares its root with the word pity. It entered English in the 13th century from the Latin pietatem meaning "piety," "loyalty" and "duty."

The Indian rupee has declined 23% against the dollar in the past six months. These shifts in money are now worldwide and tsunamis can cross any sea.

 

"It's estimated there are 3 million shipwrecks in the waters of the world," said James Delgado, director of maritime heritage for NOAA's office of national marine sanctuaries.

 

While the nation worries over the effects and implications of the administration's major efforts to control finance (Dodd-Frank) and health care (ACA), the government, with the bit in its teeth, plans to expand its management genius into education. A White House website titled "University of the United States (UUS)"--really unbelievable--introduces its plans with this sentence:  "Earning a postsecondary degree or credential is no longer just a pathway to opportunity for a talented few."  Some might suggest that the explosion of the educational system after the Second World War was its own revolution enabling the development of working people. But not these guys. Antagonism. Exclusion. Animosity. "The dreaded 1%." A political group with incomprehensible and inept reactions to some inarticulate resentment. Iconoclasts in search of an idol.

 

Does gay dating discriminate against straights? Does straight dating discriminate against gays? What about religious discrimination; must a Muslim consider a Baptist as a suitor?

 

Who was...Carolyn Bryant?

 

The unfortunate Karen Carpenter's brother, Richard, was said to have been a bit of a musical genius. He came upon a signature sound for the group by overdubbing their two voices to create an eight part harmony -- then tripling them in the studio to get twenty-four voices in all.  Their song "We've only just begun" was originally written by Paul Williams as an ad for The Crocker Bank:

We've only just begun to live
White lace and promises
A kiss for luck and we're on our way 

 

The British health care system, in an economy one sixth the size of the U.S., is projected to have a nearly $47 billion deficit in 2020.

Rush Limbaugh says that he is coming out with a childrens' book this October, to be titled Rush Revere and the Brave Pilgrims: Time-Travel Adventures with Exceptional Americans.

Of the 4 million public school students who entered 9th grade in the 2006-2007 school year, 78.2 percent, or 3.1 million, received high school diplomas in the 2009-2010 school year, an increase of more than two percentage points. Among racial/ethnic groups, Asian/Pacific Islander students had the highest graduation rate at 93.5 percent. The rates for other groups were 83.0 percent for White students, 71.4 percent for Hispanic students, 69.1 percent for American Indian/Alaska Native students, and 66.1 percent for Black students.

 

AAANNNNDDDDDddddd....a picture of Carolyn Bryant:

Stadial

If you walk along the beach in Cape Cod you will see gigantic boulders, detritus of the last ice age that nosed these huge rocks south and then abandoned them as the ice sheet retreated north. That Ice Age  was the most recent glacial period occurring during the last years of the Pleistocene, from approximately 110,000 to 10,000 years ago. The maximum extension of the glaciers within this last glacial period was approximately 22,000 years ago. The main mass was called the Laurentide Ice Sheet; at some places it was up to 2 miles thick.

It radically altered the geography of North America north of the Ohio River. At the height of the Wisconsin Episode glaciations, ice covered most of Canada, the Upper Midwest, New England and parts of Montana and Washington. The Great Lakes are the result of glacial scouring and pooling; Niagara Falls is also a product of the glaciations, as is the course of the Ohio River, which largely supplanted the prior Teays River.

The Earth began to warm and vegetative and animal patterns changed as the glaciers receded. Then, rather suddenly, things changed again. Between 12,800 and 11,500 years ago it got suddenly cold again and abruptly reversed climatic conditions back to near-glacial state. A short such period of lower temperatures during a warming trend is called a "stadial."  This period is called The Younger Dryas stadial, "younger" because it was more recent than the one several thousand years earlier and "Dryas" after the arctic-alpine flowering plant Dryas octopetala, whose pollen is found in cores dating from those times. (During these cold spells, Dryas octopetala was much more widely distributed than it is today as large parts of the northern hemisphere that are now covered by forests were replaced in the cold periods by tundra.)

(The Dryas)

This new period had an impressive impact in North America. The original glacier period allowed the Bering strait to freeze and thus passage of people from Asia to the area of Alaska. The bridge regressed during the warming and may have made a comeback in the Younger Dryas. But the impact further south was devastating with the extinction of big mammals including mammoths, mastodons, giant ground sloths, American camels, horses and saber-toothed cats. More, it doomed those people who hunted them, the Clovis People.

The cause of the Younger Dryas is still under debate. A cataclysm is possible but not essential. The Little Ice Age--not a true Ice Age as it was mild--is conventionally defined as the period extending from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, or alternatively, from about 1350 to about 1850--caused cultural disruption without much fanfare or notice. The relationship with CO2 is unknown.

  

Behavioral Insights

The U.S. government is getting interested in influencing the behavior of citizens in a more direct way than information management.

England has a "Behavioral Insights Team." These guys devise subtle policies to change behavior. One such policy concerns how to get British citizens with late tax filings to pay up. "Sending letters to late taxpayers that indicated a social norm -- i.e., that '9 out of 10 people in Britain paid their taxes on time' -- resulted in a 15 percent increase in response rates over a three-month period, rolling out to £30 million of extra annual revenue," a U.S. document reviewing the program reads.

Such policies --encouraging behavior subtly rather than outright requiring it -- have come to be known as "nudges," after an influential 2008 book titled "Nudge," by former Obama regulatory czar Cass Sunstein and Chicago Booth School of Business professor Richard Thaler, popularized the term. Thaler, who is also an adviser to the British Behavioral Insights Team, said that his research also supports automatically enrolling people in retirement savings plans. "Many people have struggled to save enough to provide for an adequate retirement. ... Two simple design changes can dramatically improve the situation ... automatic enrollment (default people into the plan with the option to easily opt out) and automatic escalation, where workers can sign up to have their contributions increased annually," he said. Presumably this would run in parallel to the already remarkably successful Social Security experiment.

Harvard economics professor David Laibson, who studies behavioral economics and is in touch with the people in government setting up the program, says there are very real benefits to some "nudge" policies -- such as one that increases the number of people registered as organ donors by making people decide when they apply for a drivers' license. There is no suggestion yet to incorporate subliminal suggestion.

There is a risk in government influencing social (as opposed to criminal) behavior. The government is always coming up with their own norms and encouraging them since they know so much better than we do. When these passive/aggressive approaches fail it is necessary to criminalize them. The teaching of evolution, sodomy laws, gambling and alcohol regulation, Sunday Blue Laws, trans-fats bans are all social behaviors made criminal when social pressure was seen as insufficient.

But one can have confidence in the vision and caution of this government; after all, they taught us how to sneeze.

Sunday Sermon 9/8/13

Today's gospel is one of those complex writings that can cause a bucket of harm. Christ is being followed by a lot of people as He journeys toward Jerusalem. In this gospel he distinguishes between the interested and the faithful by emphasizing the spiritual distinct from the material. Families, wives, children are all shockingly shown as material and temporal to make the point.  Taken alone, this gospel is difficult; one must see the whole. For example Christ's opinion of marriage is quite harsh and He repeats it: Marriage is an inviolable contract. Period. Marriage to Christ is repeatedly presented as sacred. So that the diminishing of marriage in this gospel must be more complex than at first blush.

A few years ago George Hensley started a movement in the Pentecostal Church that emphasized the handling of snakes. Several churches continue to handle poisonous snakes in their services to this day. This comes from several bible readings, Mark 16:17-18:
"And these signs shall follow them that believe: In my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues. They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover" and Luke 10:19:
"Behold, I give unto you power to tread on serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy: and nothing shall by any means hurt you." 
There is also a section in Acts 28:1-6, which tells that Paul was bitten by a poisonous snake and suffered no harm.

It is doubtful that Christ was creating a religion that hinged on snake handling. Seeing Christ and the whole of His meaning is the real message here.
 

Cab thoughts 9/7/13

We all get the same amount of ice. The rich get it in the summertime and the poor get it in the winter.” ~ Bat Masterson, found in his typewriter after he died.

John Peterson, a blogger on SeekingAlpha who is knowledgeable in the energy field, has a new article which is simple and straightforward. He has no position on global warming but agrees CO2 is rising. His argument is with the efforts to deal with the changes which he thinks are both focused on the wrong populations and mired in the belief that there are adequate rare earth minerals to substitute for cheap petroleum. But his basic point is this:
"The .....[two CO2 producing]..... culprits are:
1. 1 billion humans in industrialized economies where per capita CO2 emissions have been flat or falling for decades; and, 2. 6 billion humans in developing economies that (a) want to be richer, (b) know a better life is possible because we gave them Internet access, and (c) are working hard to build a brighter future for themselves and their children and grandchildren.

CO2 emissions aren't climbing because of activities in the industrialized west. They're climbing because billions of humans in developing economies are increasing their carbon footprints as they try to catch up."

One can view the world as sets, as mathematicians do. The editor of the Guardian says a UK official told the newspaper to destroy the files regarding Snowden. Are the government and its people in the same set?

Billy Carter, the President's brother, was paid a half a million dollars by the government of Libya while his brother was president and was registered as an agent of the Romanian government.

Named for a physician in Napoleon's army, the "Lisfranc" injury was first described when a rider fell from a horse with his foot still in the stirrup. It can be the result of a direct blow or a fixed rotational injury. They are appearing in football athletes. It occurs at the midfoot, where a cluster of small bones forms an arch on top of the foot between the ankle and the toes. From this cluster, five long bones (metatarsals) extend to the toes. The second metatarsal also extends down into the row of small bones and acts as a stabilizing force. The bones are held in place by connective tissues (ligaments) that stretch both across and down the foot. However, there is no connective tissue holding the first metatarsal to the second metatarsal. A twisting fall can break or shift (dislocate) these bones out of place. These injuries are usually mistaken for sprains.

Who was .... Phoebe Mozee?

According to a recent article on The Wefunder Blog (a crowdsourcing group), the U.S. has at least 256,000 active Angels who collectively invest some $21 billion a year (more then all venture capital sources combined) in new businesses.

Keynes’ described President Woodrow Wilson as “slowminded and bewildered”; a “blind and deaf Don Quixote”

Titanic director James Cameron optioned Steven Pressfield's Last of the Amazons in 2002 when it was still in galleys. Apparently he has lost interest.

Scientist Harold Pashler showed that when people do two cognitive tasks at once, their cognitive capacity can drop from that of a Harvard MBA to that of an eight-year-old. It's a phenomenon called dual-task interference. In one experiment, Pashler had volunteers press one of two keys on a pad in response to whether a light flashed on the left or right side of a window. One group only did this task over and over. Another group had to define the color of an object at the same time, choosing from among three colors. These are simple variables: left or right, and only three colors. Yet doing two tasks took twice as long, leading to no time saving. This finding held up whether the experiment involved sight or sound, and no matter how much participants practiced. If it didn't matter whether they got the answers right, they could go faster. The lesson is clear: if accuracy is important, don't divide your attention. (from Your Brain at Work by David Rock)

Bracken Cave, near San Antonio, Texas, harbors one of the world's largest breeding colonies of bats - about 10 million Mexican free-tailed bats. They consume an estimated 100 tons of insects each night, mainly agricultural pests.

vicissitude \vih-SIS-ih-tood; -tyood\, noun: Regular change or succession from one thing to another; alternation; mutual succession; interchange; Irregular change; revolution; mutation. Vicissitude comes from Latin vicissitudo, from vicissim, in turn, probably from vices, changes.

Donte' Stallworth, an NFL wideout, was released by the Washington Redskins. Stallworth was hindered through most of training camp by a hamstring injury. The story centered on a hot air balloon accident he suffered earlier this year. And he has had a number of injuries in the past--but nothing compared to the injury he inflicted. Buried in the story was this quote: "He was suspended for the 2009 season by NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell for violating the league's personal conduct policy for a DUI vehicular manslaughter charge." DUI vehicular manslaughter is apparently against NFL policy and will be dealt with seriously. Not only was he suspended, he was sentenced to 30 days in jail for the crime.

Alpha particles are 2 protons, 2 neutrons, like helium. Alpha particles cannot even go through a few centimeters of air. Alpha irradiation cannot hurt humans when the alpha source is outside the human body, because human skin does not let the alpha particles go through. But alpha radiation can be very harmful if the source is inside the body, for example when people breathe dust or gas containing materials which decay by emitting alpha particles.

Golden Oldies:

http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2010/07/dont-play-lacrosse-at-duke.html

Buffett on value investing: "I can only tell you that the secret has been out for 50 years, ever since Ben Graham and Dave Dodd wrote Security Analysis, yet I have seen no trend toward value investing in the 35 years I've practiced it. There seems to be some perverse human characteristic that likes to make easy things difficult. The academic world, if anything, has actually backed away from the teaching of value investing over the last 30 years. It's likely to continue that way. Ships will sail around the world but the Flat Earth Society will flourish. There will continue to be wide discrepancies between price and value in the marketplace, and those who read their Graham & Dodd will continue to prosper."Warren Buffett(Speech he gave at Columbia Business School May 17, 1984 marking the 50th anniversary of Security Analysis)

A study done at the University of London found that constant emailing and text-messaging reduces mental capability by an average of ten points on an IQ test. It was five points for women, and fifteen points for men. This effect is similar to missing a night's sleep or about three times more than the effect of smoking cannabis.

AAAAAaaaaaaaaannnnnnddddd.......a picture:

Phoebe Mozee (aka: Annie Oakley). Famous for her marksmanship by the age of 12, she once shot the ashes off of Kaiser Wihelm II's cigarette at his invitation. When she outshot famed exhibition marksman Frank Butler, he fell in love with her and they married. They remained married the rest of their lives.