Suez

The Suez canal is an artificial waterway in Egypt that connects the Mediterranean and the Red Seas. It is single lane with several lie-by areas to pass. There are no locks and seawater flows freely in the canal.
It was built for modern use from 1859 to 1869 to allow ship movement between Asia and Europe without navigating around Africa and has undergone several enhancements. The Canal is now 120.11 miles long, 673 feet wide and 79 feet deep. It serves the hugely oil-rich areas of the Red Sea and allows the easier and safer trade of petroleum products to Europe and west.

While a gigantic engineering project by La Compagnie Universelle du Canal Maritime de Suez (Universal Company of the Maritime Suez Canal) it was, remarkably, a rather ancient idea. The first canal between the Nile River delta and the Red Sea was excavated about the 13th century BC, possibly at the command of either Seti I or Ramses II. Its condition went through various maintenance efforts over the years but was finally abandoned in the 800's A.D.

The modern Suez construction company was originally a private Egyptian concern, its stock owned chiefly by French and Egyptian interests. In 1875 the British government purchased Egypt's shares. The original treaty guaranteed the Canal would be accessible to all nations but, after 1948, it was closed to Israel.

In 1956, after some disagreements with Egypt over their relationship with Russia, the U.S. and Britain withdrew financial support of the Aswan Dam project, Egyptian President-for-life Nasser took the Canal over with plans of using the Canal's receipts to build the dam. Israel invaded Egypt and the French and English invaded the Canal to keep it open. The Egyptians scuttled 40 ships in the canal to block it. Eventually the Canal was reopened and ownership transferred to Egypt.

Cab Thoughts 10/30/13

Farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil and you're a thousand miles from the corn field.

~Dwight Eisenhower

 

Pew Global Attitudes Project finds that just 79% of Americans in 2011 had a favorable view of Americans. How can that be? 21% of people in the U.S. dislike their fellow countrymen?

 

Gamma rays (γ-rays) are electromagnetic waves with the smallest wavelengths in the electromagnetic spectrum.They were discovered in 1900 by Paul Villard and named in 1903 by Ernest Rutherford.
Gamma rays are like x-rays, but the waves are smaller. Both gamma rays and x-rays are photons with very high energies, and gamma have even more energy.

Gamma rays and X-rays can also be distinguished by their origin: X-rays are emitted by electrons outside the nucleus, while gamma rays are emitted by the nucleus.

 

There are some studies that suggest the infective nature of cheating. One wonders if the effect is simply to try to keep a level playing field.

Jennifer Egan in her novel A Visit from the Goon Squad, which won the 49-year-old author the Pulitzer Prize in 2001, used unusual methods to tell a story with one chapter being written like PowerPoint slides. Her short story "Black Box" was written as tweets, 606 of them. http://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2012/06/black-box-by-jennifer-egan-tweet-by-tweet.html

The subject of the story is an expanded character from "Goon Squad."

The average monthly Social Security benefit for a retired worker was about $1,230 at the beginning of 2012. If your combined income is under $25,000 for singles ($32,000 for couples filing jointly), then your benefits aren’t taxable. If your combined income is between $25,000 and $34,000 for singles ($32,000 to $44,000 for couples), then you will have to pay income tax on up to 50 percent of your benefit. If your combined income is over $34,000 for singles ($44,000 for couples), then you will have to pay income tax on up to 85 percent of your benefit.

 

Approval of Congress has fallen to an all-time low with 8% of people with a favorable view of Congress. If so, how is it possible the average number of terms served has gone up and up, with the House in 1971 registering an all-time high of 20 percent of its members who had served at least ten terms? In 2010, 91 percent of those who ran for re-election won. Usually over 90% of congressmen are reelected and 80% of senators.

 

In Mexico, in Chicxulub, 65 million years ago, an asteroid ended the age of the reptiles. The asteroid's impact produced an explosion equivalent to about 100 trillion tons of dynamite, forming a crater approximately 110 miles in diameter, 40 miles deep. 40 miles deep! Debris covered the Earth. Researchers David King and Daniel Durda calculate that some of the debris reached halfway to the Moon before falling back to Earth. And when it fell back, it rained red-hot rocks, setting fires to forests almost everywhere. The atmosphere was heated enough to evaporate entire lakes and incinerate whole ecosystems. The Mesozoic era came to an end.

The National Institutes of Health awards $30 billion on research each year.

Bureau of Land Management's first-ever auction of public land for solar-energy development failed to attract any bids. Three parcels covering 3,700 acres in so-called solar-energy zones were offered. The bureau has created 19 zones for large solar projects in six Western states, encompassing nearly 300,000 acres.

 

Who is ....Audrey Hudson?

 

University of Texas energy poll finds that just 40% of Americans are familiar with hydraulic fracturing technology. Nonetheless everyone has opinions. This could be a problem but it is unlikely that this is much different from most of the democracy. A little knowledge and a lot of opinion, water with opinionated and slanted news, mix well, then frack.

 

aegis: (EE-jis) noun: Protection, support, guidance, or sponsorship of a particular person or organization. From Latin aegis, from Greek aigis (goatskin), from aix (goat). Aigis was the name of the shield or breastplate of Zeus or Athena in Greek mythology. It was made of goatskin. Earliest documented use: 1704.

 

The Great Comet of 1680, Kirch's Comet, (and Newton's Comet,) has the distinction of being the first comet discovered by telescope. It was discovered by Gottfried Kirch on 14 November 1680 and became one of the brightest comets of the 17th century – reputedly visible even in daytime – and was noted for its spectacularly long tail. Isaac Newton used it to test and verify Kepler's laws

 

In 1987, four years after the death of the Yale professor and renowned literary theorist Paul de Man- who advanced deconstruction as an analytical tool for literature--(along with Jacques Derrida,) a graduate student discovered an early anti-Semitic article, "Jews in Contemporary Literature," de Man wrote criticizing Jewish writers generally and suggesting isolating them. Judgement was swift. A new book on de Man by Evelyn Barish shows him as worse than was thought. de Man was indeed a convicted criminal. In 1951 a judge in Belgium sentenced de Man in absentia (he had fled to the United States by then) to six years in prison for theft and fraud related to Hermès, the publication house he created and ran. De Man had looted the funds of the company to cover his own lavish expenses. In one case, Barish writes, de Man engaged in a "deliberate swindle" of a family friend, fooling him into making a loan that was never repaid. He also was a bigamist and abandoned three sons; he actually refused to take calls from them. Ah, intellectuals.

King Tutankhamen, who lived during the 14th century BC, owned an extensive collection of boomerangs. Aboriginal Australians used boomerangs in hunting and warfare at least as far back as 10,000 years ago.

 

Americans who were recipients of means-tested government benefits in 2011 outnumbered year-round full-time workers, according to data released this month by the Census Bureau. They also out-numbered the total population of the Philippines.

 

Failures to prove a hypothesis are rarely offered for publication, let alone accepted. “Negative results” now account for only 14% of published papers, down from 30% in 1990. Yet knowing what is false is as important to science as knowing what is true.

 

AAAAAaaaaaannnnnndddddd.......a chart:

Snowden

Jim Leff raises an important point in his blog about Edward Snowden after reading a recent article on him in the Washington Post.


'In a feat of power jujitsu, the whistle-blower has taken on the responsibilities of the institution, and while I lack confidence in the wisdom and competence of institutions, I have exponentially less confidence in the wisdom and competence of a Snowden,' Leff writes.

Snowden protests his meticulous and thoughtful evaluation in the Guardian. "I carefully evaluated every single document I disclosed to ensure that each was legitimately in the public interest," he said. "There are all sorts of documents that would have made a big impact that I didn’t turn over, because harming people isn’t my goal. Transparency is."'

 

There is an argument against transparency; we certainly do not know everything we could know. Information on the Kennedy assassination, for example, will never be released in our lifetimes to no descernable outrage but to considerable social confusion. But that aside, Leff excerpts these quotes from the Washington Post article as salient:

U.S. officials are alerting some foreign intelligence services that documents detailing their secret cooperation with the United States have been obtained by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, according to government officials.

Snowden, U.S. officials said, took tens of thousands of military intelligence documents, some of which contain sensitive material about collection programs against adversaries such as Iran, Russia and China. Some refer to operations that in some cases involve countries not publicly allied with the United States.

The process of informing officials in capital after capital about the risk of disclosure is delicate. In some cases, one part of the cooperating government may know about the collaboration while others — such as the foreign ministry — may not, the officials said. The documents, if disclosed, could compromise operations, officials said.


The material in question does not deal with NSA surveillance but primarily with standard intelligence about other countries’ military capabilities, including weapons systems — missiles, ships and jets, the officials say.

Although Snowden obtained a large volume of documents, he is not believed to have shared all of them with journalists, sources say. Moreover, he has stressed to those he has given documents that he does not want harm to result.

"He’s made it quite clear that he was not going to compromise legitimate national intelligence and national security operations," said Thomas Drake, a former NSA executive who visited Snowden in Moscow this month. Snowden separately told Drake and a New York Times reporter that he did not take any documents with him to Russia. "There’s a zero percent chance the Russians or Chinese have received any documents," Snowden told the Times in an online interview last week.

Indeed, Drake said, Snowden made clear in their conversation that he had learned the lessons of prior disclosures, including those by an Army private who passed hundreds of thousands of diplomatic cables to the anti-secrecy organization WikiLeaks, which posted them in bulk online. "It’s telling," Drake said, "that he did not give anything to WikiLeaks."

The whistle-blower has always had some respect because it is assumed there is something for him to blow the whistle on, something to expose. Snowden raises a new element: Judgment. With Snowden, the whistle-blower assesses which admitted secrets should be made public. This is different from revealing hidden smoking statistics or suppressed evidence of abuse. This is the whistle-blower acting as information manager, as a triage agent. And that demands the same measure of trust as does the NSA official.

We already have hired a guy for that. How do we vet the volunteers?

Monsters and The Dialectic of Progress

Jocelyn Wildenstein is an over-wealthy New York woman who wanted to take advantage of her wealth and the incredible technology available to her to achieve some personal goals. She made changes here, then there, then, when the whole was less than she wanted from the sum of its parts, she did more. Much of this was small work, focused and controlled. It is important to understand that there was nothing casual here, nothing off handed and certainly nothing amateurish. She spent $4 million and it went to experts. Each step taken was to create her vision, to improve on what had been done before.

 

She had the audacity of hope.

 

This well intended meddling has a familiar ring to it. It is something of us all, our eagerness to improve things, make things better. It comes from a noble source: our confidence in our world, our belief in productive effort, but mostly our esteem for ideals. Beauty is not just beauty; it has virtue. So our efforts are never just self-centered. There is more on the line.

 

So we redo the garden, take New Year seriously, restructure a room done before by people of the same mind and generally try to achieve something a little bit more.

 

It is this way with government. It starts with a noble aim and writes a law. Then it rewrites its law, modifying and improving, a little addition here, a nip-and-tuck there, as it pursues the final perfection. And so a plastic improvement emerges from a hardened past.

Through our optimistic and destructive fine-tuning we build our monsters bit by bit. The average man calls this a disaster. The academic calls it "the dialectic."

Sunday Sermon 10/27/13

Today's readings are wonderful examples of the richness of early Christian writing.

The gospel is that of the Pharisee and the tax collector, pit against each other in the mind of God. On the surface it appears a simple criticism of success in the material world but quickly it emerges as much more. The Pharisee is not praying, he is declaring. In essence he is praying to himself. What is on the chopping block here is not success--in the world or spirit--it is a very human trait: Self-satisfaction. What Christ is criticizing is self-content, the lack of self-criticism. He wants us to be restless, to search. Revelation wants us to search!

And Paul's letter to Timothy: "Beloved: I am already being poured out like a libation, and the time of my departure is at hand." Just beautiful.

This used to be everyday reading for people. Skepticism has stripped this finery from us and left us with the occasional insightful snarky political editorial.

Cab Thoughts 10/26/13

"Faith in central banks today is equivalent to faith in the word dot-com in 1999 or faith in the eternal rise of housing prices in 2006."--Mauldin

While children tend to be a slight hindrance in the economy, when they mature and become young adults they usually become producers and contribute to growth estimated as about 1% of GDP expansion. When they become old, their contribution declines. So economic growth seems to be connected to a society's demographics. A low birth rate, combined with a low number of young adults with an expanding retiree population should reverse the expansive-driving demographics of the post-war West. (There is a big curve here. There must be production to meet consumption so an expanding productive base, regardless of the demographics, should compensate to some degree.)

The town of Benidorm in Alicante, Spain, had almost completed its 47-story skyscraper when it realized it excluded plans for elevator shafts.

Here are the ages of some of the nation's early founders as of July 4, 1776: Marquis de Lafayette, 18; James Monroe, 18; Gilbert Stuart, 20; Aaron Burr, 20; Alexander Hamilton, 21; James Madison, 25; Thomas Jefferson, 33; John Adams, 40; Paul Revere, 41; George Washington, 44; Samuel Adams, 53; Benjamin Franklin, 70. In the 1750s, the average person would live to only 36.9 years of age. The youngest signer of the Declaration of Independence was Edward Rutledge, 26, of South Carolina.

There is an interesting, if unproven and cynical, explanation of The American-Saudi rift: Natural Gas. The theory goes that Obama was tolerable despite his lack of help to the Saudis as long as he kept the growth of natural gas in check. But any growth during Obama's administration seems to depend on the growth of fracking and that his administration seemed to soften on it sent the Saudis over the cliff.

The war that Genghis Khan waged against the world was astonishing. He killed everyone who resisted. 1,600,000 people at Harat in 1220. At Nishapur, according to contemporaries, 1,747,000 died. China's population declined by more than 30 percent during the years of the Mongol conquest. The armies were organized by tens, hundreds, thousands, and tens of thousands, each segment with its officers, who were chosen not according to favor or birth but proven ability. The Mongol soldier carried a double recurve bow of laminated horn, with a pull of 160 pounds, which fired arrows accurately up to a distance of 300 yards. He wore no armor, only leather. Khwarezm and Persia were crisscrossed with an elaborate underground irrigation system that since antiquity had sustained a thriving culture; the Mongols destroyed them. They killed the caliph of Baghdad, Islam's ruler, and the caliphate has never been restored. Arabic scholars contend that the region's economy has yet to recover fully from this devastation.

The price of oil in Indian rupees has gone from 1100 to 7800 in the last 10 years. Imagine what a change like that would do to the U.S.. And these politicians still act as if our costs are insignificant to a broader, visionary picture.

Charles Darwin, the father of modern evolutionary biology, was also the father ten children with his cousin, Emma Wedgwood.

"Each excess was felt to be 'solved' by measures that in fact fueled following excesses; each crash was fought by an accommodating monetary policy, sowing the seeds for new bubbles and future crashes." French geophysicist and complex systems analyst Didier Sornette wrote this about economic bubbles as he expanded his thesis on "crisis" from the physical world (like earthquakes and avalanches) to economics. His basic thesis is that any sudden crisis is the result of longstanding structural instability and the precipitating factor, so easily seen and rectified, is not a cause anymore than the camel's back's last straw is.

According to the IMF, the Danish government's net debt is 10.3% of GDP, Australia's is 12.7%, New Zealand's 28.8%, the Netherlands' 35.5%, Canada's 35.9%, Germany's 56.2%, France's 86.5% — and the United States' 89%.

Electrical energy storage devices are rated by both the rate at which the storage device can deliver the energy, and the amount of energy it can deliver, at that rate. The rate is measured in Watts and its multiples, kilo (1000) Watts, mega (1,000,000) Watts, etc. The amount of energy a device can deliver is rated in Watt-hours (Watts multiplied by the number of hours), and its multiples.

SolarCity has never recorded a profit, but powered by subsidies, its stock price is $57 a share.

The idea of "government investment" is hardly new. In the 1830s, American States, seeing the spectacular success of the Erie Canal, thought all government "investments" would pay for themselves and started to borrow money like crazy. Towards the end of the 1830s most were either defaulting on their interest or frankly ignoring their debts. This little song popped up in the English press:

Yankee Doodle borrows cash,
Yankee Doodle spends it,
And then he snaps his fingers at
The jolly flat who lends it.
Ask him when he means to pay,
He shews no hesitation,
But says he'll take the shortest way,
And that's repudiation!

(Literary Gazette, London, January 1845)

There is a book review of "Fire and Ice" (Game of Thrones) in The New York Review of Books, no less, that I carefully avoided for fear of spoilers but which calls the books a "remarkable feminist epic."

Resign: (looks like "re-sign" but is the opposite--although both come from "signing") v: late 14c., "give up, surrender, abandon, submit; relinquish," from Old French resigner "renounce, relinquish" (13c.), from Latin resignare "to check off, annul, cancel, give back, give up," from re- "opposite" (see re-) + signare "to make an entry in an account book," literally "to mark" (see sign (v.)).
The sense is of making an entry (signum) "opposite" -- on the credit side -- balancing the former mark and thus canceling the claim it represents. The specific meaning of "give up a position" is first recorded late 14c. Sense of "to give (oneself) up to some emotion or situation" is from 1718. Related: Resigned; resigning. (online etymology)

American authors are making the tough decision to allow their books to be censored for sale in China, The New York Times recently reported.


Kathy Boudin, former Weather Underground member and convicted murderer, is on the Columbia University School of Social Work's faculty. Rehabilitation must work.

AAAAAnnnnnnddddddd.......a map:

All significant conquests and movements of Genghis Khan and his generals during his lifetime. His lifetime!

Conspiracy

Colorado Judge Robert Lowenbach, noting that district attorney Alex Hunter prepared possible charges against John Ramsey and his wife, Patsy, three years after the death of their daughter Jon Benet, has ordered the indictment to be released and made public today. The indictment has remained sealed for 14 years because Hunter decided against pursuing charges, but officials have never explained that decision. To spare you the anticipation anxiety, the father did it in sex-play-gone-wrong.

Or so Cyrl Wecht, the celebrity forensic pathologist said in a speech last night. He also said a number of other things. He thinks O.J. did it but not alone. He said Robert Kennedy was shot in the head at close range --inches--from behind. (Sirhan Sirhan shot at him from the front.)

And JFK. He said Kennedy was killed by two shooters and it is unlikely that Oswald was one. He thought that Oswald never was involved with the attempted shooting of Edwin Walker although Oswald himself said he was. He felt that the incredible errors and coincidences involved in the case were evidence that a large conspiracy was involved and the only organization capable of that was the CIA. Dr. Wecht thinks the President of the United States was murdered by the CIA.

We love a narrative, a story that is consistant and complete. And these captivating stories are like unfinished rhymes; we need them to be summed up. One of Dr. Whecht's arguments, like the Jon Benet situation, is the willingness of these public officials to hide information. Reams of material in the JFK murder remain sealed and will continue to be. Such secrecy is the lifesbood of conspiracy and is a poison to the wellbeing of a free society.

When the Mediocre Rise to the Occasion

A big problem emerging in the Middle East was met with an almost comic American response.

The Daily Mail reports the Saudis plan to cut back on diplomatic relations with the U.S. as Saudi Arabia is concerned about signs of a nascent reconciliation between Washington and Tehran, their religious enemy.

Saudi Arabia's current intelligence chief Prince Bandar bin Sultan is vowing that the kingdom will make a 'major shift' in relations with the United States to protest perceived American inaction over Syria's civil war as well as recent U.S. overtures to Iran, a source close to Saudi policy said on Tuesday. Trouble has been brewing since the U.S. had failed to back Saudi support for Bahrain when it crushed an anti-government revolt in 2011.

'Prince Bandar told diplomats that he plans to limit interaction with the U.S.,' the source said.

Saudi Arabia signaled its displeasure over Obama's foreign policy last week when it rejected a coveted two-year term on the U.N. Security Council in a display of anger over the failure of the international community to end the war in Syria and act on other Middle East issues. Their disrespect for the U.N. aside, the Security Chair is a plum.

In Washington another senior Saudi prince --and the former intelligence chief--criticized Obama's Middle East policies, accusing him of 'dithering' on Syria and Israeli-Palestinian peace.
"The current charade of international control over Bashar's chemical arsenal would be funny if it were not so blatantly perfidious. And designed not only to give Mr. Obama an opportunity to back down (from military strikes), but also to help Assad to butcher his people," said Prince Turki, a member of the Saudi royal family and former director of Saudi intelligence.

The Mail's "source" said the changes in relations between the two countries would include "arms purchases and oil sales." Saudi Arabia, the world's biggest oil exporter, invests much of its earnings back into U.S. assets. Most of the Saudi central bank's net foreign assets of $690 billion are thought to be denominated in dollars, much of them in U.S. Treasury bonds.

This difficulty involving complex Sunni-Shi'ite conflicts, oil, international commerce (remember the oil embargo of the '70s?) in the Middle East hotbed was met with a typical American laser response: Representative Chris Van Hollen, a member of the U.S. House of Representatives' Democratic leadership and a man close to Obama on domestic issues, told Reuters, "And the Saudis should start by stopping their funding of the al Qaeda-related groups in Syria. In addition to the fact that it's a country that doesn't allow women to drive."

Doesn't allow women to drive?

Cab Thoughts 10/23/13

'Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.' --E.L. Doctorow

The Internet Crime Complaint Center got over 250,000 Internet fraud complaints last year with an estimated fraud loss of over $525 billion, and that is just what was reported.

Class 8 tractors, the workhorses of the global freight hauling industry, consume over 100 billion gallons of diesel fuel per year and emit over a gigaton of CO2.

In an article recently, Dennis Prager objects to what he calls "moral equivalence" of very disparate events in history in an article in the NYT. An excerpt from The Times' article: "The Hutus in Rwanda called the Tutsis cockroaches, the Nazis depicted the Jews as rats. Japanese invaders referred to their Chinese victims during the Nanjing massacre as 'chancorro,' or 'subhuman.' American soldiers fought barbarian 'Huns' in World War I and godless 'gooks' in Vietnam." He says the basis of this is anti-Americanism; he might have a point.

Progressivism has roots in utilitarianism. Like the soldier's sacrifice, the value to society trumps individual freedom. Hence Prohibition and the eugenics movement of the early last century. So does this make the Tuskegee experiment reasonable and proper? Ditto waterboarding?

The age of consent in the Colonies was ten in the early 1600s and continued so into the 1800s in many states.

Who was......Grace Bedell?

The Death Master File is a list of dead people and their Social Security Numbers ostensibly created by the Social Security Administration to help financial institutions and businesses prevent identity theft. For ten dollars anyone can obtain records for one person . An annual subscription with unlimited access to all of the files of deceased individuals costs $995. The IRS has flagged 91,000 tax returns that were filed under the names of recently deceased individuals this year. Thieves also steal the personal information to apply for credit cards, cell phones and anything else requiring a credit check. About 2.4 million deceased Americans each year get their identities stolen each year -- amounting to a rate of more than 2,000 thefts per day according to ID Analytics.

So a possible agreement on the U.S.' increasing its debt ceiling is seen as a good thing for the stock market?

There is some talk about a spurt in growth based upon Big Data and its ability to retrieve information from labs, especially government labs where a lot of information lies unmined. It is being compared to GPS.

A bill in Congress called the INFORM ACT would require congressional budgeting offices to actually state the long-term fiscal impact of current legislation on future generations. This bill has the support of 12 Nobel laureates and over 500 economists.
"This generation of Americans is very likely to be the first generation in our history as a nation to leave a worse economy and a worse fiscal position than the one they inherited. The INFORM ACT is a step in the right direction toward informing Americans of the magnitude of this problem." – James Heckman, Nobel Laureate in Economics

Golden oldie:

http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2011/09/americas-greatest-threat.html

A starting forward on the USA Soccer Team has not scored in 17 months. That tells a lot about soccer's low appeal in the U.S..

We might consider Lupron therapy for governmental leaders. After all, we make them put their financial interests on hold.

Oliver Wendell Holmes' vision of law through the lens of "realism" makes it dependent upon the populous' (and their agents') willingness to enforce it. In this sense, law is independent of content as opposed to morality.

AAAAANNNNNddddd..........a graph:

Hosting Angels

Last week there was a meeting of the Angel Capital Association in Boston attended by investors and angel group managers (mostly the latter) from all over the country. It was held in a warehouse building devoted to housing local startups.

The Angel Capital Association is the leading professional and trade association and supports the success of angel investors in high-growth, early-stage ventures. It offers professional development, provides an industry voice and acts as a policy advocate to its members, more than 200 angel groups and more than 10,000 individual accredited investors. ("Accredited investors" meet federal requirements of net worth, income and the like. Essentially this excludes many people from access to these investments. Why, is unclear. It is always said that such accredited investors are more sophisticated but a sophisticated investor is almost an oxymoron. It is more likely that an accredited investor is one who will not be ruined by a loss. However, startups are more transparent, more accepting of advice, more intensely driven and have much larger reward when successful. Again, the individual must be protected from himself by someone who knows better.)

This meeting was mainly a trade meeting aimed at organizers, not investors, of these groups but was nonetheless enlightening. Two main themes emerged. First, the loosening of the requirements to invest in these startups and the loosening of the investment structure has caused considerable anxiety among the organizers. The concern is partly legal; with the legalization of "open solicitation" and "crowdsourcing," the new and less regulated investors may accidentally wander into the stricter more regulated angel groups and result in legal vulnerability. For example, can a student, clearly not an "accredited investor," go to see an angel meeting? Or can a friend a family member or associate go without filling out the accreditation forms? For that matter, can the startup company representatives go? Second, there is a palpable fear that the open investing forum will pull investors away from angel groups and into looser affiliations that are cheaper. One such group was represented there and had 7,000 members and had made 70 investments this year. Those are large, intimidating numbers. It would be a devastating trend.

The second theme was accidental. All of the stages of angel investing were discussed from the organizational template to recruiting to investing to mentoring to exits. What is the crucial element to the entire system? The exit. What was the least discussed? The exit.

Popular and Unpopular Science

"Popular Science" Magazine" has decided to drop the "comments" section on their published articles and their on-line editor, Suzzanne LaBarre, explained why:

“A politically motivated, decades-long war on expertise has eroded the popular consensus on a wide variety of scientifically validated topics,” writes LaBarre. “Everything, from evolution to the origins of climate change, is mistakenly up for grabs again. Scientific certainty is just another thing for two people to ‘debate’ on television. And because comments sections tend to be a grotesque reflection of the media culture surrounding them, the cynical work of undermining bedrock scientific doctrine is now being done beneath our own stories, within a website devoted to championing science.”

LaBarre says there is evidence suggesting that skewed comments can actually impact a reader’s original view of a news story, even if the comments are inaccurate or misleading. “Simply including an ad hominem attack in a reader comment was enough to make study participants think the downside of the reported technology was greater than they'd previously thought,” LaBarre writes.

What the Battle of Tours Really Means

The Battle of Tours in 732, also called the Battle of Poitiers, pit the Franks against The Umayyad Caliphate. Islam was invading France. Charles Martel (The Hammer) defeated ‘Abdul Rahman Al Ghafiqi, who was killed. The significance and the facts are always debated. It is assumed that the two armies met where the rivers Clain and Vienne join between Tours and Poitiers. The Franks (and Burgundians) numbered about 30,000, the Muslims about 80,000. (But there is significant disagreement over these numbers.) Europe has always claimed it a great victory, Islam less so.

What is without doubt is that 109 years after the death of the Prophet, when communication was very limited, a most powerful army developed from nowhere and, under the inspiration of this dead man,  threatened to conquer the entire known world.

Manning Up to Problems

There has been a debate over the minimum wage recently. But only 2.9% of workers in the United States make minimum wage. Over 50% of them are age 16 to 24. One wonders about our fascination and outrage over this small minority. Is it that we have solved the big problems? Are these relatively small groups symbolic of a larger problem we can not grasp? Do we gravitate to these smaller problems to exorcise our bigger demons? Or do we just trivialise our problems because we are not up to them?

Bradley Edward Manning was arrested in Iraq in May 2010 after Manning had confided during online chats that he had downloaded material from confidential databases and passed the material to WikiLeaks. Included were videos of the July 12, 2007 Baghdad air strike and the 2009 Granai air strike in Afghanistan, 250,000 United States diplomatic cables and 500,000 army reports. WikiLeaks or its media partners published the material between April and November 2010. Manning was ultimately charged with 22 offenses, including aiding the enemy (the most serious charge.)

After being held at Quantico, Virginia he was transferred to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. He pleaded guilty in February 2013 to 10 of the charges. On July 30, 2013 he was convicted of 17 of the original charges and amended versions of four others, but was acquitted of aiding the enemy. He was sentence to the United States Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth.

A number of disturbing questions come to mind here. How much of the nation's security was compromised? How could such an unreliable guy be in a position to do something like this? What is the position of a group like WikiLeaks? How does WikiLeaks get its authority, presumably its moral authority, to do stuff like this? Are there other entities that have self-appointed moral authority and how do they differ from religious fanatics?

The list could go on and on. But what was the Bradley Manning story line? He wants to be known as Chelsea and wants to have a sex change operation.

Chelsea Elizabeth Manning (nee Bradley Edward Manning)

Cab Thoughts 10/16/13

Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word: equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude.--deTocqueville

The Yellin appointment is absolutely fascinating. Her view of the Fed is to create circumstances that facilitate job growth. Has this duty ever been articulated before? The "quantitative easing" of the last leadership did not influence jobs, sooooooo.......?

With all the fuss about Obama's declining popularity these numbers for some reason have not caught the talk show eye: 28% of Americans approve of the GOP, a record low number, according to Gallup.

EnteroMedics Inc. is a small company with an electric pulse stimulator that purports to suppress appetite. The only real problem is that it doesn't work. No study has ever shown it superior to any placebo. But clever Wall Street hotshots have been buying the stock all year. Why? Because there is no other solution and it looks like it doesn't hurt people. So they are banking on the FDA to give overweight voters an action placebo.

The Nobel Peace Prize for 1994 was awarded to Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasir Arafat.

Who was....Charles Martel ?

Elision. e-li-sion: n. the omission of a vowel, consonant or syllable in pronunciation; the omission of a vowel at the end of one word when the next word begins with a vowel (th'other); an act or instance of omitting anything. ety: 1575-85; < Latin ēlīsiōn- (stem of ēlīsiō ) a striking out. One finds this in historical reviews, usually as a criticism of an incomplete or truncated explanation.

The Affordable Care Act has 9 new codes for injuries suffered from the macaw, 2 codes for turtle injuries.

Golden Oldies:

http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2011/04/square-man-in-round-nature.html

In math, reading and problem-solving using technology - all skills considered critical for global competitiveness and economic strength - American adults scored below the international average on a global test called the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies. Americans scored toward the bottom in the category of problem solving in a technology rich environment. The top five scores in the areas were from Japan, Finland, Australia, Sweden and Norway, while the US score was on par with England, Estonia, Ireland and Poland. Japanese and Dutch adults who were ages 25 to 34 and only completed high school easily outperformed Italian or Spanish university graduates of the same age. In England, Germany, Italy, Poland, and the United States, social background has a big impact on literacy skills, meaning the children of parents with low levels of education have lower reading skills. (Now, who are these guys, who is their parent group, why do they need a 350 Euro budget and where did they get it?)

Alice Munro has won the Nobel Prize in literature. She is 82 and recently announced that she likely will give up writing: "Not that I didn't love writing, but I think you do get to a stage where you sort of think about your life in a different way. And perhaps, when you're my age, you don't wish to be alone as much as a writer has to be."

Does the donning of goggles to protect your eyes during a champagne celebration after a baseball championship make the event considerably less exciting. And excited.

Non-profits are a strange beast. Non-profit sales of goods and services to households amount to almost $1 trillion a year -- or more than 5 percent of gross domestic product. According to a study by Johns Hopkins non-profit employment increased by almost 2 percent from 2007 to 2009 while for-profits employment dropped 4%. One in 10 workers outside government now works for a nonprofit, and that number is projected to keep rising. 60 percent of nonprofit revenue is received by hospitals and other health care providers. Education accounts for an additional 16 percent.

In 2006, then-Senator Obama voted against raising the debt ceiling.

There is some angst in the West over a study recently that showed the absence of looting following the earthquakes, tsunami and nuclear crisis.

AAAAAAnnnnnnddddd....a picture (probably untrue but still funny):

Mr. Hegel, Call Your Office

There is a story of the excavation on Knossos, the great Minoan city in Crete. The site showed an extraordinary culture with advanced urban life. The royal chambers contained a room apparently built for leisure but all the artistic walls had fallen to pieces. Archeologists spent years piecing the fragments together and finally reconstructed the room. The designs were shocking: The motif was of blue monkeys. No one realized that the Minoans had access that deep in Africa to see and examine the blue monkey. Papers were written explaining the presumed trade routes and economy such blue monkey walls implied.
Until it was revealed the puzzle had been put together incorrectly. With the exact same pieces you could construct the walls in the apparently original way: Blue Dolphins. The Blue Monkey Room became the Blue Dolphin room as soon as the adjustments could be made. The brochure was rewritten in a flash.

In the 13th and 14th Centuries drawings of knights in battle (usually losing) with snails--yes, snails--became popular in the margins of non-historical texts such as Psalters or Books of Hours. It has provoked some debate. Is the snail a symbol of the struggles of the poor? The hated Lombards? Is it a Resurrection theme? Perhaps the knights fought and defeated alien snails invading the planet and that information has been hidden from us to preserve confidence in our culture and future.

What are we to make of history? Can we really analyze the past with accuracy? More, can we use the past as our guide? Can we examine the past to predict the future, even spill blood in its fulfillment?

Or, do we have the vaguest idea of what we are doomed to repeat?


Knight v Snail V: Revenge of the Snail (from the Smithfield Decretals, southern France (probably Toulouse), with marginal scenes added in England (London), c. 1300-c. 1340 

Conflicker

"Honesty is the best policy" has always been the subject of debate. Does the aphorism encourage honesty because honesty is morally correct or because it is simply advantageous?

Brazil is emerging as a leader in cybercrime. One reason is Conflicker, a program that exploits a defect in Microsoft Windows. Microsoft patched it in 2008. But the market for pirated versions of Microsoft is gigantic in Brazil and those illegal versions have not been patched and so those versions can be breached. One common malware is Trojan, made in Brazil to mine for banking information.

So the people who have bought an illegal Windows are the only ones vulnerable.

Some version of Franklin is right.

Sunday Sermon 10/13/13

Today's gospel is the Ten Leper gospel where ten are cured and only one returns to Christ. It is seen as a metaphor for forgiveness, for bridging the human gulf to God. It also pushes salvation beyond the confines of Israel as the returning leper is a "foreigner."

But what did the other nine cured lepers do? Certainly even simple gratitude and politeness would have driven them back to Christ. So what did they do? They returned to the world. They went back to their families, their businesses. They returned to their ambitions, their hopes and their desires.

The world of the leper in that time was almost monastic in its self absorbed isolation. Strangely, Christ released them and, despite the obvious debt to Christ, they allowed themselves to drift back to the world, so great is its gravity.

Cab Thoughts 10/12/13

"If 'pro' is the opposite of 'con' what is the opposite of 'progress'?" - Paul Harvey


Hydrocarbons accounted for half of Russia's GDP growth since 2000, according to a May report by Leon Aron, resident scholar and director of Russian studies at the American Enterprise Institute. Russian reserves have enabled them to virtually dictate pricing. But American fracking success threatens to undermine Russian economic success.

The origin of the word "Russia" comes from "rus," an Old Norse term for "the men who row," the main method of navigating the rivers of old Eastern Europe. The name Rus' seems to have the same origin as the Finnish and eastern European names for Sweden. The Norsemen were everywhere.

Tweeter Home Entertainment Group Inc. (TWTRQ) was up 684.62%, apparently because people confused it with Twitter.

Theodore Dalrymple has an article on boxing with some interesting observations. On stereotypes he says, "The man without stereotypes is like the man who steps out into the world stark naked; the man who sticks to his stereotypes despite evidence is like the man who dresses the same whatever the weather." While he feels he would never need to see a second match he says, "but personal taste is not necessarily a good guide to public policy." And as to the qualities of boxing he says there is something ennobling in seeing bravery and chivalry. "Rational utility ," he concludes, "is not the measure of all things, and is not the only guide as to what to permit and what to prohibit."

40% of poor Americans own a dishwasher and 82% have air conditioning — more than twice the 1970 rate of 36% for all Americans. All Americans. One wonders what Carter meant about the middle class being worse off now than in the '70's. I wonder if he meant we are losing our distinctions?

"Average people talk about people, above average people talk about events, superior people talk about ideas." Did the guy who said that realize he was talking about people?

In China, electric bikes sell in the tens of millions each year.

Before writing "Robinson Caruso" Daniel Defoe was committed to debtors prison because he was more than 17,000 pounds in debt. That was a lot of money for the time. Some of his investments included underwriting marine insurance, importing wine from Portugal, buying a diving bell used to search for buried treasure, and investing in some seventy civet cats, whose musk secretions were prized for the manufacture of perfume.

London's notorious Marshalsea Prison, a debtors prison on the south bank of the Thames, had a parliamentary committee report in 1729 stating that some three hundred inmates had died in a three-month period, mainly of starvation.

 Later Defoe became England's leading crusader for bankruptcy reform through his newspaper, A Review of the State of the English Nation.

Golden Oldie:

http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2011/01/assassination-two.html

ObamaCare — which revolutionizes one-sixth of the economy, regulates every aspect of medical practice and intimately affects just about every citizen — passed without a single GOP vote. Is that a good idea, to have a revolutionary bill of this scope passed in such a partisan way, without discussion, options and compromise?

"Stylometry" is the software used to identify J.K. Rowling as the author of The Cuckoo's Nest. It has recently been applied to a suspected Poe story. It will be interesting to see what happens when the Shakespeare heretics get it.

Who was....... Wendell Berry?

The Danube River is the second longest river in Europe --the Volga is the longest, begins in Germany and flows to the Black Sea. Ancient Greeks called this river Ister. It was also called Danu by the Celts after the goddess Danu, a motherly protector of the Indo-European world. When Roman fleets patrolled it roughly 2,000 years ago, they Latinized the Celtic name to Danuvius. In 1066, when the Normans conquered Europe, the river took on the French version of the Latin name, Danube.

Tim Worstall, a fellow at the Adam Smith Institute in London, wrote in Forbes in June that "the typical person in the bottom 5% of the American income distribution is still richer than 68% of the world's inhabitants."

A vaccine has been developed that prevents breast cancer in mice. This will raise questions again about whether the FDA is a protective or merely obstructive organization. The Food and Drug Administration approval process takes abut 10 years and costs billions. The Cleveland Clinic has formed a company called Shield Biotech, to develop and commercialize the drug. The vaccine has proven to be both safe and effective in preventing breast cancer in mice, including mice bred to have a genetic predisposition for breast cancer. The research was originally published in Nature Medicine in May 2010.
The vaccine activates the immune system against proteins, including the prototypic protein alpha-lactalbumin, expressed only in breast tumors.

Before Josef Djugashvili became Josef Stalin and an editor of peoples, he became an editor of newspapers.He was, like a plastic surgeon, a shaper of things. He worked at two papers in Baku and then as editor of the first Bolshevik daily, Pravda. He was, apparently, quite good at it. He eventually ordered, and edited, a short history of the Revolution and Russia but much of his considerable contributions were edited out later by Khrushchev.

AAAANNNNnnnnddddddd..... a graph:

Stop! Mistaken Person!

An interesting and instructive story: A young man reported to his boss that he had been arrested for shoplifting. It was clear and well documented with video surveillance cameras and the young employee admitted the act. He was arrested and went through several hours of arrest processing. He explained the procedures were quite simple and banal; he described them as "routine" and he seemed unfazed by them. The process was close to an algorithm, automatic and noncritical. Just another pathway. When he finished the story he said to his boss that he regretted his "mistake." His boss said a mistake was a faux pas, an error on a bill or poor tie and shirt combination. A mistake was something that did not judge you. This was a crime and he was thief and a criminal.

The young man was shocked at this judgment which seemed to transcend apology, forgiveness and restitution.

Liking Ike

Eisenhower was a man from old America. Rural and unsophisticated, he had never been to Europe until he attacked it. He was always seen as a caretaker as President, never a politician or ideologue. Yet he had some real visionary substance as evidenced in his farewell address to the nation in January 1961. In it he spoke about "... threats, new in kind or degree, ..[which]..constantly arise." He then said, "Of these, I mention two only." He then warned about "the acquisition of unwarranted influence" of the "military-industrial complex," a phrase and concern that everyone remembers. But what was the second "threat?"

He described it as "the technological revolution during recent decades." But it is not the technology. "In this revolution, research has become central, it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government." He explains further: "..a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers. The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present – and is gravely to be regarded. "

A government contract a substitute for intellectual curiosity. Domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money. These are profound worries from a straightforward man, a man on the inside who could see it clearly.

"The military-industrial complex." And the "science-government complex." Complex: A whole made up of interconnecting parts, that is, something different from its constituents.

 

A science-government complex is something new.

Cab Thoughts 10/9/13

The greatest obstacle to discovering the shape of the earth, the continents, and the oceans was not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge. -Daniel J. Boorstin, historian, professor, attorney, and writer (1914-2004)

Annie Murphy has an article on Peruvian "Lucha Libro." Mexico's version of pro wrestling is called "Lucha Libre" where competitors put on masks and pseudonyms to fight in a ring." She says: "Peru's Lucha Libro is kind of like that, without the violence. It's literary 'wrestling.' New writers don masks, and head onto a stage where they're given three random words, a laptop hooked up to a gigantic screen, and five minutes to write a short story. At the end of a match, the losing writer has to take off his or her mask. The winner goes on to the next round, a week later. And the grand prize? It's a book contract."

Skamania County in Washington outlawed killing Sasquatches in 1969. Revised in 1984, it states that killing it would be a misdemeanor unless it was shown to be humanoid; then it would be homicide.

Two similar sounding but unrelated terms, both of Latin origin: The term Mendicant ( from Latin mendīcāre to beg, from mendīcus beggar, from "mendus" flaw) refers to begging, usually as a part of religious alms. The term Mendacity means lying. (Latin mendācitās falsehood, equivalent to Latin mendāci- (stem of mendāx) given to lying.)

Conservation groups are in an uproar over Montana's decision to issue over 6000 permits to hunt the last 625 remaining wolves in the state.

For two days' work in "Animal House," Donald Sutherland initially declined $35,000. Universal then offered him $35,000 and 15% of the film's gross, assuming that the movie would be quickly forgotten. Sutherland wanted guaranteed money and settled for $50,000; although this made him the highest-paid member of the cast, the decision cost Sutherland what is estimated as at least $20 million.

200 former exchange students were surveyed, in cooperation with an international exchange organization called AFS, and 90% of foreign students who had lived in the U.S. said that kids here cared more about sports than their peers back home did. A majority of Americans who'd studied abroad agreed. In eighth grade, American kids spend more than twice the time Korean kids spend playing sports, according to a 2010 study published in the Journal of Advanced Academics. This information is always bandied about, as if it suggested a conclusion.

Who was....Baudelaire?

Cinnamon originally came from groves in Sri Lanka but Arab merchants, eager to keep their source a secret from the Europeans, concocted the story that cinnamon was collected from nests of gigantic birds who, in turn, had collected the cinnamon from far away and mysterious sites.

Kate Losse, author of The Boy Kings (a memoir about working at Facebook), has accused Dave Eggers of stealing her story in his new novel The Circle, which is also set in the tech world. She clarifies further by admitting she hasn't read the book.

A new study from researchers at ETH Zurich (Federal Institute of Technology) has revealed that niacin (vitamin B3) could help you live longer. The niacin-rich food menu includes Marmite, sun-dried tomatoes, paprika, and peanuts. And bacon. Bacon!

Rich Synchef has collected books from the '50's and '60's with political and social ephemera because, as he says, "These are my idols." There are hundreds of important works, all signed. And his collection is deep; a copy of Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" was autographed by the poet as well as his longtime publisher, Lawrence Ferlinghetti of City Lights Bookstore. The two most impressive books in Synchef's collection are Jack Kerouac's "On the Road" (a first-edition paperback from 1958) and Tom Wolfe's "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test" (a first-edition hardcover from 1968). On October 10, 2013, these books, along with several hundred other publications and objects, are up for auction at PBA Galleries in San Francisco.

Golden oldie:

http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2010/04/read-your-own-stats.html

Breath mint company Mentos launched an ad campaign in Singapore that encouraged everyone to do their civic duty by making a baby on August 9th. Russia, which has seen a steady population decline since the early 1990s, began a program in which moms who give birth on June 12 - the country's National Day holiday -- are entered into a drawing to win money and prizes from the government, including refrigerators and SUVs.

Samantha Dempsey, a design student, a set of temporary tattoos to commemorate the extinction of the oblong rocksnail, St. Helena giant earwig, and the Pasadena freshwater shrimp. And next?

Of the twenty-seven U.S. airliners hijacked to Cuba between the beginning of 1981 and the end of 1983, twenty-four were seized by Cuban 'refugees' so eager to escape the United States they didn't care if returning home meant going to prison.

"Why shouldn't our old people... likewise suck the blood of a youth? - a youth, I say who is willing, healthy, happy and temperate, whose blood is of the best but perhaps too abundant. They will suck, therefore, like leeches, an ounce or two from a scarcely-opened vein of the left arm; they will immediately take an equal amount of sugar and wine; they will do this when hungry and thirsty and when the moon is waxing. If they have difficulty digesting raw blood, let it first be cooked together with sugar; or let it be mixed with sugar and moderately distilled over hot water and then drunk."--Marsillo Ficino (1433-1499), Italian philosopher, from his work entitled Three Books on Life. An entirely new--or old--take on the young supporting the old.

A fire that destroyed a Tesla electric car near Seattle began in the vehicle's battery pack, officials said Wednesday.

Mary Shelley, the author of "Frankenstein," kept the withered heart of her husband, the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, wrapped in silk and pressed in her leather bound copy of Adonis (his poem) for over 30 years.

Gravity" opened as the greatest earning movie in the first week in history. It has drawn flack from Tyson, the astrophysicist, who objected to a medical doctor as a general scientist in space, Bullock's hair not being at zero gravity and satellite debris orbiting east to west. Nearly all satellites orbit Earth west to east .

Marcellus Shale wells are less than 7 years old, but 78% of those wells have already paid off all their costs.

AAAAannnnnnnddddd.....a picture of a plane being hit by lightning:

Taking the Ire out of Ireland

A metaphor for the world lurks in Ireland. People refuse to forget. From Cyprus to Lebanon, The Balkans to Greece, people refuse to forget.

The year is 1688. Mary, daughter of James ll, King of England, was next in line to rule England on the death of her father. Her husband was William of Orange, a Dutch noble. But suddenly James had a new child, a son, and the heir presumptive was replaced by the heir apparent.

In June, 1688, a letter was sent by English noblemen known as the "Immortal Seven" to William of Orange. It was carried to William by Rear Admiral Arthur Herbert disguised as a common sailor and identified by a secret code. The problem? James was a Catholic, Mary was raised a Protestant as was William. James had already shown an interest in religious tolerance and was also aligned with Catholic France. If James' new son became king there was risk he might be a Catholic. Soooooo.... the letter informed William that if he were to land in England with a small army, the signatories and their allies would rise up and support him. William would then force the ruling king, James--his father-in-law--to make William's Protestant wife Mary, James' eldest daughter, heir, on the grounds that newborn baby was allegedly an impostor.

Succession. Impostor newborns. Disguises. Heir presumptive. Immortal Sevens. Depose your father-in-law. Secret codes. And more: France at the time was trying to dominate Europe in defiance of the Pope and Catholic James was an ally of......France! Crazily the Pope, in his opposition to French expansionism, opposed the Catholic James and supported the Protestant William. English speakers didn't have this much fun again until The Housewives of Orange County.

But the losers had no fun. This was the beginning of the Glorious Revolution or the Revolution of 1688. William was successful and ascended the English throne as William III of England jointly with his wife Mary II of England. Catholicism in England was destroyed.

It was worse in Ireland where the Catholics had already suffered a crushing defeat by Cromwell. Catholics lost their lands, their right to hold public office--even in Parliament--and the right to practice their religion. Resistance to William had local religious and ethnic motives: The war was fought for Irish sovereignty, religious tolerance for Catholicism, and land ownership. Led by Richard Talbot, the Irish raised an army to restore James and, by 1690, controlled all Ireland except the province of Ulster. Fearing retaliation for years of oppression, Protestants fought enthusiastically for William of Orange.

The Battle of the Boyne was joined on July 11, 1690 and took place over a wide area west of the town of Drogheda on the Irish east coast. The two armies were led by William and James. Both were experienced in battle but neither distinguished. Most feel that at some point in the even contest James panicked and ordered a retreat. This surprised and discouraged his supporters and the lines broke up. A fine cavalry effort prevented a disaster. Of the 50,000 combatants only 2,000 were killed, mostly Catholics.

This battle would never be forgotten by either side and is commemorated every year with demonstration, challenge and violence. 323 years later they still fight in the street over this conflict but, as only makes sense in Ireland, the conflict is celebrated on the twelfth. Known as "The Troubles," it became institutionalized by the IRA, a broad collection of killers ranging from abstract idealists to unreflective, vicious psychopaths.

But there is reason for hope. Sometimes people can rise above bitterness, revolution and idealism. At the Northern Bank, across from Belfast's City Hall, the novelist Stuart Neville, in an interview with NPR's Noah Adams, recalled the details of a robbery in which approximately 26 million pounds were stolen. Residents still talk about it today. "They drove a lorry up the side, opened the door, money was loaded into the lorry and away they went," Neville says. "Of course it turned out within a few days it was the IRA who'd done it. They had kidnapped somebody who worked for the bank, forced them to come and load the money up. I remember jokes at the time, you know: This was a retirement fund for the boys." 

("The boys" means the leadership of the Irish Republican Army, and jokers called the heist a "retirement fund" because the robbery happened in 2004, while "The Troubles" officially ended in 1998 — at least, on paper.)

Bonfires light up the Belfast skyline on July 12, 1997. Remembering 1688.

In Science, All Things Are Possible

In a report published online in the Journal for Healthcare Quality, a Johns Hopkins investigative group found that of the 1 million or so robotic surgeries performed since 2000, only 245 complications -- including 71 deaths -- were reported to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Such a report of complications is mandatory when a medical complication occurs. The researchers were surprised at what they felt was a low complication number for a new and complex procedure. They cross-referenced the reports with public records and found several lawsuits involving the procedure that had not been reported to the database.

In one way this is an extremely curious scientific reasoning: The absence of something confirms it.

Sunday Sermon 10/6/13

In the Gospel today the apostles ask Christ to increase their faith. It is unsettling to hear that; after all, Christ is there with them. If they are having trouble, what are we poor slugs 2000 years later supposed to think?

It is reminiscent of Joan of Arc. After years of visions, after following those visions to lead French armies to victory over the English, she denies them while a captive. Why? "I was afraid of the flames," she said simply. She knew they were going to burn her and she was afraid of the flames.

Even those with the best reasons to have faith, waver, so great is the separation between the material and the spiritual.

cab Thoughts 10/5/13

'I have always felt a certain horror of political economists since I heard one of them say that he feared the famine of 1848 in Ireland would not kill more than a million people, and that would scarcely be enough to do much good."--Benjamin Jowett, Master of Balliol. The economist was Nassau Senior, an adviser to the British government.

The U.S. Federal Reserve needs to speak more clearly and tell the world it will do "whatever it takes" to boost employment Minneapolis Fed President Narayana Kocherlakota told Reuters. The Fed has spoken about interest rates and economic growth but employment is a new item.

I wish they could fix my refrigerator.

"Nothing's been done about that story, it's one big lie, not one word of it is true," says Seymour Hersh, talking about the bin Ladin murder. He has a new book to hype but still it is a lot for him to say. He is the author of "The Dark Side of Camelot" which revealed the very seamy qualities in JFK's White House.

You can always trust people to rise above their political and religious confines when presented with science questions: Prominent Saudi cleric Sheikh Saleh Al-Loheidan claimed that medical studies showed how driving automobiles damaged women’s ovaries and pelvises and, if performed often enough, could result in their children being born with “clinical problems.”

The Norwegians are taking the Dreamliner out of long-haul service until its mechanical problems are fixed.

IKEA has begun selling 3.36 kilowatt solar systems for $9,200 in Britain, with plans to expand this program to other nations.

William the Conqueror, Duke of Normandy, crossed the English Channel from France in 1066 and brought a fighting force considered the fiercest in Europe. People forget these people were Vikings. He had viciously depopulated Normandy of all opposition and would do the same in England. Interestingly, his was a mounted army, armored cavalry, and England's King Harold, the last crowned Anglo Saxon King, fought on foot. No cavalry. No chance.

Over the last several years, the airline industry has averaged $2.10 profit per passenger before taxes.

China consumes about 20% of the world's food yet has (thanks to rapid industrialization) only 9% of its farmland. Interestingly they are starting to rent large farmlands in other countries.

Who is....Tristan and Iseult?

Britain's National Health Service serves a population less than a fifth the size of America's and is the third-largest employer on the planet after the Indian National Railways and the Chinese People's Liberation Army.

Over a century the age of menarche, when menstruation begins, has dropped in the Western world from about seventeen to twelve.

Iran sanctions go both ways. And it appears that our esteemed allies are a bit less committed than the U.S. is. Chris Harmer of the unlikely named The Institute for the Study of War estimates that the Boeing Company alone forfeits a minimum of $25 billion in business every year because of U.S.-imposed sanctions on Iran. That market that is filled by the Russians. Overall, Harmer puts the value to U.S. business of trade lost due to the economic embargo on Iran at approximately $50 billion a year. Iran imports $1.5 billion worth of cars a year from companies like Nissan, Toyota and Peugeot (when they might have been General Motors and Chrysler). Peugeot does an additional half a billion dollars’ worth of commerce with Iran just in car parts.

Golden Oldie:

http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2009/09/fundamentalist.html

Emile Zola was an accomplished writer who became the prototype for the intellectual intervening in and influencing social policy. He famously wrote an editorial "J'accuse", published on the front page of the Paris daily "L'Aurora" accusing the high level of the French Army of falsifying evidence to implicate Alfred Dreyfus, an artillery officer, of spying for the Germans despite the fact there was clear evidence that he did not do it, an officer named Esterhazy did, and the reason for Dreyfus' conviction was little more than he was Jewish. He died of carbon monoxide poisoning from interference with a furnace flue and, later, a Parisian roofer claimed on his deathbed to have closed the chimney for political reasons.

A neutron star is about 20 km in diameter and has the mass of about 1.4 times that of our Sun. This means that a neutron star is so dense that on Earth, one teaspoonful would weigh a billion tons, with a similar increase in gravitation and magnetic field.

The strange "shutdown:" the U.S. government shutdown will reduce the National Science Foundation's workforce from 2,000 to about 30. The work of scientists who are not federal employees but are supported by by the NSF will continue, but they won't receive any payments while the shutdown is in effect.

velleity \veh-LEE-uh-tee; vuh-\, noun: The lowest degree of desire; imperfect or incomplete volition; A slight wish or inclination. Velleity is derived from Latin velle, "to will, to be willing, to wish."

"Hybrid Icing":The hybrid-icing system allows the linesman to blow the play dead and call an automatic icing if he determines that the puck will cross the goal line and the defending player is not behind in the race to the end-zone faceoff dots in his defensive zone. The faceoff would go to the far end of the ice as it did with icings called in the previous system the NHL used.

AAAAAANNNNNNNnnnndddddddd......inexplicable stuff from the Middle Ages. Knights in combat with snails:

The Snails Attack (from the Queen Mary Psalter, England, 1310-1320 )