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: