“As the saying goes, if you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day, but if you teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime. Community organizers like Huerta don’t teach anyone how to fish: they teach activists how to steal their neighbors’ fish. This is what Huerta and her ilk call social justice.” --Matthew Vadum
Neanderthals dominated Europe for some 200,000 years until modern humans began moving into the region about 45,000 years ago. The two human species likely shared space for a while. A number of novels have been written about this interface (Auel the most famous).
Archaeological evidence had placed the last known Neanderthal refuges on the Iberian Peninsula, home to current-day Spain, Portugal, and Gibraltar. But now hundreds of stone tools have been found at Byzovaya—a Russian site at the same latitude as Iceland, pretty far north for Neanderthals. The Byzovaya tools match those made and used by many Neanderthals, a signature tool kit of scrapers and flakes created by banging rocks together—what's called Mousterian technology. Tools, but nothing else.
Dale Carnegie of "How to Win Friends and Influence People" fame has had a resurgence and a new bio of him has been written. His emphasis on people skills, interaction with a smile and the need to be interested in the other guy's concerns has made him a staple in the business community. President Lyndon Johnson was a Carnegie method instructor in his youth in Texas. Talk about a success.
Lucy Hughes-Hallett’s "The Pike," a biography of Gabriele d’Annunzio, has won the 2013 Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction. Hughes-Hallett had a lot of serious competition but Sarah Crompton writes: "Her achievement is all the more astonishing since d’Annunzio, who lived from 1863 to 1938, is repellent in almost every way."
As we continue to focus in on the periphery of important questions, should water boarding use only recycled water?
A new European Joint Research Centre (JRC) study looking into the supply of raw materials for the manufacture of low-carbon energy technologies found that eight metals were at high risk of shortages. The technologies of particular concern as a result are electric vehicles, wind and solar energy, and lighting. The risk arises from EU dependency on imports, growing demand worldwide and geopolitical reasons. Dysprosium was identified as being the most at risk, as the EU is expected to require 25% of the expected world supply in 2020-2030 to meet the Union’s demand for hybrid and electric vehicles and wind turbines.
Good news! Scientists say that when the earth warms, mammals get smaller and snakes get larger.
Water, like most liquids, becomes denser as it cools. But unlike other liquids, it reaches a state of maximum density at 4°C. Then becomes less dense before it freezes. In solid form, it is less dense still. That is why standard ice floats on water. If ice were denser than water, lakes and oceans would freeze from the bottom up, probably preventing the kind of chemistry that makes life possible.
Trucking accounts for 75% of transport sector fuel consumption while sea, air and rail share the other 25%.
Golden oldies:
According to the International Lead Zinc Study Group (ILZSG), global demand for lead is expected to increase 5 percent in 2013 and an additional 4.6 percent in 2014. Demand for lead in the U.S. is expected to increase by 7.6 percent in 2013, bolstered by both original equipment purchases of new vehicles and replacement purchases of lead-acid batteries. Battery storage is by far the largest use of lead in the U.S.; the second is ammunition. In spite of our rising demands--and needs--the EPA has just shut down the last American lead smelter, the Doe Run Company smelter in Herculaneum, Missouri. This will not decrease the amount of lead smelted, only where it will be done and what workers will do it.
Who is....Hannibal Hamlin?
A peer-reviewed paper that recently appeared in the journal Climate Dynamics by Judith Curry, head of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and Marcia Wyatt, from the Department of Geological Sciences at the University of Colorado-Boulder raises questions about the validity of the current global warming models. "The growing divergence between climate model simulations and observations raises the prospect that climate models are inadequate in fundamental ways," says Curry. Models are usually little more than extrapolation of inadequate data based on an unproven--often improvable--hypothesis. And "making the best of it" is not a scientific proposition.
Nearly 100 U.K. publishers folded last year.
"Welsh" comes from the Anglo-Saxon word for "foreign" as the Saxons invading England pushed the resisting Celtic tribes in the 5th and 6th Century to the periphery. Computer analysis of the English language as spoken today shows that the one hundred most frequently used words are all of Anglo-Saxon origin which became Old English. Winston Churchill's famous speech in 1940 went: "We shall fight on the beaches; we shall fight on the landing grounds; we shall fight in the fields and the streets; we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender." All these words came from Old English as spoken in the year 1000, with the exception of the last one, surrender, which, of course, is French.
40+% of all federal entitlements goes to black Americans – 3X the rate that go to whites, 5X the rate that go to Hispanics.
Amazon is asking independent bookstores to sell Kindles in exchange for 10 percent of the revenue from ebooks bought on the devices for two years. But the offer, under a program called Amazon Source, has been met with widespread derision. Suzanna Hermans, president of the New England Independent Booksellers Association and one of the owners of Oblong Books & Music, tells Publisher's Weekly, "If Amazon thinks indie bookstores will become agents for the Kindle, they are sorely mistaken," adding that "there is no way I will promote Amazon products in my stores after the havoc they have wreaked on our industry as a whole."
Consumer credit rose more than expected in September but credit card usage fell for a fourth straight month. Credit card use is usually measured in revolving credit, commercial spending. But that is not where the loans went. They went to non-revolving credit. Non-revolving credit, which includes auto loans as well as student loans made by the government, increased $15.80 billion in September, the Fed data showed. That followed a $15.04 billion increase in August. We are buying less but increasing our debt in car and education loans.
Presidential candidates who received less than 50 percent of the vote have won 18 presidential elections. Lincoln won his first presidency with only 39.8 percent of the popular votes cast -- the smallest percentage ever recorded. The remaining 60.2 percent was split among three other candidates: the Democrat Stephen A. Douglas (29 percent), and two third party candidates John C. Breckenridge (18 percent), and John Bell (13 percent). In 1992, Clinton won 43 percent of the popular vote to Bush’s 37.4; the protest Perot vote gave Clinton the election. What Perot's motives were are still obscure.
Natural Gas for trucks: LNG pricing is more expensive than CNG: typically $2.50-3.00/gal as compared to $1.50-2.00/gal. Thus, everything else being equal, the payback period for LNG is longer. And there is no escaping the fact that the payback period is often on par with the asset life of the trucks. Heavy-duty trucks operate only 3 to 4 years, a two-year payback period means that LNG can be close to a “wash” as compared to conventional diesel.
AAAAAAAnnnnnndddddd.......a graph:
No comments:
Post a Comment