“I am going to teach the South American republics to elect good men!”--Woodrow Wilson
Comet Lovejoy was discovered on November 27, 2011 by Terry Lovejoy of Thornlands, Queensland, during a comet survey. He is an amateur astronomer. It reached perihelion--its closest position to the sun-- on December 16, 2011, as it passed approximately 187,000 miles above the Sun's surface at a speed of 333 mi/s, or 0.18% the speed of light. It was not expected to survive the encounter due to extreme conditions in the sun's corona, with temperatures reaching more than one million kelvins (10,000K = 17540ºF) and the exposure time of nearly an hour. But it did survive although it lost a lot of its mass.
In Kyushu, Japan recently, which is about 300 miles due East of Shanghai, the pollution was so bad that authorities told everybody to stay in their homes for a couple of days. This from 300 miles away!
Daily oil production has doubled in Texas in the last 3 years and stands at 2.7 million barrels per day. Its all-time peak production of 3.4 million barrels per day was in 1972.
Heather Havrilesky, in Bookforum, compares literary contemporaries Nora Ephron and Joan Didion: "When life gave Ephron lemons ... she made a giant vat of really good vodka-spiked lemonade and invited all of her friends and her friends' friends over to share it, and gossip, and play charades. Whereas when life gave Joan Didion lemons, she stared at them for several months, and then crafted a haunting bit of prose about the lemon and orange groves that were razed and paved over to make Hollywood, in all of its sooty wretchedness — which is precisely what this mixed-up world does to everything that's fresh and young and full of promise."
A Pentagon study was said to prove the need to buy Russian helicopters for Afghanistan's security forces. But the study actually recommended an American-made rotorcraft, according to unclassified excerpts obtained by The Associated Press. 63 Mi-17s are being acquired through the 2011 contract, not the American made Chinook, built by Boeing Co. in Pennsylvania. The Pentagon study showed that the Chinook was "the most cost-effective single platform type fleet for the Afghan Air Force over a 20-year" period. The MI-17 contract was awarded without competition to Russia's arms export agency, Rosoboronexport.
Golden oldie:
According to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, the gap in math between Shanghai and Massachusetts (the top-performing U.S. state) translates into two years of schooling. But...BUT!... the school year is longer in Shanghai. How much longer? By the time the average Shanghai kid is 15 she has spent about two years more in school than the average 15-year-old American.
Middle East rancor sometimes is revealing. Israel, Jordan and the Palestinians have reached agreement on a three-way water supply arrangement to slake rising cross-border demand, taking a rare step toward economic integration despite persistent political conflict holding up progress on an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal.
Seymour Hersh — best known for his exposés on the cover-ups of the My Lai Massacre and of Abu Ghraib as well as the horrifying "Dark Side of Camelot" – in a story published Sunday for the London Review of Books, accuses the American administration of dishonesty with the information over the gas attacks in Syria. Hersh said the U.S. administration "cherry-picked intelligence," citing conversations with intelligence and military officials. A former senior intelligence official said that the Obama administration had altered the available information – in terms of its timing and sequence – to enable the president and his advisers to make intelligence retrieved days after the attack look as if it had been picked up and analysed in real time, as the attack was happening. The distortion, he said, reminded him of the 1964 Gulf of Tomkin incident, when the Johnson administration reversed the sequence of National Security Agency intercepts to justify one of the early bombings of North Vietnam. The same official said there was immense frustration inside the military and intelligence bureaucracy: ‘The guys are throwing their hands in the air and saying, “How can we help this guy” – Obama – “when he and his cronies in the White House make up the intelligence as they go along?”’ This is nonpartisan; all governments lie.
The wisdom of Charlie Munger: "I don't think it was good for Wall Street that they had this absolute torrent of really easy money when idiots and naives were making a fortune selling shoddy mortgages with ridiculous theories. It was very regrettable behavior. And it was the easy money that allowed it."
The largest floating vessel in the world has been launched in South Korea. At a length of 1,601 feet (488 m), the Prelude, which is owned by Royal Dutch Shell, is 150 feet longer than the Empire State Building is high. In operation, it would weigh more than 600,000 tonnes; more than five times the weight of the largest aircraft carrier. The Prelude is a floating liquefied natural gas facility which will allow Shell to produce natural gas at sea and then liquefy it by chilling it to -260 degrees F so it can be transported around the world.
Electricity transmission in Japan is unusual because the country is divided for historical reasons into two regions each running at a different mains frequency. Eastern Japan (including Tokyo, Kawasaki, Sapporo, Yokohama, and Sendai) runs at 50 Hz; Western Japan (including Okinawa, Osaka, Kyoto, Kobe, Nagoya, Hiroshima) runs at 60 Hz. This originates from the first purchases of generators from AEG for Tokyo in 1895 and from General Electric for Osaka in 1896.
AAAaaaaaaannnnnnddddddd........a picture of Comet Lovejoy through the Mörby Castle Ruins in Sweden:
Comet Lovejoy was discovered on November 27, 2011 by Terry Lovejoy of Thornlands, Queensland, during a comet survey. He is an amateur astronomer. It reached perihelion--its closest position to the sun-- on December 16, 2011, as it passed approximately 187,000 miles above the Sun's surface at a speed of 333 mi/s, or 0.18% the speed of light. It was not expected to survive the encounter due to extreme conditions in the sun's corona, with temperatures reaching more than one million kelvins (10,000K = 17540ºF) and the exposure time of nearly an hour. But it did survive although it lost a lot of its mass.
In Kyushu, Japan recently, which is about 300 miles due East of Shanghai, the pollution was so bad that authorities told everybody to stay in their homes for a couple of days. This from 300 miles away!
Reminds one of the Russians not telling the Swedes about Chernobyl.
Another side to the "dreaded 1%": There's increasing evidence that it takes a small number of high achievers to generate a great deal of economic vitality in a culture.
Scholars Heiner Rindermann and James Thompson have found that the performance of the top 5% (measured by IQ) in a country correlates strongly with economic growth. Duke University's Jonathan Wai argues that because of its size, America's top 1% have a huge impact on the country's trajectory. And, because of America's reward system, it attracts other countries' dreaded 1%.
Another side to the "dreaded 1%": There's increasing evidence that it takes a small number of high achievers to generate a great deal of economic vitality in a culture.
Scholars Heiner Rindermann and James Thompson have found that the performance of the top 5% (measured by IQ) in a country correlates strongly with economic growth. Duke University's Jonathan Wai argues that because of its size, America's top 1% have a huge impact on the country's trajectory. And, because of America's reward system, it attracts other countries' dreaded 1%.
Daily oil production has doubled in Texas in the last 3 years and stands at 2.7 million barrels per day. Its all-time peak production of 3.4 million barrels per day was in 1972.
Heather Havrilesky, in Bookforum, compares literary contemporaries Nora Ephron and Joan Didion: "When life gave Ephron lemons ... she made a giant vat of really good vodka-spiked lemonade and invited all of her friends and her friends' friends over to share it, and gossip, and play charades. Whereas when life gave Joan Didion lemons, she stared at them for several months, and then crafted a haunting bit of prose about the lemon and orange groves that were razed and paved over to make Hollywood, in all of its sooty wretchedness — which is precisely what this mixed-up world does to everything that's fresh and young and full of promise."
A Pentagon study was said to prove the need to buy Russian helicopters for Afghanistan's security forces. But the study actually recommended an American-made rotorcraft, according to unclassified excerpts obtained by The Associated Press. 63 Mi-17s are being acquired through the 2011 contract, not the American made Chinook, built by Boeing Co. in Pennsylvania. The Pentagon study showed that the Chinook was "the most cost-effective single platform type fleet for the Afghan Air Force over a 20-year" period. The MI-17 contract was awarded without competition to Russia's arms export agency, Rosoboronexport.
"We're not dealing with a corrupt system. Corruption is the system," said Stephen Blank, a Russia expert at the American Foreign Policy Council, a Washington think tank.
Golden oldie:
According to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, the gap in math between Shanghai and Massachusetts (the top-performing U.S. state) translates into two years of schooling. But...BUT!... the school year is longer in Shanghai. How much longer? By the time the average Shanghai kid is 15 she has spent about two years more in school than the average 15-year-old American.
Middle East rancor sometimes is revealing. Israel, Jordan and the Palestinians have reached agreement on a three-way water supply arrangement to slake rising cross-border demand, taking a rare step toward economic integration despite persistent political conflict holding up progress on an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal.
The water deal, which also aims to slow the steady drop in the Dead Sea water level through a channel from the Red Sea, is one of the few regional cooperation projects surviving from the heyday of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.
Water availability overcomes a lot. It might point to what will be increasingly important.
Who was....Alexander Litvinenko?
Water availability overcomes a lot. It might point to what will be increasingly important.
Who was....Alexander Litvinenko?
Seymour Hersh — best known for his exposés on the cover-ups of the My Lai Massacre and of Abu Ghraib as well as the horrifying "Dark Side of Camelot" – in a story published Sunday for the London Review of Books, accuses the American administration of dishonesty with the information over the gas attacks in Syria. Hersh said the U.S. administration "cherry-picked intelligence," citing conversations with intelligence and military officials. A former senior intelligence official said that the Obama administration had altered the available information – in terms of its timing and sequence – to enable the president and his advisers to make intelligence retrieved days after the attack look as if it had been picked up and analysed in real time, as the attack was happening. The distortion, he said, reminded him of the 1964 Gulf of Tomkin incident, when the Johnson administration reversed the sequence of National Security Agency intercepts to justify one of the early bombings of North Vietnam. The same official said there was immense frustration inside the military and intelligence bureaucracy: ‘The guys are throwing their hands in the air and saying, “How can we help this guy” – Obama – “when he and his cronies in the White House make up the intelligence as they go along?”’ This is nonpartisan; all governments lie.
The wisdom of Charlie Munger: "I don't think it was good for Wall Street that they had this absolute torrent of really easy money when idiots and naives were making a fortune selling shoddy mortgages with ridiculous theories. It was very regrettable behavior. And it was the easy money that allowed it."
The largest floating vessel in the world has been launched in South Korea. At a length of 1,601 feet (488 m), the Prelude, which is owned by Royal Dutch Shell, is 150 feet longer than the Empire State Building is high. In operation, it would weigh more than 600,000 tonnes; more than five times the weight of the largest aircraft carrier. The Prelude is a floating liquefied natural gas facility which will allow Shell to produce natural gas at sea and then liquefy it by chilling it to -260 degrees F so it can be transported around the world.
Electricity transmission in Japan is unusual because the country is divided for historical reasons into two regions each running at a different mains frequency. Eastern Japan (including Tokyo, Kawasaki, Sapporo, Yokohama, and Sendai) runs at 50 Hz; Western Japan (including Okinawa, Osaka, Kyoto, Kobe, Nagoya, Hiroshima) runs at 60 Hz. This originates from the first purchases of generators from AEG for Tokyo in 1895 and from General Electric for Osaka in 1896.
AAAaaaaaaannnnnnddddddd........a picture of Comet Lovejoy through the Mörby Castle Ruins in Sweden:
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