Cab Thoughts 12/6/14

"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    

In some states a nail technician needs to have a license that requires a 750-hour training program.

The late Nobel laureate Jose Saramago completed Skylight in 1953. Unpublished in English for some six decades, the book was not rediscovered until after Saramago's death in 2010. Now, this tale of lives woven together by a Lisbon apartment building will finally see a release this Tuesday.

Who were .....Watson and Crick?

The stigmata, the supposedly spontaneous recreation of the wounds of Christ at the crucifixion, did not appear until the 13th Century in the afflicted St. Francis of Assisi (1182-1226). Several hundred Christians have claimed the stigmata since, including several saints. All 32 of recorded cases of stigmata have been Roman Catholics and all but four of those cases were women. Many have confessed trickery but most have not, although all have raised suspicions. In 1984, an Italian court convicted stigmatic Gigliola Giorgini of fraud. The famous Twentieth Century stigmatists were Theresa Neumann and Father Pio, the latter made a saint although no ecclesiastical conclusion was reached on his affliction. One of the latest to be added to the list of alleged stigmatics is Audrey Santo, a child who has been in a coma since 1987, when she was three years old. Another is Fr. James Bruce, a Washington, D.C. priest.

Golden oldie:
http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2013/12/simon-capitalism-and-money.html

Brightness in stars is complicated, more than you would think. As a star gets hotter, more of its energy output moves beyond the visible light spectrum into ultra violet, X-rays and even gamma rays. And luminosity or total energy output (related to brightness) also depends on size. Smaller objects have less space from which to radiate electromagnetic energy, and hence are dim although hot. A newly formed white dwarf stars have surface temperatures of nearly 200,000 degrees F, but due to their small size (similar to Earth), are very dim. Smaller, hotter and dimmer still are neutron stars. A typical neutron star is no wider than the island of Trinidad, but can have a surface temperature of millions of degrees. In this case, the object is so small that its total energy output must also be small, and what energy it does radiate is mostly in shorter wavelength (non visible) ultraviolet and X-rays. Thus the  hottest stellar mass objects in the universe are comparatively very dim.

Sir Thomas Mallory completed his classic account of chivalry, Morte d'Arthur, while in prison for  robbery, rape and extortion.

There are earthquakes in Texas. Is fracking to blame? Witches? Perhaps an ancient Indian curse for drilling in old Indian cemeteries? The best relationship I have seen studied is with the very Green Geothermal power. Geothermal power production started in the Salton Sea field in California in 1982 and includes one of the largest and hottest geothermal wells in the world. Plants extract super-heated water from thousands of feet beneath the earth’s surface and use it to produce steam that drives turbines to generate electricity. The remaining brine is then injected back into the ground. The geothermal sites have long been known to be associated with earthquakes. In a paper authored by Emily Brodsky it was found that the earthquake rate mirrored the net extraction rate – the volume of water withdrawn minus the amount injected back into the ground.
“The net extraction…. at the Salton Sea is about half a billion gallons per month,” Brodsky said. “That results in roughly one detectable earthquake per 11 days. If you increase it, that increases the number of earthquakes."

Due to the sagging Canadian dollar the NHL's salary cap for the 2015-16 season might remain stagnant and force teams like the Blackhawks to make major moves during the offseason.

Carbon stays in the atmosphere for one hundred years. James Hanson, former director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, wrote a paper in 2008 saying that exceeding 350 parts per million CO₂ in the atmosphere would likely have catastrophic effects. We’ve already past that limit. Right now, concentrations of CO2 is around 400 ppm. If Hanson is right, we will be stuck with current CO2 levels for one hundred years. While stopping CO2 production is worthwhile, some option to remove CO2 from the atmosphere is more important. Why don't we hear that?

anodyne \AN-uh-dyn\, adjective: 1. Serving to relieve pain; soothing. 2. Not likely to offend; bland; innocuous. noun:
1. A medicine that relieves pain. 2. Anything that calms, comforts, or soothes disturbed feelings. Anodyne comes, via Latin, from Greek anodunos, "free from pain," from a-, an-, "without" + odune, "pain."

Christie's is offering a first edition Origin of Species. Also Watson's (Of Watson and Crick) Nobel Prize medal. The medal thing sounds a bit sad.

Some 2,500 documents potentially showing that the IRS shared taxpayer returns with the White House have appeared. This is a terrible breach of governmental ethics. Also the law. But the Treasury inspector general’s office said they would not release them because..... the documents are covered by privacy and disclosure laws! 

For Keynesians, Japan is in the Golden Age of Monetary Policy: free money and low rates. Can a productive country monetize 200% of its GDP without devastating, or at least seriously affecting, the buying power of its currency? And at what cost to its trading partners and those countries and companies that must compete against Japanese exports? Also, the Bank of Japan is the largest buyer of Japanese equities. And they are buying their own debt with borrowed money. So the Keynesians should view the Japanese economy as their own little laboratory; the thesis should rise or fall as Japan goes.

AAAAAaaaannnnndddd........a picture: