Cab Thoughts 4/2/16

"I have not the pleasure of knowing my reader but I would stake ten to one that for six months he has been making Utopias, and if so, that he is looking to Government for the realization of them."--Bastiat

There are some things a shark cannot eat, such as a small fish called the Moses sole and the puffer fish. When a shark bites a sole, the sole releases a chemical in the shark’s mouth that makes the shark release it. Scientists are trying to duplicate this chemical so it can be used to keep sharks away from people. This doesn't seem like much of an advantage to me because by the time the shark figures out the downside to the meal it is too late for the meal.

Alex Nowrasteh’s article “The Fiscal Impact of Immigration,” includes the two major analyzable components of immigration to an economy. One is what an immigrant costs the community and the other is what he produces. His generality is that the net effect depends upon the structure of the economy--especially on the social support side--but that generally the net is very small, positive or negative. So there is no great financial argument against immigration historically, but no positive one either. There is another element, the notion that each of us brings our own gift to the culture, some positive, some negative. Those who see humans as positive will see an increase of people as an increase in resource.

There is nothing in this country that can not be cured by a good satirist. The absence of one is telling; we are in unreasonable and sensitive times. One of Mencken's Laws was "Nature abhors a moron," and one of his favorite pastimes was to attack the South for being especially ruled by the "booboisie"; upon finding itself elevated to "the apex of moronia," Arkansas had apparently had enough. In 1931, the Arkansas state legislature passed a motion to pray for the soul of H. L. Mencken.

What is....Zagami meteorite?

The world is engorged with strange facts. The ant can lift 50 times its own weight, can pull 30 times its own weight and always falls over on its right side when intoxicated. Now there are several little things of interest here, perhaps even a tiny life lesson from tiny insects on effort and work. But who decided to get an ant drunk? And why? And did I fund it somewhere?

Barnett Davenport committed an awful mass murder in rural Connecticut--excluding combat savagery--apparently America's first known mass murder. Caleb Mallory, his wife, daughter-in-law, and two grandchildren were killed in their home by their boarder, Davenport. Davenport, born in 1760, enlisted in the American army as a teenager and had served at Valley Forge and Fort Ticonderoga. In the waning days of the war with the British, he came to live in the Mallory household. Today, Davenport’s crime might be ascribed to some type of post-war stress syndrome, but at the time it was the source of a different sociological significance. They thought he was a mean s.o.b..
On February 3, apparently unprovoked, Davenport beat Caleb Mallory to death. He then beat Mallory’s seven-year-old grandchild with a rifle and killed his daughter-in-law. Davenport looted the home before setting it on fire, killing two others.

On of the software modeling the CO2 in the atmosphere is the A1B of the IPCC Special Report on Emissions Scenarios (SRES), which yields a 735 ppm concentration of CO₂ by the year 2100, producing warming of 3.8°C (at least according to the C-ROADS simulation).

West Huddleston, the then-CEO of the National Association of Drug Court Professionals, wrote HHS Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell and urged her to keep strict caps on the number of opioid addicts doctors can treat with buprenorphine. Use of the medication along with counseling, known as medication-assisted treatment, is considered by public health officials to give opioid addicts the best chance at a recovery. But many drug court judges have opposed the treatment, insisting defendants go cold turkey instead.

So, is there court literature on the topic? Do judges have peer review that they fuss about?

Wiki describes a galaxy as  a gravitationally bound system of stars, stellar remnants, interstellar gas, dust, and dark matter. As of July 2015, EGSY8p7 is the oldest and most distant observed galaxy with a light travel distance of 13.2 billion light-years from Earth, and observed as it existed 570 million years after the Big Bang--although these things change all the time. Approximately 170 billion (1.7 × 10¹¹) to 200 billion (2.0 × 10¹¹) galaxies exist in the observable universe. In Greek mythology, Zeus places his son born by a mortal woman, the infant Heracles, on Hera's breast while she is asleep so that the baby will drink her divine milk and will thus become immortal. Hera wakes up while breastfeeding and then realizes she is nursing an unknown baby: she pushes the baby away, some of her milk spills and, produces the faint band of light known as the Milky Way. The English term Milky Way can be traced back to a story by Chaucer c. 1380:

"See yonder, lo, the Galaxyë
 Which men clepeth the Milky Wey,
 For hit is whyt."

— Geoffrey Chaucer, The House of Fame

The origin of the word galaxy derives from the Greek term for the Milky Way, galaxias (γαλαξίας, "milky one"), or kyklos galaktikos ("milky circle")

I went to the Pterosaur exhibit at the Museum. Quite something. One of these monsters was the size of an F-16. Their wings are the extension of the fourth digit. The whole dinosaur exhibit has been updated. Really terrific. I also touched the Zagami meteorite, the meteorite believed to be from an explosion on Mars. (It has the same gas composition as measured on Mars by the Voyager.) I did not know that all birds of flight--and the reptile Pterosaurs--have wings aerodynamically like planes.

One of the maddening things about the world is the tendency of scientists to change names of things. There is no such thing as a "pterodactyl" anymore.

Golden oldie (supreme court):
http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2012/12/bork-redux.html

So...Trump disrupts the FOX debate because he objects to a newswoman. Everyone, politician and newspeople, are upset. How close are these people? How linked are their individual success or is it mutual success? How integrated are these people?

The State Department is lying when it says it didn’t know until it was too late that Hillary Clinton was improperly using personal e-mails and a private server to conduct official business — because it never set up an agency e-mail address for her in the first place, the department’s former top watchdog says. “This was all planned in advance” to skirt rules governing federal records management, said Howard J. Krongard, who served as the agency’s inspector general from 2005 to 2008. He says “the key” to the FBI’s investigation of Emailgate is determining how highly sensitive state secrets in the classified network, known as SIPRNet, ended up in Clinton’s personal e-mails. “This totally eliminates the false premise that she got nothing marked classified,” Krongard said. “She’s hiding behind this defense. But they [e-mails] had to be classified, because otherwise [the information in them] wouldn’t be on the SIPRNet.”

After rising from clerk to sales executive in the National Cash Register Co., Thomas Watson became president of the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Co., which made scales, time clocks, and tabulators that sorted information using punched cards—all forerunners of mainframe computers. Watson renamed the company International Business Machines Corp. (IBM) in 1924 and became its chairman in 1949, widening IBM's line to include electronic computers. I wondered where the name of the IBM computer came from.

In 1943, a Mexican farmer named Dionisio Pulido witnessed the birth of a volcano in his cornfield about 329 kilometers west of Mexico City. It started as a slight depression in his field and soon became a fissure that emitted smoke and hissing noises. During the next nine years, the volcano Paricutin had grown to an elevation of 2,272 meters and its voluminous lava flows had destroyed several towns.

Guy: curious background. noun: 1. A man (in plural, persons of either sex). verb tr.: To make fun of; ridicule. 2. noun: A rope to steady, guide, or secure something. verb tr.: To steady, guide, or secure something with a rope. For set 1:After Guy Fawkes (1570-1606), a conspirator in the failed attempt to blow up England’s Parliament in 1605. Earliest documented use: 1874. For set 2: From Old French guie (guide), from guier (to guide). Ultimately from the Indo-European root weid- (to see), which is also the source of guide, wise, vision, advice, idea, story, history. Earliest documented use: 1375.

David Tepper is a big deal hedge fund manager who started the famous Appaloosa Fund. Back in September, Tepper told BBG TV that "it might be a good time to take money off the table." That's what he said. What did he do? According to his latest 13F as the market was surging in the final quarter of 2015, Tepper was busy buying. So busy in fact, that he took his total long notional exposure to $5 billion an increase of 75%, in the process adding 40% to his longs. 

Kelli Peters, a former PTA president and Orange County resident, won $5.7 million in a civil suit in damages over an incident in which a pair of two other parents, whose son attended her child’s school, planted weed and narcotics in her car. Kent Easter and Ava Everheart (who then went by Jill Easter) decided to frame Peters after a misunderstanding over a remark Peters made about their son, believing she had called him dumb. Peters said  that the boy was “walking slowly,” and his parents took it as an insult to intelligence.

Lessons from Denny's: When the cup is hotter than the coffee, it's probably microwaved.

AAAAaaaaaaannnnndddd.... a graph of Projected Path of Emissions by Region, 2017-2100, under A1B. (Gtons of CO₂)