Cab Thoughts 12/7/13

..[Some people]..have a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to lower the powerful to their own level, and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom. I believe that it is easier to establish an absolute and despotic government amongst a people in which the conditions of society are equal, than amongst any other; and I think that, if such a government were once established amongst such a people, it would not only oppress men, but would eventually strip each of them of several of the highest qualities of humanity. Despotism, therefore, appears to me peculiarly to be dreaded in democratic times.--deTocqueville

The recent Reuters Investment Outlook summit gave us lesser mortals a peek at the future of the West. "QE", low interest rates, low growth and low employment is locked in for the present and beyond. The debate is not over whether it is a good idea or not or whether it is sustainable or not. The debate is over the belief of some that the easy money distortion is making the wrong people successful. These people have figured out who the "right people" and the "wrong people" are. And they think that a few smart guys in a room with a computer can control the factors that influence the economy.

Think man on the back of a tiger.

Third World Vacation alert: Part of the stadium that will host the World Cup opener in Sao Paulo, Brazil next year has collapsed.

In the 1540s, the guinea fowl, a bird with some resemblance to the American Thanksgiving bird, was imported from Madagascar through Turkey by traders known as "turkey merchants." The guinea fowl was also nicknamed the turkey fowl. Then, the Spanish brought turkeys back from the Americas by way of North Africa and Turkey, where the bird was mistakenly called the same name. Europeans who encountered the bird in the Americas latched on to the "turkey fowl" name, and the term was condensed simply to "turkey." The Turkish name for the bird is hindi, which literally means "Indian." This name likely derived from the common misconception that India and the New World were one and the same.
A perfect circle of confusion.

Researchers at the University of Michigan found that the number and use in of light vehicles in the U.S. peaked in 2004.

The Montgolfier brothers sent up the first manned balloon in 1783. The French were very interested in balloons and Jefferson, when there, was captivated by their efforts.

A 1640 book of psalms translated from Hebrew sold for a record breaking $14.16 million at auction on Tuesday. Known as the Bay Psalm Book, it is the first book published in English in what is now the U.S. There are only 10 other known copies.

Who was....Albino Luciani?

Three weeks before Vladimir Nabokov's challenging and revolutionary "Lolita" arrived in bookstores in France (no one in the U.S. would publish it), where it first came out that September, Dorothy Parker published a story-in The New Yorker-titled "Lolita," that centered on an older man, a teen bride, and her jealous mother. Galya Diment has a nice story in New York Magazine about this astonishing "coincidence."
Never think great minds are above it all.

"Transliteration" is the conversion of a text from one script to another. It is not concerned with representing the sound of the original: it only strives to represent the characters accurately. Transcription specifically maps the sounds of one language to the best matching script of another language.

Example:

Greek word	Transliteration	Transcription	English translation

Ευαγγέλιο

Euaggelio

Evangelio

Gospel

The wisdom of Charlie Munger: "easy money corrupts, and really easy money tends to corrupt absolutely."

Golden oldie:

http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2011/05/taking-black-2.html

The popularity of The Hunger Games series is fueling an interest in the sport of archery, particularly among girls. Some sporting equipment outfitters say they've seen a big boost in bow and arrow sales since the film series began in 2012. Archery ranges are busier too.

In "12 years a Slave" a free man is spirited off from the free North to the South as a slave. The story--a true story--was the result of The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, the country's first nation law. Part of this law, crafted by Clay, states "In no trial or hearing under this act shall the testimony of such alleged fugitive be admitted in evidence."

Good news: The City of Vancouver, British Columbia has outlawed doorknobs in new buildings. Every once in a while government finds appropriate levels of action. On the other hand, DeKalb County, Georgia has a juror form that has "slave" under "occupation" so maybe you can't trust government with anything.

Gerrymander is a coined word that is a blend of Elbridge Gerry and salamander. Massachusetts Governor Gerry's party rearranged the electoral district boundaries and someone fancied the newly redistricted Essex County resembled a salamander. A cartoon showing the district in the shape of a salamander appeared in March 1812 issue of the Federalist newspaper.

The poet, translator and Soviet dissident writer Natalya Gorbanevskaya has died at age 77. She was held in a psychiatric hospital from 1969 until 1972 as a result of her opposition to Soviet human rights abuses; what possible risk could there be from the state controlling health care? She was one of the founders of the underground magazine The Chronicle of Current Events.

From "Prisonocomics," a book about British prisons:
Among women in prison, 15 per cent of prisoners report that they are homeless before entering prison and 32 per cent of prisoners lose their homes while in prison, 5 per cent of their children are able to stay in their own home when their mother is in prison, and 3% of the women prisoners had no idea who was caring for their children with them gone.




AAAAAnnnnnddddd........the cartoon from the newspaper creating the "Gerrymander":

(Migraine)genesis

      If the whole is greater than any of its parts, is there a limit to anything?

 
      The nature of origins is as old as thinking. The cosmological argument--the so-called prime move argument--was first introduced by Aristotle in the West. In Arabic, the word Kalām means "words, discussion, discourse." The Kalām argument comes from the Kalām tradition of Islamic discursive philosophy through which it was first formulated. The Kalam cosmological argument states: everything that begins to exist has a cause, the universe began to exist, therefore, the universe has a cause for its existence. This was also propounded by Averroes. His premise was that every motion must be caused by another motion, and the earlier motion must in turn be a result of another motion and so on. The basic premise of all of these is that something caused the Universe to exist, and this First Cause is what we call God.

      This is not new. And it appears it will never get old.

      But doesn't this just move the question back a square?  Does infinity have a start? And is infinity a reasonable concept in our real world anyway? (This, of course, ignores the question can "reasonable" and "real world" define the truth?) In an example that sounds eerily like the ancient question of a javelin thrower at the edge of the universe, the philosophical theologian William Lane Craig imagines a library containing infinitely many books, numbered from zero onwards. Infinity thought games create some serious problems. For example, one could add infinitely many books to such a library without increasing the number of books in the library. One could remove the first three books, and the library would not have any fewer books. One could even remove every other book, and it would not have any fewer books. Craig thinks it is obvious that such a library could not exist in reality. Even God could not create a library with infinite books.

      Some cosmologists and physicists argue that a challenge to the cosmological argument is the nature of time: "One finds that time just disappears from the Wheeler-DeWitt equation" says Carlo Rovelli. (You can look the Wheeler-DeWitt equation up but it made my teeth hurt.) The Big Bang theory states that it is the point in which all dimensions came into existence, the start of both space and time. Then, the question "What was there before the Universe?" makes no sense; the concept of "before" becomes meaningless when considering a situation without time. This has been put forward by J. Richard Gott III, James E. Gunn, David N. Schramm, and Beatrice Tinsley, who said that asking what occurred before the Big Bang is like asking what is north of the North Pole.

      But Polaris is north of the North Pole. See, anybody can do this.

Bond, Carol Bond.

There is a crazy case before the Supreme Court that looks like a tiny, technical legal point that has large implications for the average citizen. It is Bond v. U.S..

Carol Bond of Landsdale , Pa. admits that she spread a toxic chemical she had obtained from her employer on the car and mailbox of a friend who had an affair with her husband. She was unsuccessful in harming the woman despite clearly intending to do so. This sounds like a straightforward state criminal case, right? But no. The federal government intervened and charged her with waging chemical warfare. According to the Feds, Carol Bond had violated the chemical-weapons convention that the Senate ratified in 1997. And she was convicted.

Mrs. Bond was convicted of waging chemical warfare.

Mrs. Bond is challenging her conviction on the grounds that the chemical treaty in 1998 was aimed at national and international behavior, not individuals and states, and that treaties have no application on an individual or state level. In essence this is an argument between the reach of treaties vs. the sanctity of the state, internationalism versus federalism.

Think Brussels legislating fertilizer use in Great Britain, as occurs under the EU; people in foreign countries you never voted for--indeed never heard of--writing laws to affect your life. And the legal structure of the United States is very individual friendly. It is difficult for the federal busybody to legislate what they think is good for you against your will.

But it is a lot easier for the federal government to influence you if they make the law with a disinterested foreign power and then apply it to the hapless citizen as a treaty obligation. One would think that the Americans would rise up at this. But, with the apparent acquiescence of the citizen to accept federal control of his health, perhaps the nation is changing.

Cab Thought 12/04/13

'I have always felt a certain horror of political economists since I heard one of them say that he feared the famine of 1848 in Ireland would not kill more than a million people, and that would scarcely be enough to do much good."--Benjamin Jowett, the great Master of Balliol College, Oxford

An LED converts only about 25% of power consumed into light and 75% into heat.

Puzzle: I am able to measure any weight in 1lb increments from 1 to 40lb with only 4 weights. What are the 4 weights? Answer below

Three years of study in Patagonia have produced what researchers describe as most important paleontological findings in Chile in the last 10 years. The discovery of leaf and dinosaur fossils in South America has revealed the continent was connected to Antarctica 20 million years more recently than previously believed.
Around 600 million years ago, South America was joined to Antarctica, Australia, Africa and Asia in the supercontinent Gondwana. At that time, Antarctica was not the home of snow and ice which it is today. It was a fertile landmass which allowed the terrestrial migration of dinosaurs and plants to today’s continents.

The Mississippi and its tributaries drain 40 per cent of America, almost a million square miles spread across thirty-one states (and two Canadian provinces). In April, 1927, after a sudden rainfall of over a foot, the Mississippi swelled, broke through hastily made levees (killing the workmen) and, suddenly, an area almost the size of Scotland was under water -- and stayed for almost six months. The devastation lasted for years. By the first week of May, the flood stretched for 500 miles from southern Illinois to New Orleans, and was up to 150 miles wide in places. From the air, the Mississippi valley looked like a new Great Lake. The statistics of the Great Flood: 16,570,627 acres flooded; 203,504 buildings lost or ruined; 637,476 people made homeless. The quantities of livestock lost: 50,490 cattle, 25,325 horses and mules, 148,110 hogs, 1,276,570 chickens and other poultry.

From an obituary on Herbert Mitgang in the NYT: “Reading Mr. Mitgang,” Alfred Kazin wrote, “one remembers the forgotten pleasures of idealism.”

The Haredim is a community of ultra-orthodox Jews in Israel and is now 10 percent of its population. As orthodox men have a commitment to full-time Torah study and a fear of assimilation, only a little more than 4 in 10 of them work, less than half the rate of other Jewish men in Israel, and their average salaries are 57 percent of other Jewish men in the country. Their political clout resulted in exemption from military service (they serve through study) and subsidies for each child (they have a tremendous birthrate). As the men are philosophically inclined, the women work at the jobs they can, squeezed in with pregnancy and child rearing. It is estimated that their terrific birthrate will make them group 25% of the population in the next 30 years.

A word with an interesting background. Minacious(adjective) [mi-'ney-shês] definition: Menacing, threatening. The perfect synonym of minatory. The noun is "minacity". Ety: Latin minax, minacis "jutting out; threatening". Also minatorius "threatening" from which English borrowed "minatory". From Indo-European *men- which underlies Latin mentum "chin, beard" and English "mental", borrowed from it. The same root evolved into English "mountain" and "mouth" from Old Germanic *munthaz.

Who was...Meredith Hunter?

The wisdom of Charlie Munger: "You know what people did in the '30s? They moved into one another's houses. That's what families were for."

In November the Vatican unveiled newly restored frescoes in the Catacombs of Priscilla, known for housing the earliest known image of the Madonna with Child. The catacombs feature a tiny, delicate Madonna fresco dating from 230-240 AD, as well as scenes said by proponents of the women's ordination movement to be suggestive of women priests in the early church.

Puzzle answer: The 4 weights needed are 1lb, 3lb, 9lb, and 27lb.
To measure a 5lb object, for example, on one side you would have the object plus the 1lb and 3lb weight, and the other side the 9lb weight.

Golden oldie:

http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2011/05/how-do-you-saypsychological-homogeneity.html

In 1900 there were 6,000 Amish in the US. In 2011 there were 250,000 with population doubling every decade since 1960. I have no idea what that means. There is also apparently no autism among the Amish. I don't know what that means either.

There is a lot of talk about the Affordable Care Act "bending the cost curve down" in health care. And the cost has slowed. But annual health-spending growth rates began to decline a decade ago. In 2002, health-care spending grew by nearly 10% in a single year. The growth rate dropped to 7.1% in 2004, 6.2% in 2007, and bottomed out at 3.9% in 2009—the worst year of the Great Recession, where it has stayed ever since. ObamaCare was enacted in 2010.

Aaaaannnnnndddd....a picture of Aurora Borealis, with great color detail:

"Gravity:" A Review

"Gravity" is quite an exciting adventure film. George Clooney and Sandra Bullock make up almost the entire cast of a story centering upon an accident in a space station and the desperate efforts of the small crew to survive.

The technical portion is a hair-raising spectacle careening at breakneck speed. And eerie. Explosions in space are, of course, soundless and fire limited; action and reaction unforgiving. So there are no pyrotechnic distractions. The entire bulk of the story, with its mechanical and natural dangers, is gripping.

The characters are peculiar--a medical officer as a technical scientist, Clooney as Clooney--but interesting enough. The film, however,  gets very peculiar when the authors seem to become dissatisfied with the story as an adventure film and try to expand it into I-know-not-what. At some point the main character begins to question her will to live. It is a shock as she has fought so hard. And it is solved with an inexplicable and unforshadowed introduction of what can only be called revelation, a vision that teaches her. This surprising turn of events in this highly technical story is actually benumbing; the audience--first deceived by the circumstance and then understanding of it--grossly accepts it, then shrugs it off like a glancing blow and continues on its way.

I suppose that could be seen as a tribute to the excitement the rest of the story generated.

Reuters Investment Outlook Summit

The recent Reuters Investment Outlook summit gave us lesser mortals a peek at the future of the West. "QE", low interest rates, low growth and low employment are all locked in for the present and beyond. The debate is not over whether it is a good idea or whether it is sustainable. The debate is over the belief of some that the easy money distortion is making the wrong people successful. These people have figured out who the "right people" and the "wrong people" are. And they think that a few smart guys in a room with a computer can control the factors that influence the economy.

Think of a calculating, well meaning man on the back of a tiger.

Sunday Sermon 12/1/13

The gospel today is of Christ's messianic vision, in the style of the Son of Man visions in Daniel. It foretells the end of the world with the unsettling image of God as a thief in the night, stealing life, time and the future.
After an introduction of Noah's flood, the images made famous by the modern "Taken" franchise appear:
"So will it be also at the coming of the Son of Man.
Two men will be out in the field; one will be taken, and one will be left.
Two women will be grinding at the mill; one will be taken, and one will be left.
Therefore, stay awake!"

This is often seen as a criticism of man, of his trivialities and preoccupations. It is reminiscent of the Titanic where, after the iceberg is hit, the card games go on, the are drinks served and the music continues. But more striking is the similarity of those taken and those left behind. There is a distinction that God is making, one to the other, that is not visible, that is unseen. That is the spiritual nature of man and it can exist in the average life.