Author: Brian

I hereby claim a Freshright™
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/7346093.stm

They first said jiffy in 1785 and said a jiffy is a thief.

But I was born and raised smallishly. Cities were my want and in awhile I went. I first learned that showing up is critical and that timing is everything.

Later IBM said there are as many picoseconds in a second as there are seconds in 37 million years, so in a jiffy I took off my shoes to feel my cells twitch.

I also learned the King’s hands were a pound, and one handful an ounce, and if a King twitched the remainder in his hand is a scruple.

Scruples without shoes are the time I carry now.

Done with time, all is just.

The moment is eternity.

NBC’s Today Show reported a moment ago that

71% of bullies are women while 57% of men bully.

Their Microsoft packaged website is much too much a mess to find the link.

Enjoying codesmithy because analysis at this blog isn’t mere trade of jingo but sincere study. There’s this, and that:

“…obstacles or no obstacles, principles of self-reliance and responsibility should guide people’s actions.”

…

“I finished watching Fitna, the controversial movie by Geert Wilders that attacks Islam. It portrays Islam as a violent religion, quoting passages out of the Koran followed by video of atrocities committed by Muslims or clerics declaring some sort of hateful screed against Jews, homosexuals, adulterers, or other infidels. At its heart, the film is propaganda. Are there fundamentalist strains of Islam that I find concerning? Yes. However, I find those same hateful ideas embodied in Christian fundamentalism.

“The struggle to preserve the West cannot be about the domination of one fundamentalist dogma over another. It has to be about preserving egalitarian values embodied in democratic rule, scientific thought, and prefaced by basic moral truisms of equality and liberty.”

…

“I do have sympathy for the people who suffer the Ayn Rand fans.

“Alas, I digress. The larger point is the information conundrum. An underlying current of the essay is that more information is now available before two people even meet. While, this may at first be more efficient, it has its own set of concerns. One concern is disqualifying information. By putting too much information out, there will more a chance that a potential date will find something that they will not like even before they technically ask. Good for the ask-er, not so great for the ask-ee. Second, people don’t actually know what they are looking for in another person. Maybe, there is a suitable suitor who has never heard of Pushkin. Third, people game the system. The most important piece of information is seldom the one expressed, but rather the ones left out.

“Social norms have not adjusted for the vast amounts of information that is now readily available with the barest modicum of digging. Much of it is just an adjustment in expectations. Although, if there is one truth it is the difficulty in applying the same standards to ourselves as we apply to other people. What do you think you look like to an outside observer?”

…

Frontline ran an amazing two part program called “Bush’s War.” It can be viewed online here. It isn’t a complete picture of Iraq, however it gives insight into the behind-the-scenes political battles that took place surrounding the war.

I don’t want to belabor any of the points. However, a couple things are clear. First, Rumsfeld was hopelessly deluded about the war. The disastrous post-invasion looting was due directly to his incompetence. The torture of prisoners for information is something he directly authorized.

Second, Rice failed her way upwards. … Finally, Bush is one of the worst executives in history. He is in love with his own myth….

At The Issue blog, clarity took a moment:

Blogs are not about giving everyone an equal voice.
Some blogs are better than others. So people will naturally gravitate to a few, leaving the vast majority in the desktop trash bin. This is not an egalitarian internet and there’s no taxation and redistribution of traffic. Power over information is not democratized – it is simply transferred. The HuffingtonPost replaces the New York Times.

But what does change is a direct connection between the reader and the blogger. And why will the HuffingtonPost overtake the New York Times? Because to win over your customers you need more personable customer service (since the price is already 0) – And so in news – you need personality. Blogging democratizes within the media organization itself not the field of media. Removing the need for layers of editors and revisions, blogging allows the writer’s personality and perspective to shine through. And this will always win. Why?

Because as humans we are primed to seek out and respond to other people. Marketers know this as they pay athletes and movie stars to endorse products, reporters and PR people know this as the stories that sell best are the “human interest” ones. The most widely read articles in any newspaper are always the Op-Eds. Reality television makes a lot of money.

The current news revolution is all about putting people back into the focus of the news in every manner possible. That is the race for the bomb and that’s how you win in media. Let’s just hope it’s not MAD as well.

How many years out of government is Robert Reich when he warns…?

“These twelve people have more power over your daily life than your congressman and Senator, maybe even your president.”

Stephen Lewis writes frankly and honestly about campaigns and rage in America:

Far more interesting and insidious than the slips-of-the-lips of members of Obama’s confessional circles is Hillary Clinton’s decades-long involvement in an oligarchical right-wing prayer breakfast group called The Fellowship.

Sound like the stuff of crank conspiracy theories?

Writer Jeff Sharlet of The Revealer, a New York University weblog covering religion and the media, has just completed a book on the subject. Will apologies and statements of distancing and denunciation of The Fellowship be forthcoming from the Clinton campaign? I doubt it.

Worst. President. Ever.
History News Network’s poll of 109 historians: 96 percent of the respondents place the Bush presidency in the bottom tier of American presidencies.

“It would be difficult to identify a President who, facing major international and domestic crises, has failed in both as clearly as President Bush,” concluded one respondent. “His domestic policies,” another noted, “have had the cumulative effect of shoring up a semi-permanent aristocracy of capital that dwarfs the aristocracy of land against which the founding fathers rebelled; of encouraging a mindless retreat from science and rationalism; and of crippling the nation’s economic base.”

I have a proposition for you.

Do not return to this site until you understand game theory.

Start here.

No one asked.

“Central to the Pentagon’s post-Cold War strategy is outsourcing nonmilitary tasks to private contractors.”

Triumph is our journey.

Triumph we begin
and cannot stop.

Capturing reference numbers from Ed at Ecoworld.

Suddenly we discuss tailpipes and atmosphere.

First of all, a gigaton is one billion metric tons. One metric ton (2,200 lbs.) is what a cubic meter of water weighs. One billion metric tons is what one cubic kilometer (one billion cubic meters) of water weighs, and it is called a gigaton.

Next, remember atmospheric CO2 includes two oxygen atoms, and weighs 3.7x the carbon feedstock. So if there are 70 gigatons of carbon in the Amazon, for example, burning the remaining Amazonian carbon will release 2.7x that many gigatons of CO2 into the atmosphere (ref. Amazon Ecology Project). So far, tropical deforestation alone has resulted in the release of about 475 gigatons of CO2 into our atmosphere.

So how many gigatons of CO2 are we contending with, anyway…?

Suddenly we discuss water.

…it turns out that the energy required to lift a cubic kilometer of water 2,000 feet is 248 megawatt-years.

What if that water were desalinated in plants located on the coast?

So how much water is in a Sverdrup after all?

They are “the Family”—fundamentalism’s avant-garde, waging spiritual war in the halls of American power and around the globe. They consider themselves the “new chosen,” congressmen, generals, and foreign dictators who meet in confidential “cells,” to pray and plan for a “leadership led by God,” to be won not by force but through “quiet diplomacy.” Their base is a leafy estate overlooking the Potomac in Arlington, Virginia, and Jeff Sharlet is the only journalist to have written from inside its walls.

The Family is about the other half of American fundamentalist power—not its angry masses, but its sophisticated elites.

The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power

A virtuous ex-cop writes in his blog, Cop in the Hood:

When you board a plane, both you and your carry-on bags are searched. A civilian employee of the Transportation Security Administration may open and search your checked luggage as well. Although primarily looking for security threats, workers report any illegal or suspicious objects to a supervisor or law enforcement agent, even if the object represents no danger to the flight.

Two legal concepts allow both you and your bags to be searched despite the Constitution’s protection against unreasonable search and seizure. By being in an airport and trying to board a plane, the Supreme Court says, you have given “implied consent” to being searched. The “plain view” principle, according to the court, states that whatever law enforcement legally finds, feels or sees — even if unrelated to the original investigation or search — is fair game for arrest and prosecution.

Using security and terrorism as justification, the government is beginning to extend airport-like implied consent zones to more and more of the public sphere, including the entire Boston subway system. Before the Democratic convention, daily commuters, anybody approaching a national political convention, and drivers on vital bridges and tunnels were told to expect random searches without a warrant. Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable search and seizure does not apply.

When police are granted greater rights to search without probable cause, they will use these rights. Therefore it’s essential to consider the implications of implied consent and plain view searches in the public sphere.

Read more here. Discuss endlessly.

“We made progress on virtually every aspect of race and poverty for about a decade….” at Bill Moyers

A little recognition for Bill Moyers, but not enough, from The Ridenhour Prizes:

We journalists are of course obliged to cover the news, but our deeper mission is to uncover the news that powerful people would prefer to keep hidden.

Unless you are willing to fight and re-fight the same battles until you go blue in the face, drive the people you work with nuts going over every last detail to make certain you’ve got it right, and then take all of the slings and arrows directed at you by the powers that be – corporate and political and sometimes journalistic – there is no use even trying. You have to love it and I do. I.F. Stone once said, after years of catching the government’s lies and contradictions, “I have so much fun, I ought to be arrested.” Journalism 101.

So it wasn’t courage I counted on; it was exhilaration and good luck.

If you care about business, markets, and the impact of technology on them, then the following five paragraphs are truly mind bending.

It’s simple: orthodox strategy doesn’t stop at finance. Strategy as shadow-making, moral hazard, and market subversion is rife across the economic landscape, from food, to pharma, to autos, to media. It’s what the industrial-era firm has hardwired into its stale, tired DNA.

If you really want to see the bankruptcy of orthodox strategy in action, click those links – and spend a few minutes thinking about how those industries (and more besides) have spent the better part of a century and countless billions creating more and more elaborate shadows to hide behind.

As in finance, the victimizer is becoming the victim: as interaction accelerates, these industries are increasingly falling victim to the games orthodox strategy so earnestly taught them to play.

Orthodox strategy was made for an industrial massconomy. And that, I think, is the real root cause of the macro crisis: the exploding divergence between today’s economics, and strategy trapped in a distant, faded, rusting past – consigning firms to act out, like mute players on a stage, moves bereft of imagination, meaning, and purpose.

The macro crisis isn’t really just about Bear Stearns and a handful of banks: rather, as we’re all belatedly discovering, orthodox strategy itself is no longer sustainable. For society, for people, and most of all, for the corporation.

Musings of a VC in NYC, The Declining Power Of The Firm

To call Montana’s Governor Schweitzer a supporter of camelina production is an understatement. He calls it a “renaissance crop,” a “miracle crop,” and “the crop of the future in Montana.”

Running his hands through a bin of seeds, Schweitzer said he was excited about camelina because there is so much left to learn about its cultivation and uses.

“This is where we were in Montana in 1900 with wheat.”

Camelina flourished in Europe about 3,500 years ago and is on the way to becoming a major source of biodiesel on millions of acres of marginal farmland from eastern Washington state to North Dakota [previous post]. Camelina can grow in arid conditions and can produce more oil from its seeds for a lower price.

Roland Piquepaille keeps track of how new technologies are modifying our way of life at Technology Trends and found a new use for Virtual Reality in the lab.

What are paranoid thoughts? How is paranoia studied?

“Paranoid thoughts are often triggered by ambiguous events such as people looking in one’s direction or hearing laughter in a room but it is very difficult to recreate such social interactions. Virtual reality allows us to do just that, to look at how different people interpret exactly the same social situation. It is a uniquely powerful method to detect those liable to misinterpret other people.”

In this King’s College study using Virtual Reality to mimic social interaction, the results showed that 40% of us are paranoid.

Piquepaille reports, “If you don’t know how common are paranoid thoughts, here is an answer. “In one recent survey, 70% of people said that they had, at some time, experienced the feeling that people were deliberately trying to harm or upset them in some way.”

Think about this. If 40% of us are generally paranoid and 70% of us have ‘sensed’ others are attempting to harm us, how does this affect our daily lives, our society, and our political choices? It’s an important matter, very seldom admitted amongst each other, or for that matter admitted to ourselves. Day to day we pay attention to what scares us, but not to fear itself. Our fearful nature is poorly understood yet fuels the greater part of our budget and our human relations.

A short study of James Brown at metaFilter:

One night in the summer of 2001, after he’d slathered her in Vaseline (“He liked you all greased up,” she says. “Like a porkchop”) and wore her out trying to come, he gave up and left the room, and Gloria dozed off. When she woke up, Mr. Brown was standing at the foot of the bed in a full-length mink coat over his bare chest, a black cowboy hat, and silk pajama pants with one leg tucked into a cowboy boot and the other hanging out. He had a shotgun over his shoulder and a white stripe of Noxzema under each eye. “I’m an Indian tonight, baby,” he announced. “C’mon, let’s let ’em have it.” Then he dumped a pickle jar of change on the floor, told her to get a machete, and went out to the garage. He took the Rolls, drove ten miles to Augusta, weaving all over the road, clipping mailboxes, smoking more dope, and screaming about being an Indian. Gloria kept thinking she should flag down a cop, say she’d been kidnapped.

wood s lot points to Barbara Mor

What’s Left, literally, is The Sinister: the Body’s Left Side (Dark Side of the Mother, the Flesh & the Heart): the nagual. This realm which hyperrational males, positioned along all points of the ideological spectrum, have Dextrously (righteously) marked off as profane, errant, forbidden; or have worked to subordinate to some auxiliary category (Index under Politics: & Women). The patriarchal mind, from Bible to Bacon, Marx to Freud, Bookchin to – yes, sorry – Nader, does not escape its Inquisitional fascination with strict daylight dogmatism, which quickly collapses into anal-obsessiveness over correct practice and procedure, ritual observance, the absolute length of beard-hair or number of whip-strokes per minute per breath of Crime: the exact size shape & weight of stones collected fervidly to be used to stone the radical body to its Deserved Death.

When TSA screeners forced a woman to use pliers to remove her nipple rings before she could board a plane, I immediately thought we should all, all of us, purchase genital jewelery to put an end to this era of silly bullies and their thoughtless policies.

The NYTimes reports that 81% of us think the country is going in the wrong direction.

It’s our nation. We steer it.

Photo: Andy Hartmark

John Naughton makes an excellent comparison and notices that on this day

… in 1948, President Truman signed the Marshall Plan, which allocated more than $5 billion in aid for 16 European countries. [That’s upwards of $100 billion in today’s money.] It was an extraordinary act of enlightened self-interest which enabled a democratic, pluralist Europe to arise from the chaos and destruction of 1945. Nobody who was in Germany in 1945 could envisage that a prosperous liberal democracy could be built on such shattered foundations. And yet it was.

And the deliberations within the Truman government (especially the State Department) which led to the Plan provide an instructive comparison with the gibberings of the fanatical ‘war lite’ neo-cons who planned and executed the fiasco in Iraq. Marshall, Acheson, Kennan & Co were serious people.

And to think that — according to the Nobel laureate Joe Stiglitz — Iraq has already cost upwards of three trillion dollars. Ye Gods!

Here’s an update to my previous post about geothermal power, Ultra-deep Power Plants.

Discover Magazine has wrapped a few extra links and is asking an important question.

If we could extract all the geothermal energy that exists underneath the United States to a depth of two miles, it would supply America’s power demands for the next 30,000 years.

Getting at all that energy is not feasible. There are technological and economic impediments. But drawing on just 5 percent of the geothermal wealth would generate enough electricity to meet the needs of 260 million Americans – producing 260,000 megawatts of electric power and reducing coal by one-third. Doable by 2050.

So what is holding us back?

Try to imagine this thrill!

Holding her breath for two minutes, wearing just a wet suit, mask and flippers, free diver Julia Petrik cut through the ice, ­descended into icy cold -2ºC (28ºF) water without an oxygen tank to 25m (82ft), and hitched a ride with a beluga whale.

Captured at Russia’s White Sea by British photographer Dan Burton. [link to Metro story]