Category: interesting

The tongue is a muscle on the floor of the mouth that manipulates [wiki]

There are too many bullies inside our head:

“Advertisers are learning to their horror we’re in an era where any claim can be made in any ad and as a result no one believes anything.”

The Utility That Quit The Chamber:

Peter Darbee, chairman and CEO of California’s Pacific Gas & Electric, on Tuesday, took a very public stand against the US Chamber of Commerce for what he calls “disingenuous attempts to diminish or distort” the facts around global climate change.

To oppose regulation, the US Chamber of Commerce, a lobbying group that represents three million USA businesses, argues that climate change is not a result of human activity.

It’s late and I’m tired and wandering. As I get older I am remembering my friends, and discovering some are gone.

Transportation in Orbit, The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 345, No. 1, 130-142 (1963), George Fox Mott:

Transportation has now no geographical frontiers.

Its role is so vital to modern civilization that it has become more than a service function—it has become a partner of the government, the commerce, and the society which it serves and represents the occupation and livelihood of a large section of the population as well.

Having developed piecemeal, it has been subject to patchwork regulation and is uneven in its performance.

By the nature of the dilemmas facing the industry, transportation administration and co-ordination lag far behind transportation technology. This state is critical today, and a renaissance in transportation has been taking place and is on the verge of great acceleration.

Many leaders in transportation areas are active in planning for and carrying out improvements in transportation policy and operation. Many inequities and operational lags need to be corrected.

Common carriers, the backbone of the system, are operating under financial, political, and manpower difficulties. The rivalry of air and highway carriers has faced the railroads with competition which their heavily regulated quasi-public-utility status has not helped them to meet. Full advantage cannot be taken of technological improvements, due to regulations which are now inequitable or inappropriate or simply unworkable or unwieldy. Labor, from an embattled position at the beginning and during the flush period of transportation expansion, has now become an equal protagonist with management in the transportation system.

Transportation labor and management have not yet reached full co-ordination for total utilization of their resources.

Transportation capital has not been freed of its fetters; costing and pricing have become increasingly unrealistic and inoperative in the market place.

Political pressures now carry equal weight with economic and service factors.

Transport leaders in a pool of experience and knowledge are aware of the imperfections of the system, and many of them have sound plans for replacing dislocation and loss with co-ordination, profit, and the full service efficiency the system is capable of offering.

The last time I visited with George Fox Mott was at the great St. Francis Hotel on Union Square in San Francisco during the early 80s convention of the Democratic Party. He had been USA Inspector General of Allied Government in Korea and Japan after World War II, and later the Director of the American-Korean Foundation from 1952 until 1962. We were both on the board of Monorail.

A Good Boston Fellow who had known in his life every Secretary of Transportation ever put in office he liked to say.

Economists must grasp living.
We will hold them more accountable than thieves.

New approach to macroeconomic modeling by means of jump Markov processes by specifying transition rates appropriately in the backward Chapman-Kolmogorov (master equation); solutions of master equations to obtain aggregate dynamic equations, and fluctuations by solving the associated Fokker-Planck equations.

Modeling and analysis of multi-agent models to investigate such things as herding behavior and return dynamics, i.e., power-laws in share or stock markets; Modeling and analysis of multiple country models by state space time series technique; aggregation of economy with heterogeneous agents by neural network methods; adaptive learning algorithms.

It’s utterly clear now.
We can’t escape each other.

Clinton said to David Letterman:

“People are dying to be asked to do something.”

“Think of some way to make the world a better place.”

Letterman then adds, “I don’t mean to be flip about this, these problems, but they’re mundane. We can overcome this.”

Yo!

Cut energy use in office buildings in half by 2015:

The Real Property Association of Canada, whose members are property investors representing more than $150 billion in real-estate assets, has formally adopted an energy-consumption target for office buildings equal to 20 kilowatt-hours of energy use per square foot of rentable area per year, and they’ve pledged to reach that target by 2015.

“The target represents a reduction of up to one half of today’s energy use in Canadian office buildings by 2015.”

Yup. Because they aren’t worrying.

1. The importance of Bayes’ theorem is that it provides a very precise measure of how much a new piece of evidence should make us change our ideas about the world.
2. Bayes’ theorem provides a yardstick by which we can judge whether we are using new evidence appropriately.
3. Our brain is a Bayesian machine that discovers what is in the world by making predictions and searching for the causes of sensations.
4. Our brain never rests from this endless round of prediction and updating.
5. Inside your head there is an amazing labor saving device.

Crude World: The Violent Twilight of Oil.

Question: What initially got you interested in the story of oil?

Peter Maass: Much of my writing life involved wars, and oil was often mentioned.

An informed book review here, by Robert Rapier.

FCC articulates new USA policy on our Internet:

“Historian John Naughton describes the Internet as an attempt to answer the following question: How do you design a network that is “future proof” — that can support the applications that today’s inventors have not yet dreamed of? The solution was to devise a network of networks that would not be biased in favor of any particular application.

The Internet’s creators didn’t want the network architecture — or any single entity — to pick winners and losers. Because it might pick the wrong ones.

Instead, the Internet’s open architecture pushes decision-making and intelligence to the edge of the network — to end users, to the cloud, to businesses of every size and in every sector of the economy, to creators and speakers across the country and around the globe.

In the words of Tim Berners-Lee, the Internet is a “blank canvas” — allowing anyone to contribute and to innovate without permission.”

Most folks seem to feel Levi Johnston is exploiting fame, a task he wouldn’t achieve alone, but I think he’s sincere; in a huge stew, but not taking the risk of lies.

Me and Mrs. Palin, at Vanity Fair

“After Tripp was born, Sarah would pay more attention to our son than she would to her own baby, Trig. Sarah has a weird sense of humor. When she came home from work, Bristol and I would be holding Trig and Tripp. Sarah would call Trig—who was born with Down syndrome—’my little Down’s baby.’ But I couldn’t believe it when she would come over to us and sometimes say, playing around, ‘No, I don’t want the retarded baby—I want the other one,’ and pick up Tripp. That was just her—even her kids were used to it.”

As a commenter roughly characterizes Levi, as easily pointing to Sarah Palin, “It’s kind of sobering to see so much assassination applied to such little character.”

It’s probably not who you think.

New research using a sample of 24 million individual credit files has found that homeowners with high scores when they apply for a loan are 50 percent more likely to “strategically default” – abruptly and intentionally pull the plug and abandon the mortgage – compared with lower-scoring mortgage borrowers.

Techcrunch:

A growing pool of data suggests that Venture Capital firms at best have little to no impact.

The fact is that VC’s follow innovation, they don’t lead. They go where they smell blood.

Venture capital slows the innovation process.

Michael Masnick at Techdirt mediates a bit.

Just how big is that 160,000 acre Station Fire at Los Angeles?

$1.2 billion …two helipads, two swimming pools and six-foot movie screens in all guest cabins, a mini-submarine and missile-proof windows to combat piracy, plus anti-paparazzi lasers that fire a bolt of light right at the camera’s lens. woot!

Tom Paxton sings “I Am Changing My Name to Fannie Mae”

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=etUq7IY_7Mc&hl=en&fs=1&]

Nassim Taleb:

NT: My whole idea is to lower risk in society by developing a system that can resist human error, rather than one where human error rules. The first step is to make sure that no financial institution is too big to fail. Next, make sure governments don’t favor big companies. Governments should also decrease the role of economists – they’re no more reliable than astrologers, and they do more damage.

Q: Now that you’ve painted such a rosy outlook, do you have any advice on how individuals can guard against losing 40 per cent of their money in this extremely risky world?

NT: My advice is that instead of investing in medium-risk securities, you should put most of your money in very low-risk securities, and a little bit in high-risk securities. Then you might get a good black swan. Also, it’s good to have more than one profession, in case your own profession goes out of style. A Wall Street trader who’s also a belly dancer will do a lot better than a trader who winds up driving a taxi.

What?

Dana Blankenhorn:

With Glenn Beck, I think we’ve got the GOP right where we want it. Let them have the racists, the nativists, the conspiracy theorists, and the religious nuts. They will scare away just about everyone else.

What happens to many athletes and their money is indeed hard to believe.

• By the time they have been retired for two years, 78% of former NFL players have gone bankrupt or are under financial stress because of joblessness or divorce.
• Within five years of retirement, an estimated 60% of former NBA players are broke.
• MLB players have been similarly ruined, 10 in one month.

The presence of a major ideological movement in the United States of America dedicated to the dual propositions that taxes must never go up, and that government expenditures don’t need to relate to government revenue in any real way as long as the Republican Party is in charge simply makes it almost impossible for the country to be governed in a responsible manner.

If we had a different political system, it’s possible that such an ideological movement would marginalize itself, lose elections, and the other guys would run the show responsibly. Maybe. You could at least imagine it happening.

But in our system even a defeated minority gets a ton of influence over policy and becoming completely dogmatic and irrational actually enhances that level of influence.

The Epitaph of Economic Jingoism:

The Nightmare of Christianity …my mother was into all the charismatic “fanatical evangelical” insanity. Her and her church believed that Satan and demons were everywhere in everything.

Obedience is listening attentively,
Obedience will take instructions joyfully,
Obedience heeds wishes of authorities,
Obedience will follow orders instantly.
For when I am busy at my work or play,
And someone calls my name, I’ll answer right away!
I’ll be ready with a smile to go the extra mile
As soon as I can say “Yes, sir!” “Yes ma am!”
Hup, two, three!

“It’s so funny how many people want to help you and love you and counsel you when there is money involved,” he replied.

Artist Jason Hackenwerth has created a portfolio of inflatable works using ordinary party balloons, which resemble menacing deep sea creatures.

Mr Hackenwerth spends up to three days building each piece by inflating the balloons and twisting them together.

His largest sculpture was over 40ft long.

The guy who invented the locomotive:

Stephenson was determined to extend his father’s pioneering work on a national and ultimately global scale, for the benefit of mankind and the working man in particular. He believed that railway development should be comprehensive, benefiting the whole population, not just the privileged few.

“The true and full effect of railways,” he wrote, “would not take place until they were made so cheap in their fares that a poor man could not afford to walk.”

An important question is, where are we on the Laffer curve?

The notion of the Laffer curve has been used to justify all sorts of tax cuts, under the assumption/claim that we are to the right of the maximum, so that cutting taxes will actually increase revenues.

Serious economists generally don’t believe this holds true in the U.S. right now, but the lure of the idea is undeniable: lose weight by eating more ice cream!