Lazy Liar

Mitt Romney: Lazy liar
What’s most surprising about Republican distortions is how easily they’re disproved
http://www.salon.com/2012/07/22/mitt_romney_lazy_liar/

I can think of no better title, so plagiarized. I find the article interesting reading and further incentive to vote against him. Some of the early comments are also interesting (they got useless pretty quickly, though). With all this information available it seems people are even less likely to investigate and even more likely to believe provable lies. However, there can be a price and unless Obama really pisses me off betwixt now and November (something that is certainly possible!), Romney’s idiot lies has cost him a vote because until fairly recently I was intent on sitting on the side lines. I have talked with a few other friends who had been staunch Republican-types until fairly recently and they are also starting to drift into the ‘vote against’ camp (I haven’t found any friends who can do more than support Obama as the lesser of evils). I think that I am probably not alone and crap like the NAACP speech is costing votes because it is motivating people who otherwise would not vote to vote for Obama. However, there are so many idiots that desperately want to believe the GOP lies that I still expect a very close race and would be shocked if there was any sort of landslide one way or another.

A great use for eminent domain

From an Unlikely Source, a Serious Challenge to Wall Street
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/from-an-unlikely-source-a-serious-challenge-to-wall-street-20120720

I like this idea _a lot_! I am generally not a fan of using eminent domain for anything other than public utilities or the equivalent and I have a strong moral objection to seizing property to turn over to developers. However, since our Great Supreme Court has weight in and said it is totally OK for localities to seize properties and turn them over to developers, I see it hard to justify a legal objection to localities seizing blighted communities via wholesale purchase of loan instruments then ‘turning those properties over’ to the current owners. Like Matt says, it is a great way to stick it to Wall Street and the core problem in our economic downturn is that the massive losses due to the loss of home values is not being recognized on the books (i.e., written down). This approach (I sure hope it is successful, but you can be positive that Wall Street will use any means at its disposal (including lots that are illegal!) to keep it from happening) is a fabulous way to go about it. It should get full support (but almost surely won’t) by the Tea Party and all the other conservatives who insist on non-Federal solutions.

I will watch this with interest as even if it gets torpedoed, the methods that Wall Street would use to destroy it will be instructive.

Slow week

Just not a lot motivating me to comment this week. Not that there aren’t things that get me worked up, or make me thoughtful, just nothing that I feel the need to comment on. Instead I will just jot down some thoughts on random topics…

This morning I discussed with a friend my thoughts on the latest mass murder our society has had to live with and how I had avoided reading the details because that is exactly what the perpetrator wants. These people want attention, by giving them attention we are egging on the ones that are still straddling the fence. Clearly ignoring what happened won’t have any impact on the event that already happened, but I do believe minimizing the attention would have a beneficial impact going forward. Of course, my decision to ignore it won’t change anything, Americans seem to love reading about this sort of stuff, so naturally it will be all over the place.

Does anyone else think Zimmerman is a sociopath? The death of Martin was “God’s will”? I doubt he did himself any favors when this finally gets to trial, but the tiny shreds of sympathy I had for him evaporated with that comment. Everything I have read makes it plain to me that Zimmerman orchestrated the confrontation and based on my reading of the silly-assed stand-your-ground-law, Martin had more right to attack Zimmerman (if that is what happened) than Zimmerman had to shoot Martin. Also, Zimmerman’s conduct regarding the bail money indicates that he is someone who is quite willing to do whatever he pleases, society be damned, further cementing my view that he is a sociopath.

Ann Romney and her ‘you people’ crack cracks me up. Here is someone so totally out of touch with the majority it is comical, yet half the nation supports her husband. I can’t decide if it is an American thing or a Human thing, but Americans sure as hell are dumb. Not that the Democrats haven’t pulled of some whopping lies, but the score is plainly tilted against the GOP and their standard bearers. I am growing convinced that our nation will be worse under Romney (and I expect it to be really bad under Obama, or Bush’s fourth term) and will be motivated to vote _against_ him come this fall.

Poor Cadel Evans, yesterday he lost even more time and while still in the top 10, his chances of a podium slot rest on several people crashing out or having incredible bonks on the time trial tomorrow. Clearly the better man is winning (better men; Froome seems clear that he could be on the top step if that is how the team had been organized), though I had such high hopes for Cadel at the beginning.

How about that Schleck brother? So many people lie about doping and later confess that it is hard to not be cynical, but the idea that he would take something like a diuretic that can’t possibly benefit him and that he knows will be discovered doesn’t make any sense. Just like when Landis was caught regarding testosterone, it just doesn’t make sense that anyone would use something like that to enhance their performance (though testosterone is reputed to help with recovery it is hard to imagine mountain climbers risking putting on additional muscle; only sprinters benefit with the increased muscle mass).

A few days ago I read an interesting report on the WSJ or Fox that the US had seen a net reduction in CO2 emissions, largely due to the switch to natural gas. The article was so clearly out to make political points that I didn’t finish reading it and there was all sorts of Obama bashing (amazing that these people have no cognitive dissonance when they complain about Obama killing coal through the promotion of natural gas while at the same time complaining that he is against fossil fuels (while OK-ing that pipeline from the Canadian tar sands)). However, it seems the combination of the crashed economy and switch to gas (something, btw, which was going to drive coal out of business anyway as the economics of gas clearly favor coal, by a long shot) has done with the Kyoto protocol couldn’t do. Naturally I suspect that as our economy picks up (hopefully sooner rather than later, but if Romney gets elected I am sure it will be later, perhaps way later) our CO2 emissions will pick up as well. I feel confident that my duckweed approach will be successful, but I am in a position where I need to self-fund, and that rate is so slow it might be 5 years or longer before I can have any impact.

I doubt I have enough reader(s) for this plea to have any effect, but I am in the job market. The biggest problem is the ‘golden handcuffs’ of the intelligence community paycheck (except for the finance industry I am pretty much at a 20% premium to the top end of the commercial market). We have, rather foolishly in retrospect, allowed our expenses to grow to match our income, though the original intent of our second house was to be our only house and events overcame, so I am rather inflexible in the pay area. The team I am on now, a year ago last April, was funded at 16 FTEs (full-time equivalents, though we had only 14 on our team at that time), then, when I was on vacation naturally, the powers-that-be announced that they were cutting the team down to two. Suddenly there was a flood of identically skilled people looking for identical jobs and the rats abandoned ship so fast I quickly found myself as one of the two left standing. I wasn’t wild about going from an active team doing development (though most of the work was maintenance, at least there was some refactoring) to basically accepting patches and testing them, but I have been told by several people that the agency does stuff like this a lot and in a couple of years they will very likely ramp the project back up. I felt that it would be a good idea if I stuck with the project to help transition any new team, so settled in the position even though it wasn’t very exciting. However, about a month ago my team lead told me there was talk of cutting our ‘group’ down to just one person. Due to various circumstances I felt it was best not to angle for that remaining position, so am in the job market. If anyone is interested, here is my resume:

http://sol-biotech.com/resume.htm

My LinkedIn page:

http://www.linkedin.com/in/keithoxenrider

and my attempt at giving context to my rather eclectic background:

http://sol-biotech.com/KOITBio.html

The weather looks much cooler this weekend so hopefully we can get some work accomplished on the construction. So painfully slow. I have been working on detailed design for cooling our greenhouse. It sure sounds silly on the surface, but by pumping the waste heat into the pool the energetics seem to be very favorable and the radiation from the pool (about 1/4 the surface area of the building) should help minimize heating at night, so I am hopeful that experience will demonstrate that the idea wasn’t crazy after all. I read an article a while ago that in some northern European country (where the summers are much cooler on average than they are here) researchers were able to show that by eliminating venting (thus keeping humidity and CO2 levels higher) they were able to get yields high enough to justify the expense of the cooling. I don’t recall where I saved that article so can’t be certain they were using water to absorb the waste heat or if they were using that waste heat to warm the houses at night, but I am going to go with the idea because my wife wants a pool environment that is more conductive to people so the cooling is a bit dual purpose.

I wish all my reader(s) a great weekend!

Slow day

Not much is grabbing me today, though I will offer up a couple of articles that might interest my regular reader(s). The first is by good old Matt and his shouting into a vacuum on the LIBOR scandal. More interesting to me, though, was the majority of the article that focused on the rewriting of history that is allowed when organizations (and people) are allowed to promulgate the lie that they did nothing wrong and simply agreed to a massive (stock holder financed!) fine just to get the lawyers off their backs:

More on LIBOR: Plus, Spitzer takes on Bartiromo in Japanese Monster-Movie Epic
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/more-on-libor-plus-spitzer-takes-on-bartiromo-in-japanese-monster-movie-epic-20120717

The second is another shouter-into-vaccum, Glenn, on his complaints about what passes as journalism now in the US:

Inept stenographers
Journalists’ excuses for their bad behavior — it’s necessary to get quotes — are both fictitious and irrelevant
http://www.salon.com/2012/07/17/inept_stenographers/

Which is worse? Government propaganda that everyone knows is such or government propaganda that is disguised as adversarial journalism? I had a rather impassioned conversation last Saturday with a good friend who gets all her information from the Washington Post and TV, though she does get a couple of channels that give her some less-biased news via Russia, BBC, Al Jazeera, etc. She found it hard to believe (and she is not a simple believer in government, she lived through Nazi Germany) that there was so much journalist-sanction lying going on. I am trying to convince her to join the new century and get web-enabled, but after our conversation she seemed to be considering the ‘ignorance is bliss’ calculus, so I am not sure I can get her to embrace the blogosphere.

Yesterday I commented on this article:

Selling out American democracy
The 2012 election is the perfect time for the wealthy to sway an election
http://www.salon.com/2012/07/16/the_selling_of_american_democracy/

I managed to get in first, as ‘mitakeet’. My post was quite depressed, but I checked back from time to time and it seems my depression is shared by the other posters as well. Quite a sad commentary, eh?

Is cancer contagious?

Catching a Cancer
Viral culprits may explain a host of tumors with as-yet unknown triggers
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/feature/id/342223/title/Catching_a_Cancer

This is really interesting to me as it helps explain a lot of observed information. I have know that certain viruses unambiguously cause certain cancers, but up to this point those cases seemed to be the exception, now it seems there is evidence that it may be the rule. If we could develop a really cheap and fast way to sequence random DNA then we could start to accumulate high quality statistical information that could direct research efforts. Right now obtaining that sort of detailed information is so expensive and time consuming that for all practical purposes we might as well have none. You can’t do effective population studies without having detailed information on large segments of a populations, the best that can be gleaned is a shadowy image of what might be and the poor definition leaves researchers with little more than guesses.

Presuming we don’t blow ourselves back into the stone age (though the US is well on its own way to that end) I strongly believe that we are just a few decades away from some amazing breakthroughs in medicine and still hold on to the thought that my generation is just young enough to take advantage of longevity treatments such that we could be the first generation to have the chance to live forever.

Of course, I could just be full of wishful thinking (or full of something else ;-))

A reentry shield?

Moon patterns explained
Electric fields enveloping magnetic bubbles create lunar swirls
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/342189/title/Moon_patterns_explained

This article makes me think that some sort of shield against high energy particles might be practical, though it is hard to judge the weight at this point. As I briefly discussed earlier, being able to block high-energy radiation (largely charged particles from the sun) is critical to the success of any long-term presence in space and this sounds like it might be a first small step in that direction. I have read about the idea of forming a plasma shield to protect against the heat of reentry, but don’t recall seeing if there was anything practical derived from that effort. The experiment described in this article shows the potential power of just a small magnetic field, so it gives me some hope.

Romney as disaster

Romney’s ‘Free Stuff’ Speech Is a New Low
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/romneys-free-stuff-speech-is-a-new-low-20120713

I saw part of Romney’s speech to the NAACP the other day and was just floored at the level of idiocy. It was totally clear and unambiguous to me that his only interest in doing the speech was to get booed so that he could use that to convince his base that he isn’t pandering. Boy, did he do that! Since I don’t count myself as among his base, that stunt has gone a very long way to motivating me to vote for Obama just to keep that idiot out of office. Pretty soon I might start evangelizing for Obama as the lesser of two evils and I really think Obama is quite evil!

Yes, it is frustrating to see idiot politicians flip flopping (‘pivoting’, I believe, is the term they use) and sucking up to the center once they have spent months sucking up to the extremes of their party, but the audacity to go in front of a group of people and insult them just to score points with your extreme wingnuts is a clear sign that the one thing we can absolutely count on is that Romney will accelerate the middle-class rape and pillage that Bush Jr and Obama have been engaged in these last 12 years. I see not a single shred of interest in the common good from this blowhard and while I see only tiny shreds of interest in the common good coming from our current Great President, at least he makes mouth noises from time to time about preserving parts of our tattered social safety net.

I will hold off advocating for Obama, just yet, but much like I started to think that our only hope for salvation lay with that idiot Ron Paul, I am starting to think that it will matter which Constitutional shredding, in-the-pocket-of-Wall-Street, middle-class terrorizing, pathological liar we elect and will have to support Obama as much as I detest his policies and actions. If I follow through it will represent an overturning of a lifetime’s support for Republicans, but my plan of simply sitting on the side lines for this election looks like an even worse losing strategy than voting for our current idiot in chief.

BTW, as a bit of a twofer, Jared Bernstein has an interesting post over on On The Economy that shows that the stimulus, contrary to the blather from the GOP, is documented to have softened the effects of the recession and more than likely kept it from becoming a depression: Against the Tide: Offsetting Income Losses in the Great Recession.

New archeological evidence

Native Americans arrived to find natives already there, fossil poo shows
Ancient darts also found in possible prehistoric pub
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/07/13/clovis_not_first_says_paisley_caves_excrement/

The Register takes a rather excessively light hearted approach to reporting, but at least they do report on some interesting things. I have followed the research on early humans in the Americas with interest and there are quite a few ‘wild’ theories that are starting to develop some clear evidence. It is well known (among researchers) that the Vikings almost certainly visited North America, and quite plausibly settled, centuries before Columbus ‘discovered’ the Americas. Clearly conventional wisdom is not necessarily related to truth, so investigation is critical to anything meaningful. I do believe that, as Carl Sagan once said, extraordinary claims require extra ordinary evidence, but it seems to me that this evidence is now present. There should be a period where people can reevaluate a bunch of past anomalous results and see if they don’t make more sense when one considers the newer paradigm.

Which came first?

Computer Simulation Cracks Chicken-Egg Puzzle
New tech reveals how a protein kickstarts the formation of calcium carbonate particles.
http://news.discovery.com/tech/computer-simulation-cracks-chicken-egg-puzzle.html

I have always thought it had to be the chicken that came first because the egg can’t lay itself while it is plausible for a chicken-like animal that wasn’t hatched from an egg to lay one.

What is also interesting to me is the self-assembled nature of the shell formation. One of the goals of biomimetic materials is to be able to build them a molecule at a time and doing so is much easier if nature can demo a working system for us.

In case you are interested, this appears to be the scientific citation:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22531977

Get ready to duck!

Sun Fires X-ray Shot at Earth, CME on the Way
http://news.discovery.com/space/sun-blasts-x-class-flare-right-at-earth-120712.html

This probably won’t matter, I believe the CME (coronal mass ejection) is such that other than auroras where won’t be much impact, but I thought it might interest a few of my reader(s). This is the biggest thing that makes human exploration of the solar system so problematic. With the Earth’s huge magnetic field and atmosphere protecting us, we can pretty much ignore such events, even with our highly electronics dependent society. However, if you are out in some tin can floating about in between the planets, that is a totally different story and you could easily become dead in just a few hours if you get smacked by one of these things. They will have to develop some form of effective shielding (recall that everything lifted by NASA out of our gravity well costs on the order of $10,000 a pound) before we can seriously expect to get a real presence in space (the space station is a joke).