Supreme Court crumbles but no one shouts "It's a sign!"

You know I can't help but think that if a couple of left of conservative judges had been appointed to the Supreme Court and bits of the building came falling down then there would be a huge outcry that it was a sign from above that the court and the very core of our country was falling appart. As it happens it seems like it was just an architectural event.

Not that I believe in such things, but hey, in the interests of the Democrats "getting down with religion" maybe they could start seeing signs too. After all, from my recolections of the bible the man upstairs is an equal opportunity provider of signs and visions - it doesn't matter if you're good or bad he'll drop some big hints from the sky to steer homo-dubious in the right direction whenever necessary. This time it just happened to be 170 lbs of Vermont marble....

Urban street climbing

Don't ask me how I found it, but the Urban Street Climbing website reminds me that somewhere there is a photo of me up a very tall lamp post out side my college in Oxford. Although I was somewhat drunk, I do recall it quite vividly and I really don't know how I managed it as lamp posts are tricky buggers to shin up at the best of times. Even worse I seem to recall that having climbed it my erstwhile companion decided that I should do it again and take a bottle of wine with me to swig from for his photo. Sigh, of the joys of a misspent youth.

More recent evidence (see right) shows that I still haven't lost the urge to climb...

Space aliens eh?

Well stone the crows, turns out Bush is secretly building a base on the moon to fight the aliens. Well, according to a former Canadian Minister of Defence and Deputy Prime Minister under Pierre Trudeau he is. Either that or Paul Hellyer has been watching too many re-runs of UFO in his retirement.

Not that I don't believe UFOs could exist. Just that if they did and they were not being benevolant to us then we would surely have heard about it a lot sooner and there wouldn't be a damn thing Bush or anyone could do about it with a moon base or sweet talking diplomacy. Furthermore unlike in "The War of the Worlds" or "Signs" neither E. Coli or a super soaker will help us fight them off. I rather side with the Douglas Adams theory of alien life - if its out there and peaceful then it is politely and deliberately leaving us semi-evolved simians well alone until we evolve into something more worthwhile talking too, if its out there and not then it'll turn up on our door (or in our sky) and zap us to oblivion Vogon style. In fact you could probably make a good argument that Vogon diplomacy would be a close relative of Bush diplomacy, itself a close relative of Gunboat Diplomacy and shoot first, ask questions later.

Socksmas

I'm getting a kick reading the blog of Alex Tew who started a web site called Million Dollar Homepage. It's an interesting story, this guy is British, 21, just heading off to university and has an idea of how to make some money. He starts a web site with a 1,000 by 1,000 image and sells pixel space at $1 per pixel as advertising. The image is sold off in 10x10 pixel blocks at $1 per pixel so $100 per block. Do the math, he's got to sell 10,000 blocks to sell all of the image space, but when he has that's a cool $1,000,000 he's made.

This was all back in August - he launched the site on August 26th. To date he's sold 683,400 pixels and his web site is getting 200,000 unique visitors per week. His site is listed in Alexa's top 1,000 web sites on the net and Alex has been interviewed across the world and written up by the BBC, the Guardian, The Times (UK), and now the Wall Street Journal. More to the point his advertisers actually seem very happy with their investments - they are getting lots of hits.

But if you do the math something doesn't quite ad up. If he's sold 600,000+ pixels and there's 200,000 unique vistors per week that means only 33 unique vistors per 100 pixel block per week. Sure visitors will click on more than one ad per visit (I clicked on about a half dozen out of curiosity) but that doesn't really amount to thousands of hits per week, let alone per day. So either some ads are getting much more traffic than the average (which given the variation and size and prominence may be quite try) or things are not quite as they seem.

Interestingly this is an idea where execution wasn't really that important - his site works and is simple but its not very automated and took him and his friends a lot of effort to maintain - some of its many immitators are far more automated. This idea was all about being the first and getting publicity as the first. Its also probably going to spawn many studies of how a simple idea grows and explodes on the Internet. From its early stage with word of mouth publicity to mass press coverage.

I'm sure he will eventually sell all 1,000,000 pixels. After that then what? Well Alex says the site will be alive for 5 years minimum. I'll be interested to see how his web site traffic holds up, and just what new ideas he comes up with. Personally when the site is full he should start letting people trade the pixels and take a percentage of each trade. Even if people are selling out for a lower price he'll still make money. But perhaps he wants to keep the million dollar homepage the same, as a monument to his idea and phenomenally good timing and good fortune (pun intended).

Oh, and the title of this blog entry - well if you read Alex's blog you'll see he is more than a little obsessed with socks. He keeps on talking about how many socks he'll be able to buy with all that cash. Mmmmm socks. Sounds rather like Baldrick and his turnip obsession.

For the love of amateurs

Via Napsterization I am reminded that the latin root of "amateur" is "love" and that bascially the modern interpretation of amateur is more often a denegration of work or a person compared to the supposed exalted status of "professional". The assumption is that an amateur is unpaid and hence no good at what they do, and that a profesison is paid and hence must be good at what they do. The original meaning was of course that an amateur toils away for the love of what they do, not for the money.

This reminds me of my basic problem with sports these days - "professionals". Commercialization of everything from major league to the Olympics has created a generation of sports people who are anything but professional and primarily driven by the money versus love of the sport. Do you think an amateur sports person would be inclinded to take steroids for the love of their choosen sport?

But this is not about sport, its about everything we do. For many a job is just an means to an end - money and money is survival. To be paid to do something we love is a luxury not enjoyed by the vast majority of workers, and to be paid to do something has no guarantee we are good at it - hence the modern problem with liability insurance in America. Maybe if more people were actually doing what they loved, taking pride in what they do and getting paid for it there would be less need for expensive liability insurance in the first place. So ask yourself this, in the spirit of the definition, wouldn't it be better to be an amateur who happens to get paid for doing what they love, vs. a professional who just loves the money but not what they do?

Some anti-peak oil arguments

The Alternet peak oil article by Matthew Simmons I cited in the last post got some comments that peak oil theory is basically baloney. It turns out there is an active community that believes Simmons is a fraud, a stooge for Bush, and a lackey for the oil industry helping to driving up oil prices by allowing them to keep prices high. Remember the Enron scam in California? Who doesn't (don't worry, it'll probably happen all over again once we've forgotten). All created by a huge artificial shortage.

Most of the arguments say that there are vast new discoveries of new reserves being made all the time - specifically 54 billion barrels under the Gulf of Mexico - and that there are vast largely untapped (but expensive to extract) reserves in Venzuela and Canada. As prices get higher its a sure thing that even more of those reserves will come on line. In fact I've recently seen the evidence of the oil boom in Calgary first hand - its started already.

For some counter-spin and counter-counter-spin on the peak oil theory read: Does "Peak Oil" Spell Death for the Suburbs? by Randal O'Toole (himself a member of the Cato Institute), "The Myth of Peak Oil", Free Market News Network editorial, "Oil Is NOT A Fossil Fuel - It Is Abiotic, Is 'Peak Oil' A Put On?", "Abiotic Oil: Science or Politics?"and almost anything that shows up when you Google Peak Oil Scam.

If anyone can sort it all out let me know - or just add your own comments below.

Step right up! Oil 10¢ a cup!

Wow, only 10¢ a cup! I'll have some of that - in fact gallons and gallons of it!

Yes put like that oil does seem cheap, in fact way cheaper than bottled water, or soda or pretty much anything else you buy by the cup. But oil is way more expensive than that... right? Actually no. A barrel contains 42 gallons which is 336 pints or 672 cups. So when oil at $67.2 dollars a barrel (which is actually more than it is right now) that's just 10¢ per cup! Of that about 50% is refinable to gasoline for your vehicles, but even so, you can see why in many respects oil could be condsidered cheap, real cheap at current prices. Even a US pump price of $3 a gallon of gas is still only 18.75¢ a cup which considering that 50% figure for gas per barrel means really Americans are actually getting a very reasonable deal.

So when pundits like Matthew Simmons start on about peak oil and tell you "Oil will be $200 a gallon by 2010" you should actually stop and think what that is per cup - still less than 30¢ a cup, or 59¢ per pint. Never mind that by that time your gas at the pump will most likely be $9.50 a gallon, considering the utility of gasoline you're still getting a fantastic deal.

However there's part of the story that even Simmons usually ommits - the intagible costs of our current oil habit, all those externalities that the oil companies force on us and our government. To name a few:

• the subsidy of a road infrastructure
• the direct subsidies to oil companies in the form of tax breaks
• the cost of fighting wars to defend our oil and our oil producing friends
• the cost of over 40,000 dead in car wrecks (a million per year worldwide)
• the cost of pollution and CO2 emissions caused by burning oil
• the intangible cost of irrevocable plunding of resources that once gone are gone forever (or at least until we all rot down to oil - if you believe oil is produced that way).

I haven't seen a figure for these but my guess is that even conservatively they at least double the actual price of oil. But you know its still cheap at twice the price.

Maybe there is hope after all

I have to say the news of the pro-intelligent design school board being ousted, or should I say routed, in Pennsylvania is some of the first good news I've heard in a while (that and the failure of most of Arnold's propositions)

Don't get me wrong, I actually think its valid to educate people about potential weaknesses or gaps in the evolutionary theory, or indeed any theory. Budding scientists do need to be taught that not everything we know today is based on incontrovertable evidence, and even that which appears to be such, say the Newtonian theory of everything, might suddenly be invalidated over night. Of course Newtonian theory is still an extremely good approximation for most day to day calculations where quantum effects rear their head, but it does show that reality is not always as it seems.

But if you postulate "intelligent design" as an alternative to evolutionary theory then it deserves the same scientific rigour in its critique, i.e. that there is not one iota of scientific evidence for ID. While ID might be useful to some as a day to day approximation of reality - the explanation for our existance has no bearing on day to day life for many (although it should) - it has no scientific utility and shouldn't be taught in a science class as a scientific theory.

It's the stupid people stupid

Sigh

As Ripley once said, "Did IQs just drop sharply while I was away?". Now I know the answer, yes they did. According to a recent study in my home country, the United Kingdom, one in three kids didn't know chips (fries) are made from potatoes. Bless the little crackers, some of them even thought chips (that's fries to you American's) were from eggs, flour or apples, some even some thought they were made "mosty of fat". Well I guess that last one isn't exactly far from the truth since your average grease laden chip probably isn't far off being mostly fat.

As loyal reader Charlster would point out, what hope is there for us now, if kids don't even know what fries are made from? If the human race continues at this rate in a few generations we'll all end up being out smarted by just a slightly above average IQ pigeon (if the bird flue doesn't get them all first).

Memories #1

I remember standing on our porch in the depths of winter and my father pointing out a "falling star" in the sky. I was very young and as I watched it move through the sky it really bothered me, "What happens if it falls on us?" I wondered.

All grown up I now know it wasn't a "falling" or "shooting" star which are caused by meteorites burning up (hopefully) in the upper atmosphere. It was almost certainly satellite since meteorites, even slow moving ones, don't stay up in the sky long enough for someone to call you to the outside and show it to you. In fact on reflection I wonder if I remember this event clearly - my father clearly new the difference between a satellite and a meteorite in the sky. Perhaps he told me it was a satellite and explained it wasn't a "falling star" and I later fretted about the existence of falling stars until I knew better myself.

Of course the reality is that while meteorites are not stars, sometimes they do reach the earth, and as such might fall on us. While most of the earth's surface is ocean, and most of the ground is uninhabited there have been many cases of property damage by meteorites reaching terra firma. So far I haven't heard of anyone being killed by a meteorite though I'll be willing to bet it has happened.

So in a twisted kind of way, as a bright and starry eyed kid, I was right to worry about falling stars landing on me!