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!

People, corporations, what's the difference?

Here's a technology story that belongs on this blog. Coursey believes that prosecuting all people involved in corporate fraud, rather than just the top guys will help stamp it out. Big fines and taking out the top executives just doesn't work. While it may be a fine idea I think he has forgotten about corporate personhood and its death grip on modern society. Corporations just wont stand for it as it weakens their viability, people just wouldn't want to work for a corporation if they thought they could be liable for every single mistake they or the corporation makes in day to day business. The "I was just following orders" argument will be used. People will not and cannot be expected to know about the legality of everything they are told to do.

Even if you can single out all those individuals who were demonstrably responsible and culpable in some corporate fraud, the reality is that corporations have this funny way of making it worth people's while to do anyway. The benefit nearly always outwieghs the risk to both the corporation and the individuals. The risk of being caught, being fined, being thrown in jail are just the cost of doing business. Dodgy doings in businesses attract dodgy dealers with questionable ethics and those with squeaky clean ethics will just go elsewhere.

Predictably I belief the real solution is to abolish corporate personhood, and let government treat incorporation as a privilege, not a right. This will give the government sufficient power to investigate and punish corporations, with the ultimate threat of revoking their corporate charter. There are good many people behind the idea of a "three strikes" law for corporate fraud, the problem is almost every major US corporation would have to have its corporate charter revoked at the moment. But going forward, it might prompt some alternate thinking when the executives are next contemplating fraud. It would give shareholders the ultimate incentive to pay attention to who is running their company and vote for executives with squeaky clean ethics and a clean pasts to ensure their corporation doesn't sent to the firing squad for corporate fraud.

Hey George, here's another disaster for you to botch...

2004 Flu vaccine shortage - "it was the British who let us down"

2005 Katrina disaster - "nobody told us it would be that big or hit New Orleans!"

200? The Great Bird Flu Epidemic - "we didn't have enough warning"

The reality is there was plenty of notice in each of these cases. Of course the Bird Flu Epidemic hasn't hit the USA yet, but with global trade and travel its only a matter of time before avian flu does reach us. Then its only a matter of time before a strain appears that affects humans. If the last global flu epidemic was anything to go by it wont be pretty.

But will America be ready? Of course not, we're too busy fighting a futile war in a foreign country who's impact on American safety is and always was, infinitesimal compared to a flu epdiemic. Meanwhile our Homeland Security guys are out to lunch trying to bolt the doors against terrorists while the real great threats to human life in this country are all around us, every day - the air we breath.

Just think of the economic impact of a couple of cows with mad disease - hundreds of millions, if not billions in lost beef sales. And how about the impact of SARS on the airline industry just a few years ago? Now think of the impact when everyone is too afraid to go outside, to shop, work or play, for fear of getting bird flu from their neighbors? Better start stockpiling those 3M face masks and hand sanitizers!

If we get any response from the government when the shit hits the fan I'm betting it'll be something like Tom Ridge's "duct tape and plastic sheeting" defence against terrorists. Whatever way it goes, I guess 3M will make a fortune...

Condemnation nation

Browsing magazines in Barnes & Noble the other day I noticed there was an article on eminent domain in the October issue of Harper's Magazine. So I sat down and read it (hmmm, should have found a couch) and I have to say I was surprised over the angle it took. Apparently, so it says, it was all the liberal judges who supported the recent Supreme Court ruling on eminent domain. Furthermore despite all the ho-ha from across the board, the democrats pretty remained silent on the issue. In fact it was the Republican controlled states that all rushed to pass state specific laws limiting the extent to which eminent domain could be applied (as the ruling allowed).

I guess I hadn't been following the case well, and just assumed this would be popular with wealthy Republicans who support the mega-retailers and developers that love eminent domain like an old and wealthy relative. However Harper's (and I have to admit I haven't divined the political affiliation of Harper's yet) clearly states that its the liberals and not the libertarians who love eminent domain and the more broadly it can be applied "for the public good" the better. Dis-information? Well perhaps this is just an indication that the "liberal" democrats are actually not so liberal at all. More likely its that their definition of liberal has strained itself too far in the direction of socialist. I can't personally name a single friend, even those who might consider themselves "liberal", or merely left of Bush, who thinks the ruling was a good one, or that cities should be able to cease property purely on the basis of earning more tax dollars.

As the Harper's article points out, there are serious doubts that even well considered eminent domain land grabs are for the better. In this decade they are seldom used to convert blighted land to productive real estate, and mostly to convert diversely populated land to monoculture big box stores. Diversity of land use can endure all kinds of attrition and remain vital. Whereas we all know that monocultures are highly susceptible to being wiped out by a pox - a single bad quarter, a slash-and-burn takeover, or a single crooked CEO or CFO.

The result its an empty big box and underutilized, non-tax yielding land and property. Indeed, as my local neighborhood bears witness, empty real-estate is much coverted by some property developers as it is a very hand tax right-off. In the short term by inflating its "market value" its value as a tax right-off can actually exceed its value as leased property. Hence we spend five years surrounded by mostly empty store fronts because a big developer could care less about unutilized retail space, something highly unlikely if the same property was in the hands of small property owners.

Terrorists, insurgents, freedom fighters or plain old vandals?

In France Les dégonflés are going around deflating the tires of SUVs and smearing them with mud. Fortunately for them they are not acting in the USA where congress is considering branding such things as full on acts of terrorism, as opposed to good old-fashioned vandalism which is what they really are. In France Les dégonflés have to endure little more than hate mail, but they also get a lot of fan mail.

All Quiet on the Miers front

An interesting opinion on Miers is voiced in The Miers Nomination: Avoiding Advice and Consent. Discrediting current claims about why Miers is unsuitable, if focusing on her lack of written record of her legal opinions. It gives three possible explanations of why that might be, all of which, it says, are grounds for vetoing Miers as a Supreme Court candidate.

#1 for the Iraq Flag

I have two blogs, this and another with a similar name focused on technology (because I believe in separation of politics and technology). It turns out both a getting quite a lot of traffic every day due to images that they are hosting. The other blog has an image of a person driving a very fast car, this one has an image of the Iraq flag. Google for "Iraq flag" and then click"images" and there is Long Dark Tea-Time. I originally put the image online in reference to a different version I created - with a small cross for every Iraqi civilian death that had occured during the American occupation to that date.

Of course the figure of 15,000 Iraqi dead was an estimate, and the image just a token effort to try and show the magnitude of the crisis, but I wanted to try and make some statement no matter how feeble. At that time (September 2004) the civilian death toll was conservatively estimated at 15,000 but now it stands at almost 30,000. For a country of twenty-something million people that's a very high figure, more than one in a thousand. It probably means that one in eight people will know someone who has died since the invasion and occupation, and that everyone will know a handful of people who know someone that died. That's really not a good place to be if you're an American in occupied Iraq.

On my other blog I modified the popular fast car image to include my blog URL, its driven a lot of hits it's way. But I'm not going to do anything so crass with the Iraq flag image. I am more than happy to serve the hundreds of downloads that image gets every day.

Uneasy about Miers?

Personally I'm shocked by all the stories like Conservatives uneasy about Miers, many of which seem to eminate from the press themselves. It seems to me all this is a big fuss to make out that Miers would make a really liberal Supreme Court judge. Where are all the "Democrats uneasy about Miers" stories? Or how about cries of outrage about the nepotism - "Supreme Court Judge wanted, no experience necessary, cronies need only apply" ???

Frankly I'm dismayed that the democrats are keeping such a low profile on this one, like they've given in already. While they roasted Roberts on the abortion issue, it seems like this is just not an issue anyone will going to pester Miers with too much, because? Because she's a woman and we have to be thankful for Bush picking a woman? Do they think that only men oppose right to choose?

My first picket line experience

Once in a while something in life just goes differently and you wonder "Is reality on the blink again?". This happened to me yesterday when I called to take my aging Honda in for service. Since I purchased the car I've been taking it to one dealership in Berkeley called Jim Doten. They weren't the place I actually bought it at but I've always serviced my car there, although admittedly being 11 years old it more often goes to an oil-changer type place these days.

So I pick up the phone to ask for an appointment and instead of saying "How about two weeks from now?" they ask, "How soon would you like to come in?". "Well what's the earliest you can fit me in?", I ask. "How about tomorrow at 10am... no, make that 9:30am" they say. At this point the word "Blimey!" springs to my mind. You see Jim Doten is a very popular garage, has been around for years and before they made appointments you'd sit in a long line at 7am to get your car in there. But I wasn't going to complain, and assuming myself the beneficiary of a cancellation I took the appointment.

So I drive to Jim Doten Honda and approach it from the back so I'm on the same side of the street as the shop entrance. Doing so I completely miss seeing the front of the dealership. As I get near the entrance I see a bunch of people sitting by the entrance with some chairs and think "Oh, they must have some people working out their to take your car details" (instead of doing inside). Then I get closer and I see they are actually picketers holding signs saying "On Strike". They start waving at me and I look in the garage - its empty except for a single car. So I slow down, open the window smiling and a woman says "You're smiling like you're going to cross the picket line, please don't", and so I get the scoop.

It turns out that Jim Doten isn't Jim Doten anymore. The business, owned by the Doten family for 30 years was sold back in June to Stephen Beinke who renamed it Berkeley Honda and then proceeded to lay off all the staff and interview them all for their jobs again. For employees with an average of 15 years of seniority it was quite a slap in the face. It turns out that 50% of the 30 union staff at Jim Doten were not offered jobs, including the local IAM shop steward. Along with wage cuts, cancellation of defined benefits pension plan, changes to the health care plan, and an influx of new non-Honda certified employees the place became a very unhappy work place - the remaining union workers went on strike and picketing started. Even the Berkeley City council passed a resolution urging Berkeley residents to boycott the dealership until the new owner negotiated with the union. It even offered to mediate between the two sides but so far the new owners have not stepped up to the table.

Needless to say, although I really wanted to get my car serviced today I wasn't going to cross the picket line, and the only reason I made the schlep to Berkeley in the first place was because Jim Doten had always been such a nice and friendly place. As I left I pointed out to the picketer that she was wrong about me, I didn't cross the line. In fact I was smiling because I'd just realized why I had been able to get my car in for service the very next day and that reality wasn't on the blink. There are some people who are really perceptive about that kind of thing, and might have asked while still on the phone what the blazes was wrong - next time reality seems to be going off the rails I think I'll pause a bit longer before carrying on assuming all is well.

I'll huff and I'll puff

This article pretty much proves my point - buildings in hurricane prone areas should be built to better standards. As it turns out just building to current codes would have been a great start. I had previously heard stories that houses built by Habitat for Humanity do much better when hit by tornadoes than others. The reason was their amateur builders used far more nails that code requires, just to be on the safe side, whereas professional builders will cut costs and use at least the bare minimum of nails, if not less.

Mmmmmm mmmmmad diplomats

Well US diplomats may be getting mad about Japan banning US beef, but it's almost certainly just US cows that have a right to get mad about anything. The state department is using smoke and mirrors by claiming the tiny Japanese herd has ten times as many mad cow cases as all of the US herd. What it fails to emphasize is that Japan tests every single cow but the US only tests a tiny fraction.

If you read anything about factory farming in the US you'll find they still feed cow bits like blood to other cows, or other cow bits to pigs and chicken that are then fed to cows again. Furthermore many studies have shown that the stun guns used on cows basically liquify the brain and result in brain bits through the entire body of the cow after slaughter - including the muscle which is what most of us end up throwing on the BBQ. The only way to be safe these days is to eat beef from farms that never had BSE and never use any animal products to feed their cows.

I'm not going to bother giving links, just Google "mad cow usa" and you'll find hundreds of them. Do you think the Japanese thought about doing that? Maybe they even read the book "Mad cow USA" ???

The main reason I'm particularly indignant about this is because the United Kingdom was held up as the poster child of mad cow disease. They basically got rid of every single cow in country because of it - had to burn and bury the lot. However over in mainland Europe mad cow disease was also widely diagnosed, but no one ever did anything about it because the governments chose to keep quite about it an write-off any reports has being caused by imported cows. It appears the same is happening in the USA - they used to blame a bunch of British cows imported in the 80s that mysteriously vanished. Now its the Canadian cows that are to blame...

I'm almost certain that if the USA started mandatory testing of all cows we would soon uncover hundreds, if not thousands of cases countrywide. However the FDA isn't going to do that. I've heard that of those they do test they only test "downer" cows that go down at the slaugher house - not ones already down by the time they arrive which is very common. And ones that go down before they are even sent to slaughter? Who knows what happens to those.