Book Of Norm

One of the main arguments being put forward right now is that the government debt crises is "artificial" - there is no specific reason why there has to be a August 2nd deadline (that one's Obama's) and that congress can't just punt and raise the debt limit. That one is being blamed mostly on the Tea Party and Republicans.  The claim is that there is basically no real crises, just something we made up to make a political issue out of it all. In fact, an idiotic professor has put forward an idea about how another idiotic professor could sidestep Congress by issuing the Treasury two trillion dollar coins, or a two trillion option on government real estate . The man, a con law professor at Yale, is clearly exactly the kind of academic moron you would never want running the country... yeah.....  The reality is that there is a crises. Yes, this specific limit is arbitrary, but so would any other limit be. Do you wait to hit $20 Trillion? $50 trillion (it wont take t...

So, no much to glean from this other than Microsoft seems to be doing pretty well actually given the tiny number of phones which have actually been released (and how the bitter bitter taste of WinMo 6.5 still lingers). Also, sadly Palm is down to 2% - and not much hope of a big increase soon if they are only going to release one slightly larger phone (albeit one which I really want, and am bitterly disappointed is not coming to Sprint).

I hate big government. I love aircraft carriers.  No Cylons in sight These two at first seem to be rather contradictory: small government, big military. However, I don't yet have to hand over my hat to Aristotle (at least on this anyway). I believe that long term military security is one of the fundamental purposes of a government, but that it can be done better. The use of military force against a nation, or against a nation's interests, leads inevitable to the infringement of the rights of the citizens of that nation. And the protection of rights is why we have a government in the first place: protect us against each other, protect those who cannot protect themselves (no Obama, that is not "everyone but me"), and protect citizens from non-citizens.  Any nation which is incapable of defending itself or its legitimate interests is violating the basic contract with its citizens. There are some nations which simply cheat, relying on other nations to protect them a...

I am not sure why the News of The World story is being regarded as such a scandal. I mean, the paper was a rag to start with. The fact that a rag tabloid broke the law? Not really shocking. The News of the World in the UK is pretty much equivalent to The National Enquirer over here. Maybe a little better, with fewer alien baby stories, but The News of the World getting sued for liable is about as regular as Berlusconi facing sexual abuse allegations, and about as surprising. So what did they do? Well, they hacked into phones - which is really not all that hard, and they paid off cops for information. Both of these are illegal, underhanded, sleazy violations of rights. But they are not surprising, at least not to me. I have no more faith in the integrity of journalists than I have in the integrity of used car salesman. Actually, more used car salesman probably have some integrity than journalists. I used to work in securities lending - short selling. I worked there in the bad ...

I have long held, as have many others, that the premise of the left is generally that people are idiots and incapable of fending for themselves. This has certainly been the approach the current administration has taken, with massive new regulation and spending programs aimed at limiting choice, "leveling the playing field" and "protecting consumers from themselves." Essentially, Obama et al believe that the vast majority of Americans are idiots. The latest assault on choice is a proposed 56mpg CAFE (corporate average fuel economy) standard by 2025. Which is ridiculous considering there are no gasoline powered cars on the market today which get 56mpg average, not even hybrids. CAFE means that of all the cars an automaker sells, they have to hit a certain average fuel economy. Essentially, the only way to get to 56mpg in 14 years is a massive switch from gasoline to electric, which Obama would of course love because he believes oil companies are pure evil, and...

The last time Jag raced in LeMans was 1991. The year before that, they won it with their beautiful "Silk Cut" LMP1, which then played a big part in the creation of the XJ220, one of the most gorgeous cars ever made. Tata Motors has put up the money to push back into LeMans racing, where Audi and Peugeot have been dueling for top honors after a few years of Audi winning every year. Interestingly, it seems that many more car makers are going to be pushing into LeMans racing to make a name for themselves, as F1 no longer offers the opportunities or value for money they once did.

This is pulled from the WSJ. Again, all I have to say is that if you look at the UK post-WWII, very similar things happened, with long term results which were pretty freaking bad. Now, the UK has learned something from its old ways, and is actually trying to keep taxes down and instead--shockingly--cut spending. However, in the US we are still stuck in the obstinate belief that because we have been the global superpower for the past 70 years (and especially the last 20) that nothing bad can happen, no matter the macro-economic policies. So here we are, looking at a possible 70% marginal tax rate. And not just for "the rich" as the Democrats keep saying, unless you consider $60k/yr rich - which is ridiculous. By  MICHAEL J. BOSKIN President Obama has been using the debt-ceiling debate and bipartisan calls for deficit reduction to demand higher taxes. With unemployment stuck at 9.2% and a vigorous economic "recovery" appearing more and more elusive, his timin...

60 Missile warheads were stolen off of a train heading from Romania to Bulgaria. Local officials say that they were probably stolen for scrap value.... yes... yes..... Yo quiero warheads

"The Belly Button Biodiversity Project, run by scientists at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, has been analyzing navel swabs from a host of volunteers. So far, they’ve found 1,400 distinct bacterial strains, of which 662 have never been seen before." Yeah... I can't make this stuff up. Legitimately, they have been swabbing belly buttons and found almost 700 new types of bacteria... which is amazing.. and a little disturbing.

Meet one of the best adapted animals on the planet, and possibly the key to long life and a cure for cancer. It is pudgy, white skinned, lives underground, has an exceptionally long life and has bad teeth. So basically, it is Bilbo Baggins. It can be described as a "saber-toothed sausage," which passes for pretty intimidating in the benign land of Hobbitown. Num num num It is... the Naked Mole Rat. Needless to say, these are some odd critters. They live in groups - which is rare for mammals of this type, with colonies of usually 80-100 individuals but up to 300 at times. They also took a page from ant's book: there is only one breeding female, the queen. And she is big - roughly twice the size of the others. She mates with one to three breeding males. All the others in the colony, male or female, have their sexuality repressed. Clearly, this means they end up writing bizzare stories about girls on opium trips. Now with more saber-tooth The social nature c...

Between 1998 and 2008 global temperatures... fell. Which is kind of inconvenient for the inconvenient truth folks, because it makes it rather difficult to claim that anthropogenic global warming will be the end to civilization as we know it, or at least make it difficult to ski Zermatt in May. Now, a new theory has emerged: the Earth's temperature fell between 1998 and 2008 because Asia was pumping out so much pollution. Yeah, that's not a typo: because they were pumping out so much pollution, temperatures fell. Specifically, they pumped out a lot of sulphur (or sulfur for the Americans) which caused the planet to cool down, counteracting all of the CO2 and CO equivalents which they also pumped out. Yeah... Most of Asia's carbon emissions came from coal and with coal emissions comes sulfur. Sulfur is a key ingredient in the formation of aerosols, which form hazy cloud layers that reflect heat from the sun back into space. These aerosols, the paper argues, are resp...

First, let me say that most of the claims that we are running out of rare earth metals are way overblown. We have enough of most of the the fifteen lanthanoids to last until mankind has decided walking is not really our thing, and go the way of the whale and float around for a living. That said, there are still a few elements which China does have quite strong hold on. Or should I say, had. This week, there have been two big setbacks for China. First was that Japanese geologists say they’ve found huge concentrated deposits of rare earths in the Pacific seabed that could total 100 billion tons--or enough in a single square mile of seafloor to cover nearly half the world’s annual demand. The second was that the WTO ruled against China in a case brought by the US and others over China's hoarding of rare earth elements. The result of this is that China should not be able to pull any more "unofficial embargo" stunts like last year. So go ahead and make your hybrid moto...

The Shuttle was a mistake. It was not that over-budget to develop, but it was wildly expensive to operate, costing roughly 20x the initial estimates. Because of this, NASA also never had the money (or there was never the political will) to build a new alternative. Instead, heavy launch went to the Delta and Atlas programs (Boeing and Lockheed Martin) and the Space Shuttle has been stuck sending up pieces of the ISS and running somewhat questionably cost effective science missions. The reality is this: people are expensive to get into space. And they don't really 'need' to be there for science missions. The reason that people need to be in space is because we need people in space in order to expand as a civilization and ensure the long-term survival of the species. And finally, people need to be in space so that we can make $ off of space - which is the only way we are going to really move off-planet. So the Space Shuttle has been a failure, though a cool failure. And no...

Sadly, the winter Olympics are generally a money-losing proposition. They don't have the global draw of the summer games, because most of the Earth's population does not really care about winter sports (witness the tiny delegation sent by India to the Vancouver games, and China really only sent gymnasts). Because of that, the global recession, and the fact that there was a clear preference for one city, there were only three bids to hose the 2018 games: Pyeongchang, Munich, and the small French city of Annecy. Pyeongchang, located in the Alpensia mountains east of Seoul, narrowly lost out to Vancouver for the 2010 Olympics and to Sochi, Russia, for the 2014 Games. They are widely expected to win these games. Interestingly, it is the fewest number of bids to stage a Winter Olympics since 1981, when three finalists competed for the 1988 Olympics, which were awarded to Calgary. There were seven bids for the 1992 Games, four for 1994, six for 1998, nine for 2002 (cut to four ...

I have never really been a big believer in yoga - other than the fact that stretching is good for you etc etc, I just could never buy into the "ancient Indian meditation and spiritualism" mumbo jumbo. And turns out... its all just mumbo jumbo. Yoga was invented by this guy, who is still around today: Most of your Steve Jobs loving, prAna wearing, OOOOoddwaalllaa drinking friends will tell you that yoga is 5,000 years old. Which is about as accurate as saying that sitting on your ass is 5,000 years old, because those claims are based on statues where people are sitting on the ground cross-legged. Yoga is first mentioned by name in some 2,500-year-old Hindu religious texts called the Upanishads, but this is actually a term relating to a method of strapping horses together -- literally the origin for our word "yoke." The Upanishads use it as a metaphor for a mental prayer technique, but as far as all those weird stretches are concerned, the texts mention exactl...

Ratings agencies came out of the recession with more mud on their faces than a bullfrog in the spring. They were the architects of many of the derivatives which turned out to have absolutely no value. You would ask the rating agency how to get a good credit rating, and for a fee, they would tell you. I am amazed they came out of it with as much credibility as they did, and really, they probably deserved to be fined and sued out of existence. That said, they are still around, and kicking. Mostly because there is not a clear alternative at this point, though smaller independent competitors are springing up. This time, Moodys has pissed off the EU and the Germans in particular for its downgrade of Portugal to "junk" status. German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble told a news conference that he wanted to "break the oligopoly of the ratings agencies" and limit their influence. He mentioned that "panzers" and "a quick but strong offensive using mot...

Bit of an odd piece of news. The loudest animal in the world (relative to body size) turns out to be the Lesser Water Boatman - yeah, you have probably seen them skimming away from you over the surface of some small pond or backwater. FrFrom Wired: "The male lesser water boatman, aka Micronecta scholtzi, can create mating calls as loud as 99.2 decibels, which is the equivalent of sitting in the front row of a loud, full-blown orchestra, or standing 15 meters away from a hurtling freight train. “Remarkably,” said Stratchclyde University’s James Windmill in a press release, “even though 99 percent of sound is lost when transferring from water to air, the song is so loud that a person walking along the bank can actually hear these tiny creatures singing from the bottom of the river.” To make this colossal acoustic din, the male water boatman rubs his penis (or “genitalia appendage”) against the ridged surface of his abdomen, like a wooden spoon against a washboard. Size d...