The T Word

   Seen and unseen - image source unknown
A million seconds is 11 1/2 days.  A billion seconds is around 31 years.  A trillion seconds is 31,000 years.  I'm used to billions, at least I can get my head around the numbers thrown around in business and governance.  Trillions don't come up often.  There are only 11 countries in the world with annual GDP greater than $1 trillion.  The entire world economy is about US$54 trillion.  The US is variously estimated to have spent about $5 trillion in current dollars to fight WW 2.

All of a sudden, the US financial crisis, is throwing out numbers in the trillions.  This frightens me.  I hope it frightens the powers that be.  Its an enormous red flag. The kind of debt levels facing US taxpayers are unprecedented in the modern world.  A lot of people are working very hard to ensure worst case scenarios are avoided.  But even so, there's a frightening amount of debt on the table.

Both the SEC and British regulators are banning short selling of stocks.  This is an extraordinary intervention in the markets.  It scares me as much as the bad debt.  Short sellers are like pathogens that help to regulate the overall health of the markets. A need to stop short sellers, even temporarily, suggests the markets may be broken in fundamental ways.  If so, we are in scary new waters.

If you'll permit a catastrophic analogy, its a bit like the Titanic, another T word.  Having spotted the iceberg, the rudder isn't turning the ship fast enough, and we've just been informed the steel may be sub-standard, brittle and prone to crack.

Brooks Nails Bush

David Brooks is the New York Times' tame right wing columnist.  As such he is annoying rather than outrageous, like say Rush Limbaugh.  Brooks is good enough that I still read him from time to time.  He also appears on PBS and is a good political analyst, especially when he forgets that he's supposed to be a balance for the leftish commentators he appears with.   Given that role, his latest column, a scathing attack on Sarah Palin was surprising.  Not only that, but he made some astute criticisms of George Bush.

In the current Weekly Standard, Steven Hayward argues that the nation’s founders wanted uncertified citizens to hold the highest offices in the land. They did not believe in a separate class of professional executives. They wanted rough and rooted people like Palin.
I would have more sympathy for this view if I hadn’t just lived through the last eight years. For if the Bush administration was anything, it was the anti-establishment attitude put into executive practice.
And the problem with this attitude is that, especially in his first term, it made Bush inept at governance. It turns out that governance, the creation and execution of policy, is hard. It requires acquired skills.
[Snip]
Sarah Palin has many virtues. If you wanted someone to destroy a corrupt establishment, she’d be your woman. But the constructive act of governance is another matter. She has not been engaged in national issues, does not have a repertoire of historic patterns and, like President Bush, she seems to compensate for her lack of experience with brashness and excessive decisiveness.

Too fucking right.  You can read the whole thing here.

I sense that the blue-blood Republicans have had it.  They are looking at a wipe-out in November and are very, very unhappy.  They're unhappy with Bush, with McCain, but especially with Sarah Palin.  She's going to be blamed for their humiliation.  Not because she's a woman, or from Alaska, but because she is a lens that focuses nearly everything that has gone wrong in the last 8 years.

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I heard Tonya Harding is calling herself the Charles Barkley of figure skating. I was going to sue her for defamation of character, but then I realized I have no character.
Charles Barkley

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This changes everything... except human nature
Albert Einstein
on hearing of the successful atomic bomb test, July 1945

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Beware of all enterprises that require a new set of clothes.
Henry David Thoreau

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       Image: Luc Viatour via Wikicommons
Armed with my new set of glasses, I've been looking at the moon the last few nights. My old glasses are in the cornfield, so I've been without them for almost a year.  I'd forgotten what an amazing sight the full moon is. If you actually go out and look at it, its magnificent.

Faves: Greek Sculpture

Besides their other contributions to Western Civilization, it is worth noting that Classical Greek sculptors were the best anywhere anytime.  Other civilizations have produced great sculputre, like the Assyrians, India, various Chinese eras.  But nobody ever came close to the ancient Greeks.  Even during the height of the Roman era, when portrait busts became supernatuarally realistic, the actual artists were all imported from Greece.

      You could recognize Augustus on the street from his busts.
Scientists have established that these sculptures were painted in gaudy colors.  However, their reconstructions seem unconvincing.  Possibly because they are scientists, not artists.  In any case, the modern eye is used to the bleached look in classical sculptures.  It gives them a pure, abstract look reinforced by missing pieces.  But the real magic is in the detail.  Has cloth or muscle ever looked so real in stone?  Has any other statue such casual naturalness as the goddess above?  Most of all, there is nothing forced, no irony whatsoever.

Fun Facts To Know And Share

There are six million parts in the Boeing 747-400.

Fear And Greed: Securitization

US$, worth less, soon worthless?

There's been some positive feedback on the Fear And Greed post below.  However, some people are getting stuck on the explanation of securitzation.  Getting stuck on this point means the reader is paying attention and indicates the presence rather than the absence of intelligence.  Securitzation is a fuzzy game of mirrors and make believe.  Really. That's not a disparagement, but a true description.

Think about money.  Is there any inherent difference between a $5 bill and a $20 bill?  No, they are both paper with stuff printed on them.  The only difference is that we agree to pretend there is a difference.  For that matter, the only difference between paper money and any other bit of paper with printing is that we agree paper money is worth something and all other paper is not.  Paper money is completely make-believe, but as long as we all participate in the make-believe, it works.  At its heart, currency is a contract between the governments that issue the currency and the individuals that hold it.  The government guarantees that a $20 is worth $20.  Because currency is an abstract value made material, it is negotiable.  You can use a $20 bill anywhere in the country and it will be valued at $20 by everyone.  A $20 bill is a negotiable security.  A contract that you can transfer.

In practice, currency is non-negotiable.  $20 is $20.  But you and any 3rd party can trade a $20 bill for more or less than the face value.  The only time this really happens is when you convert one currency to another.  $20 might buy £10 today, but only £9.50 tomorrow.

Alexander Hamilton, the first US Treasury Secretary, inherited an enormous problem.  His solution created modern capitalism, literally.  The USA could not raise money because loans to a new, war ravaged, debt ridden republic were too risky for any bank in Europe or the  USA.  What Hamilton did was securitize the debt.  He sold bonds that were like a currency for lending money.  One could buy a 5-year, $1,000 bond that paid 5%.  It was a contract that paid the holder $1,250 in five years.  The math is way simplified, but true to the idea.  The key point is that the government paid the money not to the person who bought the bond, but to whoever held the bond at the end of five years.  If you bought some bonds, but needed the money before five years were up, you could sell the bond and thus the contract.  The security was negotiable.  A market could arise for the buying and selling of bonds by 3rd parties.  The risk of holding US government debt was dramatically reduced.  This idea was a great success, especially popular with those who ran the new markets or exchanges as they became known.

Needless to say, by now, everything that can be securitized has been securitized.  Every government and corporation big enough issues bonds.  Anyone can issue a bond on anything as long as someone in the market is willing to buy it.  Financial firms like investment banks are constantly looking for new things to securitize.  Unfortunately, due to tradition, practical considerations and law, not all kinds of debt can be securitized.  Mortgages have not been securitized in any major world market except the USA after 1999.  De-regulation swept away the legal roadblocks, and clever investment bankers figured out how to deal with the practical problems.  It worked like this:

• Consumer A borrows money for a house from Bank Z
  
• Consumer A has a contract (mortgage) to back the loan on a monthly basis for X years
  
• Bank Z takes Consumer A's contract and a million like it and goes to Investment Bank Y
  
• Bank Y takes Bank Z's contracts and bundles them up into a bond offering
  
• The bond obligates Bank Z to pay the bond holder N% of the bonds value for X years
  
• Pension Fund E buys the bonds from Investment Bank Y
  
• Investment Bank Y passes the proceeds of the sale back to Bank Z (minus transaction fees)
  
• Bank Z takes Consumer A's payments and passes part of the interest on to Pension Fund E
  
• Consumer A pays back his loan, Bank Z pays off the bond held by Pension Fund E and everyone is happy

The big winner is Bank Z, because rather than waiting 25 years to get all their money back via payments from Consumer A, they get it all at once by selling bonds to Pension Fund E.  They can re-lend or invest that money at a higher interest rate than they are paying Pension Fund E on the bonds.  Not only that, but they get to take Consumer A's mortgage off their books.  It no longer counts towards their reserve requirements.  As long as Consumer A and his million friends pay back their loans in a normal fashion, nothing can go wrong.  But, as we have seen, the money to be made by Bank Z and Investment Bank Y from issuing bonds came to be worth more than the underlying loans.  Regulations prevent this type of top-heavy imbalance in most countries because the market will eventually self-correct in a catastrophic fashion.  Think of the no-longer watertight Titanic's self-correction of the relative buoyancy of iron vs. water.   It takes time to devolve all the deals and swaps and exotic derivatives that grew up around the mortgage market.  But the market, now ruled by fear, won't give the players time, so they've started failing catastrophically.

Not many tears are being shed for the firms now getting walloped.  They had it coming.  Lots of people predicted this would happen.  Lots of firms stayed clear of this market.  But there are two potential problems for everyone.

First is a general drying up of credit.  If the banks are scrambling to restore their reserves, they may stop lending and even pull in good loans.  That could send viable companies into bankruptcy.  If the cancer of bad loans has spread beyond the housing market in the US, then its possible its spread into other countries as well.  More severe credit shocks may be coming.

Second is a run on the US$.  All of the bad loans were turned into real money and spent by US Consumers.  Where did all that real money come from?  China, Japan and other US trading partners who hold vast sums of US Treasury Bills.  They are hostages in a giant game of chicken.  If China sells lots of stuff to the US for US$, then turns the $ back into Yuan, the value of the Yuan goes up relative to the $.  The Chinese have to either live with lower profits, or raise $ prices, becoming less competitive.  So instead of turning the $ into Yuan, they park the money in US$ bonds.  This keeps the US$ artificially high vs. the Yuan.  If the US goes to crazy economically, the Chinese will sell the bonds, causing a crash in the US$.  But if they do that, then the Yuan vs. the $ goes up so much that Chinese firms can't sell profitably into the US market.  China's economy takes a huge hit.  When Japan was in this position 15 years ago, they let the currency imbalance fuel a real-estate bubble that has crippled their economy since.  China won't make the same mistake, but they are also playing a game of musical chairs that requires continuous growth.  Nobody knows what will happen when the economy slows, as it must inevitably do.  A US credit crisis, as described above, could dampen US consumer demand so much that it impacts the Chinese economy.  At a certain point, US trading partners may decide to cut their losses, sell US Treasuries, and get used to a world where they don't have to depend on the US for all their economic growth.  This could lead to a collapse of the US dollar and potential depression among the US and its closest allies.

But then, on the other hand, lots of people who make lots of money, and who want to continue doing so, are working hard on avoiding the bad case scenarios.  What goes around comes around, and nobody wants what the US financial markets have got.  The US government over the weekend demonstrated that it would be ruthless if necessary.  If the US financial market players demonstrate the same in a convincing manner, then the crisis can be dealt with in a slow and steady rather than a catastrophic manner.

Note:  The examples here are gross oversimplifications.  The details are important, but the purpose here is to strip away every detail that stands in the way of the key ideas.

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Men are not disturbed by things, but the view they take of things.
Epictetus
What about things like bullets?
Herb Kimmel, Behavioralist, Professor of Psychology, upon hearing the above quote 
via Gabriel Robins

Fear And Greed

      Market Logic

Risk and return, fear and greed.  These are what makes the capital markets work.  Greed is the motivator, fear is the regulator.  Greed is constant (people always take as much as they can get), fear is variable.  Greed is slow, fear is quick.  Markets may go down 2% in a day, but they don't go up that much ever.

For the markets to work efficiently, greed and fear must be balanced.  Too much greed (or too little fear) creates a bubble, too much fear creates a crash.  Most of the time, markets are self-balancing.  Too much or too little fear or greed creates an opportunity.  Traders exploiting that opportunity eliminate the imbalance.  Nevertheless, after 1929, everyone agreed that government regulation was necessary to keep markets honest.  Without honesty, inefficiencies can be created that benefit the creators at the expense of everyone else.  The market can be deprived of the opportunity to self-balance.

A lack of regulation during the Bush administration has led directly to the present market turmoil.  And make no mistake, this is a market problem that impacts the economy, not an economic problem impacting the markets.  The key issues are actually quite simple.  The capital markets are a huge money rental operation.  People with money rent it to people who need it.  The interest is the rental fee.  All other things being equal, the interest rate rises as the risk of default increases.  The safest investment is government bonds.  The government never defaults.  They can always raise taxes or print money to pay back lenders.  Corporate bonds are, by definition, not as secure even though corporations rarely default.  Interest rates are therefore higher for corporate bonds.  Because bonds are negotiable, there is a secondary market.  I can buy a government bond, and resell it to someone else.  That liquidity is the lubricant needed to balance fear and greed.

The problem for capital markets is that government and corporate lending are together less than consumer lending. If you have money to lend, and we all do via mutual or pension funds, then you need to find ways to lend it to consumers. But consumer credit is too risky and too regulated to package effectively outside banks.  Mortgages are different.  They have very low risk since almost nobody defaults on their house payments, and if they do, the lender gets the house.  As a result, overall risk for mortgages is in the corporate bond range.  Unfortunately, laws in most countries ensure no secondary market for mortgages.  After US laws were losened in 1999, Wall Street firms have figured out how to create a secondary market.  A Wall Street bank would buy a packages of mortgages from several banks.  Because the packages were from different lenders in different parts of the country, the overall risk was low.  The Wall Street bank would then turn the package into bonds.  It could then sell the bonds on the open market.  Everyone loved it because it was a great idea.

Banks loved it because by law, they can only lend out so many dollars for each dollar on deposit (their reserves).  Selling a package of mortgages took them out of the "lent out" category.  The people buying the bonds loved it because it was a way for mutual and pension funds to get into the low-risk mortage market without buying a bank.  But most of all, the Wall Street firms loved it because they made their money on fees.  They didn't have to lend anyone anything, they just collected a fee for packaging and re-selling the loans.  No risk, just returns.  Even if they only made pennies on each thousand dollars of bonds they processed, it was fantastic.  The consumer mortage market is huge, and Wall Street had just figured out how to route that Niagara through their firms.

The whole thing started out well.  But there was a fundamental divorce of risk and return.  Those lending the money to consumers were selling the loans, so they didn't have to worry about getting paid back.  Those packaging the loans were also passing the loans along, they didn't need to worry either.  Those buying the loans or mortgage-backed securities as they were called, had no idea where the loans came from.  They just expected them to be as risky as most mortgages, not very.  Soon enough, unscrupulous lenders started lending mortgage money to anyone who asked for it, then hid the dodgy loans in a pile of good loans and sold the whole thing to a Wall Street bank.  The Wall Street people didn't look at the loans too closely as fussy detail would slow down that volume. Consumers came to believe house prices would always to up at increasing rates and that by re-mortgaging, they could take a cut of that value for themselves.  Fear had been eliminated from the equation.

All this was bad, but not fatal.  Then, the banks crossed a line.  The banks that had made and sold the loans started buying the mortgage backed securities of other banks.  Since these were negotiable securities, they were added to the banks reserves. By securitizing mortgages, they had figured out a way to turn a $1 of lending into a $1 of reserve.  All the US banks went on a spree of buying each others securitized mortgages, thereby allowing themselves to lend even more money.   As long as housing prices kept rising quickly, nobody had to notice, and the government was no longer paying attention.  But like all bubbles, the US housing bubble burst.  Housing prices dropped and people started walking away from their mortgages.  Historically, default rates on mortgages have been 2% or less.  Many batches of securitized mortgages are now defaulting at a rate of 10%.  Some of the worst batches are approaching a 30% default rate.  Now the banks have to notice.   Because housing prices have fallen, they can't recoup defaults easily, quickly or at 100% of the value of the bad loans.  Their precious assets that govern how much money they can lend are suddenly questionable.  They either have to raise more money to compensate for the bad assets, or they have to reduce lending, or both.  Those unable to make the adjustment fail.

So far, only those banks and trusts with the biggest exposure to mortgages have failed.  But nobody knows how deep the rot will go.  How many mortgages issued in the last 10 years are worthless?  Nobody knows.  How much will the banks lose on those bad mortgages?  Nobody knows.  Have the bad loans seeped into other consumer and business lending?  Nobody knows.  How many more banks will become insolvent?  Nobody knows.  Uncertainty = risk = fear.  Fear, so long banished from the capital markets, now rules all the financial markets.  The real problem now is that international investors may decide to take their losses and dump US dollar assets.  That could create a ruinous run on the dollar.  Ruinous for Americans, but bad for everyone in lesser degrees depending on how much they trade with the US.  Poland should be ok, Canada will get hit hard.  The party is over, and the hangover may prove fatal.
----------------
Update: Edits to remove half-assed explanation of how securitization works.  See part 2 for a simple explanation of this. Also swapped graphics with part 2.

The Pashtun Wild West

       click image for larger map
The last-minute war of George Bush's regime looks to be against Pakistan rather than Iran.  The US Navy has dispersed the large concentration built up last month in the Persian Gulf area.  They don't seem to be planning an attack on Iran anytime soon.  Instead, Bush's determination to deal with Osama bin Laden before he leaves office and the deteriorating military situation in Afghanistan has led to increased US activity in the Pakistani border area.

The map above shows the main Pashtun border territories in Pakistan.  The orange overlay shows the ethnic Pashtun distribution in the region.  The Federally Administered Tribal Areas in Pakistan are not really under Pakistani control.  The Pashtun recognize neither the border nor the government in Islamabad.  They don't recognize the government in Kabul either unless they control it, and not much then.  The swath of mountains running north-east from Quetta to the top of the map is almost entirely under their control.  Only the corridor running from Peshawar through the fabled Khyber Pass to Jalalabad and Kabul is under the firm control of the Pakistani and Afghan governments.  Major NATO deployments in the area are shown by flags.  The Taliban stronghold is Waziristan in the southern section of the Tribal Areas.  Bin Laden has probably been hiding here since the battle of Tora Bora.  There are estimated to be about 60 million Pashtun.  They constitute the largest ethnic group in Afghanistan and the second largest in Pakistan.  The total population of Afghanistan is probably 32 million (no census in a long time) and of Pakistan 164 million.

The Taliban are a Pashtun faction.  They were created and supported by the Pakistanis during the Soviet occupation.  They continue to enjoy support and funding from elements of the Pakistani government Intelligence and Military.  NATO is thus fighting a proxy war with Pakistan.  Other elements of the Pakistani government are supportive of NATO's operations and want to exert control over the tribal areas.  All the "official" parts of the Pakistani government fall into the latter camp. While Musharraf was in charge, the government was willing to overlook US cross-border actions. Provided there was plausible deniability of Pakistani cooperation in these actions.

Pakistani Army enthusiasm for operations in the tribal areas has always been weak.  A major offensive in 2003 resulted in unacceptable Army casualties.  Musharraf was forced into a cease-fire with tribal leaders and the Pakistani military has alternated operations and cease-fires since.  Musharraf never regained the credibility lost both internally and internationally.

The new government is less tolerant of US cross-border actions.  After a major US special forces operation and at least 4 airstrikes in Waziristan this month, domestic political pressure begun to build.  In reaction, Pakistan has threatened to fire on any NATO soldiers found on the Pakistani side of the border. Realistically, there is nothing the Pakistanis can do to stop NATO encursions, just like there's nothing they can do to prevent Taliban operations on either side of the border.  Pakistani Army presence is mostly limited to border posts.  The tribes are willing, apparently, to tolerate the Pakistani Army patrolling the Afghan border as long as they are patrolling against NATO and ignore the Pashtun.

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You can pretend to be serious; you can't pretend to be witty.
Sacha Guitr
via Gabriel Robins

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Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever.
Napoleon Bonaparte
via Gabriel Robins

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It's just a job. Grass grows, birds fly, waves pound the sand. I beat people up.
Muhammad Ali

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       Photo: Mark Theissen - National Geographic - click on image goes to story on National Geographic website
Here is a great National Geographic photo essay on US forest fires.  Some pretty amazing images.

Good News

Fun Facts To Know And Share

An Octopus has only two legs. The other six are arms.
Individuals in the wild have been seen with as few as six and as many as ten appendage.

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His lack of education is more than compensated for by his keenly developed moral bankruptcy.
Woody Allen

NFL Visualization

A fascinating visualization of NFL games by Christopher Healey a professor at North Carolina State

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There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves we feel no one else has a right to blame us.
Oscar Wilde

Oopsie

When Microsoft landed the huge and high profile London Stock Exchange account, it published the self-congratulatory ad below:

Yesterday, the exchange went down for 7 hours.  Innuendos aside, it was a bad day for an outtage.  Traders were fuming that they missed out on action related to the Fannie and Freddie takeovers.  Reuters quoted one: "We have the biggest takeover in the history of the known world ... and then we can't trade. It's terrible".

This just shows that public masturbation, while it may feel good at the time, is never a good idea.

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This man is a brilliant genius.  He does vector renderings of military aircraft.  These two statements may seem contradictory.  I assure you the characterization is not made lightly. WS_Clave can somehow bring out the inner beauty of airplanes in a way that's rare to see in any type of technical illustration.  His illustrations remind me of Haeckel and other great nature illustrators from the 18th and 19th centuries.  Pages of F-16s in various colour schemes may not be your thing, but that doesn't lessen his achievement.  These pictures, to me at least, have the same magic stillness as Renaissance alter pieces.  

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People take different roads seeking fulfillment and happiness. Just because they’re not on your road doesn’t mean they’ve gotten lost.
The Dali Lama

Game Changer

When I first started photography in the mid-80's, the princes of the publishing world were the typesetters.  If something went into print, it had to be type set, and the princes would exact their toll.  They had money to burn and would ride around Yorkville in specially imported BMWs and Rolls.  Then Steve Jobs decided laser printers and Macs would be a killer combination for publishing.  He was right, and ten years later the type houses were gone.  Not only did people who were already spending money on type switch, lots of others who could never have afforded to became publishers.

The same thing is about to happen in the film business.  Making a cinema quality movie remains an extremely expensive enterprise.  The digital revolution has made movie making a mass market proposition, but professional quality has remained far out of reach.  The gold standard is 35mm film run through a professional movie camera. HD digital cameras are widely used for TV and some cinema productions.  But HD is nowhere near 35mm in terms of quality, and the cameras have limitations compared to traditional film cameras.

Red Digital Cinema surfaced two years ago with claims of a new digital movie camera that would hammer traditional movie technology.   They promised three revolutionary features.  A 35mm quality sensor, an ability to take standard movie camera lenses, and a price of less than 1/10th that of professional motion picture cameras.  According to a feature in Wired (watch the video), they have delivered all three.  The $17,500 4K Red One captures 4,096 x 2,304 pixels and takes off-the-shelf professional lenses.  That compares to 1,920 x 1,086 for a $150,000 HD camera that cannot take standard lenses.  Or to a standard 35mm movie camera from Panavision that rents for $25,000 a month and delivers in the region of 4K resolution.  Plus film, development and scanning.  This can be worth several hundred thousand dollars for a feature film.  The 4K outputs to hard drives.  And hard drives are cheap.    Its also smaller than an HD camera  and much, much smaller than a film camera.  Size and weight are important as they limit what can be done with the camera.  Shots using cranes, booms and helicopters are rare in all but the most expensive films due the cost of cranes, booms and helicopters.

This is apparently only the beginning.  Really epic films used to be shot in 70mm rather than 35mm.  That's about halfway between 35mm quality and Imax quality.  Unfortunately, the cost became so great that the last film shot entirely in 70mm was Ryan's Daughter in 1972.  The splendor and impact of such visual quality disappeared from movie making.  Red is promising a 5K camera next year.  Obviously, they can go further.  But even if that was all, 5,000 lines of resolution is better than anything since 70mm became uneconomic.

They are also promising a 3K camera next year.  Its incredibly small, can be controlled wirelessly, and will be cheaper yet I expect.  Still cameras are also under consideration.  High-end professional digital cameras cost upwards of $40,000.

All very interesting from a technology and cost point of view.  But there is an interesting asthetic promise as well.  Over the last 15 years, movies have used more and more digital effects.  Not only are they cheaper than the real thing, but can deliver scenes that could never be filmed at any price.  For example, the 250,000 strong Orc army in Return of the King.  A steadily larger slice of what we see on the screen is CGI.  Despite being a digital technology, Red holds the promise of making traditional film making techniques more cost-effective.  Unlike many at my end of the political spectrum, I believe technology is more liberating than dictatorial.  To paraphrase uh, someone, communication becomes democratic when the people control the means of production.  The artist in me is please also because digital has come to mean crap.  Crappy digital music, crappy digital pictures and crappy digital video.  Technologies like Red will hopefully change that.

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For the great majority of mankind are satisfied with appearances, as though they were realities, and are often more influenced by the things that seem than by those that are.
Niccolo Machiavelli

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      click image for larger
Saturn by Cassini and more:









And best of all:

Fun Facts To Know And Share

The New York phone book had 22 Hitlers listed before World War II ... and none after.

Another Non Event

Image: Knoxville News

On Friday 13th, 2029, the asteroid 99942 Apophis will pass as close as 15,000 km to the earth. It may pass even closer on Sunday April 13, 2036. However, the 2036 pass can't be accurately predicted until closer to 2029. During that pass, the path of the asteroid will be strongly deflected as shown in the diagram below. Nevertheless, scientists are pretty sure we are safe. The current odds of an impact are 1 in 45,000. But its still going to be close. Well within the orbit of communications satellites.

The asteroid is 350 meters in length. An impact would be locally devastating, but not an extinction event. Local, in this context, depends on where it lands. A few hundred km if it hit land, but a lot more if it landed at sea due to tsunamis. The good news is that there would be plenty of time to evacuate. In any case, its worth noting because of how close the asteroid will pass, rather than threat level. This is a game of numbers, and the scientists are good at that.

Image: Marco Polo - Wikimedia

Fortunately, there are several organizations dedicated to tracking possible asteroid strikes. The best known is B612, which produced the handy map below. It shows where, if the asteroid were to strike in 2036, the impact might occur. NASA is tracking it as well. There is also a handy countdown page here. I'm just glad somebody is paying attention.

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Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.
Oscar Wilde

A Nastygram From Uncle Sam?

      US Navy Tomahawk cruise missile
Is the US about to attack Iran with an armada of unmanned aircraft as widely reported over the weekend?  Probably not, unless by unmanned aircraft you mean cruise missiles.

Apparently, if reports are to be believed, the Dutch of all people had a mole deep in Iran's missile program.  A respected Dutch journalist reported that the mole had been sabotaging the Iranian program, but had fled the country in advance of a US strike by said unmanned aircraft.  This kind of thing gives me a headache.  How to tease apart the web of deceit layered with truths in such a tale?  For truth there surely is, to make the whole thing plausible.  But can it be discerned?

The Iranian "agent" part is probably true to the extent that somebody in their missile program could have defected for money or favour or fear.  The Iranians know if they are missing someone or not.  But if anyone would have been able to place an agent it would have been the Israelis, not the Dutch.  Also, the notion of a highly placed saboteur is Hollywood, not real life.  I'm just not buying it.

As for the imminent attack by an armada of US unmanned aerial vehicles, I'm not buying that one either unless the vehicles are cruise missiles.  Cruise missiles are the perfect superpower intimidation tool you see.  Unmanned, reliable, precise, very long range.  Unless nuclear tipped, they can't do much damage, but there's no PR hit if one gets shot down.  Bill Clinton loved them. 

George Bush was famously contemptuous of Clinton's remote controlled, symbolic approach to "sending signals".  But Clinton avoided exactly the kind of trouble that Bush would invite with a normal set of airstrikes against Iranian targets.  Planes shot down, aircrews paraded on TV, show trials.  So a remote controlled symbolic strike may be Bush's only option.

Cruise missiles would be the remote-control method because currently deployed US drones have neither the speed nor the lifting power necessary for long-range strikes of this kind.  Here's a photo of the current state of the art MQ-9 Predator.  It can only carry 1,500 lbs of munitions and would be a sitting duck for Iranian SAMs and aircraft.

Its possible that the Air Force has a secret program similar to the Boeing X-45 pictured below.  The F-114 Stealth fighter was operational for years before it was declassified.  But given the very public squabbling over the direction of US Fighter programs in the last year, and the non-secret X-45 and its competitors, there is little possibility of a major secret delivery platform.

Even so, I'm not betting on a strike with cruise missiles or anything else.  Iran has passed the point of no return on its nuclear program.  At the end of the day, and that end is drawing close for George Bush, there isn't much the US can do about it.  Besides, if the world can live with a nuclear Pakistan, a nuclear Iran is tolerable.  The Israelis may not like it, but like the US, there's nothing practical they can do about it short of attacking Iran with their own nuclear weapons.  Its just not worth it.

The Clbuttic Mistake

      Lincoln Buttbuttinated!

The Telegraph has an amusing article about obscenity filters gone wrong.

DNA Trophy Cabinet

      Illustration by Zephyris - GNU Free Documentation License

There's an intriguing article in the Washington Post about remnants of ancient retroviruses found in the human genome.  Over the course of evolution, retroviruses like HIV have stitched themselves into human DNA.  Clearly, these retroviruses have been defeated by our immune systems, or we would not be around to discuss the matter.  However, bits and pieces of these retroviruses remain in our DNA.  Kind of like trophies.  Indeed, some of the functions provided by these viral skeletons have been hijacked by our immune systems as defenses against incoming retroviruses.  Scientists have succeeded in putting the pieces of one retrovirus back together from snippets spread around the genome.  Unfortunately, like all such stories, this one starts out interesting, then peters out.  There is just too much we don't know or understand about the genome.

Faves: Marylin

       click image for a printable size
It took me a long time to get Warhol.  Robert Hughes helpfully explained that this is not a portrait of Marylin Monroe, its a sign that says Marylin Monroe.  The industrial quality of the image makes sense in this context.  Iconic is the point, and that's what its become. 

Yap

If the fans don't wanna come out to the ballpark, no one can stop 'em.
Yogi Berra

Fear Is The Best Policy

 

      click on image for legible size. Photo by gruntzooki

This photo was posted on Flickr a few days ago.  I have no reason to believe its not genuine.  Because you can't make this shit up.  Click for larger to read the actual copy.  Better be specific next time someone asks you about your travel plans.  And delete that Al Jazeera bookmark. There is another poster targeting suspicious river traffic.  But that is so outlandish I'm not 100% sure its real. 

What amazes me about all this is that the British went through the whole thing before with the IRA.  There was none of this insanity at that time.  Arguably, the IRA threat was far more material than any posed by jihadis, and the Irish blended in so well you couldn't spot them.  Maybe that's the difference, that the Irish weren't that different.  Muslims, on the other hand can often be spotted because of their skin color, dress, accent, etc.