Later On

Read this post: one company took another company’s $500 Blu-Ray player, put it inside a new chassis, and sells it for $3000.

That’s right: they took the $500 player and simply plopped it into a new chassis, without even taking the original chassis off.

Photos at the link.

Includes complete debunking of the surface weather station “problem.”

Via Americablog:

From Brad DeLong’s inbox:

Currently, the strong El Nino is reaching its peak in the Eastern Pacific, and now finally appears to be exerting an influence on our weather. The strong jet has been apparent for quite some time out over the open water, but the persistent block had prevented it from reaching the coast. Now that the block has dissolved completely, a 200+ kt [this means approximately 230 miles per hour] jet is barreling towards us. Multiple large and powerful storm systems are expected to slam into CA from the west and northwest over the coming two weeks, all riding this extremely powerful jet stream directly into the state.

The jet will itself provide tremendous dynamic lift, in addition to directing numerous disturbances right at the state and supplying them with an ample oceanic moisture source. The jet will be at quite a low latitude over much of the Pacific, so these storms will be quite cold, at least initially. Very heavy rainfall and strong to potentially very strong winds will impact the lower elevations beginning late Sunday and continuing through at least the following Sunday.. This will be the case for the entire state, from (and south of) the Mexican border all the way up to Oregon. Above 3000-4000 feet, precipitation will be all snow, and since temperatures will be unusually cold for a precipitation event of this magnitude, a truly prodigious amount of snowfall is likely to occur in the mountains, possibly measured in the tens of feet in the Sierra after it’s all said and done.

But there’s a big and rather threatening caveat to that (discussed below). Individual storm events are going to be hard to time for at least few more days, since this jet is just about as powerful as they come (on this planet, anyway). Between this Sunday and the following Sunday, I expect categorical statewide rainfall totals in excess of 3-4 inches. That is likely to be a huge underestimate for most areas. Much of NorCal is likely to see 5-10 inches in the lowlands, with 10-20 inches in orographically-favored areas. Most of SoCal will see 3-6 inches at lower elevations, with perhaps triple that amount in favored areas.

This is where things get even more interesting, though. The models are virtually unanimous in “reloading” the powerful jet stream and forming an additional persistent kink 2000-3000 miles to our southwest after next Sunday. This is a truly ominous pattern, because it implies the potential for a strong Pineapple-type connection to develop. Indeed, the 12z GFS now shows copious warm rains falling between days 12 and 16 across the entire state. Normally, such as scenario out beyond day seven would be dubious at best. Since the models are in such truly remarkable agreement, however, and because of the extremely high potential impact of such an event, it’s worth mentioning now. Since there will be a massive volume of freshly-fallen snow (even at relatively low elevations between 3000-5000 feet), even a moderately warm storm event would cause very serious flooding. This situation will have to monitored closely. Even if the tropical connection does not develop, expected rains in the coming 7-10 days will likely be sufficient to cause flooding in and of themselves (even in spite of dry antecedent conditions).

In addition to very heavy precipitation, powerful winds may result from very steep pressure gradients associated with the large and deep low pressure centers expected to begin approaching the coast by early next week. Though it’s not clear at the moment just how powerful these winds may be, there is certainly the potential for a widespread damaging wind event at some point, and the high Sierra peaks are likely to see gusts in the 100-200 mph range (since the 200kt jet at 200-300 mb will essentially run directly into the mountains at some point). The details of this will have to be hashed out as the event(s) draw closer.

In short, the next 2-3 weeks (at least) are likely to be more active across California than any other 2-3 week period in recent memory. The potential exists for a dangerous flood scenario to arise at some point during this interval, especially with the possibility of a heavy rain-on-snow event during late week 2. In some parts of Southern California, a whole season’s worth of rain could fall over the course of 5-10 days. This is likely to be a rather memorable event. Stay tuned.

I probably will not be doing outside walks for the next week or two.

Very interesting post indeed. If you like or dislike Rand, you will find it intriguing.

Clive Thompson at Collision Detection:

Here’s a study with an interesting finding: If you want to get better results on Google,try using a shorter query.

I found this while doing research for a story about automated “question answering” systems. I was reading through the work of James Allan, a computer scientist at the University of Massachusetts, and read his paper “A Case for Shorter Queries, and Helping Users Create Them” (PDF here). In it, he and his coauthor Giridhar Kumaran conducted an experiment: They took the query Define Argentine and British international relations and ran it through a search engine. (They don’t specify which one they used.) Then they ran various similar queries that used fewer words — “sub queries” — such as define britain international argentina or define britain relate argentina. Each time, he graded the relevance the search engine’s results, expressed as their “average precision” on a scale of zero to 1.0.

So which sub-query produced the best results? The shortest one. It was only two words long — britain argentina — but it scored 0.626, quite a lot better than the original, full-sentence query, which scored only 0.424.

Why would short queries work better than longer ones? Possibly because …

Continue reading.

Interesting post by Kevin Drum:

Chapter 6 of William Bernstein’s A Splendid Exchange is about the Black Death of the 14th century. It contains this passage:

Even this greatest European apocalypse is only a small part of the story. If the cultural and demographic records of the Black Death are imperfect in Europe, those for the Middle East and Far East are essentially nonexistent; there is no Arab, Indian, or Chinese Decameron.

The basic story here is that the Black Death was actually considerably worse in the Middle East than it was in Europe. In the Nile Valley, where there was no place for city dwellers to escape to (thanks to the surrounding Sahara Desert), the original plague and its aftershocks were especially devastating. Egypt never recovered.

But why are there so few non-Western accounts of the plague? 14th century Arab and Chinese culture were more advanced than European culture, after all. So why no records?

Nick Wingfield and Justin Scheck, writing in the Wall Street Journal:

A push to legalize marijuana on the West Coast is picking up steam as Washington lawmakers and pot proponents in California and Oregon propose separate measures.

The Washington state legislature will hold a preliminary vote Wednesday on whether to sell pot in state liquor stores, though even its authors say the bill is unlikely to pass. The same day in California, backers of a well-funded ballot measure to legalize marijuana are expected to file more than enough signatures to put the initiative before state voters in November.

Activists have also been busy in Washington state, with one group filing a marijuana-legalization initiative last Monday to put the issue on the November ballot. Activists in Oregon, meanwhile, say they have collected more than half of the signatures they need by July to allow a vote on whether the state should set up a system of medical-marijuana dispensaries.

The efforts are part of a national marijuana-legalization movement that has lately been emboldened by several factors, including laws allowing marijuana for medical purposes. The recession may be another reason. With many states suffering big budget deficits, for instance, legalization advocates say the states could benefit from new taxes on the sale of marijuana. In addition, the Obama administration appears to have taken a more-mellow attitude on medical marijuana as societal views about the drug evolve. In a poll last week of 500 adults in Washington state by SurveyUSA, 56% of respondents said legalizing marijuana is a good idea.

"We’re beyond a tipping point culturally," said Roger Goodman, a Democrat representing Kirkland, Wash., and other Seattle suburbs in the Washington legislature who co-authored the legalization bill, known as HB 2401. "Now we’re at a point where we’re figuring out the safest way to end prohibition."

West Coast states—especially California—are particularly in the vanguard of the marijuana-legalization push given the region’s more-liberal attitudes toward a variety of issues. Legalization measures in other states, such as Massachusetts and New Hampshire, haven’t gotten as far, said Allen St. Pierre, executive director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws.

Washington lawmakers will vote on a second bill next week that seeks to …

Continue reading. It’s an interesting story, though the reporters let stand some statements without pointing out the obvious problems with the statement. For example:

Still, there is deep opposition to legalizing marijuana in Washington state from law-enforcement groups and chemical-dependency organizations, many of which argue it would make the drug even more accessible to teenagers than it is currently. Also many argue that marijuana is a "gateway drug," meaning it will lead those using it to move on to other drugs.

First, one should note that drug dealers do not check IDs. If marijuana is sold in state stores and requires an ID, how is that making the drug "even more accessible to teenagers than it is currently"? That makes no sense.

Also, the notion that marijuana is a gateway drug is completely false. First, the studies that have been done have indeed identified a gateway drug—a drug that almost always is involved in leading people into more dangerous drugs—and that gateway drug is alcohol. Moreover, by keeping marijuana illegal and using random drug tests, people are pushed toward harder drugs like cocaine, meth, and heroin. The reason: marijuana can be detected in drug tests as much as 30 days after use, but the harder drugs vanish from the system over a weekend. Moreover, drug dealers tend to want to push people toward addictive drugs to get a captive market, and legalizing marijuana would take that push off the table.

It should also be noted that marijuana is a benign drug. No deaths attributable to marijuana overdose have ever been recorded, and even heavy marijuana smokers do not get lung cancer. The dangers from alcohol and tobacco are MUCH greater than dangers from marijuana.

Still, it’s good to see the conversation going on.

A list of all the colors of Crayola® crayons available since the earliest days. The first 8 colors, available beginning in 1903:

1. Black
2. Brown
3. Orange
4. Violet
5. Blue
6. Green
7. Red
8. Yellow

Dahlia Lithwick in Slate:

There are lots of interesting ways to frame the gay-marriage trial taking place this week in San Francisco: It’s either too early or too late. It’s either a piece of Vegas-style showboating by former Bush v. Gore adversaries David Boies and Theodore Olson or a noble quest for marital equality in America. But perhaps the most potent frame casts it as a grand battle between elitist, anti-democratic judges on the one hand and the will of ordinary Americans on the other. That whole story line suffered a major hit this week when the anti-gay-marriage forces waged an epic fight to prevent the trial from being broadcast to ordinary Americans.

Perry v. Schwarzenegger promises to be a sprawling exploration of every aspect of the fight over gay marriage. But beneath all of the social-science testimony and constitutional nitpicking lies a deep institutional anxiety about whether California’s voters or unelected federal judges should be the arbiters of what marriage means. Opponents of liberal jurisprudence, and their pushy push to legalize gay marriage, have long argued against allowing unelected, sherry-sipping judges to substitute their values for those of the American people. As an argument, this has legs. It’s populist. It’s catchy. But it’s hard to take it seriously when the same people making it also come out strongly against letting the people watch trials.

The legal question for the court is whether Proposition 8—the California ballot initiative, passed in November 2008, that limited marriage to one man and one woman (overturning the state Supreme Court in the process)—is unconstitutional. As testimony has proven, this inquiry is not a narrow or technical one. That’s why Judge Vaughn Walker (a George H.W. Bush appointee, for those keeping score) decided to broadcast the trial in several courthouses around the country and on a delayed basis on YouTube. On Monday, just minutes before the trial opened, the U.S. Supreme Court responded to an appeal from proponents of the gay-marriage ban and stopped any broadcasting for at least several days while they mulled the problem.

Read the rest of this entry »

Sounds like an interesting biography:

The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Quantum Genius

by Graham Farmelo

A review by Michael D. Gordin

Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac (1902 – 1984) might be one of the best subjects imaginable for a scientific biography. He is also surely one of the worst. In most scientific biographies, presenting the life is easy, but integrating the scientific work proves a struggle. For Dirac, the polarities are reversed. His accomplishments in theoretical physics provide a natural narrative. His life, however, was disjointed, chaotic and almost surreal in its juxtaposition of incongruous elements. In The Strangest Man, Graham Farmelo offers a highly readable and sympathetic biography of the taciturn British physicist who can be said, with little exaggeration, to have invented modern theoretical physics. The book is a real achievement, alternately gripping and illuminating, and the few flaws in the biographical integration are often due to the recalcitrance of the subject himself.

It would have been far easier to tackle only the physics, and surely that would have been enough. Dirac’s life spanned most of the 20th century, and he was at the core of its decisive scientific revolution: quantum mechanics. "At the core" is an understatement. As Farmelo sagaciously puts it,

In his heyday, between 1925 and 1933, he brought a uniquely clear vision to the development of a new branch of science: the book of nature often seemed to be open in front of him.

Dirac’s contribution to physical theory was legendary even before he turned 30: He was appointed to the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at Cambridge in 1932, becoming the most distinguished holder of that honor since Isaac Newton (it is now occupied by Stephen Hawking). The following year, Dirac became the youngest theorist to win a Nobel Prize in physics. It had been a short rise to the top. Only in 1926 had Dirac submitted his dissertation, titled "Quantum Mechanics" (the first ever written on the subject), to the University of Cambridge. After that he seemed to be on a single-minded mission to recreate the universe. The reader will be stunned as one staggering insight after another is described — the Dirac equation, the prediction of antimatter, the cosmological speculations, his forays in the 1950s into "strings" instead of point particles, his postulation of a magnetic monopole, and so on. In the case of nearly every exciting new theory of modern physics, Dirac appears to have gotten there first. Richard Feynman, no slouch himself, eventually became famous for expanding quantum mechanics further, and afterward would sometimes quip, "I don’t know what all the fuss is about — Dirac did it all before me."

But it was not simply that Dirac made a number of important developments in quantum theory. The manner in which he developed quantum mechanics bore a characteristic stamp — a style — that helped determine the nature of theoretical physics. Dirac’s style demands …

Continue reading.

Bruce Bower at Science News:

Behaviors and intellectual capacities that scientists have commonly attributed to the rise of Homo sapiens around 200,000 years ago actually appeared in other Homo species as well, according to a pair of new investigations.

Excavations in Kenya have yielded nearly 100 complete and partial stone blades, along with stones from which blades were struck, dating to 500,000 years ago, say Cara Johnson and Sally McBrearty, both of the University of Connecticut in Storrs. That’s roughly 150,000 years before the earliest previous evidence of blade making. Production of these thin, sharp-edged implements flourished around 30,000 years ago among modern humans. But the mental wherewithal and physical skill to make blades as needed had emerged long before, perhaps in species such as Homo rhodesiensis and Homo erectus, Johnson and McBrearty propose in an upcoming Journal of Human Evolution.

Neither did modern humans have a monopoly on flashy personal ornaments. Discoveries at two 50,000-year-old Spanish sites indicate that Neandertals made necklaces out of seashells dyed with red and yellow pigments. Holes carefully cut out of these shells allowed for their suspension from twine or fiber, say João Zilhão of the University of Bristol, England, and his colleagues. Expanding populations and increasing social complexity among modern humans — not intellectual superiority to Neandertals — led to the widespread production of such ornaments, Zilhão’s team hypothesizes in an upcoming Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Greg Kaufmann in The Nation:

If you’re not scared as hell, you should be.

Two days of Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission hearings have me rattled about how little has changed about our financial system and how much is still at risk. They also have me wondering this: where the hell are the media?

For the first day of panels, reporters were squeezed together in the back rows after filling more reserved seating than I’ve seen at any prior hearing during this session of Congress. But as I wrote previously, after the banksters had preened for the cameras and recited their testimony like four schoolboys BSing their way through an oral report, the press vanished, missing out on more candid and informative witnesses.

Yesterday, day two of the hearings, maybe a dozen reporters attended, fewer than were at for the press conference afterward. What did they miss?

For starters, FDIC Chairman Sheila Bair testified that the credit-default swaps (CDS) market still poses a systemic threat and that even she can’t access CDS information to accurately assess financial institutions’ exposure.

Bair and SEC Chairman Mary Schapiro were in agreement with Commission Chair Phil Angelides’s assessment that the credit rating agencies were "proved to be worthless and remain so today," given that they are paid by the very Wall Street firms who are profiting from AAA-rated securitized assets.

State attorneys general Lisa Madigan of Illinois and John Suthers of Colorado revealed that not only were their warnings about unscrupulous and predatory lending practices ignored but that their investigations were actively thwarted by federal regulators who in turn did nothing–under the guise of pre-emption.

Madigan also described how rate sheets reveal that Wall Street paid mortgage brokers and loan officers more for risky mortgages–with low teaser rates, pre-payment penalties, low or no documentation–because the consequent higher interest rate paid by the borrower would bring in more income. Wall Street wasn’t the victim of bad underwriting that it claims to be; indeed, it incentivized it.

Denise Voigt Crawford, a Texas securities regulator for twenty-eight years, discussed the revolving door between agencies and the industries they regulate, and the "chilling effect [it has] on the zeal with which you regulate."

Schapiro, Bair and Madigan argued that …

Continue reading. There’s much more and it’s staggering.

Via Boing Boing:

Yesterday I skipped both Nordic Track and Spanish. I noted that yesterday followed an intensive workout on Friday, when I did the weight training on top of everything else. The Wife then came up with an excellent suggestion: skip the Nordic Track on days when I do the weight training. That makes sense to me. I would still be doing the Nordic Track 5 days a week, which is plenty, and the weight-training days would become less burdensome. So this morning I revised the checklist to show Nordic Track every day save Monday and Thursday.

And today I do the Nordic for 12 minutes—the length of time, according to Cooper, that you need in order to get the training effect, though clearly I’ve been getting some training effect from the shorter workouts, as evidenced by the fact that I can now do 12 minutes.

A note in The Week:

A new study found that each additional hour spent plopped motionless in front of the TV every day increases the risk of dying by 11 percent.

I don’t understand this. I thought that the risk of dying was 100%: everyone dies. So if you don’t watch any TV you’re immortal? (Good news for me, if true.)

Or perhaps a set, for different size balls.

Via Boing Boing:

Thanks to Jack in Amsterdam for the pointer. Nick Turse and Tom Engelhardt at TomDispatch.com:

In his book on World War II in the Pacific, War Without Mercy, John Dower tells an extraordinary tale about the changing American image of the Japanese fighting man.  In the period before the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, it was well accepted in military and political circles that the Japanese were inferior fighters on the land, in the air, and at sea — “little men,” in the phrase of the moment.  It was a commonplace of “expert” opinion, for instance, that the Japanese had supposedly congenital nearsightedness and certain inner-ear defects, while lacking individualism, making it hard to show initiative.  In battle, the result was poor pilots in Japanese-made (and so inferior) planes, who could not fly effectively at night or launch successful attacks.

In the wake of their precision assault on Pearl Harbor, their wiping out of U.S. air power in the Philippines in the first moments of the war, and a sweeping set of other victories, the Japanese suddenly went from “little men” to supermen in the American imagination (without ever passing through a human phase).  They became “invincible” — natural-born jungle- and night-fighters, as well as “utterly ruthless, utterly cruel and utterly blind to any of the values which make up our civilization.”

Sound familiar?  It should.  Following September 11, 2001, news headlines screamed “A NEW DAY OF INFAMY,” and the attacks were instantly labeled “the Pearl Harbor of the twenty-first century.”  Soon enough, al-Qaeda, like the Japanese in 1941, went from a distant threat — the Bush administration, on coming into office, paid next to no attention to al-Qaeda’s possible plans — to a team of arch-villains with little short of superpowers.  After all, they had already destroyed some of the mightiest buildings on the planet, were known to be on the verge of seizing weapons of mass destruction, and, if nothing was done, might soon enough turn the Muslim world into their “caliphate.”

Al-Qaeda was suddenly an organization against which you wouldn’t launch anything less than the full strength of the armed forces of the world’s “sole superpower.”  To a surprising extent, they are still dealt with this way.  You can feel it, for instance, in the recent 24/7 panic over the thoroughly inept underwear bomber and the sudden threat of a few hundred self-proclaimed al-Qaeda members in Yemen.  You can feel it in the ramping up of the Af-Pak War.  You can hear it in the “debate” over moving al-Qaeda detainees from Guantanamo to U.S. maximum security prisons.  The way some politicians talk, you might think those detainees were all Lex Luthors and Magnetos, super-villains incapable of being held by any prison, just like the almost magically impossible-to-find Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri in the wild borderlands of Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Because most Americans have never dealt with or thought of al-Qaeda as a group made up of actual human beings or accepted that, for every televisually striking success, they have an operation (or several) that go bust, the U.S. can’t begin to imagine what it’s actually up against.  The current president, like the last one, claims that we are “at war.”  If so, it’s a war of one, since al-Qaeda and the U.S. military are essentially not in the same war-fighting universe, which helps explain why repeatedly knocking off significant portions of al-Qaeda’s leadership (even if never finding bin Laden and Zawahiri) doesn’t seem to end the threat.

But let’s stop here and try, for a moment, to imagine these two enemies side by side in the same universe of war.  What, in that case, would the line-up of forces look like? …

Continue reading.