December 22, An Open Letter to Ruth Reichl.

Thanksgiving is old history now, but paging through the New Yorker last night I saw an ad for Ruth Reichl's new collection of recipes from Gourmet.  Took me back.  One of our family Thanksgiving traditions is home-made cranberry sauce.  Not a complicated thing, just cranberries, oranges and apples in the Cuisinart.  Blip the thing a couple of times.  Add sugar to taste and you're done.  Usually kind of tart.  May actually be healthy if you go lean on the sugar.  But back to Ruth.  I'm driving home from work the week before turkey day, switch on NPR and there she is getting interviewed by Susan Stamberg on the radio.

Now I am not really a cook.  I can find my way around the kitchen.  I get the slicing and chopping chores when we have a big meal.  Yeah, I use the bent knuckle trick to avoid a trip to the ER.  I do know how to season up something so it tastes OK (to me).  But tend to break the yolk on what should be sunny-side up eggs.  Anything with technique causes me stress and an urge to flee.  Anyhow, smack dab in the middle of this interview about Thanksgiving family recipes  I hear "cranberries".  OK, maybe it's time to listen up. So this is a recipe that Susan's mother found.  Dates back to a 1959 New York Times clipping of a Craig Claiborne recipe.  This is not just any old Cranberry relish recipe.  This thing has pedigree.  Ingredients even had most of my favorite foods!

Ingredients

* 2 cups whole raw cranberries, washed

* 1 small onion

* 3/4 cup sour cream

* 1/2 cup sugar

* 2 tablespoons horseradish from a jar ("red is a bit milder than white")

The real draw was Ruth going on about how it would look. "Having had this on my Thanksgiving table many times, it is really shocking. It's a color that doesn't look like it belongs on your Thanksgiving table.".  And then Susan pipes in with "OK, Pepto Bismol pink." 

Wow, what a great thing to pull the family together and make the holiday memorable. A large bowl of Pepto Bismol right next to the turkey.  Wouldn't that be just fine.  So the day of, I look up the recipe and get to work.  Made two batches of cranberry sauce: the original recipe - just to be safe - and the contribution from Susan's mom. Chopped the onion.  Got the rest of the ingredients.  Threw it all in the Cuisinart and started blipping.  Sure enough, all started to turn kinda light pink. And then the consistency seemed about right so I carefully poured it into our leaded crystal heirloom bowl.  Really set off the pink.  And then I tasted it.  Kinda strange.  Now I do know that some preparations work better after setting up in the refrigerator.  Let's face it, even ice cream would be a little overpowering as a soup at room temperature.  So lets give this stuff a chance.

A couple of hours go by.  And then Ann shows up.  Old family friend.  Not one to mince words.  And she is a cook.  Knows the tricks, understands the science.  OK lets haul out the cranberry stuff.  "Try this".   Ann grabs a spoon, tries a little dab.  And looks confused.  So I try a little more now that it is cold."Interesting".  Nicest thing anybody said about it.  Ann wouldn't actually commit to not liking it.  But, come the Meal, it just sat there.  A lovely crystal bowl of pink glop.  Kids wouldn't touch it.  I did put a spoonful on my plate.  I think somebody else did too; there were at least a couple of furrows in the slick pink surface.  But it just sat there.  And nobody wanted to take some home.   Even the brussel sprouts (halved, braised, lots of butter) did well.  But not CranPepto.

So why is this an open letter to Ruth?  Ruth, you shoulda known!  Let's face it, Susan Stamberg is an NPR interviewer.  What does she know about cooking?  But Ruth.  A legend.  A name anybody would recognize.  Wouldn't be surprised to see Ruth on an Iron Chef panel.  But after CranPepto, who knows.  I am disappointed.  You see the names, the professional foodies, you think they really know stuff.  But hey, if even CranPepto can make it onto the talk show circuit maybe its all a sham.  Did I miss something?  Was it April Fools in November?

September 3, From Long Beach
Are language and engineering both creatures of grammar?   Rules is rules, whether man-made or rooted in physical reality.  Subject and predicate are bound by rules just as strong as those relating force and friction.  Not something most people would willingly accept.  Let's face it, the beauty in writing, the fanciful flights of imagination..are those really distinct from the making of machines or the construction of complex mechanisms?  Another world?  Culture vs. construct?

But maybe it's all the same thing.  I often despair at my inability to remember the signposts of culture.  Who did what or who wrote, said, or depicted what.  And yet the what that they did, the products and ideas.  Those are easy.  And how things work, that's just as easy.  But who did it?  Whether it is Boyle's Law or l'Hopital's Rule?  Who bloody knows.  But how Boyle's Law works or whether l'Hopital's Rule predicts the unpredictable, no problem.  Although l'Hopital's rule was kind of fun.  Look at this complicated equation of limits.  Just keep taking the derivative and eventually you get a solution.  Just works.  Sure, there's a mathematical derivation, a proof replete with equations and carefully constructed logic.  But the geometric interpretation is cute.   And easy.  And you can just think about it.

Maybe that's the answer.  An equation can be thought of as an application of mathematical theorems or as an expression of what happens in the real world.  

!July  3, Letters From Tiburon
 From watching fish manage to miss each other at  the California Academy of Sciences to building a hearing assistive device for my father-in-law, what a day it's been!  Was watching the aquarium down in the basement of the Academy.  Hundreds of fish swimming around in a clear-walled tank. Big fish, little fish, red fish and of course green fish.  No obvious protocol exchange that I could see; no central controller, just hordes of relatively simple submersible neural units doing their thing in the tank.  And they never bumped into each other!  Of course that wasn't the first thing that came to mind.  The first thing was a fantastical musing about what might happen if I dropped a radio control fish into the tank.  Little RC thing with a LIPO battery so it would last a while.  And then you could sit in the viewing gallery and run the RC fish all around the tank, scattering the real fish all over the place and having a grand old time.  And I checked, you can buy an RC fish.  Looks kind of like a Garibaldi.  Not Guiseppe, Italian hero and revolutionary exiled to Staten Island, New York who fought for the reunification of Italy until his death on the island of Caprera June 2, 1882.  He looked nothing like a fish.  His likeness is graven on statues all over the world including a lovely statue in Washington Square Park in New York City.  Turns out that Garibaldi fish are called Garibaldi fish because they are the same color as Guiseppe's favorite shirts! 

 But I digress.  The most amazing thing was watching the fish.  They never run into each other!  How do they do that?  Some of them even swim around in formation.  Couldn't we get a little of that smarts into an autopilot or something and save all kind of money on air traffic control systems?  Let's face it, fish are not usually the sharpest tack in town.  Yet they put LA traffic to shame....with a much harder problem.  No lanes in the road and they have to worry about moves in all three dimensions.  Just something to think about.

And then came the afternoon and a little experiment in audiology.  Turns out that as people age, their hearing starts to go.  Hearing starts to go, you miss stuff.   You really do need to hear with BOTH ears to make the most of whatever you are listening to.  But telephones don't work like that.  They only play out of one little hole.  Bummer.  And the sin is compounded when you try to buy a set of headphones and microphone to plug into the phone.  Turns out that a lot of phones do have a little jack to let you plug in a headset.  But the jack is the skinny 2.5 mm kind.  And the headsets built to be used as phones -with the skinny 2.5mm plug-  typically have only one earphone; still stuck with the one hole problem.   The headsets that do have stereo headphones and a microphone are built for gamers. Gamer headsets are intended to plugged into PC sound cards. The gamer headsets come with separate 3.5 mm plugs: one for the headphones and one for the microphone.  So whaddya do?  Let me tell you, trying to get advice from the friendly folks at Best Buy or Radio Shack will not get you very far.  Best Buy at the telephone counter,"do you have any stereo headsets?".  Blank stare followed by "does that have a microphone?".  That's why we have different words in the language; headphones are headphones; headsets are headphones with a microphone. So we try over at the gamer side of the store.  Yep, they got 'em.  But only with the pesky 3.5 mm sound card plugs.  Figure we'll go over to Radio Shack and find an adapter.  So, buy the gamer headset. Back into the car and drive to Radio Shack.  Find adapters.  Meanwhile asking, just in case, whether the store actually carries what I am looking for, the two headphone headset.  "Oh no, we don't carry those.  Had some but the people plugged them into amplified phones and sued us 'cause it was too loud."   Then the guy notices that I am buying the adapters.  "Don't even try.  Phones and headsets use a different kind of microphone.  And it's all wired differently".  Yeah right, go back 40 years and telephones had funky little carbon microphones....but that's before the Radio Shack guy was even born!

Take it all home.  Break out the soldering iron, tie it all together, plug it in and -a miracle- it works!  A stereo headset for the telephone.  And the father-in-law can use the phone again.  This can't be the first time a hard of hearing person wanted binaural sound out of a telephone.  Would somebody out there with a small manufacturing capability PLEASE come up with either a stereo telephone-2.5mm plug-compatible headset  or a gamer headset to telephone adapter so that hard of hearing people who aren't handy with a soldering iron can still manage on the phone?  And let's keep the price down.  Parts cost should be under $5 so could easily be sold for $10.  Course if its called a "hearing assistive device"; even QVC will demand their $29.95 and  shipping is extra.

March 5, On Awareness
Driving the kids to school yesterday.  Approached an intersection just a little too fast, but stopped in time.  Pedestrian walking across the street.  Just started off from the sidewalk and walked across the intersection.  Didn't look around.  Didn't look from side to side.  Just straight ahead, oblivious.  If I couldn't have stopped in time, he'd be a goner.  So was this guy missing some essential piece of defensive mechanism? Don't the rest of us look up when we find ourselves seemingly headed for contention with a 1.5 ton car?  Had he just experienced some soul-wrenching turmoil that made him wish for release, secretly hoping that a subliminally observed vehicle might put an end to his agony.  Or was he just unaware?

Awareness is not your straightforward attribute.  For some folks awareness might be walking outside and observing the plants and flowers and knowing the names of each of those organisms, their likes and dislikes, latin names, and growing cycles.  For other folks awareness might be the pain shooting down their sciatic nerve as they stir their spine into motion after a night of fitful sleep.  Still other folks might experience awareness as a visualization of pistons moving up and down in their steel collars propelling an automobile down the street.

Reminds me of a book, Breakfast with Buddha by Roland Merullo.  I am not sure that the Buddha in the book is a real Buddha.  For one thing he is Russian rather than Indian.  But I did a little research on the nature of buddha-hood (which seems to be a real word).  Being Russian is OK.  Russians can be Buddhas.  Per the wiki, this character seems to have the characteristics of a Sammasambuddha.  A Sammasambuddha is someone who has somehow attained buddha-hood, then decided to teach others the truth he or she has discovered.  We are talking spiritual kind of guy.  Volya Rinpoche, the guy, has a following drawn by his convincing spiel.  The gist of what he says is that we should be open to life.   Open seems to mean an ability to experience life unhindered by expectation or a need to judge.  Be simply open, ready to accept what is, what happens.  Seems related to "not-self" a term translated from anattā (Pāli) or anātman (Sanskrit) in the literature on Buddhism.  Actually like a Will Ferrell movie of all things, "Stranger Than Fiction".  Will Ferrell's affect as IRS Agent Harold Crick is an amazing depiction of not-self.  He is totally accepting.  No judgement.  No pushback until the outcome, his death at the pen of Karen Eiffel played by Emma Thompson, might seem  fatal.  

So are awareness and this Buddhist not-self idea somehow related?  If you have too much going on inside; if you are concentrating on your life, your private agony, reliving a pleasure, do you lose the ability to experience what is outside?  Like retracing the same path in your car year after year to the point that the drive becomes an opportunity for meditation, but you lose the ability to experience the warmth of the sun, the look of distant mountains, the smell of rain.  

Sort of interesting that Transcendental Meditation came out of the same school as not-self.  With TM, you recite a mantra over and over and over again.  Eyes closed.  And your mind shuts down.  Said to transcend thought through a process that Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in The Science of Being and Art of Living described as a mental procedure that allows the mind to quiet itself.  But that seems the opposite of awareness and not-self.  As if awareness were the opposite of meditation.  Awareness is the letting in of the outside.  Meditation is all-self, a closing off.  Too much awareness can drive you a little crazy.  Too little and you don't make it through the crosswalk.

February 14, Reach Out To Me, Mr. President!
Driving in to work the other day I heard the news on KNX, Judd Gregg backed out of the Secretary of Commerce job. First Richardson, now Gregg. Richardson, I understand, "Pay for Play" allegations can be a little embarrassing. The Judd Gregg thing is puzzling. Sounds like Judd wanted the job...and then got nervous. But hey, politicians are fair weather friends. Vote public opinion and you'll have a House to live in till the rest of your days; go against the grain, vote your heart and you better start looking homeward.. In this case, it may have been vote against your party or deny your party that extra vote in the Senate, but who can tell. At least he didn't leave you in the lurch after a couple of months on the job.

So, Mr. President, I want to help out. After minimal consultation with family and friends, I am throwing my hat into the ring. Reach out to me, Mr. President! I can do the Commerce job. After getting twice burned, I don't expect you to leap at the prospect without a little background on my credentials. I looked for an application at usajobs.gov, but couldn't find the listing for Secretary of Commerce, so I hope you'll understand my approach. Call it an open resume.

I should begin by stating that I am a registered Republican. I joined the Grand Old Party right out of graduate school on the advice of my old friend Hobart. Hobart pointed out that nearly everyone he knew had started out a Democrat, but once they achieved some career goals and bought a first house they moved over to the GOP. I didn't have a house and at the time was earning significantly below the poverty line but I took Hobart's words to heart. I wanted to have a house and I certainly wanted to increase my income so I figured that joining the GOP would sort of bootstrap the rest of it. I do now have a house and my earnings place me somewhat over the poverty line (family of four) so I guess it worked. Thank you, Hobart. But I must confess, Mr. President, even though I have been a registered Republican lo these many years, even though I have voted in nearly all the Republican primaries (except the last two); I must confess that in no general election have I brought myself to actually vote Republican. Whether this be a failing on the part of myself and my conscience or, perhaps, the GOP itself, I cannot say. However, I do feel it incumbent upon me to come clean at this juncture, my possible first foray into Washington politics. Despite my lack of a clear ideological compass, should you feel the need to reach out across party lines, Mr. President, I stand ready.

But enough of my political affiliations, what are my qualifications to assume the office of Secretary of Commerce? What is it in my background that allows me to hope, even imagine that I could make a contribution at such an exalted level? Long time readers will note that I have some acquaintance with software. This acquaintance springs from working within a large software development organization supporting the DOD. Thus situated, I have some experience with government procurement practices, both in nascent form when a program is still but an idea as well as in full bore operational form when the full weight and measure of the government regulatory practices can be brought to bear. I must admit that knowledge of these traditions has not fostered in me an inordinate appreciation of their value. The correspondence between metrics and accomplishments remains, for me, an unproven relationship. The ability of small groups to create vast achievements contrasted with the ability of large groups to spend correspondingly large amounts of money without creating similarly large capabilities has fostered in me perhaps a cynical view of the process as it is exercised by large government programs. And yet I exist quite happily within that world. Mr. President, I stand ready.

I do have strong opinions, backed by quantitative analysis, of the directions our government - dare I say it - my cabinet department might take as elixir for our current economic impairment. Past readers will note that within this column, I have proposed "making well" the tens of thousands of mortgages falling to foreclosure each month. I have provided projections of the expense of such balm and noted that the cost is well within the scope of funding applied to TARP and the latest government economic fix. These opinions and ideas are not without a certain historical basis in economic theory. John Maynard Keynes in The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money wrote

"a large proportion of our positive activities depend on spontaneous optimism rather than mathematical expectations, whether moral or hedonistic or economic"

Pretty exciting stuff, but what better way to create a little spontaneous optimism than to fix all those bad mortgages. Tax breaks, that extra $5 to $10 a week, do not create optimism. The most likely scenario is that the money will go to one more fast food outing, leading to heartburn and yet one more percentage point in our country's embrace of obesity. Consider an alternative. Create a symbol of hope, a stars-and-stripes embossed government-standard envelope containing mortgage relief, delivered to a foreclosee's door. The contents of the envelope document a promise to make the unmanageable house loan, thanks to a change in the nation's economic policy, now manageable. Talk about raising the spirits. And what better way to celebrate than putting some newly-spendable cash into the local economy. Would it be expensive to make all those defaulting loans well? Of course it would, but the analysis (see the archives at datacorner for the numbers) suggests this fix is way cheaper than proposals currently on the table. Imagine the impact on national morale, immediately lifting what Keyes called the "depressed animal spirits" now dragging out the recession. Mr. President, I stand ready.

So Mr. President. Reach out to me, a lapsing Republican, an engineer, a software developer, husband and father of two - I hew to academia's tradition of putting the most important attributes last. All I can offer is pragmatism, facility with numbers, and an adequate dose of common sense (although writing this blog may give lie to the last observation). Is this the ground from which the next Secretary of Commerce will spring? Much as the carefully tended tomato seeds refuse to spring from the planter in my backyard, I doubt it. But should you make the offer, I pledge to continue your tradition of complete sentences noted by Andy Borowitz in his November 18 column, and I do remain untainted by any appearance, actuality, or even opportunity for "pay for play" or tax dissimulation.

February 7, Aliens Write Software Too
Or do they. Threw this little gem out at dinner the other day. Came from sitting at the laptop and wondering about spaceships. The little green guys that motivated Independence Day and Area 51, do they have guys sitting at laptops too?  Being a software person, I figured the answer must be yes. But number one youngest daughter (at the dinner table) had a different take. "What if they don't." How do you answer that? Might start with, "what is software?". As a working definition, let's say software is anything that lets you take hardware, a concrete thing that you can touch and feel, and then cause it to change its behavior or function. In a very limited sense, a switch might be considered a piece of software since it can cause a lightbulb (thing which you can touch and feel) to change its behavior (lights up and if you feel it and touch it you probably get burned). Course a switch is a pretty simple piece of software, but the lowly switch does cover a bunch of attributes associated with software: configuration, ability to change state, memory are a few. More complicated software would have a bunch of switches and more complicated functions...but you get the idea.

Ok, so do aliens have software? Or not. Let's get on with it. Consider the spaceship (that's the Millenium Falcon being refueled down below). Pretty complicated piece of thing. Lots of moving parts. Can stretch or exceed normal physical limits. Can keep the driver alive in the "vastness of space". Means supplying whatever the driver breathes and eats and handling whatever comes later. Means the ability to go pretty fast, unless aliens live really long. Means the ability to counteract gravity...which is not such a problem when you're in space since even low-power ion propulsion can work. But it gets pretty important pretty darned fast when you're falling through the atmosphere. So a spaceship can do an awful lot of things and probably do them pretty well. And? Well, pretty complicated things usually have a lot of parts. For the whole spaceship to work, all those parts gotta work, too. Which introduces the idea of yield.

What's yield? Suppose the spaceship needs 100 thrusters to get off the ground. You can make 100 relatively simple thrusters and hook them up to the spaceship or you can make a single really complicated thruster that does the work of all 100 simple thrusters. But the really complicated thruster will have a whole lot more pieces to it then the 100 simple ones. So the really complicated one takes a whole lot longer to build, and if it does break, you really are hosed. Think single engine airplane and the engine quits. Remember that guy who just landed the airplane in the Hudson? His plane had two engines and they both, simultaneously, choked on a bunch of birds. If you'd said, just before takeoff, "Sully, you are about to fly in to a flock of birds. Would you rather be flying a twin engine A320 or a four engine 747. Whaddya think?" Go ahead, take a guess at the answer. So, even the alien, might prefer a 100 thrusters to a really complicated single thruster solution. Imagine we're now at the Thruster Assembly Plant - out there in alien-land. The assembly plant is churning away. Workers hunched over the assembly line. All those thrusters coming down the conveyor belt. And you've got the alien chief tester all the way down at the end of the belt. The chief tester is responsible for making sure that each thruster actually works. Unfortunately, it turns out that they don't all work. Turns out that about 95 out of every 100 are OK; 5 don't quite make spec. 

Those 95 out of every 100 work, right out of the factory, but what happens in space? Well, hopefully the aliens did some end of life testing...means running a bunch of thrusters till they poop out and seeing how long that takes. If you're gonna put your best spaceship pilot in this thing and go across the "vastness of space", you probably want some expectation that your pilot will come back....or at least keep communicating until we've all lost interest. So, lets assume that trip across "vastness of space" from alien home-central to earth is a week. The end of life testing reveals that if you put 100 thrusters on the spaceship, you run them all for a week, they still all work. But if you run them for two weeks (don't forget the trip home), a couple of them break. So what to do? OK, if the spaceship needs a 100 thrusters to move around, let's put in a couple of spares and when a working thruster breaks, we can switch in the spare.

A switch. Isn't that how all this got started? Yep, for most conceivable complicated things you want to do, you do need some means of affecting or changing the thing's behavior. At the very least, you need a switch. But it could get even worse. Suppose in doing the end of life testing, the aliens found out that if, rather than run each thruster until it stops working, you give each one a break every once in while. Turns out thrusters really like those breaks. Turns out that thrusters run that way, with breaks, stay alive twice as long! Wow. Back to the spaceship. So, let's say the green guys put in 10 spare thrusters. Rather than letting them sleep until something breaks, the alien chief tester suggests a new strategy. Rotate through all 110 thrusters. Every once in a while, the chief tester guy says, give 10 thrusters a break, keep at least 100 of them running. What happens? End of life testing says they will all last quite a bit longer....and you still get some spares. Those aliens are pretty smart.

So what needs to happen to implement that strategy? You probably need 110 switches to turn each thruster on and off. You probably need to remember which thrusters last ran so you get an idea which ones need to get a break. If a thruster goes south, you probably want to remember about the broken one so you never try to use it again. All that stuff to remember, and it has to be ready to change on moment's notice...like when the spaceship hits a flock of birds. Oh yeah, no birds in space, all right, maybe when the spaceship is landing. Back to our definition of software, "anything that lets you take hardware, a concrete thing that you can touch and feel, and then cause it to change its behavior or function", looks like we can make a pretty good argument that a safe (good against breakage), efficient (good use of spares) spaceship probably has something like software....and that's just to move around. Also has to navigate and keep the pilot alive and all that stuff...but that might be chapter 2.

So maybe there are little green guys sitting at laptops messing with software. Kinda weird. Is the existence of software one of those absolutes? People gotta breathe and eat. To exert a little control over the breathing and eating they build stuff. And when the stuff gets a little more complicated they gotta write software. Might software be an expression of existentialism, our -and the green guys- autonomy over the physical world? The developer of software imposes a his/her/its own view of reality upon the physical attributes the software controls. According to Sartre, "Evil is the product of the ability of humans to make abstract that which is concrete." What is software other than an expression of the ability of humans to make concrete that which is abstract?

February 3, Forget the Bailout, A Better Fix.
What's it gonna take to fix the economy? Well, it sure isn't saving money. Your friendly Commerce Department just released data showing personal savings rate going from 2.9% to 3.6%, second highest rate in a year. What do our exPrez and Mr. Keynes tell us as a way to get out of this mess? Answer is simple; spend don't save. Spend money and businesses get revenue. They get revenue and all them stuck economic wheels start to turn. But where are we gonna get the money?

A huge bonanza of cash remains lurking out there in the economy. More money than the TARP and the AIG bailout and all the government grease used to slide the Wells Fargo Wachovia and Bank of America Merrill Lynch accommodations into place. So much money. Where is it hiding? Apart from documenting the continuing slide of business and investment credit, your friendly Federal Reserve also provides detailed information on retirement funds. Table 118c downloaded from their website lists total assets for "Private Pension Funds Defined Contribution Plans" as, get this, 3.5 trillion dollars as of the end of 2007. Sure its gone down a bit since the crash of '08. Let's say 40% to be generous. That would still leave something north of $2 trillion in those accounts. Just sitting there.

Can we spend it? Nope. Under age 59 and a half and the government adds a 10% penalty. And of course anything you pull out just goes against income so it bumps your overall tax rate as well. So, is anybody spending it? Not unless you really are broke. And then the money is probably getting used to salvage a mortgage. Not buying goods and influencing businesses.

Is this a good long term approach? Well, by the numbers its kinda dumb. What are you going to do in 20 years when you need the money that was in the 401K? Actually the question -and answer- are not all that simple. Remember that $1.5 trillion of your 401K just evaporated in the final 4 months of 2008. Did we (or you) get any value for that money? Nope. So what if the floodgates opened a bit so we spend some of the un-evaporated residual. And then the economy gets a little bit better. And, amazingly, the value of the remaining holdings gets a little better, too. Sounds like Pollyanna don't it. Something for nothing. But why should this be crazy? We just lost a whole bunch something for nothing in the last third of 2008.

Let's face it. Economics modelling has been revealed as a recipe in search of science. Dear old Alan Greenspan is left with,"those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholder's equity (myself especially) are in a state of shocked disbelief." Didn't he ever consider self-interest as a motivator? How do you compare shareholder equity with an Aston Martin and a Manhattan penthouse (including garage containing aforementioned Aston)? Wells Fargo was just caught willing to spend the bailout money on a Las Vegas junket. Screw shareholder equity. Till the news broke, anyway. So maybe its time for something new. Just an idea, and Barak doesn't have to print more money to make it happen.

January 6, 2009 Toys are Us or A Long Strange Trip
Technorati's a funny kind of word. If it is a second declension noun, then, as it refers to an individual, the correct form would be technoratus but the Net doesn't know beans about technoratus. Still, let's be grammatically correct; keep Cicero and that ilk from turning in their graves. So, am I a technoratus? Got me the latest phone, actually a smart phone, the other day. Neat gadget that pretty much crosses the line from phone to computer. Had an early version for two and a half years, that's six months past the free Verizon renewal cause they hadn't actually come out with anything better. And then they did, more dots on the display, faster processor and mainly unlimited bandwidth at what seemed like a reasonable price.

I got the new toy. And then I had to go through one of those soul searching experiences. What was the motivation in buying the thing? Was it to show off the new toy to family, friends, and anonymous acquaintances sardined next to me on the airplane? Was it to materially improve productivity at work, enhancing my reputation, and bringing me ever closer to the next raise or promotion. Was the expectation that ownership of said toy would become a truly life changing event? "By owning this new gadget, my life will improve 48.6%". Maybe it was a subliminal response to the economic misery. "By buying this thing, I am affirming my level of affluence so I feel good. And by the way, I am spending money which helps the provider's bottom line and puts cash into the marketplace." It’s awfully hard to assess the truth in these things. The old Romans used to say, "nosce te ipsum" and before that the Greeks would throw out a couple of "γνῶθι σεαυτόν or gnothi seauton" to pass the time . OK, it’s "know thyself", which is a pretty tough concept. Can you ever know what really drove you to do something? Do you even really want to know? Could be embarrassing or maybe, even, frightening.

But back to the unlimited bandwidth thing. Unlimited bandwidth opens all kinds of interesting opportunities. A couple of apps have sprung up to help justify the cell provider's investment in 3G. The new generation of apps provides streaming radio and TV all down to the cell. Apps are cheap, around 20 bucks. So let's try it out. I download the app to the computer. Hook the computer up to the phone. Do the ActiveSync thing. The app installs. (First time). Run the app, see the menu. Click the buttons. Read the manual. Go back to the buttons; make it work. And the most amazing discovery, Internet Radio! Seriously cool. Puts XM and Sirius to shame. Paid XM $12 a month for two years and gave up after I had learned all my favorite channels by heart. Dunno how those guys can ever compete with a whole world full of content. Wow, Internet Radio. Cool

So about a week later, still in search mode, I discover Radio IO. They're trying to make money off of Internet Radio. But they really do have the key to my heart. A whole, complete channel with only one rock group. Yep, just one. That's all they play. What group is it? What's the secret? Grateful Dead. Barely interrupted streaming audio of the Dead. Just the Dead. Live, studio, concerts. Anything they ever cooked up what got captured on media, Radio IO plays it.

So now, I'm cocooned in the car. Phone plugged in to the radio. Jerry's playin'; Phil Lesh providing that driving bass guitar. And what a smile I have on my face. Brings back all kinds of great memories, saw them in Chicago sometime in the late seventies (must have been ’76 or ’77), and the music sounds so fine. And now I know why I got the darned thing. No worries.

January 2, 2009. Jobs, jobs, jobs
And now an idea for a jobs program. President-elect Obama has made it clear that his approach to fixing the economic doldrums is jobs creation through investment in infrastructure improvements. Fix roads and bridges; create jobs. A great idea, modelled after the job programs that pulled the country out of the Great Depression. But might there be a solution much closer to home? Conservative estimates put the current bailout outlay at something north of $300 Billion. Same sources, when attempting to pin down exactly what the money was used for are left at a loss. One quote, thanks to the Washington Post,

"It's a mess," said Eric M. Thorson, the Treasury Department's inspector general, who has been working to oversee the bailout program until the newly created position of special inspector general is filled. "I don't think anyone understands right now how we're going to do proper oversight of this thing."

Of course we do know what some organizations are doing...they are converting themselves to banks so they can get a piece of the pie. Most recently, GM's financing arm, GMAC, converted themselves to a bank to the tune of $5B. Wonder why they were so late to the party...the Project on Government Oversight saw fit to publish the short list...

• Lincoln National Corporation is in the process of acquiring Newton County Loan and Savings, an Indiana bank.
• Hartford Financial is acquiring Federal Trust Corporation, the parent company of Federal Trust Bank in Florida.
• Genworth Financial is purchasing InterBank FSB in Minnesota.
• CIT Group has converted its Utah Industrial Bank to a Utah State Bank.
• Morgan Stanley was approved as a Bank Holding Company on September 21, 2008.
• GMAC Financial Services has opened GMAC Bank, a Utah chartered Federal Reserve Bank member bank.
• American Express was approved as a Bank Holding Company on November 10, 2008. The company owns American Express Centurion Bank, an industrial loan bank, and American Express Bank FSB, a federal savings bank in Utah.
• Goldman Sachs was approved as a Bank Holding Company in mid-September and opened Goldman Sachs Bank USA in Salt Lake City.

But what does all this have to do with jobs? Seems that the New York City financial sector (that's the Wall St. part when they compare Wall St. and Main St.) historically has provided just under a half million jobs. Some estimates place the job losses on Wall St due to the economic crisis at 80,000,nearly 20% of the total. Those 80,000 folks who are about to be out of work are not necessarily dumb and incompetent. What got them and their firms into trouble was greed, fueled by the wrong incentives. They weren't incentivized to work smart or build a healthy business; they were incentivized to show a big short-term profit....not at all the same thing. Sometimes, they didn't even have to show a profit, just show a large volume of capital flows...money in and money out, and take a little vig off the top.

And those people do represent a valuable resource. Given the right conditions those folks are great at making money. What are the right conditions? How about the right incentives. That $300B that the government is doling out with little or no oversight for example. Right now the Treasury is incentivized to spend the money quickly, "see we are putting words into action". And the banks are incentivized to grab it, "see, we are working with the government and using the money to help stabilize our business". Looking at the examples above, from the bank's point of view, "stabilizing our business" means buying a bunch of other businesses at taxpayer expense.

So let's put those 80,000 unemployed to work overseeing the bailout. Sure they might be a little crooked, but the wrong incentives drove them to it. Could be as simple as, "every dollar you find that has been mis-spent by the bank, you get a penny". Sounds pitiful, doesn't it. But let's look at the numbers. A penny of every dollar on $300 Billion is $3 Billion. Spread over 80,000 people that's (3,000,000,000/80,000) or $37,500 per person. Not that much. All right, let's aim lower, only provide jobs for half of them. That's $75K per person. Wow. We have an army of potential overseers who could just about guarantee heavy-duty scrutiny of the bailout procedure. We could turn them back into valued contributors to society by incentivizing them to do their jobs. And we could probably save a bunch of dough in the process...remember 99 cents of every dollar they find goes right back to the Treasury. What an opportunity! Could only happen in America.

October 8, 2008 And now the story can be told. How Sarah Palin got on the ticket.
Want to hear the real story of how Sarah got to be Big John's VP pick? Can't yet tell whether she's just a flash in Big John's pan or Big John is a flash in hers. Of course we'll know when the candidates comes out swinging in 2012 and we're reminiscing about the crash of '08.

John McCain's sitting in a booth with wife Cindy and campaign manager Rick Davis at T-Bones Steakhouse and Saloon in Lake Wylie, S.C, " Hey Rick, where's that VP list?", "over here Big John" Rick hands him the list. Big John ponders the list of names. Who was it gonna be? Could it be Mitt? or Tom Ridge? How about Joe Lieberman? Tim Pawlenty? How about Condy Rice? Colin Powell? Oh man, how we gonna figure this out. "Hey Rick, Anybody got phone numbers for these guys? I better start calling. May as well start at the top." Big John reaches for the phone. "Mitt? Is that you Mitt? Yeah, you're at the top of my list! Don't worry about that stuff. They misquoted me. I said Mormonites, not Moron-ites. Bygones. So, how about it? What do you mean? Yeah, I read the Articles of Faith. Yeah, I can be honest and benevolent and all that stuff. No, really! What do you mean you're busy. Aw forget it."

"Hey Rick, who's next on the list. Condy? Are you there. It's John. John. John McCain. No, I'm not kidding. It's really me! Alright, call me back." Phone rings. "Condy? See, it was me. So, what I was calling about. Yeah, its the VP thing. You're the one. Top of the list. Condy, I'm being honest here. You've been the one all along. To have and to hold, my partner in the big house. Not like Dick Cheney. Where's Dick been lately? Probably out hunting. Better look out. George's been carrying the ball by himself. Would I make something like this up? No way. Condy, this is the real thing. What do you mean you heard that line in high school. Condy I need you. I want you. You're a woman and you're black! So what if we disagree a little on the platform. I just need you standing up there next to me. Yeah, kind of like a anti-Hillary. Let me get this straight, you don't think I'm going doing this for the right reasons? Hey, now there's a line that Carol gave me back in my courtin' days. Oops, sorry Cindy. Yeah, I know I promised never to mention that woman. Aw, this is too hard. Condy, just forget it. Thought I could do you a favor."

"Hey Rick, who's next on the list. What happened to those ribs?" Looks down at the list. Sucks a rib. Grabs the phone, "Joe? Hey, Joe my friend, how about it? You know what I mean. Yeah, for the Republican party. So you strayed for a while. You're a great Republican. Nobody's gonna remember the last time you were running for VP, with Al Gore. Glad that's over. And forget that Connecticut for Lieberman stuff, that was years ago. Yeah. I want you to run with me. We'd be a great team. What do you mean you're tired. You're just a kid. I got ten years on you. My ticker's been missing a couple of beats every once in a while. With any luck, you could get to be president too. You don't want it to happen that way? You think the job's gonna be too tough. Damn straight it's gonna be tough. But the perks? George Jr. is making a fortune off of this gig. Yeah his dad too. You don't need the money? Everybody needs money; what are you talking about? Aw, this is too hard. Forget it."

Hey Rick, I'm getting kinda wore out here. We're just about outa names. And I'm not calling that Ron Poole guy. Who's left? Sarah who? Where's that? No, what is it. Oh you mean it's a town. Wasilla? Never heard of it. Alaska? The governor? She's a woman. Wow. Is she black? What do you mean she hunts. With a gun? You're putting me on. Moose? Holy mackerel, the NRA guys are gonna love me. Rick, you're a genius. This gal is pure gold! Let's call her up." Hands Cindy the ribs, retrieves the phone, "Who's this? Piper? What kind of a name is Piper? Oh, you're her daughter! This is Mr. McCain. No I'm not calling about the museum. Or the bridge. McCain. John McCain. I'm running for president. Look, is your mother home? I did say so. Oh just put her on the phone. Hello? Sarah? This is John, John McCain. Yeah, the candidate. So I was talking to the brain trust here. You know, trying to work out who would help the ticket. And your name came up. Really. Sarah, I am not one of Todd's buddies down at Tailgaters. Ok, call me back. Here's the number. I'm not at home; we're sitting here at T-Bones Steakhouse. Hey Rick, what town is this? Lake Wylie in South Carolina. Great ribs. So, call me back!" Puts the phone down, starts on another rib. Phone rings. "Yeah, its me. I want you to run with me. Honest. OK, forget that, but I do want you to run with me. And you can have time off for the annual Moose run."

October 6, 2008 Get me Outa Here!
What have they done! First the gov't sponsors Citi to buy Wachovia. Next thing you know Wells Fargo goes for it without the sweetener. Sort of an alternative bailout in miniature. All those non-performing assets that are bringing the banks down, they're not worth what the borrower's signed up for but they ain't worth nuthin either. Wells Fargo wants to pick up Wachovia even with an extra $32B in losses on loans. Course, Wells Fargo has stockholders. Course Wells Fargo wants to pony up $15B for the privilege of being saddled with those extra losses. Course they also think that Wachovia will add 15% to their net after only two years.

And everywhere else? Disaster. Interesting numbers in the Economist this week. Evidently, commercial banks in the US have lent 96 cents for each dollar of deposit. Money in is just about money out so that's about par unless the depositors start wanting their money back. So what happens when those loans become nonperforming? So the value of the loan isn't the borrowed amount anymore, it's the value of the asset. Real assets are 20% to 30% down these days so that 1:1 is history...at least for now. That drop is a real loss in value. Unless you're Charles Keating, to compute the bottom line you have to subtract the losses from the assets, in this case the deposit..and all of a sudden instead of 1:1 the balance sheet starts looking more like 1.2 or 1.3 to 1. Which is driving all the domestic US banks into the arms of the Fed. What's happening to the Continental European Banks? According to the Economist, they are starting out at 1.4:1. So, they are starting out where the domestic banks wound up. What cost financial security across the pond when somebody factors in the drop in real value? Somebody better have some awfully deep pockets.

September 29, 2008 Bailout Mania
So what does that $700 billion bailout really mean? Is it a sell-out to Wall St? Or a gift to Main St. How about a couple of numbers. As of August this year, the total capitalization for all stocks in the New York Stock Exchange was...are you ready?...$13.5 trillion. Makes a mere $700 Billion look like chump change. So, going back to the numbers, what does the bailout represent? About 5%. Yep, that's all. The bailout is just 5% of the NYSE capitalization. How much did we lose today when John McCain failed to deliver his party's vote? Just the numbers now. If we say the Dow Jones Industrial Average is at all representative of the market as a whole, we lost 7% of the market capitalization. Go ahead, do the math. We lost $950 billion today because Congress messed up. Who lost the dough? Was it the fat cats of Wall St.? Who are those guys anyway?

Let's face it. The people who lost $950 billion today are you and me; that's Main St. in media-speak. That's us folks with any kind of investment, whether its stocks, a house, or your shriveling retirement money. The fat cats are supposed to be keeping the money whole, but who's holding the bag? Yep, you and me. So the $700 billion dollar question? How can $700 billion make such a darned difference? Well, let's think about leverage. Assuming you are one of the shrinking population of homeowners, how did you buy your house? Did you pay cash? Do you own the house outright? Of course not - unless your last name is Buffett and your first name starts with a W. How did you do it? The famous answer is leverage. If you bought before the Era of the SubPrime, you probably put 10% down or 20% down and the bank covered the rest. Everybody was happy because you got to live there and the bank figured you wouldn't walk away from your $25K to $50K investment. That down payment is leverage...a little dough up front goes a long way. The way it is supposed to work...leverage that the bank holds on you so you won't walk and leverage you give the bank so they'll fund the loan and allow you to pay them interest. That's before SubPrime when all we had were healthy loans. Of course when we hit SubPrime, the bank's stopped caring about the down payment. And the quasi-homeowner had no qualms about walking away.

So how is $700 billion going to make a difference? Think about the leverage. $700 billion is 10% of $ 7 trillion. So the $700 billion bailout has the capability of making over $7 trillion worth of mortgages well, turning them into healthy loans. That's a lot of houses. Figure the median house price is $220K then that $7 trillion represents 31.8 million homes. What's our current foreclosure rate? The good folks at housing wire reported about 215K foreclosures in December of last year. That's a problem. That's the problem that Bernanke and Paulson and all them guru's out there are telling us brought the economy down. Back to how is $700 billion gonna make a difference? Suppose it really would fund $7 trillion in mortgages by making them healthy with a real 10% down. Those 215K foreclosures per month and $220K represent a monthly tab of $47 billion a month. Sounds awful don't it. But the bailout would let us make those mortgages well for the next 12 years by taking all them subprime mortages with little or no money down and converting them to the traditional 10% down healthy model. Want to be conservative? Even at 20% down, the bailout buys us 6 years of economic peace. Seems like a deal.

July 10, 2008 Update
OK, so we skipped a day. Hancock rocks! Yeah, we do movie critiques too. A long list of movie critics, Kenneth Turan at LATimes, Lisa Schwarzbaum at Entertainment Weekly among a list of favorites, have panned that particular piece of film making. But then the Denby's piece in the New Yorker came out for it. And actually Ebert kind of liked it. Certainly has more depth than your typical Spiderman movie. Like, the characters are nearly believable. And after the initial disbelief you don't have to put up with the recurring technobabble about magic machines and death rays that litter most attempts at getting past reality. Spiderman, the Hulk, Fantastic 4 all got to be that way because of somebody's idea of magic science. And people buy it! Course they're buying Hancock too, and he got to be super coz he's an angel.

An open message to Pope Benny, this could be the opportunity the Church has been looking for. Go mainstream. Get rid of the $14Mil deficit run by the Holy See, Vatican city, by coming out with a string of holy superheroes. Superhero suggestions accepted here. Never realized that the flying nun was so far ahead of her time. If only Sister Bertrille had banged a few heads she could have spawned a new movement. Not bad for immaculate conception. (Yep that's Sally Field using terrain-following radar doing 0.75 Mach at 200 feet).

But what is it about Will Smith that makes him so watchable. Not bad looking but certainly not in the top 5 Hollywood actors. Is it charisma? What is charisma anyway. Would think that for a good actor, charisma is up to the writers and acting coaches. Whatever is going on, you buy what he is selling. And Charlize Theron. Certainly makes the top 5 for hot factor. But stays believable in movies like Monster, Sleepwalking, North Country that discount hot. You won't find the answer here. But the movie ain't bad. Fun to watch, crazy stunts. And plenty of laughs.

At least Megan Fox bumped Miley from the top 20 searches. Why? Coz she is still together with her boy friend. Amazing the levels of depths and insight we run into when panning the Internet for truth. Uh, that's panning like for gold, not panning like a movie sucks. English is great that way; never quite sure what the intent is as long as the words get strung together.

Jesse J. came out with a hot one yesterday. Said on Fox News that he wanted to excise some essential parts of Barack Obama. This sharp comment in response to a rousing discussion of speeches the nominee had made on the black experience. But Jesse has a reputation for measured off-the-cuff discourse like his 1984 reference to New York City as "Hymietown,". And he is quotable (http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/j/jesse_jackson.html), "If there are occasions when my grape turned into a raisin and my joy bell lost its resonance, please forgive me. Charge it to my head and not to my heart." I guess after this experience he'll leave Barack's raisins alone.

Jesse was just trying to make friends and influence people. More fuel for "National Day of Repudiation of Jesse Jackson". An annual event sponsored by WND Books author the Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson. Actually, that's a cool idea, a national day of repudiation. Would have been a hell of a lot cheaper to do a "National Day of Repudiation for Saddam Hussein" than the current experience. How about a "National Day of Repudiation for Robert Mugabe"? So much less expensive than actually taking them down. And would likely have minimal impact on oil prices.

But the serious news is the imminent economic downturn in China. First they removed the oil subsidy so gas prices went up. When gas prices go up, what do you do? Stay home and do the couch potato thing. Get fat in front of the boob tube. So what's the China buzz now? "Obesity Levels in China are rising" (http://www.fitsugar.com/1768567). Beginning of the end. An industrial revolution followed by runaway pollution and now obesity. Afore you know it we'll be hearing about the Chinese credit crunch due to speculation in cricket futures.

July 7, 2008 Update
Makes you wonder. LATimes runs a headline this AM, "Experts say numbers don't add up for Obama". What does that mean? Bunch of so-called smart guys ran the numbers on government revenue and the cost of Barack's to-do list including: healthcare, Energy, education, science, foreign assistance and community assistance (jobs for the under-utilized). Bottom line cost for all those things? Just shy of $130B as a recurring expense. Course, for each one of those line items, the smart guys describe how they think Barack is gonna find funding. Same experts pegged the cost of the Iraq war at 25 billion bucks/year. So, if (when) Obama follows through on the BIG PROMISE of out in 16 months, they see (only) a $25B net gain of available money.

How does this compare with reality? First of all, the overall DOD budget request or 2009 is $541B. Makes the Obama plan look like peanuts. And the part for funding Iraq? Total to date is $661B with the over $150B in 2008 alone. Makes you wonder what kind of math those LATimes experts are smoking.

Same issue plays games with big John McCain, "McCain restores vow to balance budget in 4 years". Right and his BIG PROMISE is to stay in Iraq, as long as it takes. So he must plan to give up on all those items on Obama's agenda just to fund our continued presence.

Scientific American ran an article a couple of months ago, a reasoned approach to energy independence based on conservation and heavy emphasis on renewable energy using wind and solar. Proposed supplying 35% of the U.S.'s total energy needs including 69% of electricity using renewables by 2050. But it left us hanging with the BIG QUESTION, how to pay for it. Cost? $420B total, spread through 2050. Sounds like a lot of money. How much have we spent on the war? Estimates peg the total at $661B, in only 8 years. So actually its a bargain! Likelihood? Take a guess. If the plan were in place, would we be losing lives in Iraq? Take a guess.

July 6, 2008 Update
Fresh news from the Tour. Yep, it's on. Got rid of all the druggies. It's clean. Spain pulled off the first day and now it's France's turn. Dumoulin (cofidis) won the third stage. Let's face it, these guys are awesome. A 208 km stage...that's 125 miles for the uninformed. And Dumoulin's time? 5 hours 5 minutes. That's averaging over 20 miles an hour over 5 hours. Try that on your Walmart Huffy.

Not be outdone, Kylie Minogue made the news again. Turns out she is the secret to Dumoulin's success. Couldn't get her out of his head. Fast as he could go, she was faster. The result? International fame and a brief burst of national pride on the part of the Gallic lobby. She is, after all, Britain's Favorite Celebrity after receiving an OBE (Order of the British Empire) from Prince Charles. She joins other notables such as Nicolae Ceausescu and well known character Robert Mugabe, along with Benito Mussolini, Emperor Franz Josef 1 (of WW1 fame), and Emperor Hirohito (of WW2 fame) among a host of others. Really fascinating what you get when searching on "rescinded" for the list of OBE honorees.

But the real news is staycations. Just a new glitzy way to explain to your friends why your car hasn't budged in the last two weeks. Yep, gas breached the $4.50 barrier and is on its way to the magic nickel dollar. That's about all a dollar is worth these days. Just driving a couple of hundred miles to visit Grandma or Enchanted gardens can cost you a $100 bucks. Thanks George. May as well lay this one at the big cheese's door. Not that he's using more gas what with all them sorties and Hummer convoys evading IED's in Iraq. But he sure put the fear of uncertainty into the folks pumping the stuff out of the ground. Combined with those booming "Emerging Markets" economies, all of a sudden there ain't as much to go around as there used to be. Course that might be a good thing. Forget conservation, forget carbon dioxide emissions control. The whole problem is self limiting. Soon its gonna cost too much to consume oil. And so we won't. First time in years the DOE is reporting reductions in gasoline consumption, about 4% less than last year for the month of May.

A different way of looking at the oil consumption data. Since January of this year, gasoline consumption has dropped back to levels not seen since 1995...that's over 10 years of increased consumption wiped out by higher gasoline prices. Yep, we're into "Staycations", but maybe that's a good thing.

July 5, 2008 Update
So, what's with Wimbledon? Top headline: Governing bodies agree to form integrity panel Why? To deal with gambling. Let's face it, we can't have too many governing bodies. Tennis has 4: WTA, ATP, Grand Slams and ITF. Datacorner floats a fifth: the DCNTA, Datacorner Tennis Association. Never heard of it? And your point is?

And then there's NASCAR. The headline? Busch nips Edwards to win under caution at Daytona. Sounds like the last election. Bush nips Kerry to win under caution in Florida. Maybe that's what we need. Obama and Cain at the Daytona Speedway. Driving Chevy Aveo's. Want to see some really rum reviews. Try reading about the Chevy Aveo. Born as the Daewoo Kalos in 2002, the Aveo surfaced on the "12 least satisfying cars" list at Consumer Reports. But there is an Aveo club. And the first post? Details on the "Warranty Improvement Act". Can't wait.

More to the point, what's going on in Iran. Are they or aren't they. Anybody looked at the aerials of Natanz? Home of particularly tasty pears and the famed NNF (ok, the Natanz Nuclear Facility). And now the truth can be told. Pears, nuclear facility. What goes hand in hand with nuclear? Yep, mutations. Not sure what a mutation is? Remember reading about those 3 headed frogs? Spotted by some surprised kids in Weston-super-Mare back in 2004 (news).

Laura Pepper, head caretaker, claimed the creature escaped from a sealed container within hours of capture. Well, Weston-superMare is in England, right? Off the A370. England has nuclear facilities, right? If nuclear facilities can turn an innocent garden frog into the scary thing across the pond, imagine what it could do for pears. Starting to get a handle on mutations? That’s the natural way to boost mother natural evolution. And all it takes is a little help from your local nuclear facility. Wow, pears the size of watermelons, here we come. Those Persians must be pretty smart.

And what about the UFC? That’s the Ultimate Fighting Championship. Gabriel and Justin went at it for just two minutes. Man, that’s quick. Bet the advertisers were pissed. Big bucks to set up the whole thing and its done in two minutes. Hopefully they broke it up with a couple of spots.

Which brings us to the good reverend Jeremiah Wright. Old news, he’s off the campaign. Probably got tired of planning the Joshua Generation Project. New push to go after the Christian segment. All them Republicans looking for a home after the loss of Billy Graham. This is the place. Course there is a problem with the name. Domain name is already taken. And then JoshuaGeneration.com probably had their own set of beefs. Still might actually be worth holding a breath or two. Merger of Obama-style pragmatism, “A dumb war. A rash war. A war based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics,”from the 2002 speech. Interleaved with some JoshuaGenerationSpeak, “Turn hopeless situations around through prayer”or “Where there is a sacrifice, the fire will fall”. That one actually works. The North Koreans spent their food money on nucular development. Had a little weapons test. And now their blowing the whole thing up. Why? They are off the nuclear terrorism black list. And of course there’s all that aid. 500,000 tons of food promised by George B. through the World Food Program, (aid). Man those North Koreans are smart. Spend a couple of million building a demo bomb. Put up with a little arm twisting to tear it down and then get billions in material aid. Does anybody remember Grand Fenwick? Course their bomb looked more like a football. Let’s not get started.

And what about cricket. More talk about governing bodies. This time it’s the ICC. “The game's governing body has surpassed itself with its moves over Zimbabwe and the Oval Test forfeiture”. Just trying to help out our old friend, Robert Mugabe. Spent his childhood reading Joe Goebbel’s “Primer for Disinformation”. If the big lie doesn’t work, go for the sports connection. And it shows up right there in the headline, you can’t even make this stuff up, “The ICC must believe it's possible to fool all of the people all of the time”. Keep the headlines full of cricket and the National Election will fix itself.

So last but not least, “Strength of Will”. That’s what Angelina Joie has tattooed on her arm. Where does it come from? The Will, not the arm. Turns out it’s a pretty popular phrase. George B. uses it frequently. Which puts it in good company with other adventures in speech making:

"Take the Middle East seriously because that's the center of—that's the place where people get so despondent and despair that they're willing to come and take lives of U.S. citizens."—on advice he would give the next president, Washington, D.C., May 12, 2008 (thanks to Jacob Weisberg’s rag ).

So remember boys and girls, “It’s what you don’t know that you don’t know that’s gonna bite ya”(with apologies to Big Don Rumsfeld. Course now we know that “what ya made up that you don’t know”will dig an even bigger hole.

The Zen of Dental Prophylaxis 4/26/2007
Let's face it, DP (Dental Prophylaxis) better known as "teeth cleaning" probably won't make for good Internet buzz, but is it Zen? Wikipedia's intepretation of the Buddha Siddhartha Gautama's teachings tells us that Zen is "a "special transmission outside the scriptures that points to each individual practitioner's inherent Buddha-nature." That pretty much describes the special relationship between the young thing wielding the sharp pointed stainles steel objects and the object of her attentions reclining in the dentist chair.

So, as the hapless recipient of Prophylaxis, what character clues should you let slip through that "special transmission channel"? Can you appear too eager to receive the ministrations? What level of cooperation is politic? Since the advent of suction, swallowing the awful stuff that pools in your mouth has clearly become outre. And yet, does requesting that bent hissing tube more often than some civilized threshold suggest an excessive concern for cleanliness symptomatic of OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder)?

Where do we draw the line between what is reasonable and what become overly aggressive demands for a rinse? Studies have shown that nearly everything alimentary in nature contains some trace of alcohol. Even the lowly glass of orange juice contains measurable amounts. So, what about the mouthwash comprising that rinse? Gotta be at least 5 to 10 proof pure alcool. Start getting too heavy on the rinse and you could wind up facing a DUI. Imagine the dialog when they pull you in to the pokey for inability to drive a straight line after leaving the dentist's office. Brought in to the local precinct. Placed on the bench awaiting processing next to the other malfeasers. The baddest one of all starts in, "Whatcha in for?". Grinning maniacally while showing your (now-polished) incisors you respond, "Getting my teeth cleaned". And all the other malfeasers move to the far side of the bench. (With apologies to Arlo G.)

Often wondered if hygienists have a special lingo: gagger, biter, drooler for example. What do they actually write down as they dig away at your oral cavities? "Found a pearl today. Just under the right bicuspid. Lovely thing, luminous white only slightly obscured by a strand of yesterday's spinach". Maybe it's just the grocery list. "Found a fleck of tomato, reminds me that we are planning spaghetti for tonight, better get a can of Progresso". But it all really get's back to the Zen thing. Do Type A folks tend to keep their mouth's closed. Do the really easy going folks just leave it open? How long can you hold your breath? Do you mouth breathe? Or try to breathe through your nose. Is somebody out there counting how many hygienists pass out from overly hearty oral exhalations?

There have been books written about emotional communications expressed through body language but, oddly enough, no exploration of the even greater opportunities for physical expression between the hygienist and the patient. Seems like somebody somewhere could fashion a peg to fill that hole.

Buying A Car 3/23/2007
"Buy cheap, sell high". That's what my sainted stepmother has always told me. Seems pretty obvious until you look at the business news and check thetrading volumes on days that stock prices are headed downhill. The traders areall selling, selling low. So, looks like most people blithely ignore the "sell high" part of her dictum. Let's look at the "buy cheap". You'rein the market for a new car. Study the mags, Road &Track, MotorTrend, Car & Driver,read the reliability pages of Consumer Reports, oh yeah, read the Dan Neil columnsfor the visceral spin and then you come up with your choice of automobile, thegem that really does it for you. Then ya gotta go deal with the low lifes (sic)at the dealership. You could deal on the web. But there is that issue of delayedgratification. On the web you have to reveal your name, address, email and phonenumber to somebody or some organization who has put up the web page for profit.Is this just going to open you up to spam and harrassing phone calls? You betit is. More of those See Alice offerings and invitations to visit that jewelof the Italian landscape, the Via Gra. Then you have to wait to get the emailedquote. Then you have to go down and see what it is they are actually offering to sell you.

There is a better way. The main issue when you walk in the door of RipOffs'R Us is that you really have no idea what that slickly put out salesman's bottom price will be. He's gonna wheedle and push and make you wait while those fictitious negotiations with his "buyer manager" take place. But, let's face it, he's probably just gone to take a potty break while making you think he's pleading your offer with the higher ups. If you had the confidence, the knowledge of what that guy would settle for, then, my friend, life would be good. Walk in with a "take it or leave it" attitude and price and then give the dealership 5 minutes to make up their minds. Sure that invoice price that Consumer Reports is interesting, but, let's face it....things will cost what the market will bear. You picked out your car because you thought it was cool and would satisfy your needs. If it's really cool and rings your chimes; odds are that it looks cool to other folks too. So the dealer is just not going to sell the car at invoice. So, what's the bottom price the dealer will take?

A true story. Couple of years ago, we needed a car. Did the research. Looked at the Consumer Reports reliability stuff. Picked a car. Toyota Avalon. Reasonably big, roomy, peppy, reliable. Went down to the local dealership. Found a car. Silver, XL (lower trimline), leather, air, radio, heater and all the other stuff. Offering price? $29K. Drove the car. Great ride, wonderful experience. Went back in to haggle. Dealer immediately dropped $500. Said, "that's it, this is a popular car, we can't do better". We looked suitably sad, said," thanks, we'll have to think about it". Went home. Got on the web. Surfed over to CarsDirect.com. Put in the exact details of the dealership's car. Mashed the appropriate buttons and got a guaranteed low price for $26,500. What the guaranteed price means is that some dealer in our zip code was willing to sell the car at that price. So we printed out the details of the guaranteed low price and went back down to the dealer. Swaggered into the dealership, dumped the paper with the details on the sales guy's desk. "This is Our best and final offer" (BAFO for those in the know). And you know what? They folded! Yep. Walked out of the dealership with a new car at $26,500! The car we saw; the car we wanted, and no waiting. For 5 minutes work on the Net.

How did this work? All in your head. If you know you can find a lower price, you'll be confident and you won't feel victimized. Find a web site that actually provides quotes (see the list at the bottom). Go find your car. Carefully note all the options and details (each one you miss will give the dealer extra wiggle room). Important step: go home! As soon as you walk out, you've given the dealership an important message, "Don't need you, I can buy the car somewhere else". Now run the numbers off the web site. Print out the quote. For whatever reason, nothing speaks louder than an inanimate piece of paper. Go back to the dealership. And deal.

carsDirect
yahooCars
msnCars
cars.com

LNG jam in Long Beach. 3/18/2007
Every day seems to bring another item in the litany of bad news. Britney shaves her head. Could donate the proceeds to charity, but no...next thing you know, the locks show up on eBay, as reported by theBlemish. One million bucks per lock. Wow. In more serious news, the Senate failed to halt staying the course in Iraq. By a vote of 50 to 48, Senate rejected the resolution that set a goal of a withdrawal of troops by March 2008. Shows the power of the popular mandate. Can anybody still remember that election in the fall that reversed the congressional Republican majority -both houses that is- presenting the incumbent administration with pretty convincing proof of ripples in the popular mood. And of course there's the latest weather news. Warmest in recorded history. Thanks to Rep. Data Rohrabacher (R-CA) 49th District (Huntington Beach,Costa Mesa) we know that a strong causal agent in the past was dinosaur flatulence. Given that the total biomass of humanity at 6,583,145,067 may easily exceed the total biomass of dinosaurs during the Triassic and Mesozoic eras, it seems reasonable to propose that global warming could be stopped in its tracks by providing free Pepto Bismol and GasX samples to the developing world. Let's face it, the US has been bearing the brunt of criticism for CO2 emissions. Maybe the problem is methane-sourced flatulence. C'mon Congressman Rohrabacher, let's get a publicity campaign going; a little consensus on foreign aid and we could have this climate thing nipped in the bud!

But that's not the point of this rant. Remember all those articles about Sound Energy Solutions and the push to establish a LNG offload terminal in Long Beach (my backyard)? Well, looks a popular mandate worked for once. The following release of the Long Beach Board of Harbor Commissioners says it all

(Jan. 22, 2007, updated Jan. 23) -- LB's Board of Harbor Commissioners voted today (Jan. 22) to halt environmental review of a proposal by Sound Energy Solutions to build a Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) facility at the Port of Long Beach.

Wow. And then the newly elected mayor weighed in

LB Mayor Bob Foster by letter informed SES that he will not support its LNG proposal, stating in part, "Nothing in my continuing review of the EIR, response to questions from the Port, commentary by the California Public Utilities Commission or other documentation has substantiated the viewpoint that this project ensures the safety of Long Beach residents to my satisfaction. Further, I continue to believe that locating such a large processing and storage facility at the gate of America's commerce pipeline is simply ill advised. As such, this letter is to inform you that I will not support of [sic] a Sound Energy Solutions LNG facility proposal at the Port of Long Beach."

Let's face it, Bob Foster said in his campaign that he would not support the LNG project. But what do mere campaign promises mean anyway. Looks like they do actually mean something. In Long Beach

Commanding acres of real estate on the Business and Technology page, Chris Hawthorne's article toiled endlessly and painfully to create a deep heartfelt message, if network connectivity becomes ubiquitous, people will use it. Wow. His thesis, connectivity is "turning every corner park and sidewalk bench into a possible home for the kind of coffeehouse culture" that will lead to "noticeable increase in the odd sort of public, shared alienation already on display in cafes everywhere, with people packed in next to one another but staring into their own individual screens".

So, what is the point of all this? Are we better off without universal connectivity? The Paper has been running equally poignant articles about providing Internet connectivity to the disadvantaged. Did we really just get to see this populist rag run an article decrying a vision that would help those folks? What really brought it home was an offhand comment buried deeper down, "But free wireless service doesn't mean a whole lot if you can't afford a laptop."

Brought back that nascent queasiness this writer feels when reading just about anything in the LATimes that covers some particular technical, political, or -thanks to Allie - some cultural topic I actually know something about. Believe it or not, wireless service works with Any computer. Just needs a wireless card or USB plugin. Cost? $10 at Fryes or sometimes even free thanks to rebate coupons. Talk about a boon for the disadvantaged. But of course, with the superficial level of expertise resident at the Times, these kinds of omissions are tolerated, maybe even encouraged in pursuit of the Message.

Why should we care? Whatever the motives, universal connectivity can only narrow the cultural divide between haves and havenots. It provides a common context between the elite with their laptops and the poor folks with their 5 year old freestanding MaxiTower PC's. For once Mayor Villaraigosa should be applauded rather than excoriated.

Here we go again 10/27/06

Does anybody else worry about being eviscerated by the coffee grinder? 5:12AM, after pouring the coffee beans into the Mill, finding the lid in the kitchen maze and then hitting the "make it so" button. With a wail of sheer electrical energy, the precision ground stainless impeller, sharpened to a fine 5 micron or so edge begins spinning at an estimated 15,000 RPM only 4 inches from my gut. "What if it broke off? What if a tiny piece detached itself from the body of the thing, tore through the clear plastic covering and shot like a tiny shiny meteorite straight for my abdomen, embedding itself in my precious intestinal organs. It could happen."

And then the rest of the morning began. Daughter coming down the stairs. "Yo Homey". Doing the chemistry homework. "This is something that some pasty-faced guy in a chem lab should do."
"What do you mean pasty-faced guy?"
"Some pasty faced guy named Alvin"
"Why does he have to be pasty faced?"
"Cause he spends all day in the chem lab"
"I spend all day inside too, Am I pasty faced? I'm certainly not calledAlvin"
"You ride a bicycle and your name isn't Alvin"
"Oh all right, we won't change your name to Alvin".

Hot Links

Pasty faced guys defined at

You are here.

ramblingRant 07/14/2005
Happy Bastille day, celebrating the start of the French Revolution in 1789. Group of terrorists stormed the gates of the Bastille -large stone building begun in ~1369 by Hugh Aubriot, then mayor of Paris under King Charles V.- freed the seven inmates, killed the guards and kicked off the mild disturbance that followed.
About to go watch Lance do his thing on the mild ~2000 foot descent out of Briancon. By the way for you cognoscenti out there, Briancon contains a lurking cedilla (Please click for the historical antecedents of the symbol @ Wiki). The lurking cedilla is the little hook that hides under the 'c'. Looks suspiciously like this Ç (man isn't this editor cool?). For some reason the news rags have elected to omit the modest little hook. But back to the cognoscenti, -completely different from paparazzi (sorry Cameron...)- what the little hook does is turn the hard ka sound we associate with the letter 'c' into a soft ss sound. So, if you really want to be in the know...Briancon is pronounced Bree/awn/ssohn, not Bree/Awn/kohn (pardon the phonetic interpolation).
And of course the inhabitants of the town are Brianconnais. Back to the Tour. A profile of stage 12 from the BBC.

But the real reason to pull out the updated Smith Corona (much better than Smith and Wesson) is continued angst at the desecration of my back yard, continued progress on the neighborhood LNG program. A fabulous resource on the physics of energy. Laws of thermodynamics, comparison of the energy released by often-cited nuclear bomb with the energy released in the making of a cup of tea.
Well off to the stationary to feel vaguely unfulfilled as I watch the riders screaming down the descent at over 30mpg. Personal best on the flats sans wind is a mere 28mpg or so for about a block. Tour riders do it for 100 miles. In the words of the immortal Herbie Bookbinder, I wish. ramblingRant 07/07/2005
Been a while...so the main thing to consider with the LNG thing is how fast all that energy is released. The good folks at The Science Fair Project Encyclopedia tell us that all the energy in a nuclear bomb is released in about a microsecond. That's one millionth of a second which is pretty darn quick. So back to the LNG example, it's unlikely that all the energy in the tank could be released that quickly. LNG without air is just really cold liquid. LNG has to warm up, mix with air and become a flammable mixture before unfriendly events can occur. So what is a worst case here? Suppose a large airplane landed in the tank. We might expect the airplane to displace a volume of gas equal to the volume of the airplane. So that volume of gas would pretty instantaneously leave the surroundings of the tank and be mixed with air. How big is that volume? Does look pretty large, but how many cubic feet? Which is the measure we have for LNG. Well, the dimensions of the fuselage, thanks to the 747 specifications are 231 feet by 21 feet just for the fuselage. Works out to a volume of 320,000 cubic feet. Add 50% again for the wings and we are close to 500,000 cubic feet. If just that volume of gas were displaced by an aircraft landing in the tank the equivalent BTU''s work out to 500 million BTU or about 1% the size of our Hiroshima bomb standard. Man, as a homeowner I feel a lot better. If the bad guys land a plane the size of a 747 into the LNG tank down the road, the instantaneous blast will merely be 1% the size of the Hiroshima bomb. Of course I will still be stuck with the total burn equal to 50 bombs. Just that first split second will be reassuringly small. Whew.

Oh yeah...one detail. How quickly will the gas be displaced? Suppose the plane is diving towards the tank at a moderate 500 miles per hour. Works out to 733 feet per second. Remember that the plane is 231 feet long, so it will all be over in 1/3 of a second (231/733). Whew again.

ramblingRant 06/27/2005
So the new thing in Long Beach (that's CA, if you're wondering) is the Liquefied Natural Gas terminal the Fed is thinking of putting in around the harbor. Naturally this has all kinds of folks up in arms about (1) the jobs it will create or (2) the havoc it will create when environmental nasties occur. Just depends on what side of the fence you're living.

But what is Liquefied Natural Gas, anyway. Is it bad? Frankly, I couldn't really get my thoughts (or my arms) around how to think about a billion cubic feet of natural gas. So I did a little arithmetic.

Seems that the good folks at Dominion Gas down in Richmond, VA are putting in a new LNG tank in their storage farm. They were kind enough to publish some numbers. Tank size is 2.8 billion cubic feet of gas. LNG is about 1000 BTU per cubic foot, so we are talking 2.8 trillion BTU in the tank.

OK fine. Just for argument's sake...how many BTU in a nuclear bomb? Well, the bomb we dropped on Hiroshima was 14 kilotons. Did a good job of wiping out the city. A kiloton is 4.2 trillion joules. What do joules have to do with BTU? Well, they measure the same thing, heat...so we can convert between them. 4.2 trillion joules is about 4.2 billion BTU. So the 14 kiloton Hiroshima bomb was 59 billion BTU.

So where does that get us? The amount of energy in the LNG tank is 50 times the energy in the bomb we dropped on Hiroshima.

And the Feds want to put that tank in my backyard.

ramblingRant 06/26/2005
But I don't really care about all that stuff. Let the gas prices soar. Who cares? Bound to get a lot of the SUV's off the road. I mean, sitting here in the Mini. Surrounded by gargantuan hunks of stamped steel. Is it an H3? or a Yukon? At least the Ford Valdez is history. You really wonder...how are the brakes on the two and one half tons of angry Cummins-powered F450 riding the rear bumper? What's the last thing a Mini driver sees before being rear-ended by a Chevy Suburban? His butt.

vs

ramblingRant 06/26/2005
Just getting started here with respect to the blog. Just got back from a trip to NYC. Lovely place, if the cockroaches don't get you the garbage will. But, why dwell on the negatives? Actually, the city works pretty well.Coming from LA, the city works damn well. Let's face it, the subway is actually useful. Want to go more than 10 blocks? Hop on