Crochet Covered Smart Car

What do you get in Rome, when you cross a smart car with a crochet hook? Fabulous.

Happy New Year from 973 Third!

Choking on Affluence: Decline of Western Ambition

The difference in ambition can be seen clearly at airports, which now serve as the entry halls of the global economy. A traveler to John F. Kennedy Airport, Heathrow, Charles De Gualle LAX or Dulles passes through decayed remnants of fading late 20th century buildings and technology. In contrast, airports in Dubai, Hong Kong and Singapore offer clean, ultra-modern facilities with often impressive design.

The West’s retreat from space exploration further underscores its metaphysical poverty. Today, Europe and the U.S., the world’s historic leader in the field, are cutting back on plans to explore the cosmos, which has included a manned operation to the moon. President Obama wants NASA to focus more on issues regarding climate change instead. In contrast, the rising countries of Asia, notably China and India, have begun plans for manned flights to the moon and beyond. _JoelKotkin

The decline of the western world has been discussed since the days of Oswald Spengler in the first half of the 20th century. Under the new left leaders of Europe and the US, the decline has accelerated to alarming speeds.

Europe, particularly the U.K., suffers acutely from metaphysical angst. Once touted as the new great power by its leaders and their American claque, the E.U. is quickly dissolving along cultural and historical lines; this is especially evident in the division between the resilient countries of the north (something like the Hansa trading states of the late Middle Ages) and the weaker countries along the periphery. For the most part, Europe no longer seems capable of doing much more than finding ways to control an unaffordable welfare state without tearing about its social net. The once cherished notion of a multi-racial “new” Europe largely has dissolved as immigration has devolved from a source of demographic and cultural salvation to a widely perceived threat to the E.U.’s economic and social health as well as security.

Such defeatism usually has less success in the United States. But America’s “progressive” left increasingly resembles its European cousins. Obama’s science advisor, John Holdren, has been a long-time advocate of the idea of “de-development,” the purposeful slowing of growth in advanced countries in order to protect the environment. The critical infrastructure needed to accommodate upward of another 100 million Americans — new dams in the west, intelligent development of our vast natural gas reserves and building new cities, airports and ports – are not at the center of either party’s platforms. These could be financed largely with private sources, given the right incentives. _JoelKotkin

The imminent bankruptcy of several European nations and US cities and states reveals just a hint of early collapse of western dysfunctionality. [As usual, public sector unions play a pivotal role.]

As the Obama administration and the EU progressively starve the US and Europe of reliable energy supplies, and choke off private economic initiative via ruionous taxes, regulations, penalties, etc. the underlying foundation of the nations and regions crumble.

The trend cannot be reversed, because its source is the lack of substance and realism -- along with a lack of ambition -- of the underlying human populations of Europe and the Anglosphere. Two of the most important reasons for the decline in human substrate are dysfunctional schooling and errant childraising. It is not just the children of the very wealthy who suffer from affluenza -- the "Paris Hilton" syndrome. Compared to most children of the world, almost all American and European children are affluent, with much idle time on their hands to be filled with dysfunctional thought patterns.

The emphasis is on "de-development" and on not giving any offense to those who would like to destroy western culture altogether. The ruling ethic of the modern west is not only dysfunctional, it is actively suicidal. And since all of these nations are "democracies," the human substrate actually elected the figureheads of the ruling classes.

Best Ideas of 2010

For the last 10 years the New York Times has created it's annual year in ideas. Here are my favorites from this year:

The 2000s Were a Great Decade:

Two recessions. 9/11. Iraq. Afghanistan. You might think the last decade was among the worst in modern history. But according to the economist Charles Kenny, author of “Getting Better,” a forthcoming book on global development, you’d be wrong. Average worldwide income, at $10,600, is 25 percent higher than it was a decade ago. Thanks to increases in agriculture efficiency, cereal production grew at double the rate of population in the developing world. Vaccine initiatives have helped cut the death rate from common diseases like measles by 60 percent. Child mortality is down 17 percent.

Aftercrimes:

After an earthquake, changes to the earth increase the likelihood of aftershocks occurring in a particular place and time — something that seismologists have become good at forecasting. This year, the mathematician George Mohler showed that what holds for earthquakes also holds true for crime: not only does an initial crime beget future offenses, but these “aftercrimes” also tend to occur according to a predictable distribution in time and space. The idea of follow-on crimes is nothing new — once a house is burglarized, police know that criminals are likely to return to the same house or others nearby — but Mohler showed that the timing and location of the crimes can be statistically predicted with a high degree of accuracy. Using L.A.P.D. burglary data to identify a series of random, initial offenses in a sector of the city and adapting algorithms used to forecast aftershocks, he predicted that 17 percent of the city’s burglaries would occur in a 5-percent area of the city over the next year.

Turbine-Free Wind Power:

Conservationists argue that wind turbines pose a risk to birds, bats and sensitive habitats like shorelines. People living close to wind farms, meanwhile, complain of constant noise and vibration. This year, engineers responded with a new way to draw electricity from the wind: oscillating wind panels.

The Real-time Inflation Calculator:

Measuring inflation is a time-consuming business: at the beginning of each month, government researchers across the country amass troves of data on prices for everything from shoes to milk to phones. Two weeks after the end of the month, the government releases gauges of inflation like the Consumer Price Index. But inflation hunters may now get an advance glimpse of the data, thanks to a real-time inflation calculator devised by two economists at M.I.T., Alberto Cavallo and Roberto Rigobon.

Cavallo and Rigobon devised software that scans Web sites for prices, using a method similar to the one that Google uses to index Web pages.

Human Milk for Sale:

Wet nurses have been profiting from the sale of human milk since the dawn of civilization. Why not the nutrition and biotech industries? This year, Abbott (makers of Similac) began selling a new line of "immunonutrition" made entirely from purified, concentrated and pasteurized human milk. The product, called Prolact + H²MF and manufactured by Prolacta Bioscience, is considered a human-milk fortifier, designed to be added to breast milk for premature babies weighing less than 2.75 pounds.

The Train That Never Stops:


D.I.Y. Macroeconomics:

The democratization of economics owes much to the financial crisis that first hit in 2007. That ongoing catastrophe, which few economists predicted, tarnished the profession’s reputation, prompting some to look elsewhere for answers. They turned to — where else? — the Internet, where vast amounts of economic data that had once been hidden from public view were now online. Sites like FRED, maintained by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, enabled anyone with a connection to the Web to download data on everything from local home-price indexes to credit-card balances to weekly fluctuations in diesel prices.

At the same time, a growing army of knowledgeable “econo-bloggers” began analyzing the data available online.

Social Media as Social Index:

Even as several social networks have surpassed the populations of most nations — more than 500 million people are now signed up for Facebook and 175 million for Twitter — we still tend to regard these sites in terms of their value to us as individual users. In the past year, however, social scientists have begun looking more broadly at the aggregate value of social media. According to a number of recent studies, it now seems possible that the networks’ millions of posts and status updates are adding up to something culturally and financially priceless.

This past April, for instance, Sitaram Asur and Bernardo Huberman at HP Labs demonstrated that by analyzing the positive or negative sentiments expressed in 2.8 million Twitter messages about 24 movies, they could predict how the films would perform at the box office. Their methodology — an algorithm, actually, that their company is now in the process of patenting — worked significantly better than the Hollywood Stock Exchange, another popular tool for predicting box-office success.

In October, a team led by Johan Bollen at Indiana University reported that by classifying 9.7 million Twitter posts as falling into one of six mood categories (happiness, kindness, alertness, sureness, vitality and calmness) they could predict changes in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. As Bollen explains, when he began his study, he expected that the mood on Twitter would be a reflection of up and down movements in the stock market. He never imagined it would be a precursor.

Here are the ones that didn't make my cut: Relaxation Drinks, The Youth Condom,Cybercom, Literary Near Futurism, The Bra Mask, The Megalobster, Doping Bicycles, The Armored T-Shirt, The Long-Life-Span Smartphone, The Guitar That Stays in Tune, Biocouture, Emotional Spell-Check, Perfect Parallel Parking, More Club Teammates, More World Cup Success, Performance Enhancing Basketball Shoes, The Meat Dress, End-of-Men Fashion, The Ginger-Ale Celebration, The Comeback Album as Testimonial, LeBron James's 'Decision', Taking Your Pulse by Webcam.

To get an idea on the accuracy of these, here are the best of the best ideas of the last 10 years:

2001: “Populist Editing.” Wikipedia has since eclipsed the Encyclopaedia Britannica and Microsoft’s Encarta project, and many of us use it almost every day.

2002: “Early-Detection Revisionism.” We often find extra medical treatment hard toturn down, yet frequently it does us little good or even harm, so sometimes it’s better not to know your condition at all. Prostatecancer is one area in which this idea is having an impact.

2003: “Social Networks.” The New York Times has a Facebook page, a Facebook application and a New York Times News Quiz on Facebook; then there are Facebook’s 500 million users.

2004: “Dumb Robots Are Better.” The days of the Jetsons, and housecleaning robots, are not upon us, so settle for less. Be happy if your robot does anything useful at all.

2005: “Touch Screens That Touch Back.” This pick was ahead of its time, as few people realized that this technology, as seen in the2002 Steven Spielberg movie “Minority Report,” would show up so quickly in the iPhone and the iPad.

2006: “Walk-In Health Care.” We’ll need more of this, as general practitioners are harder to see and emergency-room waits get longer.

2007: “The Best Way to Deflect an Asteroid.” Send satellites with mirrors to reflect the sun, vaporizing one spot on the asteroid, releasing gases and changing its course. If this ever comes in handy, it will be the biggest idea of them all.

2008: “Carbon Penance.” “ . . . a translucent leg band . . . keeps track of your electricity consumption. When it detects, via aspecial power monitor, that electric current levels have exceeded a certain threshold, the wireless device slowly drives six stainless-steel thorns intothe flesh of your leg.” Satire is an idea, too. The slightly more practical anti-global-warming idea from 2008 was to eat kangaroos,since they, unlike cows, do not produce methane gas.

2009: “Music for Monkeys.” We still don’t know which of the ideas from last year will pay off, but the idea of generating music that monkeys enjoy (and humans don’t) was the most fun of the bunch.

Russia: The World's Largest Dying Empire

There are four main areas that made 2010 a record year for Russia’s degradation:

1. The country declined on the 2010 United Nations Human Development Index from 57th place five years ago to 65th place this year ....

2. The state has become more corrupt and criminalized......

3. The economy has become more state-controlled and ineffective....

4. Most Russians are overcome by cynicism and anger over their declining standard of living and the fact that the ruling elite abuse their power and continue to embezzle money and assets from the people and businesses with impunity. In short, Russians have lost all hope for the future under the current leadership. This is reflected in rising crime, xenophobia and violence.... _MoscowTimes

MoscowTimesRussia can still build nuclear power plants and certain weapons systems -- both very much in demand both in the emerging world and in several oil states such as Venezuela and Iran. Even China -- which prides itself on the ability to steal technology from its trade partners and allies -- has found it difficult to duplicate some of the Russian systems.

Purchases of some items [from Russia] continued - S-300 air defense systems and billions of dollars worth of jet engines. An engine China made for its Su-27 knock-off would routinely conk out after 30 hours whereas the Russian engines would need refurbishing after 400, Russian and Chinese experts said.

"Engine systems are the heart disease of our whole military industry," a Chinese defense publication quoted Wang Tianmin, a military engine designer, as saying in its March issue. _WaPo

Even so, Russia's military is rotten and rotting from the inside out. The situation is not helped by Russia's demographic nightmare.

the main problem is that political and military leaders ignored a basic demographic reality that makes it impossible to draft 750,000 new conscripts a year even under the best recruitment efforts. There simply aren’t that many able 18-year-olds in the country. _LaRussophobe_quoting_MoscowTimes

Demographic shrinkage is also leaving Eastern Siberia open for Chinese takeover.

Moscow is also warily watching China's unauthorised movements into Siberia and the Far East.

Beijing is about six times closer to the port city of Vladivostok than is Moscow, which has very weak administrative control over its eastern territories.

Already, an estimated 200,000 to 500,000 Chinese nationals have illegally settled in these oil, gas and timber-rich areas.

Beijing is also tempted by Siberia's freshwater supply, given that China already has severe shortages throughout the country.

The Russian Far East is inhabited by only six million people, while the three provinces in northeast China have about 110 million Chinese inhabitants. By 2020, more than 100 million Chinese will live less than 100km to the south of these Russian territories, whose population will then number between five million and 10 million.

As Medvedev recently admitted, if Russia does not secure its presence in the Far East, it could eventually "lose everything" to the Chinese. _RealClearWorld

Russia's people are demoralised by the increasingly totalitarian nature of Russian life. Putin's hands can be clearly seen controlling the puppet Medvedev from behind the barely closed curtains. The recent conviction of former Yukos chief Khodorkovsky on trumped up charges has not helped matters. Thousands of Russians recently rallied to demand Putin's resignation.

Ahead of the verdict, hundreds of supporters gathered outside the central Moscow courthouse.

Security officers, who maintained a heavy presence outside the building, whisked several people away while others stood in below-freezing temperatures chanting "Freedom" and "Russia without Putin" -- referring to the prime minister. _CNN

Russia has lost a large number of competent people via emigration to the west and to Israel. Between the emigrants and the competent people that Putin has jailed, it is a wonder that any production is achieved in Russia today.

But Russia is losing its population year by year, and allowing much of its remaining population to waste away via alcoholism, drugs, HIV, TB, suicide, and a generalised, nonspecific malaise which discourages family formation or thoughts of a positive future.

This is the hollow hulk which US President Obama continues to make concessions to and bow down before. In the end, Obama may be even worse for the US than Putin is for Russia.

To people of both Russia and the US: Hope for the best, but prepare for the worst.

We Are All Israelis Now: Reframing the Right of Return

In what could change the whole picture of human evolution, archaeologists claim that modern man may have evolved in the West Asia, rather than Africa, after they discovered remains said to be 400,000 years old.

A team, led by Prof Avi Gopher and Dr Ran Barkai of the Tel Aviv University, has found eight human-like teeth in the Qesem cave near Rosh Ha’Ayin, 10 miles from Israel’s Ben Gurion airport.

The teeth were 400,000 years old, from the Middle Pleistocene Age, which would make them the earliest remains of homo sapiens yet discovered... _DeccaChronicle

JPostThe discovery of 400,000 year old teeth in Qesem Cave inside Israel, suggests that modern humans may have evolved in the middle east -- not in Africa as most anthropologists believe. This discovery can be added to a host of others which contradicts the common belief that all modern humans are descended from a branch of the human tree which evolved inside Africa.

Long before the land was called Israel and the residents Jews, Homo sapiens lived here twice as long ago as was previously believed, the researchers wrote in the latest (December) edition of the American Journal of Physical Anthropology.

The cave was uncovered in 2000 by Prof. Avi Gopher and Dr. Ran Barkai of TAU’s Institute of Archeology. Later, Prof. Israel Hershkowitz of the Department of Anatomy and Anthropology at TAU’s Sackler School of Medicine and an international team of scientists performed a morphological analysis on the teeth found in the cave.

The examination included CT scans and X-rays indicating the size and shape of the teeth are very similar to those of modern man. The teeth found in the cave are also very similar to evidence of modern man dated to around 100,000 years ago that had previously been discovered in the Skhul Cave on Mount Carmel and the Qafzeh Cave in the Lower Galilee near Nazareth.

The Qesem Cave is dated between 400,000 and 200,000 years ago, and archeologists working there believe that the findings indicate significant changes in the behavior of ancient man. This period of time was crucial in the history of mankind from cultural and biological perspectives, and the fact that teeth of modern man were discovered indicates that these changes are apparently related to evolutionary changes taking place at that time, they maintained. _JPost

If these findings are confirmed, they will throw a monstrous monkey wrench into anthropological discussions. One of the reasons the "out of Africa" viewpoint has been made official dogma, is that it unifies all of the branches of modern humanity. This makes it possible for educated people to say with a straight face that there is no difference in average intelligence or developmental potential between different populations of humans -- even though the best of modern science demonstrates very real differences.

Science moves forward, even when powerful interests wish otherwise.

Avoiding Xmas Deadweight Loss, Part III

In the first and second parts of this series I discussed different ways to avoid the huge loss to society in bad or overpriced gifts (but maybe not wrapping). The suggestions were simple ways to be sure what the receiver gets is close to what the receiver wants. I've suggested giving guilty pleasures, giving in your expertise, and also fun gift exchanges. But apparently Amazon may solve this problem for us:

Every year, millions of packages get shipped across the country from Amazon from all over their various warehouses to gift receivers who open them and invariably look at them and go, hmm, I didn't want that. And then the gifts go back across the country.

Amazon has come up with a way to make sure that the gifts that you get are the gifts that you want. They have patented a method of creating rules in your Amazon account so that if you get a gift, for instance, from Aunt Mildred who is a awful gift-giver, those gifts would automatically either be converted to a gift card or something from your wish list.

You can specify, for instance, don't give me wool sweaters. And if a wool sweater is ordered for you, it would be converted into something else. The rules could go sort of on and on and on. You could say anything over $50, let me know first and convert the gift.

All this without ruining those good feelings the giver gets:

In many cases, they would not know. In fact, in their patent has made it pretty clear that you could send a return thank-you note that thanks the person for the actual gift that you converted, without telling them that the gift had been converted.

Until then, we'll have to just have to be uncomfortably forward with what we do and do not want.

Tommy Hilfiger Bags

Thomas Jacob "Tommy" Hilfiger (born March 24, 1951) is an American fashion designer and founder of the brand Tommy Hilfiger.
Hilfiger was born and raised in Elmira, New York. The second of nine children, he grew up in an Irish-American family; he claims direct descent from Scottish poet Robert Burns. His parents originally intended for him to be an engineer. He attended Elmira Free Academy for high school. Rather than furthering his education, he started to work in retail at the age of 18. Hilfiger would go to New York City to buy jeans and bell-bottom pants, which he customized and resold at a local downtown Elmira store, Brown's.
He later opened his own store, named The People's Place, around the block in downtown Elmira. Although the store was a hot spot for teens with frequent contests and live DJ appearances, there were often more people hanging out than shopping. Over the years, a number of stores closed in downtown Elmira as shopping traffic shifted to the new Arnot Mall in Horseheads, New York. It wasn't long before The People's Place became another casualty. After seven years, The People's Place went bankrupt, when Hilfiger was 25. The site of the original store has since been demolished to make room for First Arena, home of the Elmira Jackals Hockey team.

Tommy Hilfiger Corporation is an American company which is incorporated in Hong Kong.
A Tommy Hilfiger shop In 1989, a Hong Kong businessman Silas Chou acquired Tommy Hilfiger Corporation via Sportswear Holdings Limited, along with his partner Lawrence Stroll. Chou served as Chairman and then Co-Chairman from 1989 to 2002. In 1992, The Corporation listed in New York Stock Exchange. Later Chou sold the company, and in 2006 de-listed and privatization to Apax Partners. Phillips-Van Heusen bought the company in 2010.
Currently the company licensed the brand to it OEM company though its subsidiary Tommy Hilfiger Licensing LLC, which based in New Jersey. The Licensing owned the rights of the logo. Currently The Corporation also own Tommy Hilfiger USA and Tommy Hilfiger Europe B.V.

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Thomas Jacob "Tommy" Hilfiger (born March 24, 1951) is an American fashion designer and founder of the brand Tommy Hilfiger.
After turning to the design of clothing by designing for the rest of his stores in upstate New York, Hilfiger moved to New York City with his now estranged wife, Susie. Although he was offered design assistant positions with designers Calvin Klein and Perry Ellis, and was broke, he turned them both down with greater plans in mind.
In 1984, he founded the Tommy Hilfiger Corporation, (NYSE:TOM), with support from The Murjani Group, which went public in 1992, introducing his signature menswear collection. By 2004 the company had 5,400 employees and revenues in excess of $1.8 billion. Hilfiger was named Menswear Designer of the Year by the Council of Fashion Designers of America in 1997.
In 1998, Hilfiger gave singer Aaliyah her endorsement deal, in which he honored her in his Summer 1998 fashion show in Jamaica.
In 2005, a CBS TV reality show called The Cut tracked the progress of sixteen contestants as they competed for a design job with Hilfiger in similar fashion to Donald Trump's The Apprentice. In the end Hilfiger chose Chris Cortez.
Largely due to declining sales, in 2006, Tommy Hilfiger sold his company for $4 billion, or $16.80 a share, to Apax Partners, a private investment company. In March 2010, Phillips-Van Heusen, owner of Calvin Klein, bought the Tommy Hilfiger Corporation for $10 billion.

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Tommy Hilfiger Corporation is an American company which is incorporated in Hong Kong.
A Tommy Hilfiger shop In 1989, a Hong Kong businessman Silas Chou acquired Tommy Hilfiger Corporation via Sportswear Holdings Limited, along with his partner Lawrence Stroll. Chou served as Chairman and then Co-Chairman from 1989 to 2002. In 1992, The Corporation listed in New York Stock Exchange. Later Chou sold the company, and in 2006 de-listed and privatization to Apax Partners. Phillips-Van Heusen bought the company in 2010.
Currently the company licensed the brand to it OEM company though its subsidiary Tommy Hilfiger Licensing LLC, which based in New Jersey. The Licensing owned the rights of the logo. Currently The Corporation also own Tommy Hilfiger USA and Tommy Hilfiger Europe B.V.

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India Concluded

After digging to a depth of 100 meters last year,
Russian scientists found traces of copper wire dating
back 1000 years, and came to the conclusion that their
ancestors already had a telephone network
one thousand years ago.



So, not to be outdone, in the weeks that followed, American scientists dug 200 meters and the headlines in the US papers read: US scientists have found traces of 2000 year old optical fibers, and have concluded that their ancestors already had advanced high-tech digital telephone 1000 years earlier than the Russians.




One week later, Indian daily newspapers reported the following: After digging as deep as 500 meters, Indian scientists have found absolutely nothing.
They have concluded that 5000 years ago, their ancestors were already using Bluetooth and Wireless technology.

A Clevered Daughter

Many years ago in a small Indian village,

A farmer had the misfortune of owing a large sum of money to a village Moneylender.

The Moneylender, who was old and ugly, fancied the farmer's beautiful Daughter.

So he proposed a bargain.

He said he would forgo the farmer's debt if he could marry his Daughter. Both the farmer and his daughter were horrified by the Proposal.

So the cunning money-lender suggested that they let Providence decide the matter.

He told them that he would put a black Pebble and a white pebble into an empty money bag.

Then the girl would Have to pick one pebble from the bag.

1) If she picked the black pebble, she would become his wife and her father's debt would be forgiven.

2) If she picked the white pebble, she need not marry him and her father's debt would still be forgiven.

3) But if she refused to pick a pebble, her father would be thrown into Jail.

They were standing on a pebble strewn path in the farmer's field. As they talked, the moneylender bent over to pick up two pebbles. As he Picked them up, the sharp-eyed girl noticed that he had picked up two Black pebbles and put them into the bag.

He then asked the girl to pick A pebble from the bag.

Now, imagine that you were standing in the field. What would you have Done if you were the girl?

If you had to advise her, what would you Have told her?

Careful analysis would produce three possibilities:

1. The girl should refuse to take a pebble.

2. The girl should show that there were two black pebbles in the bag And expose the money-lender as a cheat.

3. The girl should pick a black pebble and sacrifice herself in order To save her father from his debt and imprisonment.

Take a moment to ponder over the story. The above story is used with The hope that it will make us appreciate the difference between lateral And logical thinking.

The girl's dilemma cannot be solved with Traditional logical thinking.

Think of the consequences if she chooses

The above logical answers.


What would you recommend to the Girl to do?

Well, here is what she did ....

The girl put her hand into the moneybag and drew out a pebble. Without Looking at it, she fumbled and let it fall onto the pebble-strewn path Where it immediately became lost among all the other pebbles.

"Oh, how clumsy of me," she said. "But never mind, if you look into the Bag for the one that is left, you will be able to tell which pebble I Picked."

Since the remaining pebble is black, it must be assumed that she had Picked the white one. And since the money-lender dared not admit his Dishonesty, the girl changed what seemed an impossible situation into An extremely advantageous one.

MORAL OF THE STORY:
Most complex problems do have a solution.
It is only that we don't Attempt to think.

Contrary to Peak Oil Orthodoxy, Oil Industry Reacts to Prices

Khaled Al Buraik, executive director of the government-controlled Saudi Aramco, announced that new technology could add as much as 2 trillion barrels of oil to global proved reserves.

Although the current global oil reserves in place are estimated at 14 trillion barrels, only about 1.2 trillion can be recovered, said Khaled Al Buraik, executive director of the government-controlled Saudi Aramco.

Speaking at a seminar in Riyadh, Buraik said the quantity of oil extracted so far worldwide does not exceed one trillion barrels.

"Advanced technology in hydrocarbon production could add around two trillion barrels to the existing proven crude reserves in the near future," he said in his address, published by Saudi newspapers on Monday.

"The real challenge for scientists and engineers is how to access to nearly 11.8 trillion barrels to meet the growing world needs of hydrocarbon in the future...what is needed now is more effort by scientists and specialists in this field to invent new methods and very advanced technology." _Zawya

Higher oil prices are spurring oil companies to increase their spending for exploration and production.

Brazil's rich offshore reserves keep growing larger

Brazil announces ambitious new underwater technologies to provide easier access to its vast undersea oil wealth

Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) is a growing component of national energy budgets from Britain to Japan, as a compensatory move against higher oil prices.

A new and ambitious approach to increasing the value of cheap, abundant natural gas, is being advanced by San Francisco startup Siluria Technologies.

Siluria has decided not to go after gasoline or diesel but instead to produce ethylene, a building block for plastics, fertilizers, pesticides, beverage bottles, tires and lots of other materials that are now made from oil. Ethylene can also be turned into alkanes, a class of hydrocarbons that are a component of gasoline.

A more important difference, though, could be the energy needed for conversion from the natural hydrocarbon molecule, methane, to the synthetic one, ethylene. In Siluria’s process, using a new kind of catalyst, that conversion gives off heat instead of requiring it. _NYT

I will present more information on Siluria in the future.

As you can see, advancing technologies will bring about both new proved oil reserves and production, AND new substitutes for crude oil in both fuels and chemical uses. Gas to liquids and LNG are certain to achieve traction for significant scaleup within the next 2 years.

It will take about 20 years for advanced biofuels and small modular fission reactors to get approved, licensed, and scaled up to provide significant quantities of energy and fuels. In the meantime, unconventional hydrocarbons such as shale gas, oil sands, coal to liquids, and heavy oils will scale up to ease the transition. If needed, oil shales and methane clathrates can provide more hydrocarbon energy than all other resources put together.

Taken from an earlier posting at Al Fin Energy

"Flannery O'Connor" She wrote about the South. VOA.

SHIRLEY GRIFFITH: I'm Shirley Griffith.

RAY FREEMAN: And I'm Ray Freeman with the VOA Special English program, People in America. Today, we tell about writer Flannery O’Connor.
(MUSIC)

SHIRLEY GRIFFITH: Late in her life someone asked the American writer Flannery O’Connor why she wrote. She said, "Because I am good at it." She was good. Yet, she was not always as good a writer as she became. She improved because she listened to others. She changed her stories. She re-wrote them, then re-wrote them again, always working to improve what she was creating. Flannery had always wanted to be a writer. After she graduated from Georgia State College for women, she asked to be accepted at a writing program at the State University of Iowa. The head of the school found it difficult to understand her southern speech. He asked her to write what she wanted. Then he asked to see some examples of her work. He saw immediately that the writing was full of imagination and bright with knowledge, like Flannery O’Connor herself.

RAY FREEMAN: Mary Flannery O’Connor was born March twenty-fifth, nineteen twenty-five, in the southern city of Savannah, Georgia.

Flannery O'Connor grew up in the small southern town of Milledgeville, Georgia. The year she was born, her father developed a rare disease called lupus. He died of the disease in 1941. By that time the family was living in the small southern town of Milledgeville, Georgia, in a house owned by Flannery's mother. Life in a small town in the American South was what O’Connor knew best. Yet she said, "If you know who you are, you can go anywhere."

SHIRLEY GRIFFITH: Many people in the town of Milledgeville thought she was different from other girls. She was kind to everyone, but she seemed to stand to one side of what was happening, as if she wanted to see it better. Her mother was her example. Her mother said, "I was brought up to be nice to everyone and not to tell my business to anyone." Flannery also did not talk about herself. But in her writing a silent and distant anger explodes from the quiet surface of her stories. Some see her as a Roman Catholic religious writer. They see her anger as the search to save her moral being through her belief in Jesus Christ. Others do not deny her Roman Catholic religious beliefs. Yet they see her not writing about things, but presenting the things themselves.

RAY FREEMAN: When she left the writing program at Iowa State University she was invited to join a group of writers at the Yaddo writers' colony. Yaddo is at Saratoga Springs in New York state. It provides a small group of writers with a home and a place to work for a short time. The following year, 1949, she moved to New York City. She soon left the city and lived with her friend Robert Fitzgerald and his family in the northeastern state of Connecticut. Fitzgerald says O’Connor needed to be alone to work during the day. And she needed her friends to talk to when her work was done.
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SHIRLEY GRIFFITH: While writing her first novel, “Wise Blood”, she was stricken with the disease lupus that had killed her father. The treatment for lupus weakened her. She moved back to Georgia and lived the rest of her life with her mother on a farm outside Milledgeville. O’Connor was still able to write, travel, and give speeches. “Wise Blood” appeared in nineteen fifty-two. Both it and O’Connor's second novel, “The Violent Bear it Away,” are about a young man growing up. In both books the young men are unwilling to accept the work they were most fit to do. Like all of Flannery O’Connor's writing, the book is filled with humor, even when her meaning is serious. It shows the mix of a traditional world with a modern world. It also shows a battle of ideas expressed in the simple, country talk that O’Connor knew very well.

RAY FREEMAN: In “Wise Blood”, a young man, Hazel Motes, leaves the Army but finds his home town empty. He flees to a city, looking for "a place to be.” On the train, he announces that he does not believe in Jesus Christ. He says, "I wouldn't even if he existed. Even if he was on this train."

Many people in the town of Milledgeville thought she was different from other girls. His moving to the city is an attempt to move away from the natural world and become a thing, a machine. He decides that all he can know is what he can touch and see. In the end, however, he destroys his physical sight so that he may truly see, because he says that when he had eyes he was blind. Critics say his action seems to show that he is no longer willing to deny the existence of Jesus but now is willing to follow him into the dark.

The novel received high praise from critics. It did not become popular with the public, however.

SHIRLEY GRIFFITH: O’Connor's second novel, “The Violent Bear it Away,” was published in nineteen sixty. Like “Wise Blood,” it is a story about a young man learning to deal with life. The book opens with the young man, Francis Marion Tarwater, refusing to do the two things his grandfather had ordered him to do. These are to bury the old man deep in the ground, and to bring religion to his uncle's mentally sick child. Instead, Tarwater burns the house where his grandfather died and lets the mentally sick child drown during a religious ceremony.

RAY FREEMAN: Critics say Tarwater's violence comes from his attempt to find truth by denying religion. In the end, however, he accepts that he has been touched by a deeper force, the force of the word of God, and he must accept that word. Both of O’Connor's novels explore the long moment of fear when a young man must choose between the difficulties of growing up and the safe world of a child.

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SHIRLEY GRIFFITH: Flannery O’Connor is at least as well known for her stories as for her novels. Her first book of stories, “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” appeared in nineteen fifty-five. In it she deals with many of the ideas she wrote about in “Wise Blood,” such as the search for Jesus Christ.

In many of the stories there is a conflict between the world of the spirit and the world of the body. In the story, "The Life You Save May Be Your Own," a traveling workman with only one arm comes to a farm. He claims to be more concerned with things of the spirit than with objects.

RAY FREEMAN: The woman who owns the farm offers to let him marry her deaf daughter. He finally agrees when the mother gives him the farm, her car, and seventeen dollars for the wedding trip. He says, "Lady, a man is divided into two parts, body and spirit. . . The body, lady, is like a house: it don't go anywhere; but the spirit, lady, is like an automobile, always on the move."

He marries the daughter and drives off with her. When they stop to eat, the man leaves her and drives off toward the city. On the way he stops and gives a ride to a wandering boy. We learn that when the one-armed man was a child, his mother left him. Critics say that when he helps the boy, he is helping himself.

SHIRLEY GRIFFITH: In nineteen sixty-four, O’Connor was operated on for a stomach disease. One result of this operation was the return of lupus, the disease that killed her father. On August third, nineteen sixty-four, Flannery O’Connor died. She was thirty-nine years old. Near the end of her life she said, "I'm a born Catholic, and death has always been brother to my imagination."

RAY FREEMAN: The next year, in nineteen sixty-five, her final collection of stories, “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” appeared. In it she speaks of the cruelty of disease and the deeper cruelty that exists between parents and children. In these stories, grown children are in a struggle with parents they neither love nor leave. Many of the children feel guilty about hating the mothers who, the children feel, have destroyed them through love. The children want to rebel violently, but they fear losing their mothers' protection.

In nineteen seventy-one, O’Connor's “Collected Stories” was published. The book contains most of what she wrote. It has all the stories of her earlier collections. It also has early versions of both novels that were first published as stories. And it has parts of an uncompleted novel and an unpublished story. In nineteen seventy-two this last book won the American book industry's highest prize, The National Book Award. As one critic noted, Flannery O’Connor did not live long, but she lived deeply, and wrote beautifully.

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SHIRLEY GRIFFITH: This Special English program was written by Richard Thorman. I'm Shirley Griffith.

RAY FREEMAN: And I'm Ray Freeman. Join us again next week for another People in America program on the Voice of America.

Ronald Coase Explains the Market

Nobel Prize winning economist Ronald Coase turns 100 years old today. I first came across his work when learning about the seemingly magic ability of the Coase theorem to work out disputes when property rights are well defined. He's more famous for his article The Nature of the Firm. In it he discusses a question so important so few bother to ask it: Why do people form companies in the first place? Why not simply trade individually through the market?

The question and the answer gets at the main economic debate over just how much organization and central planning is required for the maximum production. It seems obvious to organize in businesses, but businesses like governments are forms of bureaucracy. The bigger the business, the bigger the bureaucracy. Just imagine how much inefficiency there much be in major corporations like GE and AT&T. Yet so many industries have almost all large companies (banking, gasoline, cars, etc). Try right now to think of examples of small businesses you frequent.

The benefits of big business can also apply to government. Think of the government as a business that provides products (property rights, defense, health and retirement insurance). On the question of size of government, like most issues, the answer is on the margin. Rarely do we want all or none of something. Instead we want some portion of it. Government works the same way. We don't want a small government, we want a good government. That good government isn't small or large, it's just right. Here's how I think about it:

Imagine anarchy to the left, communism to the right, and the United States somewhere in the middle. That may actually be what the legacy of the US will be. Maybe our greatest export isn't computers, medicine, or weapons, but good government. The question is, are we currently to the right or the left of the peak of the curve?

Bottlenecked Blog Readability

I've posted before on the personality type of this blog. But recently Justin Landwehr posted on one of Google's new advanced search features. It allows you to see and filter your search results based on reading difficulty. Which also means you can check to see the reading difficulty of your own writing. Here's the results for the Bottlenecked Blog:

I'm not exactly sure what to make of this. Compared to other blogs I read I am above average. A part of me is happy. Everyone likes to be told they have a high reading level. Even though the topics discussed here may be a factor, the sites that are blockquoted probably are too. And reading level doesn't necessarily imply intelligence. It's also possible that Google just couldn't get a good read on the site and just gave it an intermediate score. So what really matters, readability, probably isn't measured very well with this tool. Good thing there's another tool that let's me measure that, the comments section. Please let me know how this blog can be made more readable, even if the answer is better grammar.

To use this tool yourself click on advanced search on the Google homepage, and select "annotate results with reading levels" under reading level.

Difference Between Humans and Animals, Part XVI

Yesterday I mentioned that giving cash to panhandlers is more harmful than helpful. Here's a biological explanation of the drug addiction that often leads to real homelessness. From Physician Dr. Gabor Maté:

Well, the human brain, unlike any other mammal, for the most part develops under the influence of the environment. And that’s because, from the evolutionary point of view, we developed these large heads, large fore-brains, and to walk on two legs we have a narrow pelvis. That means—large head, narrow pelvis—we have to be born prematurely. Otherwise, we would never get born. The head already is the biggest part of the body. Now, the horse can run on the first day of life. Human beings aren’t that developed for two years. That means much of our brain development, that in other animals occurs safely in the uterus, for us has to occur out there in the environment. And which circuits develop and which don’t depend very much on environmental input. When people are mistreated, stressed or abused, their brains don’t develop the way they ought to.

That's a small portion of a fantastic interview with Democracy Now! about drug addiction and decriminalization. It seems to balance out my earlier post on letting parents relax about their responsibility and my earlier posts on the legalization of drugs. I recommended the whole video.

Denni - the Chic Muse - Paris