Sunday Reading

Interview with the pilot of the Enola Gay from 2002.

A star "only" 190 light-years away is about 14.5 billion years old making it about the same age as the universe.

PhD neuroscience grad Greg Dunn makes beautiful neuron inspired art.

An interview with Marshall Brown, a former professor of mine from IIT. His urbanism class was fantastic. It reminded me of my psych undergrad just making you skeptical of everything.

Natural gas is so cheap in the US that we need to export it. Granted that's not entirely legal yet.

Nice graphic of population density in the US.

A TED talk on data for international school performance, a tad dry but very good.

Monday Reading

China becomes the worlds second largest economy (as measured by country) passing Japan. China's economy is still 1/3 the size of the US's.

Wind power manufacturing in the US is growing... fast. The cost of transporting the large components too far means that domestic manufacturing is here to stay and grow.

Portable lightweight housing that can be erected in a day with nothing but a screw driver. Here's a somewhat more established non-profit manufacturer, World Shelters, of a similar product that has humanitarian and individual sales in mind.

Roosevelt Island near New York has an island wide trash sucking system... no more garbage cans. Photos.

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates is slashing the Pentagon's budget which has increased unabated since late 2001 - in fact in nominal terms it has doubled in the last decade. This isn't small stuff. He's talking about almost trillion dollars over 9 years. Lots of this has already happened.

^ Speaking of a trillion only 21% of Americans knew how much a trillion dollars was relative to a million. It's a million millions. There are 1000 millions in a billion and 1000 billions in a trillion.

Greenspan calls for an end to the Bush tax cuts! But for all the wrong reasons... he thinks the deficit is too big and the (to use Krugman's coinage) the invisible bond vigilantes could strike at any time. Yet somehow bond rates hit a record low yesterday.

Best story ever? Wikileaks, after having embarrassed the military by releasing some 77,000 classified transcripts from Afghanistan, says it wants to release another 17,000. The military is coyly threatening them, so what did wikileaks do? It distributed an encrypted torrent through Piratebay.org that has a large file size. They say the classified information in the torrent is much more damaging that what is already out there. So... if the government does anything, they tweet the encrypted torrent passwords and tens of thousands of people around the world unlock their classified torrent. Brilliant.

NYT story on purple martins - the bird that eats a ton of insects and relies on humans for its housing. We had one in my backyard when I was growing up that still exists.

All sorts of old people are missing in Japan, or rather lots of them have died and their children hide their death in order to collect their pensions.

Ecosystem engineering - I'm curious to see the results of this test. If it's at all promising it could mean huge gains for the natural world.

One of the most famous daguerreotype series recently went under restoration efforts which found that they have a degree of detail that is - utterly shocking. Basically at 30x magnification the plates don't lose detail. That means the series of 8 - 6.5"x8.5" plates could be blown up to 170' by 20' without losing any detail. The irony is that photography in its early stages often produced images that are in many ways more detailed, fine, and artistic than modern cameras are capable of producing. How powerful would your digital camera need to be? Oh, 140,000 megapixels.

Readings From Monday

This is a free movie produced by a group of two guys called the Yes Men. Basically they find ways to trick event promoters, journalists, and talk show hosts into believing that they represent some company. They then go on to embarrass the company by revealing truths, stating positions that make sense but that the company themselves would never agree to, or just straight up comedy. At the very least watch the first 10 minutes or so.

Economists View via Krugman (seem to be reading a lot of him lately... yet he's so accurate and great at representing data) - why the climate bill was killed.

The Big Picture explains why deficits don't matter much to bond holders which is kind of an explanation of what Krugman would call the invisible bond vigilantes. thirty year bond notes are still below 3%... Also, AMAZING graphic on federal income and expenditures.



(Explanation of what I'm talking about - bonds being below 3% means that EVERYONE is willing to lend the US government money because they view it as safe. This goes somewhat counter to the idea being promulgated by conservatives that as the government amasses more debt bond buyers will at some point be completely unwilling to lend the government money and bond prices will soar and we will be unable to finance our expenditures - i.e. Greece. My own addition to this is that the US government enjoys a position of lender of last resort to the world - that is - if we default the world we know will cease to exist. It will make the Great Depression look like a shallow recession. It's like the Supreme Court, it's not that they're infallible, they're infallible because they're the highest court in the land.)

The Big Picture on net worth on as percentage of disposable income.



Algae as a biofuel seems to be nearing the possibility stage.

The biggest story of the day - wikileaks published 77,000 reports from Afghanistan that give a different view of the war then what is generally portrayed.

This is a must read: Martin Wolf, a British economist, explains supply side economics or rather the failure of along with a host of other scientifically broken models that politicians love to tout. Scarey. Here's Krugmans simple take down of supply side economics.

Nanosecond market trading pushes the envelope of internet speeds for all.

Picturequote

"There is a wild spirit of good naturedness which looks like malice." - Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 184

This is another photo I picked up (for $3 no less) at the Printer's Row Book Fair. It's an almost 100 year old gelatin-silver print of an artillery shell exploding in no mans land during WWI.

Picturequote

"I do not know with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones." - Albert Einstein in a letter to Harry Truman

I went to the Printer's Row Book Fair yesterday scouring the area for old platinum prints. I found one. This is a 12 inch coastal gun being fired. You can see the round moving just beyond the barrel. I'm not sure where or when it's from, but my guess is that it's Great Britain around one of the world wars.

Picturequote

"So many young people seem to be getting quite pro-military these days. Somebody should tell them they'll get their legs blown off if they go to war." - Paul McCartney

This image and accompanying article were found at the New York Times.

Blink... and Paintball

For JC's birthday I asked for and received many books that I had been looking for at the library, but had never been able to locate. Apparently libraries are growing in popularity.

Anyways, I read Blink in a little over a day. It's a book by the ever popular and quoted New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell. This is his second book. The first one being The Tipping Point and the latest being Outliers. Both of which I plan on reading after my current slew of books.

It was a good book, not amazing but pretty good. None the less I find myself talking about it a lot. The concepts he talks about are very applicable to everyday life. Namely, the snap judgments we make and how they can be good or bad. Many of the research studies were famous psychology experiments that I was familiar with, but the extra factor that I had never been aware of was all the product development cases he wrote about. Money for experiments flows to the areas where the most profit can be made... so naturally a lot of it goes to product development.

Then an issue was brought up that I think about all the time but never know how to contextualize or really just do anything productive about; firearm fire fights. I always wonder if all those years of playing paintball has taught me anything with a real world application (outside of the whole Randy Pausch head fake theory). To be honest I'm not sure that anyone really knows for certain. I don't know any former professional players who have or would even consider joining the military, police, etc. And I'm not talking about warfare. Just small groups of people shooting at each other.

Gladwell posits that people enter a state of "temporary autism" when put in such a situation. That is, they focus intently on one thing and other stimuli such as noises and time get blurred or entirely erased. It's funny because there are all these cops' stories about shooting a bad guy, and they all say the same (predictable) things, "time slowed down, I don't remember the shots, etc." I feel in some ways like it's wrong of me to chime in. After all, I've never been involved in a shooting of any sort. Nor do I really wish to be, but some things about paintball have always been true for all its participants.

No matter who you are and how level headed you normally are, after a game of paintball you breath heavier, you're all jacked on adrenaline, your sense of time is screwed up, and you're about 100 times more likely to yell and get in a fight (I'm constantly embarrassed by this). In short, you kind of lose your mind and go on some primitive autopilot. This is what Gladwell attempts to explain. It's also worth mentioning that that feeling you get when playing subsides over time, but never goes away entirely. It's like that part of Fight Club when Edward Norton says that being in Fight Club turns down the volume on everything. Nothing seems like as big of a deal. It takes more to rattle you. But is it really fair to say that playing paintball a lot is in some way really similar to being involved in a fire fight or going to war?

I think, to some extent, yes. I just never know what to do with this idea. It's something that paintball players think a lot about, and something that most military and law enforcement officers will be quick to deny the merit of. Even though their training in actual combat situations or real life experience is severely limited. Blink is essentially a book about how informed people can make snap judgments in their fields of expertise and perform with remarkable accuracy. This is something we can all attest to. Most of us are extremely proficient at at least one thing. It's the nature of our specialized worker society. One of the things I'm really good at (relative to the general population) is paintball. Paintball is a relatively new sport. There aren't a lot of terms for moves, positions, and styles of play. Beyond the basics it's also really hard to teach people how to play it well, and even when you are really good it's hard to explain why you're so good (a similar concept is talked about in the book).

What I'm trying to say is that I think certain professions could get some really cheap and effective training by using paintball as an instructional tool and hiring professional players to help guide them. We're all poor and willing to work cheaply! At the very least it's a good work out and it'll teach its participants to think calmly under pressure. The ability to remain semi-calm under pressure is the biggest plus. This is what should make paintball appealing to a variety of people. Hell, one of my paintball friends trained with a bunch of Navy SEALS and scout sniper teams and Camp Pendleton in CA. Three paintball players (1 old pro, 1 field ref, and probably the best player in the world) against 12 of America's top badasses... all veterans. To be fair he said they were great marksman and learned really quickly, but in the end it was an ass kicking all day by the paintball players. But how is that surprising? Most military personnel are only in for 2-4 years, and most of that time you aren't running close quarters combat simulations. Now compare that to a bunch of kids who grew up playing paintball 2 days a week for several hours for 5,7, or 12 years (for me by the time I was 23). It just seems like a huge waste to not tap some of that talent.

Aaron Goes to Afghanistan

"In war you win or you lose, live or die - and the difference is just an eyelash." -Douglas MacArthur

I'm not entirely sure of Aaron's details but he's leaving for Afghanistan tonight. He's in the Army Reserves as an infantryman with demolitions training (the actual designation escapes me).

I've considered joining the military before, but a multitude of factors have prevented me from taking that leap. The largest of which was, suprisingly enough, paintball. The above quote is dead on. Years of training, weekend after weekend of play, dozens of games, and the difference always came down to something like slipping at the beginning of the game, breaking a ball, or catching a lucky bounce. Paintball taught me that sometimes you're doing everything right, and that's a subjective term, and you get shot anyways. Or as Hass told me one time in Denver, after we blew a 6 on 3 lead in the finals, "it doesn't matter [if it's the right move], it either works or it doesn't." I could ramble about this for hours. Bottom line, even the most prepared throw dice in war.

Aaron and me. Aaron is into polaroids.