Picturequote

"The harsh, useful thing of the world, from pulling teeth to digging potatoes, are best done by men who are starkly sober as so many convicts in the death-house, but the lovely and useless things, the charming and exhilarating things, are best done by men with, as the phrase is, a few sheets to the wind." - H.L. Mencken

This is a palladium print I made from a 3 3/4" x 2 1/2" negative I found at my parents house. It was printed on a hand-coated cotton rag paper. Palladium prints have a quality that can't be photographed or scanned. They have a texture and tonality very different from a typical gelatin-silver print. The person on the far right is my grandfather (Dad's dad) I'm pretty sure. Second from the left is Wilson who is now 91, and continuing left is Thad (fighter pilot MIA in WWII in the Pacific), Inez, and Charles.

Physics = Economics

I recently started taking a physics class at Northwestern (yes, I definitely feel pretentious, and the funny thing is that I didn't expect to) because it's a prerequisite for me to attend IIT this Fall. Apparently it's important for an architect to know something about physics...

I was walking home from class today, which by the way has been consuming my life (the class) as it starts at 7AM and goes till noon and the work outside of class is generally a few hours, and something occurred to me as I pondered my ineptitude when it comes to understanding friction - physics is just like economics. Yup, everything I study is just like everything else I study.

In economics there are these theories which predict very precisely how one event will effect another, and they're always very elegant and in some sense idealistic. Then there is reality, and in reality the number of variables truly acting upon any given economic event is generally mind numbingly large. So some kind of a sluff factor is often included in equations to account for hard to account for variables. This is where Chicago school economists need to ease up a bit and become less rigid in their dogma (maybe it's just my reaction to the times). It may be more efficient to let the market dictate, but in reality a few people always screw it up for everyone in that system.

In physics it's the same deal. Elegant, simple, beautiful equations explain about 90-95% of any single event that happens at a very earthly level (read: masses, velocities, and forces that are familiar to you). The moment you start talking about speed as it relates to the speed of light or mass as it relates to a star... more or less everything starts to break down. Then you hit the speed of light time stands still, you become mass-less, and turn into pure energy. The factors that screw up your answer vary, but again, on an earthly level they generally include some sort of air resistance or friction which are kind of ridiculously hard to factor into the final answer.

Lesson: When few variables with reasonable quantities are involved the products of these equations is quite knowable. Things get complex (and to some extent unknowable in the predictive sense as of the present) when they hit reality and specifically, very messy situations involving "large" quantities or variables. What I'm trying to say is that models and theories are nice and extremely helpful but sometimes you just have to build a model and put it in a wind tunnel. Physicists have nature as their final arbiter as my professor is fond of saying. On the other hand progress in economics will most likely be brought about by making huge mistakes. And according to one of my favorite economists (one of the authors of Freakonomics, Steven Levitt) economists are often tasked with solving arcane math equations because there's more incentive to do so.

Reassuring I know.

Obama Orders Colbert's Head Shaved

Hilarious

16 Year Old Circumnavigator

Zac Sunderland, of SoCal, set out when he was 16 to sail around the world. He's almost finished and is now working his way up the Mexican coast. He should finish in the next few weeks, making him the youngest person to ever sail around the world solo.

This is a view of Intrepid, a 36' 1972 Islander that he bought for around $6,000 and fixed up with the help of his father.

Here's his blog and website.

Here's an ESPN article about him that's really good (longer).

Jon Voight - Totally Confused

This is hilarious.



Answers (and questions):

Holocaust... what?

The Israelis will defend themselves...

Force for good... yeah, we've been so great in the last decade and now that Obama is president he's screwing it all up!

"We and we alone are the right frame of mind..." That one's the best.

Stuff Worth Reading

Great pieces on taxes in America and income distribution. I don't think most people fully appreciate just how pressing of an issue this is, and to top it off I have heated debates with my conservative friends and parents about this contstantly. Stow your emotion, look at the data; the rich are getting richer and we're cutting their taxes.

This is just, awesome. A cop in Austin, TX tasers a 72 year old lady.

Cell phones that charge themselves off of ambient waves.

GOOD Magazines list of upcomming films about food.

This is an interesting blog I found called War and Health. They have some good links to data on there.

More from GOOD - one of my favorite words, laconic, is the 4th most looked up word on the NY Times site. To look up a word just highlight it then click the question mark on any NY Times article.

Wired - a bet about horses feet touching the ground sets off some technical inovation to the camera and Facebook allows users to grab URL's.

And Chinese, Indian, and Korean families in the US tend to have more male children.

More On the Beginnings of Life

I first reported a few weeks ago that scientists had recreated the basic ingredients of RNA in a laboratory setting similar to that of primordial earth.

Well now some scientists have recreated tPNA, "a transitional stage between the lifeless chemicals and the complex genetic architectures of life."

"'Ghadiri’s important and highly innovative new work potentially relates to the origin of life as we don’t yet know it,' said Sutherland. Life’s emergence took billions of years, a process now being compressed into the passage of a few human generations. 'The possibility that humans could come up with an alternative biology that outdoes that which produced us is a mind-freeing and mind-bending concept,' he said."

What I assume he's talking about here is the rise of computers and AI. One day, 2045 according to Raymond Kurzweil, computers will be autonomous and smarter than human beings. This event is inevitable and it's easy to be somewhat scared by the idea. I once read that Kurzweil said that these machines will look at humans as their ancestors. Much like how we think of chimps Which is good or bad depending on how you look at it.

"Asked how long it would take before fully synthetic life could be coaxed from an inert chemical mixture, Ghadiri said, 'Soon. If not in our lifetime, then the next. In my opinion, it shouldn’t be longer than that.'"

Yeah, that's pretty mind-bending.

Work Video

Google updated its Android OS (which resides on my phone) and they added a video camera function, so I now have a video camera of sorts. This is my first upload to YouTube. It's me scrapping a 55 gallon stainless steel drum by cutting off the steel with an oxy acetlylene torch. You have to get rid of the steel as the stainless is worth a lot more.

Stuff Worth Reading

Here's an interview with Pan's Labyrinth director Guillermo del Toro. He says some really great stuff later in the interview.

"Hollywood thinks art is like Latin in the Middle Ages—only a few should know it, only a few should speak it. I don't think so."

"In the next 10 years, we're going to see all the forms of entertainment—film, television, video, games, and print—melding into a single-platform "story engine." The Model T of this new platform is the PS3."

Extended Reading - A doctor set up his own gold backed online currency called E-Gold because he thought a gold standard was direly needed. Yeah... he was arrested a few years later after criminals began using his system to move, launder, and hold money without oversight.

The Hawthorne Effect gets debunked by Steven Levitt. HT: Joe

Afghanistan Embassy to home: "Send more money, you need it to buy influence in DC."

What many crash investigators are saying may have caused that Air France airliner to go down.

The Onion on "getting into" photography. HT: Sandy

Disaster Housing

MIT students got a hold of a leftover FEMA trailer and turned it into some sort of composting, plant growing, rainwater catching art project - interesting, but... what problem does this solve?


After Hurricane Katrina these trailers were offered up as temporary housing. The trailers cost $18,620 a piece, (which the surplus of which are now selling for an average of $7,400) but their maintenance costs pushed the real costs closer to $229,000 in some cases. In an economic double-whammy this should hurt companies who sell trailers. Selling a new trailer, even one that is priced aggressively, can't compete with a market flooded with trailers market down some 60%.

Of course I would have the government build some sort of mixed use commercial residential monolithic dome community powered by a district energy system, but perhaps my, engineer and ex-military, father was right. The military has all sorts of bases in the South that are empty and being torn down at great expense. Why didn't we send the hurricane victims there? The military knows how to hold; feed; and house thousands of people, and when it's all done there won't be leftover toxic trailers.

Stuff Worth Reading

Mockingbirds teach us a better way to live for a second time.

I've heard a few murmurs of hope in the news, but not in the best economics and finance blogs I read. This one is scary, but he's also usually right.

Paul Krugman on health-tourism.

Econ and finance dorks only. Germany, China, and Japan are more or less screwed economically speaking in the long run. Basically those economies are net exporters and the countries that buy from them are now saving their money. Now their currencies are appreciating against ours so their exports fall further...

A private company in California called Space X is trying to send rockets with payloads into orbit. They've already launched one rocket successfully and are almost done with a second larger one. The whole idea is to do what NASA does at 1/10th the cost, and so far it seems to be working.

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.