Stupidity at 2,500 Frames Per Second

But it sure looks like fun...

Musical Intermission

I know, I already put up an Orlianthi video tonight, but...

Closing the Indian-Pakistan Border

One of the most heavily militarized borders in the world

A view of the Indian-Pakistan border at night.  I presume the continuous orange line is the border lit up by sodium vapor lamps.

The link comes from Charlie, and the picture from the Artless Dodger.

She'll Remeber Her Wedding Day

Because she can always find it on YouTube.

In Northern California where rogue waves are a known issue.

Embedding is disabled; Go see it here.
 

Americas Early Hybrid Cars

A cool article by Jay Leno on the first true hybrid car manufactured and sold in the US, the 1916 Owen Magnetic:

People think hybrids are something new, but they've been around since the beginning of the automobile. Ferdinand Porsche built the Lohner-Porsche series hybrid car back in 1901. It used a gas engine to spin a generator that fed electricity to in-wheel motors. In 1917, the Woods Motor Vehicle Company of Chicago offered the Woods Dual Power, a series hybrid that could motor along—at speeds of less than 15 mph—solely on battery power. But I think the 1916 Owen Magnetic might be the most interesting early hybrid of them all.

The Owen Magnetic's technological leap was its electromagnetic transmission. Invented by the wonderfully named Justus B. Entz, an electrical engineer from New York who once worked with Thomas Edison, the electromagnetic transmission compactly housed both a 24-volt generator and an electric traction motor. The crankshaft of a 75-hp gas engine was attached to the generator, which sent juice to the traction motor, which in turn powered the rear wheels. There was no mechanical connection between the engine and the drivetrain.

 It appears to have been a pretty advanced car for the time, and maybe that was it's downfall:

So why did the Owen Magnetic company fail in 1922, after producing just 700 cars?

The ads called it the car of a thousand speeds. But as is sometimes the case, being better isn't always enough. The car had to be competitively priced. A 1917 Ford Model T cost $360; Cadillacs ran about two grand. An Owen Magnetic started at $3700 and went up from there.

Another problem was the complicated relay-and-wiring shift mechanism. It's mounted under the hood alongside the steering column. I haven't opened mine up because it seems to work fine. And, quite frankly, I'm frightened to poke around in there. A plate on it says, "If something goes wrong, do not attempt to work on this yourself. Send it back to the factory." Who would want a car that a blacksmith couldn't fix?

So basically, it was a old time Fisker, without the government subsidy to keep it alive.  Ford made a car that everybody could afford, and most of them could afford to have fixed.

Don't Want to Have a Fat Bay...

A strained  analogy here by Tom Horton.  Fatter folks, sicker bay

In the United States, obesity-related health problems are soaring. The standard revolving door has gone from six to eight feet, and hauling our ampler butts costs airlines a quarter-billion more in fuel than it used to. The proportion of normal-weight Americans is at an all-time low.

But what's a fat book got to do with the state of the Chesapeake Bay? Around the world, coastal waters have gotten fat. "Eutrophic," or overfertilized, is the technical term, from the Greek for well-fed. Dead zones like the bay's occur in more than 40 regions of the world.

It's intriguing to compare graphs tracking these declines to graphs in Messrs. Power's and Schulkin's book that track the U.S. upsurge in fatness...

Ah yes, the confusion of correlation and causation.  In the classic statistics text (at least for me) "How to Lie with Statistics", Darrel Huff uses the example of the correlation between the price of rum in Jamaica and preachers salaries.  A pretty strong relationship with no particular causal mechanism, except both are a response to monetary inflation.

Of course, the relationship between human nutrition and eutrophication in the bay is really no coincidence.  The Bay is eutrophied for two related reasons.  First, the number of people in the Bay watershed, spewing nutrients in sewage and in the air, and from nutrients used in agriculture. 

The large number of people that the Bay supports is due to nutrients, nutrients used to raise adequate crops to feed humanity.  Without added nutrients, particularly fixed nitrogen, we simply couldn't grow enough food to support all our people (or alternatively, we could convert all arable land to farmland).  Look around you, who do you want to starve to death?

This is not the say that we shouldn't dispose of our wastes properly (it's practically a sin to was the fixed nitrogen in sewage by blowing it off into the air (denitrification) when it could be reused to grow more crops).  And we should manage our fertilization so as to waste as little as possible by spilling it into the Bay.

But the holier than thou attitude about people and the bay is tiring.  Tom, if you really feel that way, do your part to save the Bay by leaving.  May I suggest North Dakota?  The farmers there will really appreciate the message.

Was it Something I Said?

Kurt Cobain Reincarnated in Peru

There appears to be (or have been) a show like American Idol (which I steadfastly refuse to get interested in) called "Yo Soy" ("I Am", in Spanish), which has people on who do impressions of well known artists. There was also a pretty good Amy Winehouse (below). Maybe they need to be dead to be memorable. Check out the hot judge. Some things are part of the script:

HHS Gives Obama $8 Billion Campaign Donation

An $8 billion trick?  Toying with Medicare to fix the election campaign

It’s hard to imagine a bigger electoral disaster for a president than seniors in crucial states like Florida, Pennsylvania and Ohio discovering that he’s taken away their beloved Medicare Advantage just weeks before an election. This political ticking time bomb could become the biggest “October Surprise” in US political history.

But the administration’s devised a way to postpone the pain one more year, getting Obama past his last election; it plans to spend $8 billion to temporarily restore Medicare Advantage funds so that seniors in key markets don’t lose their trusted insurance program in the middle of Obama’s re-election bid.

The money is to come from funds that Health and Human Services is allowed to use for “demonstration projects.” But to make it legal, HHS has to pretend that it’s doing an “experiment” to study the effect of this money on the insurance market.

That is, to “study” what happens when the government doesn’t change anything but merely continues a program that’s been going on for years.

The easiest experiments are always the ones you know the answers to.


G.A.O. claims it's a waste of money, but the Administration continues the program anyway:

The report, to be issued Monday by the Government Accountability Office, a nonpartisan investigative arm of Congress, urges the Obama administration to cancel the program, which pays bonuses to health insurance companies caring for millions of Medicare beneficiaries.

Administration officials, however, defended the project and said they would not cancel it because it could improve the quality of care for older Americans.

Mild Atlantic Hurricane Season Forecast

We anticipate that the 2012 Atlantic basin hurricane season will have reduced activity compared with the 1981-2010 climatology. The tropical Atlantic has anomalously cooled over the past several months, and it appears that the chances of an El Niño event this summer and fall are relatively high. We anticipate a below-average probability for major hurricanes making landfall along the United States coastline and in the Caribbean. However, coastal residents are reminded that it only takes one hurricane making landfall to make it an active season for them, and they need to prepare the same for every season, regardless of how much activity is predicted.

But remember, it only takes one; stay prepared...

Full forecast here.

He's the Dogeater

As Treacher says: "A day will come when I stop enjoying this. Today is not that day"

Markets, the Solution to Pollution and Overfishing

A little libertarian porn

By far the most common response to providing environmental quality or to conserving natural resources has been command-and-control regulations where the government decides what actions shall be taken by individuals and organizations to meet an environmental objective and enforces them with its police powers. As one would expect, there are numerous problems with this approach; let’s focus on air pollution control and fisheries to illustrate them...

In both air pollution control and fishery regulation there has been an ingenious “property rights” solution. Because air and migratory ocean fisheries cannot be easily bounded into individual property rights, the alternative has been to designate private “use rights” to the resource, while not to the resource itself. What this means is that fishermen have a right to fish, but do not own the fishery. Similarly, firms have the right to pollute, but do not own the atmosphere. While traveling fish stocks and the air cannot easily be carved up into property rights, their use can.

A little, no, a lot long, but worth the read if you're into such things.  We desperately need better solutions than we are using now.

The only problem I see is that there is insufficient room for government to accumulate power and generate graft.

Snakeheads: Wanted Dead or Alive, but Mostly Dead

MD rewarding anglers for catching Chesapeake Bay frankenfish

This is old news here, of course, but the video this Richmond Virginia TV station put out is too classic to pass up.  Hold out for the end and the ditzy blonde news reader: 

They’re big, have sharp fangs, and can even walk on land. If you’re brave enough to hunt down snakehead fish, Maryland wants to pay you.

Snakehead fish are becoming a big problem in the mid-Atlantic region. The invasive species is originally from Asia. Since being introduced to the US they’ve ravaged river ecosystems, devouring hordes of fish and reproducing quickly.

You can find them in Maryland and portions of Virginia. To curb the population Maryland is rewarding people that catch them within the Chesapeake Bay watershed by entering them in contests to win fishing-related prizes,such as gift certificates to Bass Pro Shops.

To enter, an angler should submit catch details and a photo of their dead snakehead online through the DNR Angler’s log, a popular social fishing site.

Say It Ain't So, Carla!

Nicolas Sarkozy loses vote, forced into run-off with Socialist

French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Socialist candidate François Hollande will face off in the second round of France's presidential election after edging out the far right's Marine Le Pen in Sunday's first round of voting.

Socialist presidential challenger François Hollande topped the first round of France’s presidential election on Sunday with 28.4 percent of votes, while incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy finished second with 25.5 percent, according to exit polls. Those figures set up a widely expected run-off between Sarkozy and the candidate of France’s main opposition party who led most voter intentions surveys before the first round...

A run-off between Sarkozy and Hollande is scheduled on May 6, with opinion polls largely favouring the Socialist Party candidate.

You know what this means, don't you?  This means that Carlo Bruni Sarkozy, heiress, super model and rockstar, will lose her position as First Lady of  French Republic! Mon Dieu!

And you know what else that means?  All the photos I saved for my ongoing series of posts on Carla Bruni are going to waste! I can't let that happen.  How many other First Ladies posed nude, (NSFW link) and would we appreciate it if they did?

I wonder if there's anything else in this article is worthwhile commenting on; it's mostly just French electoral politics, which are even more meaningless and futile than our own.  At least our candidates eat puppies, and tie dogs to the roof of cars (I need some text to wrap around these pictures):

Hollande, who was seen as benefitting from a wave of hostility towards Sarkozy, proved a surprisingly resilient candidate. The Socialist hopeful began campaigning months before the incumbent and while he temporarily slipped behind Sarkozy in opinion polls, he regained his frontrunner status in the final two weeks of the race.

At least in France, the Socialists are out of the closet, unlike the democrats in the US who pursue identical policies.

French analysts rushed to speculate on how the whole of the election results would affect the outcome of the May 6 run-off, and on what many saw as the impending return of the Socialist Party to the Elysee Presidential palace and a Socialist-led parliament.

The French left has spent the last 10 years as the country’s main opposition group, and had to digest three consecutive presidential defeats in 1995, 2002 and 2007. Former president François Mitterrand, who won back-to-back elections in 1981 and 1988, remains France’s only Socialist head of state since the end of World War Two.

Let France experiment with Socialism.

Special Thanks to Wombat-Socho for picking up this and other links in his special Thursday edition of Rule 5 Sunday.

Smells Like Teen Cellos

They have a bunch of others, too.

Moo!

Thoughts on Earth Day

A Yucky Morning at the Beach

We went down to the beach this morning, and, to say the least, it was obnoxious in the extreme. It's been raining since late last night, with a nasty north wind.










We thought we might find Joel and Red down there too, but apparently Red didn't feel as strongly about it as Skye.

The wind was driving the rain into our faces, and the camera, on the way up, resulting in such fine photos as is one:








 
Just a little "erosion art".


That's enough; suffice to say, it was a short walk.

Cruise Ship Passes Broken Down Fishermen, 2 Die

Photo of the broken down fishing boat from cruise ship

News of stranded fishermen didn't make it to the Cruise Ship Captain.

Three Panamanian men were on their way home after a night of fishing, happy with their success, when the motor on their small open boat rattled and quit, leaving them adrift in sight of land, but too far out for their cell phones to work. With nothing left to eat but the fish they caught and a few gallons of water, they drifted for 16 days, more than 100 miles from home, before they thought they must be saved.
...
"I said, `God will not forgive them,'" Vasquez recalled. "Today, I still feel rage when I remember that."

That same day, March 10, birdwatchers with powerful spotting scopes on the promenade deck of the luxury cruise ship Star Princess saw a little boat adrift miles away. They told ship staff about the man desperately waving a red cloth.

When Judy Meredith of Bend, Ore., looked through the scopes, she could plainly see it was a small open boat, like the kinds they had seen off Ecuador. And she could see a man waving what looked like a dark red T-shirt. "You don't wave a shirt like that just to be friendly," Meredith said. "He was desperate to get our attention."

Barred from going to the bridge herself to notify the ship's officers, Meredith said she told a Princess Cruises sales representative what they had seen, and he assured her he passed the news on to crew.

Gingers in the News

Ginger girl nabs perv on "T"

A strap-hanging MBTA heroine said she went into “She-Hulk” mode to single-handedly collar a man who exposed himself on a crowded B-Line trolley — dragging him off the train and holding him until cops arrived. The 24-year-old Allston woman, who did not want to be named, said the man boarded one stop after she did on her ride home from her marketing job Thursday. She immediately noticed him staring.

“This guy was just being a real creeper,” she said. As she shuffled along the train, he followed her. She zoned out, listening to music, only to look up and see him standing over her. “I looked up and felt awkward, so I looked down,” she said. She said the man was exposing and touching himself, but tried to cover himself with his shirt.

The woman — not someone to meekly let an alleged creep get away with it — shouted out what he was doing, but no one stepped in to help. She said one male passenger even shrugged. So, she said, she went into “She-Hulk” mode, lunging as the man tried to bolt at Packard’s Corner in Brighton.

She said she held the man with one hand and “berated” him while she waited for the cops to arrive. She said he looked frightened.

“He kept saying sorry, but he was just sorry for himself,” she said.

How else could he get her to touch her?