In a recession, spending by businesses in general goes down - for just about everything. So of course, companies which sell tangible hard items are hurt. Their saving grace is that hard items do wear out - cars eventually fall apart, computer power supplies die. So at some point, folks have to come back to […]
The rush to embrace “biofuels” in the US is an incredible scam.
The main rush here is to produce ethanol from corn. The idea is, if we grow a bunch of corn, and convert it to ethanol, and mix the ethanol with gas to put in our cars, we will be “on the road” to becoming […]
In the Washington Post on Sunday there was one of the most ridiculous articles I have read! Robert Bryce claims that the idea of energy independence for the US is a myth. Here are what he calls the myths, and how I would answer his absurd arguments:
1. What he calls a myth: “Energy Independence will […]
Oil as an energy source has many problems. It is harder to come by these days (even though it is very possible oil is continually seeping up deep from within the earth). A lot of the oil exists in politically unstable areas. So oil is responsible for much war and economic dislocation.
Coal, while plentiful, is […]
Here are some funny, ambiguous, or otherwise tortured headlines and such from Steven Pinker’s The Language Instinct:
Child’s Stool Great for Use in Garden
Stud Tires Out
Stiff Opposition Expected to Casketless Funeral Plan
Drunk Gets Nine Months in Violin Case
Iraqi Head Seeks Arms
Queen Mary Having Bottom Scraped
Columnist Gets Urologist in Trouble with His Peers
Yoko Ono will talk about […]
Check out the Neuros OSD. This is a really cool device for copying all sorts of multimedia, including DVD’s, cable TV programs, VHS tapes, etc. to a compressed format on a hard disk. So you can coalesce all of your video/audio material from a variety of sources onto a single, easy-to-navigate hard drive. And this […]
I’ve been writing a plugin for Wordpress Mu (multi-user) to gather visitor statistics for each blog in a blog farm, and display them selectively. This will give the full awstats functionality to the admin of each blog. See this page for more information.
Jared Diamond has an OP-ED piece in the New York Times where he discusses the number 32. The number 32 measures the relative standard of living between average folks in the developed world (US, W. Europe, Japan, Australia, etc) and those in the developing world. He says that the average person in the developed […]
Wolfgang Pauli won the Nobel prize in physics in 1945 for his famous Pauli Exclusion Principle. Very simply, it states that no 2 electrons can occupy the same state at the same time. This principle is a consequence of basic quantum mechanical laws, such as that tiny particles like electrons are indistinguishable from each other. […]
