Linkage

A real Turing machine.

All by themselves, words can cause pain.

iPad lockin.

Chinese quality strikes again.

The newest Gulf war.

Are we living inside a black hole?

Why we hold onto things.

A tale of two health cares.

The art of the steal.

Neither a bull nor a bear be.

Occasional Links

The oil export crisis has already arrived.

Iran will punch Western powers.

China starts to dump.


Is the Sahara blooming?

Spray-on liquid glass.

The social graph of the United States.

Two cheers for insensitive bosses.

We've misjudged China.

Why California is in trouble.

Is Beijing vacant?

Wednesday Links

Buff up your T-cells.

Old media caught at their usual double-standard.

How to demo your startup.

Drill and conserve—why is this hard?

Bigger cheaper solar cells.

How to find the work you love.

Witches, goblins, and Nazis.

The brain unmasked.

The ultimate of bridges.

Confessions of a risk manager.

The brain's fairness detector.

Wednesday Links

Are you Gay?

The audacity of hubris.

Practical jetpacks are almost here.

Stiffing our allies to favor our rivals.

The blinding light.

The Democrats are winning the battle of staging.

Building the quantum simulator.

Oil at $500/barrel?

The Devil's Business Dictionary, in pictures.

The first trans-national President.

Hope for Alzheimer's.

Educational growth, or its opposite, and economics.

Introducing the Sphere.

Russia's continuing legal nihilism.

The real psychic paper.

Friday Links

Why cold weather really does spread the flu.

25 skills every man should know.

Say you're sorry, make more money.

Is this why wild monkeys are not allowed in the Northern Virginia and Maryland woods?

Common repairs made easy.

The story of Baikonur.

Undercover in the Apple Store.

How quantum cryptology works.

Character—not technology—is the solution to crime.

Or did the Clean Air Act lower crime?

The Nigerian child sex trade smashed.

Is OPEC the new Fed?

Disconnect

Has anyone else noticed that pump prices aren't tracking the futures prices? Usually, pump prices move up in matched lockstep (down, for some reason, has a little lag). I found this explanation:

But the real drive behind the rally, many analysts said, is an influx of speculative "nontraditional" capital into energy commodities. And that inflow increases when the dollar falls.

rather unpersuasive. Commodity futures have transaction costs and uncertainty levels that make them unlikely havens for those who frighten easily. Unless I match it to this rant, which includes this illustrative paragraph:

In the Boston Tea Party, patriots dumped tea into the ocean rather than pay the taxes imposed by a distant king. On the NYMEX, they dumped 117M barrels that were scheduled to be delivered to the American people - BARRELS YOU ALREADY PAID FOR AT THE PUMP - in order to create a bogus shortage so you can pay record high oil prices to a distant sheik.

This isn’t just criminal behavior - it’s TREASONOUS!

Perhaps it's a rigged game that "everyone" has just discovered? I could admit to the possibility that someone frightened by a falling dollar might flee to the safety of a game which he presumes to be rigged. In which case there will be some very sad faces when the music stops, as it inevitably will, leaving a rather significant shortage of seats for those whose ears are not attuned to the abrupt cessation.

Another alternative involves wide knowledge that the Israeli raid on Syria was actually just a test of the new Russian provided air defense system. The one that is supposedly identical to that which the mullahs have emplaced as a ward against the US doing site preparation work for major reconstruction projects all over Iran.

I'm sure there are other, more reasonable scenarios, but the thought of major site preparation work in Iran remains a fond hope.

Weekly Links

Personal jet-packs (finally!) for sale.

The BBC's Brain Story is available for free download.

"He has no idea what it's like out there!"-dot-mp3.

Overview of biodiesel and petroleum lifecycles.

Growing perfect crystals.

10 of the best natural phenomena.

Everybody wants prosthetic tails on their real heads. (Apologies to They Might Be Giants.)

Why open source works.


Heretical thoughts about science and society.

Biodiesel vs. renewable diesel.

10 tips for keeping the peace.

The beginner's guide to lock-picking.

Flexible, biodegradable batteries from carbon nanotubes.

The idea generator.

More than 60 resource sites for college students.

Europe's cheap hotels reviewed.

The world oil supply is still lagging demand in a "worrisome way".

The world's largest, most sophisticated people-tracking network.

Crowd farming.

How to solve the traveling salesman problem—use optics.

Renewable gasoline.

Update: Crystals link fixed. Thanks, Luther!

Weekly Links

Iran, oil, inflation, Venezuela, Russia, and all the trouble in the world.

Why do they hate us?

The nano-mechanical computer.

The lies of women.

6 productivity tips.

Alternative energy of the vampire sort.

Yet another potential HIV vaccine.

Three chick flicks and their unintended message.

Housing woes in the prime sector too?

Hard truths about energy.

The taxonomy of fallacies.

Printed circuit board do-it-yourself guide.

Chinese foodstuff quality control in perspective.

24 real-life sea monsters.

Does man control the weather, or does the weather control man?

Is reality coming back from the future?

The 12 kinds of ads.

Liquids are more fun.

The Road to Serfdom

Few men desire liberty: The majority are satisfied with a just master.
—Sallust

Barry Ritholz has a rant. Barry Ritholz believes that oil is "a matter of National Security". Consequently, Barry Ritholz believes it is not only the prerogative, rather the very duty, of the Federal Government to crack down on oil usage in the United States. The government must pass laws—and quickly!—which mandate all of the following:

- Subsidies for Oil and Ethanol need to be replaced with subsidies for Solar;
- CAFE standards need to be raised;
- Expedited processing for Nuclear Power plant permits should be issued.

Barry's thinking seems to be that whenever there is an emergency, it is imperative for the Federal Government to solve it immediately, by draconian measures if necessary.

It occurs to me that there are two standard mechanisms by which our liberties are gradually removed, one for each party. Either they must be removed in the name of National Security or they must be removed in the name of Doing Good (aka Helping Poor People, Ending Poverty, Stopping Global Warming, Serving Gaia, etc.). It has famously been stated that "patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels", but I would submit that it is holier-than-thou do-gooderism which is the last refuge of mountebanks.

Reading further in Barry's rant, we discover that

I own a V8 (automatic), a straight 6 (6 speed), and a 4 cylinder (5 speed) -- so I am the last person to preach we all need to shift to Vespas and biofuels. But it's pretty apparent to even a gas hog like me that we need to do something other than send billions of dollars to terrorist nations each and every single month.

Why then, Barry, don't you do it? What, praytell, restrains you?

So, let us analyze this. In order to be spared the considerable pain of having to give up his V8 and replace it with a bicycle, or to sell off one or more of his cars, Barry demands that CAFE standards be raised abstractly, so that lots of other people are forced by the (evil) car companies into having more expensive cars with higher-mileage.

Is there not something utterly peculiar here? Is there not something rotten in the State of America? Is this the rational action of an adult free man, or the whine of a would-be child who wants to be taken care of by the nanny-state? I submit that this is not the American Way. I submit that our forefathers would have died of shame before demanding laws to protect themselves against their own actions from far-away Washington. A nation which consciously chooses sheepdom should scarcely be surprised to find that it is no longer free.

I call on you, Barry, to step up and be a free man after all. Sell your car. Do it for your country. Do it for Global Warming. We'll all be glad you did.

Weekly Links

Ethanol production is eating our lunch.

China is blocking Flickr.

Decorative pencils.

World's cheapest car.

Nitrogen pollution is causing trees to soak up more CO2 from the atmosphere.

The feathered dino explained.

Rome reborn.

Talking jewelry.

23 ways to improve your work life.

Over a thousand parents named their daughters "Unique" during this decade. I guess they aren't.

The seven engineering wonders of the world.

Scramjet hits Mach 10.

Is Google scarier than the FBI?

Venezuela launches the sale of "Bolivarian" linux-based computers for the masses.

How motherboards are made.

The full panoramic view from Everest.

A new particle was discovered at Fermilab, one representing all three families of quarks for the first time.

The SEC just ended an important safeguard in the stock markets. Will this be another example of being condemned to repeat history?

In nature, bacteria emit proteins to sweep up nanoparticles into innocuous clumps.

Totalitarian communist and Gaiaist propaganda compared.

Thousands of pearls found.

Deja vu explained.

Too much sex in the Bible?

The Jefferson Memorial is sinking.

It's now legal for women to be topless in New York.

Space colonization may be hopeless. (hat tip: Luther McLeod)

Why the Soviet Union collapsed.

What people are doing online and which demographic groups participate.

How to give yourself a good life.

Chinese slaves freed.

Calculations with two qubits were successfully performed for the first time.

Floating sand.

Microinjection of materials into a single cell at the nano-level.

Oil

Let's talk about oil. It's black and ugly. And cheap.

Which seems an odd statement, because the price of gasoline is now at an all-time high after inflation has been accounted for. Partly that represents a temporary setback in refinery utilization. But the elephant in the gasoline living room is that we don't want those ugly refineries anywhere near our house any more. Nor near our neighbor's house nor even in the same state. In fact, this side of the mountains is probably much too close. So we haven't built a refinery in this country in 30 years, and the price of gasoline spikes every time a screw goes missing. Shock.

But, even at today's prices, oil gives us more energy bang for our buck than anything else we can come up with. Which is why we keep buying it, why demand keeps going up. While poets and artists demand that Scientists wave their magic wand and produce new cars running on hydrogen, back in the real world there's nothing better than stinky toxic gasoline.

Oil—follow the money. Because it's almost always the best choice for the consumer, demand stays high and continues to grow, no matter what the price. " The U.S. Energy Information Administration forecasts that total world demand for petroleum will reach 118 million barrels a day in 2030, up from 83 million barrels a day in 2004." But on the supply side, we seem to have peaked. The non-OPEC countries seem unable to produce any more; many former big producers such as the US and Mexico seem to be clearly headed for decline during the next 30 years.

Growing demand and limited supply mean only one thing: higher prices. Don't expect this painful market truth to be blurted out by demagoguing pols any time soon. We'll first see endless rounds of "oil policies" and "windfall profit taxes" which will cause—exactly as it did in the Seventies—long gas lines and plenty of misery. Unfortunately, when people don't choose to face the unpleasant facts they are often forced to face the horrific ones.

Saudi Oil Running Out?

That's the question upon which the "peak oil" theories turn. This article provides a fascinating analysis which seems to indicate that Saudi Arabian oil production is declining faster than predicted and that this alleged underproduction is adequate to explain the recent rise in the price of gasoline prices we have seen (that, plus the recently shut-down refineries). Read the links at the bottom if you have a week to spare, some background in geophysics, and some time to do analysis.