Les Jones

Madoff was an amateur in comparison

Monday, January 5th, 2009 | Social Security | Permalink | No Comments |

Cartoon: where did Madoff get the idea to pay early investors with the money from later investors?

Word of the Day: Scaramouche

Monday, January 5th, 2009 | A&E, Word of the Day | Permalink | 1 Comment |

There’s a line in Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” that never made sense to me. Something about a moosh? One day I looked up the lyrics.

I see a little silhouetto of a man,
Scaramouche, Scaramouche, will you do the Fandango
Thunderbolt and lightning, very, very fright’ning me
(Galileo) Galileo (Galileo) Galileo, Galileo Figaro
Magnifico

And with the word in hand we go to Wikipedia:

Scaramouche is a historical novel by Rafael Sabatini, originally published in 1921.

It was subsequently adapted into a play by Barbara Field and into feature films, first in 1923 starring Ramón Novarro, Scaramouche (1923), and a remake in 1952 with Stewart Granger. It is a romantic adventure and tells the story of a young lawyer during the French Revolution. In the course of his adventures he becomes an actor portraying “Scaramouche” (also called Scaramuccia, a roguish buffoon character in the commedia dell’arte). He also becomes a revolutionary, politician, and fencing-master, confounding his enemies with his powerful orations and swordsmanship. He is forced by circumstances to change sides several times. The book also depicts his transformation from cynic to idealist. The later film version includes one of the longest, and many believe, best swashbuckling sword-fighting scenes ever filmed.

The three-part novel opens with the memorable line, “He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad.” This line was to become Sabatini’s epitaph, on his gravestone in Adelboden, Switzerland.

Previous WOTD - Liquidity Trap (economics)

Previously:

• Islamic Girls You Make the Rockin’ World Go ‘Round

The seven dirty words cartoon trains can’t say on TV

Saturday, January 3rd, 2009 | Home Life | Permalink | No Comments |

It’s a little odd when I’m listening to “Thomas the Tank Engine” with my kids and realize George “the seven dirty words you can’t say on TV” Carlin is narrating.

Other times Alec Baldwin does the voice work and I expect him to say “You know what it takes to sell real estate? It takes brass … bells.”

NexTag Price Alerts (and Nikon price drops)

Saturday, January 3rd, 2009 | Misc | Permalink | No Comments |

I mentioned a while back how much I like NexTag for finding the best deals online.

Twice now in the past week I’ve received price alerts from Nextag letting me know that two Nikon lenses I was watching have dropped down to my target price. From this morning’s email:

Here’s NexTag’s price graph for the Nikon 18-200mm lens (the red line is maximum price, blue is minimum, black is average):

What a great shopping tool. Price comparison services are the only way to fly for consumer items. You can find the lowest prices - tax and shipping included - along with customer ratings of their experience with the resellers. How ya gonna beat a deal like that?

Here’s a link to the item above. As always, you’ll need to click on the Price header to sort by price. The one slightly tricky things these services do is to allow stores to pay get top position.

episiarch on conventions

Friday, January 2nd, 2009 | Misc | Permalink | 1 Comment |

“As a person who loves certain aspects of Star Trek, I can tell you with authority to never, ever go to a convention of any kind, even something you like. It is depressing as hell when you realize that 99% of the people that share your love of X are insane, drooling nerds with absolutely no life, dignity, or personal skills.”
 –episiarch

Movie: Battle Circus (1953)

Friday, January 2nd, 2009 | Misc | Permalink | No Comments |

I’m sitting in the hospital with mom. Turner Classic Movies is having a Humphrey Bogart fest. Now playing: Battle Circus.

It’s a love story set in the Korea War. Bogie plays a medical doctor at an army MASH, which the movie helpfully explains stands for mobile army surgical hospital.

I’m thinking this movie would be even better as a comedy with a couple of zany captains, a by-the-books major, and a hot-lipped she-major. You could do it as a movie or a TV show. The TV show would be better until the lead actor started producing it and turned it into a sanctimonious half hour melodrama.

Previously:

• Movie: The Big Sleep (1946)

Bush was no deregulator

Friday, January 2nd, 2009 | Politics | Permalink | 2 Comments |

Obama’s assertions to the contrary, the 43rd president was the biggest regulator since Nixon.

Likewise, Bush was in no way a small government conservative or a fiscal conservative, as the Medicare prescription benefit and the ballooning deficits showed.

Via Insty.

Peak coal

Friday, January 2nd, 2009 | Environment | Permalink | 39 Comments |

Similar to the current peak oil theory, a century ago the Victorians were worried about running out of coal. I guess it was sort of the steampunk version of peak oil with brass fixtures and handlebar mustaches.

Previously:

• 2008: The end of anthropogenic global warming
• Ethanol production creates 15% of Iowa’s greenhouse gases
• Steampunk Star Wars

Whatever happened to municipal WiFi?

Friday, January 2nd, 2009 | Municipal Wi-Fi | Permalink | No Comments |

Ars Technica - Muni WiFi flop a bad omen for FCC’s free wireless plan:

New York City, New Orleans, Portland, Chicago, Houston, Atlanta, Miami, Washington D.C., Boston all moved to seed wireless clouds. Earthlink, Google, Microsoft, Intel, Earthlink and a gaggle of corporate boosters joined the crusade. By Summer 2006, a law review article pronounced the issue decided: “Citywide WiFi as a public service is no longer a bureaucratic pipe dream, but has the backing of America’s technological titans.”

Today the muni WiFi experiment is a shambles. The Philadelphia system was abandoned by Earthlink in June, and sold for scrap. It never performed as promised, and served fewer than 6,000 subscribers out of a population of 1.6 million. It had promised to serve tens of thousands of low-income households; the final tally of such users: 902. Those who did sign-up for $6.95 per month found slow speeds and spotty coverage. Alas, even tech-savvy early adopters eager to sip lattés while browsing via broadband were disappointed. On some occasion, it is possible that a connection strong enough to Google search results for “digital divide” was maintained, but that was likely as close as Philadelphia’s vaunted network got to impacting it.

Boston, Houston, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Chicago—all have gone bust. New York City, early on the bandwagon, got bogged down in politics, and now has simply given up. “We don’t think municipal WiFi will succeed,” offers a city official.

Great post from Melody Byrne

Friday, January 2nd, 2009 | Political Survival Kit | Permalink | No Comments |

I’ve linked to Chris Byrne many times, but this is the first time I’ve linked to one of his wife’s posts. The Most Basic of Differing First Principles:

Then I realized Og was having the exact same problem in his anarchy discussions. In fact, Jane’s position and Billy Beck’s position could be summed up as

The world is perfect. People are perfect. If we could just keep from messing things up, everything would stay perfect.

If we could keep from getting sick, things would be perfect. If we just didn’t mess with other people and kept our own boundaries, we wouldn’t need government because everything would be perfect.

If only evil man would stop polluting the planet and save the polar bears, everything would be BACK to perfect.

This entire principle assumes that there is such a thing as “perfect”.

My position, however, and Og’s position could be summed up as

The world is chaotic and shit happens. Nothing is intrinsically perfect. Deal with it.

I fall firmly in the “The world is chaotic and shit happens. Nothing is intrinsically perfect. Deal with it.” camp. Scout’s motto: be prepared. Or as Beck Weathers discovered alone and blind atop Everest, you may find yourself in deep shit and the cavalry not coming. What are you gonna do then?

Likewise when news happens I don’t believe it all could have been averted if only Bill X from Politician Y had passed. Bad things happen sometimes and they aren’t always avoidable.

2,008 Things I Learned in 2008

Thursday, January 1st, 2009 | Misc | Permalink | 1 Comment |

You’re not supposed to sleep on pillow shams. But I do anyway.

Lyme disease can be debilitating, and it can be mis-diagnosed as Lou Gehrig’s disease, fibromyalgia, lupus, multiple sclerosis, or a number of other diseases.

The electro-magnetic field around high tension power lines is stronger than I thought.

The term moveable feast comes from the variable date of Easter and subsequent holidays.

The marionberry is a blackberry cultivar

It’s easy to see what your competitors are spending on Google Adwords by using SpyFu.

And this year’s list will be well short of 2,008. I’m been staying in the hospital with my mom who we admitted Monday morning.  This week I’ve certainly learned a few things about what’s really important in life. We’re pretty sure now she’s going to get to come home, and we’re grateful for that.

Previously:

• 2,007 Things I Learned in 2007
• 2,006 Things I Learned in 2006
• 2,005 Things I Learned in 2005

2008: The end of anthropogenic global warming

Wednesday, December 31st, 2008 | Misc | Permalink | 2 Comments |

The (UK) Telegraph) - 2008 was the year man-made global warming was disproved:

Just when politicians in Europe and America have been adopting the most costly and damaging measures politicians have ever proposed, to combat this supposed menace, the tide has turned in three significant respects.

First, all over the world, temperatures have been dropping in a way wholly unpredicted by all those computer models which have been used as the main drivers of the scare. Last winter, as temperatures plummeted, many parts of the world had snowfalls on a scale not seen for decades. This winter, with the whole of Canada and half the US under snow, looks likely to be even worse. After several years flatlining, global temperatures have dropped sharply enough to cancel out much of their net rise in the 20th century.

Secondly, 2008 was the year when any pretence that there was a “scientific consensus” in favour of man-made global warming collapsed. At long last, as in the Manhattan Declaration last March, hundreds of proper scientists, including many of the world’s most eminent climate experts, have been rallying to pour scorn on that “consensus” which was only a politically engineered artefact, based on ever more blatantly manipulated data and computer models programmed to produce no more than convenient fictions.

Thirdly, as banks collapsed and the global economy plunged into its worst recession for decades, harsh reality at last began to break in on those self-deluding dreams which have for so long possessed almost every politician in the western world. As we saw in this month’s Poznan conference, when 10,000 politicians, officials and “environmentalists” gathered to plan next year’s “son of Kyoto” treaty in Copenhagen, panicking politicians are waking up to the fact that the world can no longer afford all those quixotic schemes for “combating climate change” with which they were so happy to indulge themselves in more comfortable times.

As the temperatures have gotten cooler the rhetoric has gotten hotter to compensate, but the cooling trend is abundantly clear to everyone this year. The recent cooling in both 2007 and 2008 correlates with decreased solar activity, bolstering the solar theory and contradicting greenhouse theory.

Global warming stories from 2008:

• Alaska’s glaciers show record growth
• August was first month without sunspots since 1913
• Anchorage on Track for Coldest Summer in 38 Years
• Sunspot Activity Down, Temperatures Down
• NPR: Cooling Temperatures? Must be Instrument Error!
• “Runaway greenhouse theories contradict energy balance equations”
• First snow in 100 years falls on Baghdad

Real estate bust in Spain

Wednesday, December 31st, 2008 | Misc | Permalink | No Comments |

The Economist - Spain’s property crash: Builders’ nightmare:

SPANIARDS are not used to housing busts. Since property seemed for so long to be a one-way bet, some still find it hard to grasp that prices can ever fall. Recently 2,000 people spent a chilly night sleeping out to sign up for “cheap” new homes due to be built in the Madrid dormitory town of Fuenlabrada. They could have found lower prices on the internet.

The market is dropping fast. Property fairs tout discounts of as much as 60% on new-built homes, or even “buy one, get one free” offers. “All the statistics show a fall,” concedes the housing minister, Beatriz Corredor. Yet pinning down just how big a fall is tricky. Tax-shy Spaniards do not always declare the true selling prices. The government’s main index, based on valuers’ estimates, shows a 1.3% nominal fall in the third quarter. Most think the true figure is far bigger. The IESE business school talks of prices of existing homes falling by 8%.

Private sellers cannot believe that their homes are losing value, according to Fernando Encinar, communications director at idealista.com, a property website. But developers know the game is up. Some deals are being struck at 20% below advertised prices, he says, a fact few developers are keen to broadcast. They do not want people writing off deposits on half-built homes and shopping around for something cheaper.

Unlike some other countries, Spain’s problems seem limited to a simple loss in real estate value. According to the article the loan-to-value (LTV) ratios were 80% or less, which indicates a sane mortgage industry. This is unlike the US and the UK where 100% no-money-down loans became commonplace during the real estate rush. Home owners will lose some equity, but most will have enough to weather the downturn, and the banking industry won’t be threatened.

Hat tip to Instapundit and Barcepundit.

Previously:

• Mortgage problems in the UK
• Canada is having its own mortgage meltdown
• What caused the global housing bubble?

McNairy County animal shelter closing

Wednesday, December 31st, 2008 | Misc | Permalink | No Comments |

A very sad story. The shelter is closing due to lack of funds. Any animals that aren’t adopted will be euthanized. Rusty has the details for anyone who can help out by adopting an animal.

A word to the wise from Michael Shedlock

Wednesday, December 31st, 2008 | Economics, Political Survival Kit, Quotes | Permalink | No Comments |

“It is the very nature of the market that it takes the convincing of nearly everyone to believe that something cannot happen, to actually cause it to happen.”
- Michael Shedlock

That’s from his piece, Things That Can’t Happen, published one year ago today, about all of the things that couldn’t happen that did.

One of the reasons the Fed was created was to manage the economy and prevent further depressions. Guess What? The biggest deflation in history, the great depression, happened 17 years later.

At one time economists thought that inflation and recession could not happen at the same time. It happened anyway. A new term was coined for it “Stagflation”.

Deflation supposedly couldn’t happen in a fiat regime. Japan proved otherwise.

If you asked anyone in Japan if housing prices could fall for 18 straight years, they would have said “It can’t happen”. It did happen.

For 30 years people have said US housing prices would never again decline on a national scale. They were wrong. It happened.

Daoud Kuttab’s crazy bias against Israel

Tuesday, December 30th, 2008 | Media Behaving Badly, Middle East | Permalink | 3 Comments |

Little Green Footballs - Washington Post: ‘Amateur’ Rockets ‘Nagging’ Israel:

The Washington Post gives column space today to Palestinian shill Daoud Kuttab, who turns in one of those very predictable whiny pieces claiming that fighting against terrorists “only makes them stronger:” Daoud Kuttab - Has Israel’s Gaza Attack Revived Hamas?

Includes this absolute howler of an opening sentence:

JERUSALEM — In its efforts to stop amateur rockets from nagging the residents of some of its southern cities, Israel appears to have given new life to the fledging Islamic movement in Palestine.

Other great Washington Post headlines from history:

• DALLAS - Amateur assassin nags JFK’s head with old milsurp bullets
• NEW YORK - Amateur pilots nag Twin Towers, much like Maverick playfully buzzed the control tower in “Top Gun”

I’ll have to check my copy of the AP Style Book, but I don’t think nag is an acceptable synonym for “murder.” This year Hamas rocket attacks on Israel killed a number of Israeli civilians, wounded others, and kept the population in terror.

Also, I don’t think Iran would appreciate the WaPo describing their Qassam and Katyusha rockets as “amateur.” Many of the press reports describe them as “Hamas rockets,” but Hamas couldn’t make a light bulb, much less a rocket. The rockets are provided by outside countries like Iran and Syria who are using Hamas in a proxy war with Israel.

Really cool time lapse over a year’s time

Tuesday, December 30th, 2008 | Photos | Permalink | 4 Comments |

Eirik Solheim’s One year in 40 seconds:

One year in 40 seconds from Eirik Solheim on Vimeo.

Follow the link for how he did it - it was pretty straightforward. The two minute video is even better.

Hat tip to Tennessee Mud.

But wait! This is cooler!

Eirik shows you a way to take the ordinary circular bokeh of light sources:

and change it into whatever shape you want by superimposing that shape in front of the lens:

That’s the craziest thing I’ve ever seen. I can hardly believe it works. He has a video showing how it’s done. What makes it even cooler is that the raw materials are Scotch tape and construction paper.

Henry Ford

Tuesday, December 30th, 2008 | Economics, Political Survival Kit, Quotes | Permalink | No Comments |

“It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.”
 – Henry Ford

Sirhan Sirhan Sirhan

Monday, December 29th, 2008 | Funny Ha-Ha | Permalink | No Comments |

So, yeah. Assassins usually have three names. Lee Harvey Oswald. John Wilkes Booth.

But not Sirhan Sirhan. I wonder why don’t people use his third name, which you would assume is also Sirhan.

“Did you hear? Somebody just killed Bobby Kennedy. Guy named Sirhan Sirhan.”

“You mean Sirhan Walter Sirhan down at the steel plant?”

“No, I mean Sirhan Sirhan Sirhan from the university, ya dope.”

“Oh, him.”

I guess technically Sirhan Sirhan Sirhan would just be one name cubed.

And anyway his middle name is Bishara.

The ShareThis WordPress plug-in really works

Monday, December 29th, 2008 | Blogging, Tech | Permalink | 1 Comment |

A few weeks ago I added a ShareThis link to my layout. Sure, I thought, it might not help me get on Digg or Reddit, but it might get me on someone’s blog or Facebook or make it easier for them to email the link to a pal.

Then I was checking my Sitemeter tonight and noticed the biggest influx of StumbleUpon users I’ve ever seen. (StumbleUpon is one of the social networking sites supported by ShareThis).

The StumbleUpon link goes to an entry on the Remington 1740 double barrel pump shotgun, which now redirects to my WordPress URL.

P.S. One of the things I’ve been doing over the Christmas break is redirecting popular URLs from my old MovableType blog to my spiffy new WordPress blog. The most popular and most-commented posts, along with the category pages now redirect to the WordPress blog.

Obama: free jobs that cost $250,000 per job

Monday, December 29th, 2008 | Economics | Permalink | No Comments |

Radioactive Communist Zombies - Obama’s Stimulus Flunks the Math Test (math corrected from the original):

Obama is promising 3 million jobs with $750 billion in stimulus. So $750,000,000,000/3,000,000 jobs = $250,000/job (one thing I learned in physics was “keep your units straight”).

According to Baum there’s 10 million unemployed in the U.S. right now. So a) the stimulus won’t make a dent (especially since about 3 million more people will enter the work force in the next couple years) and you could just more easily write $75,000 checks to each unemployed person which should keep them in beer and pretzels for at least a year.

Heck, for $750 billion you could give every man, woman, and child in the United States $2,500. Take out retirees, children, and the richest 10% of households, and you could probably double that. If we’re just handing out money, why not be stupid about it, like the Feds have been with the last few stimulus packages. (And didn’t those work so well in avoiding financial catastrophe?)

ATTN friends ‘o mine: cell phone number is out of commission

Monday, December 29th, 2008 | Home Life | Permalink | 1 Comment |

I lost my cell phone in Franklin, TN yesterday, so I’m not reachable on that number. If you need to get in touch call me at home, call Melissa’s cell phone, or email. ktxbye.

Katie’s breakout performance in Christmas play

Sunday, December 28th, 2008 | Home Life | Permalink | No Comments |

“Katie Jones’s role as the donkey brought a real kick to the show!”
–The New York Times

In her preschool Christmas play Katie was the donkey that pulled Mary to Bethlehem. Then for Christmas she got  Disney’s Classic Holiday Stories. The first story, “The Small One,” is all about the donkey. Katie has watched it over and over. She’s been running around the house with a blanket over her back pretending to be a donkey.

My wife’s conversation about college with our four year old

Sunday, December 28th, 2008 | Misc | Permalink | No Comments |

KATIE: I’m going to college.
MELISSA: You are?
KATIE: Uh huh.
MELISSA: What are you going to study?
KATIE: Music and art.
MELISSA: Oh no you’re not. You’re going to study something that will get you a job.

Previously:

• Conversation about college with my four year old

Ebenenezer Scrooge was a Malthusian

Saturday, December 27th, 2008 | Population | Permalink | No Comments |

TCS Daily - Malthus And Scrooge:

“Since you ask me what I wish, gentlemen, that is my answer. I don’t make merry myself at Christmas and I can’t afford to make idle people merry. I help to support the establishments I have mentioned: they cost enough: and those who are badly off must go there.” “Many can’t go there; and many would rather die.” “If they would rather die,” said Scrooge, “they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”

That phrase–surplus population–is what first tipped me off to Dickens’ philosophical agenda. He’s taking aim at the father of the zero-growth philosophy, Thomas Malthus. Malthus’ ideas were still current in British intellectual life at the time A Christmas Carol was written. Malthus, himself, had joined the surplus generation only nine years before. But his ideas have proved more durable.

Malthus taught the world to fear new people. An amateur economist, he created a theoretical model which allegedly proved that mass starvation was an inevitable result of population growth. Populations grow, he said, geometrically, but wealth only grows arithmetically. In other words, new people create more new people, but new food doesn’t create new food.

Malthus’ influence, unfortunately, grew geometrically and not arithmetically. His ideas provided fodder for Darwin, and Darwin’s lesser mutations used the model to argue for the value of mass human extinction.

Hitler’s hard eugenics and Sanger’s (founder of Planned Parenthood) softer one, both owed a great debt of gratitude to Thomas Malthus. So do the zero-growth, sustainable-growth, right-to-die, duty-to-die, life boat bio-ethicists who dominate so much of our intellectual discussion. Malthus turned out to be, ironically, right in some sense. His prediction of mass death has taken place; not because he was right, but because he was believed.

There’s a petty, hateful philosophy that looks as at every newborn child as a a drain on the public coffers or a devower of the Earth’s resources. That philosophy is fundamentally Malthusian.

The apocalyptic effects of overpopulation threatened by Malthus and Paul Ehrlich never came to pass. Most developed countries are instead trying to avoid the harmful effects of de-population.