BBC FAQ on the subprime crash - very readable

The BBC has put together a very readable FAQ about the "meltdown" in the sub-prime mortgage industry and the related bank losses (and wins, but nobody's talking about who's winning - yet). It's the best summary I've seen anywhere. For example ...

BBC NEWS | Business | Q&A: World stock market falls

.... Even if the central banks stem the financial panic, there seems to have been a general shift in market perceptions about risk. Generally, the riskier the investment, the higher the interest rate - but now the additional premium for risky investments (the 'spread') is set to widen sharply. When people with money to lend become worried about risks, they tend to put their money in safe investments. So there has been a rush to invest in government bonds, like US Treasury bonds, and safe currencies, like the dollar. In contrast, people are now demanding much higher interest rates to lend to smaller companies or to the governments of developing countries. Investors have also grown wary of lending to private equity funds who want to buy and sell companies. This may mean that this is much less takeover activity than in the past few years, which could also affect the stock market...

Apophis: mark your calendar for April 2029

If I live, I'll be almost 70 when Apophis flies by. I hope that our orbital calculations are as good as we think they are, I'm looking forward to the show. I recall reading about this in 2004, but I didn't remember that the passage will be so close ...

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | UK plan to track asteroid threat

.... The 300m-wide (980ft) rock, known as Apophis, will fly past Earth in April 2029 at a distance that is closer than many communications satellites.

Astrium, based in Stevenage, Herts, wants a probe to track the asteroid so its orbit can be better understood.

The concept will compete for a $50,000 (£25,000) Planetary Society prize, but a full mission would cost millions.

The British design calls for a small, remote-sensing spacecraft, dubbed Apex (Apophis Explorer), which could rendezvous with Apophis in January 2014.

It would then spend the next three years tracking the rock, sending data back to Earth about the object's size, shape, spin, composition and temperature.

From this information, orbit modelling would enable a more accurate prediction of the risk of any future collision.

Astrium says that if its concept won the prize, it would donate the money to charity...

... A full mission would be expected to cost about $500m (£250m) dollars to develop, launch and operate.

Apophis caused some consternation in 2004 when initial observations suggested there was an outside chance it might hit Earth in 2029.

Further study by ground-based telescopes indicated there was virtually no possibility of this happening, and the expectation is that the object will whiz past the Earth at a close but comfortable distance of just under 36,000km (22,400 miles).

However, there is always some uncertainty associated with an asteroid's orbit.

One reason is the Yarkovsky effect. This describes what happens when an asteroid radiates energy absorbed from the Sun back into space.

Releasing heat in one direction nudges the object in the opposite direction. The resulting acceleration is tiny, but over the centuries acts like a weak rocket and could make the difference between a hit or a miss in some circumstances.

The close encounter with Earth in 2029 will also perturb Apophis' orbit gravitationally.

A mission like Apex to track and study the rock would help reduce uncertainties and give solid predictions about the rock's course long into the future...

... were such a rock to hit the planet, it could cause devastation on a country-wide scale, leading possibly to the deaths of many millions of people.

An Apophis-like object striking at about 20km/s (45,000mph) would gouge a crater 5km (three miles) wide. Even standing 30km (18 miles) away from the impact site, a thermal blast would ignite your clothes and the ground would shudder with an earthquake measuring more than six on the Richter Scale.

Given sufficient warning, though, a potential impactor could be deflected out of Earth's path, scientists believe.

Some have suggested such a rock might be nudged on to a safe trajectory by hitting it with a small mass. Others have proposed flying a spacecraft next to the object, to use gravity to tug the asteroid clear of the planet....

See also the New York Times, March 2007 for a related discussion focusing on general impact management.

Nixon in China: Gay rights and the GOP

Only Nixon, it was said, could go to China. If a Democrat tried, the right wing would have cut him down.

So maybe it's time for the GOP to formally declare an end to the culture war. A Salon article makes a convincing case - the GOP at least as Gay as the general population -- if not more so. Really, it's as laughable to hear GOP candidates talk about "family values" (meaning anti-family values) as it is to hear Bush talk about ... well ... anything.

Obesity, exercise and MN's running of the bull

The CDC released state-specific obesity and exercise recently, and every state played it differently. The most interesting statistic for me was that that the thinnest state today (Colorado) is fatter than the fattest state of 15 years ago. That's largely demographics -- the median age has probably risen 10 years in the past 15 years -- but it's still a bit amazing.

Our local papers claimed Minnesotans are #1 in exercise and near the median for obesity. We're generally a good mirror of America, so median obesity is to be expected. The weird part is our relatively enthusiasm for activity -- it's not like we have a long bicycling season! On the other hand we have a heck of a lot of bicycle/skate/run trails, both in the metro area and throughout the state (more on that in a future post).

Coincidentally Minnesotans again demonstrated the fruits of fitness:

... An angry bull escaped Friday morning from his owner at the Minnesota State Fair, barreling past fairgoers for more than a block before headbutting a fire hydrant and dying at the scene.

No one else was injured...

... Pooch said the bull ran for nearly a block while stunned fairgoers jumped out of the way. "There were a lot of people on the grounds at that time because when I got to the scene there were about 250 people standing around the bull," Pooch said.

Were people afraid?

"I would be," Pooch said. "You have a 1,600- to 1,700-pound animal running at you, you don't want to get in its way."

The bull apparently set his sight on a fairgoer, but the man jumped out of the way, Pooch said. Then the bull turned and saw the fire hydrant. "I guess he decided to take it out on the fire hydrant," Pooch said.

A vet on the scene immediately checked for a heart beat and found none, Pooch said.

"I don't think he felt any pain," Pooch said...

It's a mildly funny story (though not for Mr. Pooch or his bull) only because a lot of people moved very quickly. We saw the same thing when our bridge fell; a lot of people swam out of the Mississippi.

It would be useful to know why we're exceptional exercisers. We're average enough that there ought to be some valuable lessons there -- for the day (if ever) that we start taking obesity seriously.

My MN congressman calls for a federal gas tax increase

This is why Exxon has been running a fake fear campaign in Minnesota papers. My congressman, Betty McCollum, has declared in favor of a gas tax. I probably need not mention that McCollum has one of the safest safe seats in America ... (emphases mine)

TwinCities.com - U.S. Rep. McCollum calls for gas tax hikes to pay for rebuilding nation's infrastructure

Citing America's crumbling roads and bridges, U.S. Rep. Betty McCollum [jg: home area is Saint Paul, MN] today said she supports increasing both state and federal gas taxes to pay for a nationwide infrastructure rebuilding effort.

Before revisiting the site of the collapsed Interstate 35W bridge in Minneapolis, the St. Paul Democrat said, "over the past 20 years, we have not been reinvesting in infrastructure... the way we need to support the common good of our country. The bill's coming due."

Asked how she would pay that bill, McCollum replied, "I believe we need to look at the gas tax."

She didn't say how large a gas tax increase she would support, deferring to the House Transportation Committee and its chairman, Rep. Jim Oberstar, D-Minn., to determine the funding needs. Oberstar has proposed a temporary nickel-a-gallon gas tax increase to finance a bridge-rebuilding program...

If a carbon tax PAC existed, we'd be donating to a future McCollum senate run. (She doesn't need money for a House campaign, she basically runs unopposed). Minnesota's representatives get some cover on this gas tax stuff because we're a water-sucking corn fuel state; presumably the ethanol portion of gasoline would not be taxed, thereby creating price support for biofuels.

Infrastructure repair, of course, is only a cover story. The legitimate justification for a gasoline tax is that it's an essential first step towards greater carbon taxes.

Hmm, do you think I should start that carbon tax PAC?

The Ganges and the lost plutonium cores

Indian agents and the CIA managed to lose a set of plutonium rods in the snows of the Himalayas:

Damn Interesting » Spies on the Roof of the World

...A quick survey of the scene suggested that the stone ledge had been sheared from the mountainside by an avalanche, presumably embedding the generator and its seven cigar-shaped plutonium rods deep into the ice fields below...

.... No one could be certain what would become of the core in the glacier's clutches, but there was cause for great concern. There were two equally alarming prospects: the nuclear fuel might fall into the wrong hands, leading to any number of diabolical designs; or the slab of migrating ice might slowly grind the plutonium into a paste and deposit it into the Sanctuary melt waters, shuttling the four pounds of radioactive material into the vital Ganges River...

...To the best of Dr. Schaller's knowledge, the Central Intelligence Agency never managed to reacquire their missing nuclear appliance. But a water sample from the Sanctuary in 2005 showed troubling hints of plutonium-239, an isotope which does not occur naturally. Years, decades, or centuries from now, the corpse of the rogue generator may yet rise from its icy grave and exact a radioactive revenge upon humanity. However, the CIA can neither confirm nor deny the existence or non-existence of a disaster approximating the aforementioned depiction....

I wonder if anyone has finding the plutonium in their current job description.

Asperger's and the professions

Lisa Nowak, a fallen astronaut, probably has Asperger's syndrome. There are interesting implications for how psychiatry needs to evolve to manage high functioning adults with autism-spectrum disorders who begin to decompensate ...

Be the Best You can Be: An astronaut with Asperger's

...My personal sense is that individuals with Aperger's, and with high-IQ autism (the definition of both is famously inexact, they likely overlap) can do extremely well in some settings. They do, like all of us*, retain weaknesses they must continue to compensate for. I don't know how much of a role Lisa's Aperger's played in her tragedy, but I suspect the combination of obsessive-compulsive disorder, Asperger's and depression was just the 'right' wrong mix. As psychiatry continues its sluggish and difficult transformation into a scientific trade, there will be more of an emphasis on how persons with austism, Asperger's, attention-deficit disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder can leverage their strengths and offset their disabilities, and how decompensation can be recognized and individually managed...

Exxon's full page ads against conservation in Minnesota papes

Yesterday's twin cities' newspapers had two full page ads urging Americans to stop our government's plot to suck the gasoline out of our cars. One of the ads was "signed" by "Americans working in the energy sector", I believe the other wasn't. Exxon's history makes them the most likely source of the ads, so I'll skip the nonsense and re-sign them "Exxon".

One of the ads claims that "price controls" and "other thingamajigs" (I'm paraphrasing) will induce gasoline shortages. That's cute -- a classic conflation of a partial truth and an outright lie designed to advance a lie. Price controls, of course, would induce gasoline shortages -- but nobody is talking about price controls. The proposal that terrorizes Exxon is a gasoline tax, possibly including a preferential tax on premium gasoline. The reason the ads are running in Minnesota is that our (a smarter version of Bush, alas) republican governor has made noises about a gas tax to pay our bridge repair.

I presume Exxon's terror comes from an expected near-term reduction in their profit margins if American's were to reduce the growth of their gasoline consumption. It may even be that Exxon's competitors are better positioned to take advantage of such a transition, so that Exxon's loss may be greater than the industry average.

This is the most hopeful sign in some time. First comes denial, then comes the fight, then will come the carbon tax, starting with significant gasoline taxes. The fight will be very nasty, I'm pretty sure I know who will be making Karl Rove rich. We can expect a full Rove smear all the time.

Lefties, greens, realist-rationalists need to stop with the feel-good stuff and start funding a carbon tax PAC. Taxation first of gasoline, and then of other carbon sources, is the only way to reduce CO2 emissions, reduce the power of petroleum producing states, and drive a migration to extreme conservation and non-petroleum energy sources.

Thanks Exxon. You'd have done better to stay in the shadows, by showing your hand you're advancing the rationalist agenda.

Rove and Philip Morris

Karl Rove did deals with Philip Morris during his rise to power, and after Bush took control Rove squashed the Federal prosecution of Philip Morris...

Why did Gonzales resign? | Salon.com

...Typical of the political interference was the 2005 federal racketeering case against big tobacco companies in which government witnesses were suddenly withdrawn, suggested penalties lessened and lawyers ordered to read a weak closing statement prepared for them. Sharon Y. Eubanks, the 22-year veteran federal prosecutor in the case, revealed to the Washington Post in March 2007 that the chain of command ran directly through the attorney general's office. "The political people were pushing the buttons and ordering us to say what we said," Eubanks said. "And because of that, we failed to zealously represent the interests of the American public ... Political interference is happening at Justice across the department. When decisions are made now in the Bush attorney general's office, politics is the primary consideration ... The rule of law goes out the window."

Rove's interest in tobacco cases was hardly new. From 1991 through 1996, while guiding the ascent of Bush to the Texas governorship and during his early years in that office, Rove worked as a $3,000-a-month consultant to Philip Morris. In 1996, when Texas Attorney General Dan Morales filed a suit against tobacco companies seeking compensation for state Medicaid funds spent on workers who fell ill because of smoking, Rove conducted a dirty trick against him -- a push poll spreading smears about him....

I assume he also squashed the antitrust case against Microsoft, but I don't know what the deal there was. I'm puzzled the Rove/Philip Morris connection didn't come up more often.

Zelikow and the overthrow of Maliki: How Washington works

Glenn Greenwald, in a series of iterative updates, describes how our government works -- by giving us the details on the emerging overthrow of (the very nasty) Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki. In the old days this type of story only emerged in books written decades after the event, but now we get to see 'em in real time. I love these blogging journalists, but full credit to CNN as well.

It's a long story, and so familiar to what we've read over the past six years that it's hard to stay awake all the way through. The most important outcome of this expose is probably yet more shame heaped on The Washington Post, which presumably traded OpEd space for future privileges (jobs? news? leaks?) -- a bad move on national security matters.

I look forward to reading about what's going on behind the corruption story. Is this really all about deposing Maliki, or is it about providing political coverage for abandoning Iraq, or is it some messy mixture of both?

As to our culture of corruption -- how do you beat these things back? It's up to the voters. If American voters decide they care, they can change who they vote for. I've yet to see much sign of caring American voters, but one can always hope ...

You can't fly with your eyes closed - at all

I thought I new most everything, but I didn't know this ...

James Fallows (August 21, 2007) - Aerodynamics 101 (following JFK Jr crash discussion)

...No one who has received an instrument rating in an airplane doubts any of the above, because as part of the training everyone has been through this exercise: When the plane is safely several thousand feet in the air, the instructor will tell the trainee pilot to close his eyes and keep flying the plane. He is supposed to keep it level just by feel.

Within sixty seconds or so, the instructor crisply says "my airplane" and takes control again. The trainee pilot opens his eyes and is startled to see the ground coming up toward him, since the plane is spiraling* down. This always happens when the plane is flown blind, it usually happens very quickly, and generally the eyes-closed pilot had no physical sense that anything was wrong. This process is what tragically kills most pilots without instrument training when they unexpectedly enter a cloud; having no visual cue to what is up and down is the same as wearing a blindfold. It is also what is assumed to have happened to poor John Kennedy Jr and his passengers, in the dark and fog over the water.

It's the same reason you can pour tea more or less correctly in a plane flying upside down -- they're designed to keep the "floor" in place (meaning, of course, that you're losing altitude pretty fast ...)

Bane of the net: who maintains those pretty web sites?

You're a local official and you need a web site. You scrape up a budget, find someone who can put one together, and you're done.

Except things change. Thinks like, you know, schedules. Then you rediscover what everyone who's ever built anything learns.

Maintenance is a drag. It's not funded. It can be expensive. Pretty things may be much more expensive to maintain. That hand-crafted web site can't be updated without ... yes ... the original developer.

Not to pick on anyone, but this is typical:

Lake Wobegon Trails - Hiking, Biking, Walking, Blading, Skiing, Snowmobiling

We are working on an updated listing for 2007. Dates shown as 2006 dates will probably be very near the same dates for 2007....

It's August 2007 now. They're a bit behind.

Small businesses, schools and non-profits ought to choose for ease of maintenance, not for the initial product. The ideal solution should manageable by any high school graduate, but there's nothing like that on the market.

For MN Special Hockey I cobbled together a combination of Google Apps, Google Custom Domain, Google's Page Creator, Google Docs and Google/Blogger. It was very hard to setup, it's quarter-baked, and only a true geek is going to be able to tweak the overall configuration -- but I hope non-specialists will be able to post news (blogger), and even edit the main pages (Page Creator, note it requires admin access to do any page edits). If Google Apps ever get sorted out they could turn into a pretty good solution.

Content management systems try do something similar. They require experts to configure initially, but basic updates may require less expertise. In practice, however, these seem to run into considerable maintenance issues.

Another approach is to leverage "web 2.0" solutions. This is still emerging, but one way for the Lake Wobegon trail team to cost-effectively update their feeble map would be to replicate it in Google Maps and send out four bicyclists with cameras. Create the map as free custom content in Google Maps, upload photos to a free Picasa album, comment on the photos as needed, and lay them out on the trail map. Now link to the Google map and expect other users to add to it.

Lastly there's the combination of Apple's iWeb and Apple's dotMac (.mac) services (now support custom domains). Apple's can be an unreliable partner, but this might hit the usability requirement. The catch, other than Apple pulling an 'iMovie' (replacing a high end product with dumbed-down solution under the same brand), is that this requires OS X. On the other hand, if you can't afford website maintenance you definitely can't afford to maintain XP (bad) or Vista (worse). There are a few like solutions in the OS X world, I'm not aware of any in the XP world. (FrontPage once owned that space, but Microsoft abandoned it years ago.)

Google Maps: sort of display Picasa photos

Ooops. This was posted here by accident. The real one is here (Gordon's Tech).

Sorry!

Physicist bloggers getting cranky

I read a few physics blogs, and lately I think I'm seeing a bit of irritability. CV (Sean)'s post today hints at the trend ...

Ask a String Theorist! Or an Atomic Physicist. | Cosmic Variance.

..Aaron has begun to talk a little about the multiverse — here, here. He has thereby earned grumpy mutterings, rolled eyes, and “help” from some sensible physicists, some crackpots, some curmudgeons, his guest co-blogger, and even himself. I don’t quite understand what all the angst is about...

Bio-blogger crankiness is usually related to creationists. Creationists seem to leave physics alone (an interesting phenomena); the "crank" and the "crackpot" are the bane of physics bloggers. I think biologists have a legitimate complaint, but physicists protest too much. In the case of physics, the cranks have a case.

It's not that cranks are a good guide to physics, it's rather that physics is so weird that to an outsider the cranks are hardly less plausible than the science. Entanglement across the multiverse? Seems almost plausible.

It doesn't help that by nature and practice physicists are driven to contemplate the forbidden. Tests for "life in a simulation"? Answers to the Fermi Paradox? Rules for the least harmful use of the Bayesian anthropic principle (ok, so maybe the creationists do show up)? Physicists can't stay away -- but the very questions make even them irritable. Cranks like me only darken their mood.

Relax gang. Ignore your cranks and embrace your fundamental weirdness. It's a weird universe, and the crackpots are at home ...

A carbon tax PAC: the most effective form of greenery

I added this comment to Kristof's blog following his "conservation is good" NYT OpEd:

Energy Conservation - Nicholas D. Kristof - Opinion - TimesSelect

Conservation = Carbon Tax.

It's a fairly simple equation. I'm disappointed that you chose not to mention it. I understand it's probably wise to let people slowly draw their own conclusions, but it is a bit dishonest.

You know perfectly well that the only way to accelerate conservation is by an overt carbon tax or by a hidden tax (regulatory mandates).

To that end, I'd like to see a "carbon tax PAC" that we could all contribute to. It makes far more sense to send $25 to a "carbon tax PAC" than to spend $25 on a low energy light bulb.

Perhaps you're constitutionally opposed to taxation. That's where we can negotiate. I'm ok with shifting funds, so the revenue raised through a carbon tax is offset by cuts on capital gains, increasing personal exemptions, increasing EITCs, etc.