Month: July 2006

deus ex Asimov

This feed from Marginal Revolution is by far the most uneven of any I read. Sometimes I feel like I’m reading the thoughts of an educated person, a deep thinker. Then other posts are nothing more than puerile jibbering.

What caused the Agricultural Revolution?:

For instance we are told that if the entire world lived like the United States, fossil fuels would run out within seven year’s time, or maybe ten. What a horror such a world would be. There is no talk of how much higher the rate of invention would be, or how much we would save by having better institutions.

Perhaps this was tossed off after lunch or at some other time when professors are not at their best, but rather than claim “the article was terrible” (is he comparing a piece in a general audience magazine to a refereed journal piece?), why not point to a better one or an argument against the points that were argued.

Instead we’re told the piece was terrible and that some pie in the sky solution would emerge under the constraints of everyone living like an American. This discounts the possibility of how much resource wealth would have been squandered in the meantime, etc.

But this is from a guy who claims driving a car is pleasurable and that living in the country or exurbs is the ideal. [my comments here]

Nieman Watchdog: the questions that should be asked

Nieman Watchdog > Commentary > Speculators – not supply and demand – are to blame for skyrocketing gas prices:

What we are left with is the possibility that out of the $70 price for a barrel of oil about $20 can be accounted for by speculation. This brings us to the most important part of the report: We need to know more.

Until quite recently trading on futures markets was regulated by the CFTC. Trades on regulated markets are subject to reporting requirements. Traders are required to report large trades to the CFTC, which has the responsibility of limiting excessive speculation. However, concurrent with the dramatic increase in speculative trading of energy futures, there has been a shift of this trading to unregulated commodity exchanges.

Essentially this shift is the result of an exemption written into the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000 at the behest of Enron. Perhaps more important is the announcement by the Intercontinental Exchange that it would permit traders to use its terminals in the United States to trade futures contracts for crude oil, gasoline, and heating oil produced and delivered in the U.S. on its ICE Futures exchange in London.

In effect, American traders can completely circumvent all U.S. regulation, including reporting requirements, by simply routing their transactions through London. It is important to understand that the CFTC’s large trader reporting requirement is the Commission’s primary tool for preventing market manipulation. The recent charges against BP for manipulation of the propane market appears to involve activity on the over-the-counter-market. Apparently it was part of BP’s strategy to use the unregulated market, where it could avoid making reports and could expect no surveillance.

Not sure how accurate it is to say that speculation is to blame. It looks like a trailing indicator, if the price before speculation went from $20 to $50. Good old-fashioned gouging is still a possibility, of course.

This chart shows the nominal and adjusted prices of a barrel of crude from 1865 onward. A history of OPEC and their control of the market since the early 70s might shed some light on why the prices get so wild after 1975.

email from across the centuries

From: Pushkin:

Many months ago I found myself exploring a website with the collected works of Alexander Pushkin, and taking inspiration from the Samuel Pepys blog, I thought it might be fun to import Pushkin’s letters into an email client. Apart from the novelty value, the mail client provides all kinds of very useful search and sort features you don’t usually get with literary texts.

I’ve finally gotten around to trying it – you can download this mbox file of his early letters, which I have only checked with Mail.app. The titles are all in Russian, but many of the letters are written in French, so speakers of either language may find them interesting.

I had to bump the date up by 200 years because Mail.app refuses to properly sort nineteenth century email. I consider this a bug.

The messages are in HTML format because the site I got them included many links to useful supporting material. All emoticons, however, have been removed.

In the future I would like to set up an IMAP server for this kind of historical correspondence, so people can annotate letters by replying to them. For the moment, I’m just trying to amass material – drop me a line if you know of good online sources for other authors.

Unlike other notable whiners, Maciej understands that while mbox is not a standard, IMAP is. Shame about the emoticons, though.

philosophy or ill-defined discomfort?

Not sure how I missed this epic (in size and scope) takedown of “conservative thought” but better late than never. This snippet jumped out at me:

John & Belle Have A Blog: Dead Right:

And so it turns out Lionel Trilling was maybe not such a poor prophet after all, when he wrote way back in 1953: “in the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition;” for the anti-liberals do not, by and large, “express themselves in ideas but only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.”

What is modern conservatism but saying no?

WordPress, Pages, and php includes

It has been a long time coming but I finally found a way to integrate static content into WordPress’s Pages. Pages with a P are like posts but exist outside their time-based organization.

I have had this search query cloud forever but had no way to integrate it into the site, since it gets updated nightly, WordPress doesn’t allow you to include files in posts or [Pp]ages and I didn’t really want to create a static WordPress frame to wrap around it. There had to be a Better Way.

It’s really just as easy as the author claims: I had to make one adjustment to allow for files with a .txt ending but I suspect I didn’t really need to do that.

There are a bunch of WordPress plugins that claim to make this possible. Not one of them did. And this one is designed to protect you from yourself by only including files from a designated directory reserved for includes.

Thanks again, Jack.

something new to learn

I has to look up something about Loading Large Format Film Holders since I just bought one from a local shop to go with a bunch of cigar boxes I plan to experiment with.
It looks less hairy than I feared, but I won’t be at all surprised if I get the film in backwards or pull the dark slide at the wrong time or not at all. And that doesn’t even cover developing the stuff afterwards.

I scored a partly full box (some would say partly empty) of Kodak Pan film (Develop before Mar 1970[!]). It’ll do for experimental purposes.

<grumble> I just noticed on looking it up that the film is 5×7: that won’t fit in a 4×5 holder now, will it? So add “read the ^&*() box” to the list of things to learn.

While I was digging through the film, I found a nice condition T-Max readyload film holder: those sell for a bundle on eBay. Perhaps I should taken the chance, but I let the owner know about it anyway. I guess the junk boxes can be rewarding for everyone.

dress rehearsals

Larry seems to have stepped in a mess here, but this point stuck out for me:

Iran, meanwhile, is sitting in the catbird’s seat. They have a well-trained and highly competent surrogate force in Hezbollah. Hezbollah’s successful attack on Friday on an Israeli naval vessel is a reminder that Hezbollah is not a bunch of crazy kids carrying RPGs and wearing flip flops. I would be willing to wager that at least one Iranian military advisor was helping Hezbollah launch the missile that hit the Israeli ship. But Iran is doing more than simply engage in tit-for-tat. They are thinking strategically.

My history classes, where they mentioned the Spanish Civil War, usually worked in the fact that Franco’s troops used tactics and equipment supplied by Hitler’s Germany: the war in Spain was a proving ground for what became the bloodiest conflict the world has yet to see.

In a purely pragmatic sense, can you blame Iran for leveraging this, especially as it offers real-world testing of their capabilities against the enemy they expect, even want, to fight?

new cat

A small black cat — the blackest cat I have ever seen — has joined my household, all the way from Kyrgyzstan[1][2]. Cadbury, as her English owners have named her, is also the smallest adult cat I have ever seen.

She seems remarkably mellow after flying from Bishkek > Istanbul > Chicago > Seattle with a couple of layovers along the way. The Istanbul > Chicago leg was 13 hours by itself.

She’s doing what cats do — exploring — and I can hear the sounds of soft landings as she jumps down from various places she’s investigated.

She has a busy couple of days ahead of her. To be admitted to the UK/EU she needs a microchip implant, a rabies test, and general health documentation. The rabies test can only be performed by one lab (in Manhattan, Kansas) and she can’t be admitted to her true home until 6 months have elapsed since her last clean test.

And she may have fleas.

More as she reveals more of her personality, which if early signs are to be believed, is likely to be very sweet.