Category: Technology

Phone humour!

Just a little light-heartedness for today.

From John Z. here in Payson, AZ.

I see LG have recognised that many people the wrong side of 60 now use a mobile phone and have recently launched …..

 

Cell phone for seniors

 

and from John L. from Devon, England this lovely story.

Several men are in the changing room of a golf club.  A mobile phone on a
bench rings and a man engages the hands-free speaker function and begins to
talk.  Everyone else in the room stops to listen.

MAN:  “Hello”

WOMAN:  “Hi Honey, it’s me. Are you at the club?”

MAN:  “Yes.”

WOMAN:  “I’m at the shops now and found this beautiful leather coat.  It’s
only £2,000.  Is it OK if I buy it?”

MAN:  “Sure, go ahead if you like it that much.”

WOMAN: “I also stopped by the Lexus dealership and saw the new models.
I saw one I really liked..”

MAN:  “How much?”

WOMAN:  “£60,000.”

MAN: “OK, but for that price I want it with all the options.”

WOMAN: “Great! Oh, and one more thing.  I was just talking to Janie and

found out that the house I wanted last year is back on the market.  They’re

asking £980,000 for it.”

MAN: “Well, then go ahead and make an offer of £900,000. They’ll probably
take it. If not, we can go the extra eighty-thousand if it’s what you really
want.”

WOMAN: “OK. I’ll see you later!  I love you so much!”

MAN: “Bye! I love you, too.”

The man hangs up.  The other men in the locker room are staring at him in
astonishment, mouths wide open.

 

 


He turns and asks, “Anyone know whose phone this is?”


 

Power of social networks in the area of finance

“The nature and reach of social conversations in the investment arena.”

The above sub-heading is from a recent Post on Naked Capitalism that rather spookily comes hot on the heels of one of my recent musings.  Here’s what I published on the 12th January although I wrote it on the 9th.

In the past opinion and commentary has been in the hands, more or less, of the giant media moguls.  But technology has changed that.  Now more than ever a huge people have access to the Internet.  Indeed, a quick Google search reveals that of a world population of 6.85 billion people, just under 2 billion (29%) have internet access.  In North America that percentage is 77.4% (226 million) and in Europe the percentage is 58.4% (475 million).  I.e. nearly a billion people in just North America and Europe!

My point is that, in a manner never before experienced in human history, the vast majority of us have the ability to read, learn and muse about the critically important issues facing us today, coming to conclusions that carry political weight.  We have almost infinite choice as to where and how we form opinions.

Thus having access, via the internet, to the scribblings of so many wise people may end up giving democracy the boost it really needs in the face of overwhelming powerful plutocratic forces.

Coincidentally, also on the 12th Yves Smith of Naked Capitalism published an article entitled, The 20 most influential blogs in financial media.  You can find that article here.  Here’s a flavour of what was written.

Thanks to Minyanville for publicizing this study by MindfulMoney on the nature and reach of social conversations in the investment arena. But even bigger thanks go to loyal readers and contributors for their frequent comments, leads, and critiques. The success of a blog depends on its community and I am very grateful for all the input so many of you have generously provided.

Perhaps the most interesting finding (boldface ours):

The research confirms the existence of a network of investment super-connectors with extraordinary media influence and reach. These super-connected new influentials are, for the most part, not well established voices in the media but individual bloggers who fiercely champion their independence….In the US, the network functions as the unofficial voice of Wall Street & the US federal bank with no mainstream media players at the centre of the network.

Given how many of these top blogs are critical of the status quo, this map may be hopeful sign that the blogosphere is beginning to become a important channel of discourse outside the reach of the PR machinery of major corporations and government entities.

And rather than publish all the top 20 names, you can see that list here, the top 10 are as follows:

1. Naked Capitalism
2. Infectious Greed
3. The Big Picture
4. Jesse’s Cross Roads Cafe
5. Zerohedge
6. Mish’s Global Economic Analysis
7. Calculated Risk
8. Paul Krugman’s Blog
9. FT Alphaville
10. Ludwig von Mises Institute

Anyone interested in downloading the original report as published on the MindfulMoney website can go to the article here; the link to the pdf, requiring prior registration, is towards the end of the article.  The article opens thus:

Most investors would acknowledge that social media is playing an increasing role in their investment decisions. Yet no-one has mapped the emerging network of influence likely to be playing a crucial part in those decisions.

Until now that is.  MindfulMoney’s ‘Social Finance: The New Influentials” report is aiming to better understand what this network looks like and to see if a number of super connections, so beloved of writers like Malcolm Gladwell, exist.

The research indicates that they do.

As I said, to download the article you need to register first – that link is here.

It’s a very interesting new world that we are living in and one, I pray, that is returning real power to the electorates.

 

 

 

 

In humble recognition of great writers

The technology of the Internet will prove to be of huge democratic value.

Those who know me know a disquieted man.  Someone, who despite being more at peace with himself than ever before, nonetheless senses that we, as in the mankind of Planet Earth, are already deep in the ‘no mans land’ of change between the last, say, forty years and a very different future just around the corner.

In the past opinion and commentary has been in the hands, more or less, of the giant media moguls.  But technology has changed that.  Now more than ever a huge people have access to the Internet.  Indeed, a quick Google search reveals that of a world population of 6.85 billion people, just under 2 billion (29%) have internet access.  In North America that percentage is 77.4% (226 million) and in Europe the percentage is 58.4% (475 million).  I.e. nearly a billion people in just North America and Europe!

My point is that, in a manner never before experienced in human history, the vast majority of us have the ability to read, learn and muse about the critically important issues facing us today, coming to conclusions that carry political weight.  We have almost infinite choice as to where and how we form opinions.

Thus having access, via the internet, to the scribblings of so many wise people may end up giving democracy the boost it really needs in the face of overwhelming powerful plutocratic forces.

Here are just a couple of those wise voices.

Simon Johnson

I first came across him in an article in The Atlantic Magazine back in May 2009.  That article was called The Quiet Coup.  If you haven’t read it, go here.  It is introduced thus:

The crash has laid bare many unpleasant truths about the United States. One of the most alarming, says a former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, is that the finance industry has effectively captured our government—a state of affairs that more typically describes emerging markets, and is at the center of many emerging-market crises. If the IMF’s staff could speak freely about the U.S., it would tell us what it tells all countries in this situation: recovery will fail unless we break the financial oligarchy that is blocking essential reform. And if we are to prevent a true depression, we’re running out of time.

Simon is also one of the lead writers for the Blog Baseline Scenario.  Have a read of a recent article about the appointment of Bill Daley as President Obama’s new chief of staff.  That article concludes thus:

Top executives at big U.S. banks want to be left alone during relatively good times – allowed to take whatever excessive risks they want, to juice their return on equity through massive leverage, to thus boost their pay and enhance their status around the world.  But at a moment of severe financial crisis, they also want someone in the White House who will whisper at just the right moment: “Mr. President, if you let this bank fail, it will trigger a worldwide financial panic and another Great Depression.  This will be worse than what happened after Lehman Brothers failed.”

Let’s be honest.  With the appointment of Bill Daley, the big banks have won completely this round of boom-bust-bailout.  The risk inherent to our financial system is now higher than it was in the early/mid-2000s.  We are set up for another illusory financial expansion and another debilitating crisis.

Bill Daley will get it done.

Now let’s turn to that other writer, Patrice Ayme.

That name is a nom-de-plume but so what!  Having read Patrice for some time now and corresponded via email from time to time, I have to tell you this is one giant of an intellectual thinker.  Take this Post from example: Pluto Lie #1: Glass Beads Matter More It’s a beautifully written article but not something that you should try a skim read through; it deserves a really focussed mind on the words and the meanings expressed. Here’s a flavour:

Abstract: An American historian paid by the hyper rich, exhumed again the old fallacy that material riches matter more than anything else. He points at recent electronic gadgetry, and attributes it to Reagan. This article of faith in Reagan and American plutocracy amusingly gives, obviously without knowing, prominence to recent French and German governmental research, which allowed to make such gadgets.

I skewer this lamentable, not to say corrupt, piece of dismal propaganda which was published all over the American media, for Christmas. I use the occasion to give a new metric to evaluate riches over the last 100,000 years, explain why the USA does not use the metric system, and what European kings were really about.

Too great a disparity of riches is another name for plutocracy.  Indeed, money is power, and thus, too much money is too much power.

Here is how Patrice’s article closes (but it would be so much better if you read the article in its entirety):

Morality? Europeans Kings of old could live long, and lived strong.The best of them were working relentlessly, brandishing whatever it took to stabilize the situation ethically, politically, and civilizationally. They were incredibly brutal. They would die, and kill, just over the length of hair (kings and prospective kings wore it long, religious wore it nought). Even small children, if viewed as potential kings, would be presented with the scissors and the sword (if they did not go for the former, they would get the later).

So of course, kings of old would have made it to today’s highest class. Kings were often the richest people around, and they got there, or stayed there, by killing, in the name of new, and higher principles. This only happened because their subordinates agreed to strive towards the same new and higher principles. Hanson misses completely the spiritual dimension of the kings of old. Kings of old led an ethical revolution, which was their reason for being in power, and why people elected them (or elected to follow them).

Kings of old lived very comfortably by their metrics, with residences all around Europe, and wives, concubines, nobles under oaths to serve them (to death). Some, such as Charlemagne, were very healthy into old age. What’s more fun than to make war for decades, mostly winning, as Charlemagne did?

Dr. Victor Davis Hanson, a classicist and military historian, is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and a recipient of the 2007 National Humanities Medal.

That appurtenance, too, tells volumes. Hanson has tales to tell, and they sing of American plutocracy. It remains to be seen if history will sing along. Two things, though: history does not tell lies, and human beings are not reducible to gadget loving midgets.

So to repeat my point.  Whether or not one choses to agree with the likes of Simon Johnson and Patrice Ayme there is no doubt that in my mind it will be writers like these that, through the better education of millions of citizens, will not only preserve democracy in so many countries but will ensure that the age before us will be fairer and more just.

Change can be achieved by the threat of tomorrow being the same

even quicker than by the hope of tomorrow being different! C. Graham-Leigh.

The Future of Content

A fascinating piece by John Maudlin.

I came across John Maudlin’s web site some time ago and ended up subscribing to one of his Blogs, Outside the Box.  To be frank, much of what John writes is a little bit too technical for me but this item did catch my eye to the extent that I read the item in full and was intrigued by it.

The article was called, “Apple, Google, NewsCorp and the Future of Content”  You can read it directly here.  But just to whet your appetite, here’s a small extract of what is primarily an interview with Michael Whalen:

In this issue of The Institutional Risk Analyst, we speak to Michael Whalen, [Emmy] award winning composer and new media observer about the outlook for the business of creating and delivering content.  Since graduating from Berklee College of Music, Michael has taught a business for music class that has saved thousands of young artists from making terrible mistakes with content and other contractual rights.  Think Frank Zappa and Warner Brothers.   And yes, Michael is IRA co-founder Chris Whalen’s younger brother.

and later …

Whalen: Frankly, I think we’re going back to the 19th century in terms of the “status” of artists. They’ll be figureheads. Imagine: like Paris or Vienna of the 1900s, we’ll have wealthy patrons and small clutches of people who support the art of “real” artists. In this environment, the work we will try to sell is simply a loss leader and an inducement for us to perform or create a “custom” song, TV show or film… Yup, it’s all here now… What will be really interesting is what happens next… I am not pretending to be the “Grim Reaper” but I think the record business, the film studio system and the television networks are over as we think we know them. I think there is a new business emerging in gathering creative investment, content and creative marketing…. It will be in a structure that’s more akin to a stock market than the traditional structure we’ve seen for artistic and creative content and the platform for it will be the digital ocean we have already discussed. Based on the “buzz”, there will be a “futures” market and the idea is commoditized and funded in days – not months or years. For decades, most record companies and networks have been little more than funding sources for artists – now the truly visionary artist won’t even need these ancient businesses – the market itself will generate everything it needs to create content efficiently. It’s a little overwhelming the change that is here now vs. five years ago and that will be coming in torrents in the next few years. Amazing.

Read the full interview here – I promise you won’t regret it.

By Paul Handover

Beauty of flight

There’s more to flying than many of us realise.

Thanks to Mike T who I have known for a few years now.  Mike is an air traffic controller as well as being a keen private pilot so if there is one person who can see through the telescope from both ends, it’s this man.

Anyway, GE Aviation are one of the big players in aviation.  Here’s a quote from the website that I am going to link you to in a moment.

GE Aviation designs engines, flightpaths, and advanced aircraft systems. And we wanted to share the intricate choreography of flying in all its glory.

 

Dancing in the air!

 

Here’s the video – just 1:48 long – it’s captivating.  This link takes you to the GE web page where there is much more of great interest other than the video.

If you only want to watch the video then, of course, there’s a copy on YouTube, as below.  Enjoy!

Thanks Mike.

By Paul Handover

Spices

A fascinating insight and a reminder, courtesy of Alistair Cooke

Jeannie recently gave me the book Alistair Cooke’s America.  The book was published in 1973 and was born out of the scripts that Cooke wrote for the television series America: A Personal History of the United States shown in both countries in 1972.  I can’t recall when I first started listening to the BBC Radio programme Letter from America, broadcast by Cooke, but it was a long time ago considering that the 15-minute programme started to be broadcast on the BBC in March 1946, just 18 months after I was born!

 

Alistair Cooke Nov 1908 - Mar 2004

 

Anyway, the motivation to start into the book was born out of a desire to know a lot more about this new country of mine.  But quickly there was a fascinating detour.

Early in Chapter One, The New-found Land, Cooke writes of the consequences of the Turks capturing Constantinople:

In 1453, there was a decisive turn in the centuries of warfare between the Christians of Europe and the Moslems of Asia.  Their common market, bridge, and gateway was Constantinople, our Istanbul.  In 1453, the Turks conquered it, and in so doing shut off the commerce between East and West, the exchange of cloth, leather wines and sword blades of Europe for the silks, jewels, chessmen, and spices of Asia.  All things considered, the stoppage was much harder on the court treasuries of Europe that those of Asia and, in one vital item, harder on all Europeans.  That item was spice.

Cooke then writes about historic change often being caused by the denial of a simple human need.  Shortage of water, total absence of timber for the Egyptians since the time of Solomon, for example.

What I hadn’t realised that for Europeans, spices were regarded as “fundamental to human survival”.  That was simply because in the 15th century spices made food edible.  Cooke writes,

Even in rich houses, the meals came putrid to the table. (Dysentery, by the way, seems to have been considered through most of the last five centuries a hazard as normal as wind and rain.)

Think about that the next time you reach for the pepper!

That led me to think about the enormous benefit that electricity and therefore domestic refrigeration has had on the health and life expectancies of mankind.  It is almost inconceivable to imagine the consequences of a widespread loss of electricity for, say a week, let alone a few months.

Patrice Ayme wrote a guest post for Learning from Dogs that was published on the 26th.  In it he wrote,

But then, after an auspicious start, Mars lost most of most of its atmosphere (probably within a billion years or so). Why? Mars is a bit small, its gravitational attraction is weaker than Earth (it’s only 40%). But, mostly, Mars has not enough a magnetic field. During Coronal Mass Ejections, CMEs, the Sun can throw out billions of tons of material at speeds up to and above 3200 kilometers per seconds. It’s mostly electrons and protons, but helium, oxygen and even iron can be in the mix.

The worst CME known happened during the Nineteenth Century, before the rise of the electromagnetic civilization we presently enjoy. Should one such ejection reoccur now, the electromagnetic aspect of our civilization would be wiped out.It goes without saying that we are totally unprepared, and would be very surprised. Among other things, all transformers would blow up, and they take months to rebuild. we would be left with old books in paper, the old fashion way. A CME can rush to Earth in just one day. (Fortunately the Sun seems to be quieting down presently, a bit as it did during the Little Ice Age.)

So let’s just hope and pray that our continued interest in spices remains a flavouring desire and doesn’t return as a critical need for human survival.

By Paul Handover

Whoops, just on the phone!

The unacceptable side of mobile (cell) phones.

Recently, I saw something come in to my in-box that just held my attention for sufficiently long to get me to move from scan reading to actually thinking about what I was reading and how it made me feel.

The US government may require cars to include scrambling tech that would disable mobile-phone use by drivers, and perhaps passengers.

“I think it will be done,” US Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood said on Wednesday morning, according to The Daily Caller. “I think the technology is there and I think you’re going to see the technology become adaptable in automobiles to disable these cell phones.

No, this is not some other form of Government interference in areas of our lives that are irrelevant to the real world.  This is serious stuff:

Believe it or not, I wasn’t always so outspoken about the dangers of distracted driving. Like a lot of folks, I just didn’t give a lot of thought to it.

But that all changed as I met people from coast to coast who told me about the loved ones they lost in senseless crashes caused by texting and cell phone use behind the wheel. And it was their stories–of dreams shattered and lives cut short–that turned the fight to end distracted driving into my personal crusade.

These people have had a profound effect on me. And I think their stories will have a profound effect on you.

SNIP

Just last year, nearly 5,500 people were killed and 500,000 more were injured in distracted driving-related crashes.  But, these aren’t statistics. They’re children and parents, neighbors and friends.

So this really does deserve thinking about.  As The Register article puts it:

The problem is that the average driver doesn’t think that he or she is an average driver: nearly two-thirds of drivers think of themselves as safer and more skillful than a driver of median safety or skills — a statistical impossibility, of course.

When faced with the prospect of automotive mobile phones being disabled, we’d be willing to bet that most drivers, suffused with confidence in their own skills, will think in terms of personal inconvenience and a restriction on personal freedom.

Perhaps it might be better to think of the guy texting in the lane to your left, or the gal yelling at her ex on her iPhone in the lane to your right, and think not of your own inconvenience, but of some distracted dolt killing you.

Remember one unassailable statistic, as explained by the late, great George Carlin: “Just think of how stupid the average person is, and then realize half of them are even stupider!”

LaHood may be right. Disabling mobile phones in cars should not be looked at as a way of protecting you from yourself, but instead as a way of protecting you from the stupid.

Quite so!

By Paul Handover

It almost goes on for ever.

The almost everlasting heavens above us.

There is so much information around us these days that it’s easy to forget how incredibly advantaged are those today that wish to learn about everything and anything.  It was just such a meander around the internet that brought me to a website called Science Daily, a wonderful daily digest of top science news items.

And a browse through that web site brought me to this piece on the creation of the very first stars in the universe.

June 1, 2007 — Astronomers removed light from closer and better known galaxies and stars from pictures taken with the Spitzer Space Telescope. The remaining images are believed to be the first objects in space, 13 billion light years away.

The first stars in our universe are long gone, but their light still shines, giving us a peek at what the universe looked like in its early years.

Astrophysicists believe they’ve spotted a faint glow from stars born at the beginning of time. Harvey Moseley, Ph.D., an astrophysicist at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, says, “The reason they’re faint is just because they’re very, very far away, they’re over at the far edge of the universe.”

I don’t know about you but I find this so deeply inspiring – a reminder of the instinctive nature of man to enquire and explore.  And it is this exploratory instinct that will pull us all through from the challenges that we all face today.

Anyway, I’m wandering off the subject!

Do read the piece in full here and then watch the following video from Avi Loeb.

Oh, want to know how far 13 billion light years is?  Brace yourself!

Light travels at 186,000 miles per second or more properly expressed 299,792.458 km/sec.  See here.  (Brilliant website by the way) That is 10 trillion kilometres a year.

So 13 billion light years is simply! 10 trillion multiplied by 13 billion kilometres.  Anyone got a larger calculator?

By Paul Handover

To the heavens

Life is about journeys – here’s a spectacular example

Yesterday while I was travelling the 5,450 flight miles between London Heathrow and Los Angeles airports, another marvel of flight technology approached a small lump of rock far out in space.  I speaking of NASA’s Deep Impact/EPOXI spacecraft passing within 450 miles of the Comet Hartley 2.

“There are billions of comets in the solar system, but this will be only the fifth time a spacecraft has flown close enough to one to snap pictures of its nucleus,” says Lori Feaga of the EPOXI science team. “This one should put on quite a show!”

Cometary orbits tend to be highly elongated; they travel far from the sun and then swing much closer. At encounter time, Hartley 2 will be nearing the sun and warming up after its cold, deep space sojourn. The ices in its nucleus will be vaporizing furiously – spitting dust and spouting gaseous jets.

“Hartley 2’s nucleus is small, less than a mile in diameter,” says Feaga. “But its surface offgasses at a higher rate than nuclei we’ve seen before. We expect more jets and outbursts from this one.”

The EPOXI Mission website is here, from which has been selected this photograph of the Comet.

The details of this photograph are:

Caption: This EPOXI mission image of comet 103P/Hartley 2 was taken 34 days from Encounter (E-34d) using the Medium Resolution Instrument (MRI) and a clear filter. Science Team member Dr. Dennis Wellnitz combined three successive one-minute exposures to make this single image. The mid-exposure time was 2010/10/01 16:22:51 UTC. The comet was 1.12 AU from the Sun and 0.23 AU (35 million km) from the spacecraft.

Of course, when this Post is published, automagically, you will have to go onto the mission website to see the very latest information.

I will be more interested in catching a South-West airline flight into Phoenix.

By Paul Handover