We must confess that it will seem odd to most people that this week’s worldly essay should call to mind an unworldly poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins. But in our defense, The Wreck of the Deutschland was inspired by a worldly event.
You can find a simplistic explanation for this poem here. You can a better explanation of the poem here.
We have always wanted to profile one Tanta’s rants. She does them so well. But most of her rants are on subjects that would strike the average reader as being a little obscure. So we were happy when Tanta finally let lose on a subject that everyone can understand.
Her problem is reporters. More particularly, her problem is with some reporters who want to quote her.
Why?
Just read the Rant.
Many people profess to be interested in the news. Many people profess to want to know what goes on in the world. Few actually do. To actually be interested in the news you must be willing to follow complex arguments. You must also be willing to tolerate a certain degree of ambiguity.
If you are one of those people with those distressingly rare traits, then you owe it to yourself to read this essay by Stuart Staniford called A Nosedive into the Desert. In one sense, you could argue that this essay is nothing more then an exercise in punditry. It is one man’s opinion on what the available data means. But if all opinion’s were as rigorously argued as this essay is, the world would be a better place.
If you have time you might want to familiarize yourself with the context for this essay by readying Staniford’s post called Saudi Arabian oil declines 8% in 2006 and a critique of that post by Euan Mearns called Saudi Arabia and that $1000 bet. It was in response to that critique that Staniford wrote A Nosedive into the Desert. You can also read the Ape Man’s thoughts on the subject here.
But if you don’t have time to do all that reading, I think that A Nosedive into the Desert stands on its own.
In an earlier post I already mentioned an article by Stuart Staniford that made me think this might be the case. Since then the debate has moved forward. A man by the name of Euan Mearns responded with a well written article of his own that was critical of Staniford’s methodology.
While I appreciated Click Here to continue reading.
There is an interesting article in the New York Times on dark matter and dark energy. A quote from the article…..
And if the right ripples hadn’t shown up? As Frieman puts it: “You just would have thrown up your hands and said, ‘My God, we’ve got to go back to the drawing board!’ What’s remarkable to me is that so far that hasn’t happpened.”
Yet in a way it has. In the observation-and-theory, call-and-response system of investigating nature that scientists have refined over the past 400 years, the dark side of the universe represents a disruption. General relativity helped explain the observations of the expanding universe, which led to the idea of the big bang, which anticipated the observations of the cosmic-microwave background, which led to the revival of Einstein’s cosmological constant, which anticipated the observations of supernovae, which led to dark energy. And dark energy is … ?
The difficulty in answering that question has led some cosmologists to ask an even deeper question: Does dark energy even exist? Or is it perhaps an inference too far? Cosmologists have another saying they like to cite: “You get to invoke the tooth fairy only once,” meaning dark matter, “but now we have to invoke the tooth fairy twice,” meaning dark energy.
The article makes me think of the argument in Spinoza, Einstein, and the Failure of Reason. Especially those places in the article were they are speculating that the answer might be more complicated then we can conceive.
Did you know that sub-prime lenders (those that lend to people with bad credit) are dropping like flies in a cold snap? No? It is common knowledge amongst those who follow business news but it has not made the headlines yet. To get an idea of how fast this turn around was, consider this quote from this New York Times article…..
On March 1, a Wall Street analyst at Bear Stearns wrote an upbeat report on a company that specializes in making mortgages to cash-poor homebuyers. The company, New Century Financial, had already disclosed that a growing number of borrowers were defaulting, and its stock, at around $15, had lost half its value in three weeks.
What happened next seems all too familiar to investors who bought technology stocks in 2000 at the breathless urging of Wall Street analysts. Last week, New Century said it would stop making loans and needed emergency financing to survive. The stock collapsed to $3.21.
The analyst’s untimely call, coupled with a failure among other Wall Street institutions to identify problems in the home mortgage market, isn’t the only familiar ring to investors who watched the technology stock bubble burst precisely seven years ago.
New Century Financial is not the only one. Every company that made loans to poor people is having serious problems. Now an analyst at Bear Stearns is saying that….
Tougher lending standards stemming from the shakeout in the beleaguered subprime mortgage industry could prevent up to 1.1 million U.S. homebuyers from getting mortgages this year, a Bear Stearns analyst told investors on Friday.
You might wonder why you should listen to anyone from Bear Stearns. After all they were the same fools who put a buy call on New Century a week before it collapsed. In fact, there are a lot of people out there arguing that problems in the sub-prime market are no big deal. Consider this quote from the LA times….
Many economists, as well as Fed officials, say they don’t believe that sub-prime borrowers account for a big enough share of the housing market to have a dramatic effect on the economy.
Haven’t these people ever heard of canaries in the coal mine?
Bear Stearns might be off in saying that 1.1 million homebuyer will not be able to buy a home this year because of tightening lending standards, but I would not bet against them. Bear Stearns itself has a lot of its own money in the game. They are reputed to have already taken big losses. Their recent pain is what makes me think that they are now a little more grounded in reality.
But regardless of whether you trust Bear Stearns or not, it has always been conventional wisdom that problems in the sub-prime market were early warnings of coming economic problems. Why do people think that this time will be different?
There are a lot of web sites covering this unfolding story. But my favorite is Calculated Risk. They tipped me off to all of links in this story except for the New York Times article.
Last weekend, I was making pancakes to send to a relative. Multiple barbarians came by and said things like “Yum!”, “Yay!” and the like, and all were met with “These aren’t for you”, which was responded directly with snarls and grumps. Finally I said if someone else made the batter, I’d make pancakes for lunch. That’s no small offer; it means making over 200 pancakes, with enough batter it wouldn’t fit in most peoples’ dishpans.
Usually when I make pancakes, I keep them warm on platters in the oven until I’ve got them all made. Nobody can eat them till I’m done cooking. It takes about an hour of constant, high speed pancake turning to get them all made, and about 15 minutes for them all to disappear.
I began turning out dozen after dozen of pancakes onto a platter on the counter. Everyone hung about like a flock of vultures, but not a one of them was fool enough to touch the pancakes (past experiences indicating it not a wise idea). After I had a small lead, I decided to allow that they could start eating them hot—and so I entered Pancake Purgatory.
The lead that I had established disappeared in the time it would take an average human to sneeze, and people hadn’t even been called from the four corners of the house yet. Ever after that, any time I put down a pancake, it was snatched up off the platter in less time than it takes a germ to move (3-second rule, don’t cha know).
When you are turning pancakes onto a platter, you can see your progress. The platter becomes increasingly more full, and you can see yourself coming closer to achieving your goal. When you allow them to be eaten as soon as they are cooked, you never see anything but an empty platter. It’s like like a scene from a myth, were the guilty party is condemned to preform a meaningless task forever—like carrying water to fill a basin with gaping holes in the bottom. While you stand over the hot stove turning out pancake after pancake, you can feel the the passage of time without seeing any progress. Then you begin to think, “I’m not gaining on them at all. Since they’re eating them as I’m making them, they’re burning off calories as fast as they are eating them. At this rate, they will be hungry enough to keep on eating forever, and I shall never satiate their appetites.”
I finally confessed I felt like I’d been sentenced to purgatory for 500 years to work of my sins with pointless labor.
The consoled me that I only had enough sins to keep me there for 437 years.
Oog.
Did I triumph? Of course not. I stuffed them fuller than a Christmas goose, but they were hungry again in a few hours. As usual.
Peter Bone has always been a big inspiration for me. He serves as living evidence that you can hold down an unrelated full time job and still get really good at juggling. Peter is a computer programmer by day, but when he is off the job, he is a world class juggler, holding several unofficial Click Here to continue reading.
Due to an uncooperative camera, poor lighting, and batteries running out of juice, and a frazzled cook, there will only be a few photos accompanying this recipe. And unfortunately, this in not one of those “carved in stone” recipes, but one of those “wing-and-a-prayer, this is how I did it this time” recipes. Every time Click Here to continue reading.
For a depressing read look at this article in the New Yorker on whether the US can be made safe from nuclear terrorism. The answer is no.
That answer will surprise no one of course, but I was surprised to learn that a load of bananas were easier to detect with radiation detectors then Uranium. Click Here to continue reading.