Interesting article on swat valley

When a nuclear armed state is descending into anarchy, you ought to keep tabs on it. But you don’t read much about Pakistan in the mainstream press. To help rectify that, we bring you this article from From Spiegel….

With its anarchy and lawlessness, the Swat Valley has come to symbolize Pakistan in the year 2007. This time it’s not about the tribal areas, such as Waziristan along the Afghan border, where radical Islamists have been successfully undermining the power of the state. The Swat Valley is just a few hours drive from Islamabad. And Mullah Fazlullah’s jihad is directed at Musharraf’s regime. He and his fighters want to see a strict Islamist state, that is not oriented towards the US but to Sharia law. It is an enemy in the heart of the country — one that Musharraf seems increasingly incapable of dealing with.

Fear People, not Radiation

Atomic Radiation is not good for you. But the fear that it inspires in people is far worse. If a major radiation leek, your first concern should be how to protect yourself from fear crazed people. Unless your right next to the radiation leak, people are almost always the greater danger.

This article from Spiegel explains how the fear of radiation was blown out of proportion.

The briefest of glimpses

Wired has a micro-tour of a product design process in the multimedia section. Of note to me is that they significantly misrepresent the activity in one slide and slightly misrepresent it in the next.

In slide 7, Brad Niven is certainly not using a “Haas VF-2 CNC (computer numerical control) milling machine to fill a cavity.” He is using a glue gun. He is using a glue gun. It looks like a bigger glue gun than you buy in the craft store, so it probably cost $100, $150. Visible in the foreground are what you might call the “drill bits” that the machine uses to do the actual dirty work. Of course since this is a milling machine, it is not going to be drilling holes. It will be pulling the tooling (the “drill bit”) across some portion of the surface of the work, not drilling a straight hole.

You can see the machine at work in the next slide. Here it is slightly misleading to say that “Hass [sic] CNC milling machines run hot.” This would give the impression that the motor of the machine is hot itself, and needs to be cooled off. The further comments give a better idea of what is going on. The “drill bit” is spinning so fast that it is generating a lot of heat from friction as it cuts, even though it is quite sharp and hard. Anyone who has done any amount of handiwork knows that drill bits and screws get hot, but their speeds are quite pathetic compared to the RPM put out out by this machine.

If you don’t use an expensive “drill bit” (a mill, here), you simply can’t run the machine that fast. The “bit” will get too hot and loose its hardness or break altogether.

After seeing the nice shiny clean new Haas, it mollified my envy somewhat to see that Frog has to retrofit some old clunkers, too.

Essay of the Week: 11/18/07-11/24/07

It is easy to get tired of reading about the current subprime problems. It seems likes everyone is writing the same story over and over again with different words. But sometimes I read something that tells me something I did not now before.

This speech by David Einhorn on the rating agencies was one of those things that told me something new. It is well worth reading if you want a better understanding of how we got into the current mess.

At least somebody is trying to keep the dollar from falling

This from Bloomberg….

Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest crude oil exporter, rejected a proposal by Iran and Venezuela to discuss the weak dollar at this weekend’s OPEC summit in Riyadh, saying it didn’t want the U.S. currency to “collapse.”

Saudi Arabia won’t discuss pricing oil in currencies other than the dollar, Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud Al-Faisal said, speaking at a meeting of oil and finance ministers today that was accidentally broadcast to journalists.