Evidence suggests that grief counseling may not be helpful. What a shock. Better talk this over with my therapist.
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Category Archives: Knowledge
Links of Interest
Closer every day
Huge news for real-life ray guns: Electric lasers have hit battlefield strength for the first time — paving the way for energy weapons to go to war.
In recent test-blasts, Pentagon-researchers at Northrop Grumman managed to get its 105 kilowatts of power out of their laser — past the “100kW threshold [that] has been viewed traditionally as a proof of principle for ‘weapons grade’ power levels for high-energy lasers,” Northrop’s vice president of directed energy systems, Dan Wildt, said in a statement.
What is the truth?
For more than six decades scholars have believed the scrolls originated with a different, ascetic Jewish sect called the Essenes.
The Essenes are said to have lived in the 1st Century, in mountains in Palestine, where they recorded religious practices on parchments.
But Rachel Elior, a professor of Jewish philosophy at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, claims the 930 scrolls were written by the Sadducees, a group of Jewish priests living in Jerusalem, and that the Essenes did not exist.
The article is mostly worthless because all that it amounts to is a he said/she said type of thing. The evidence for and against is not really gone into. On the other hand, I have always thought that the evidence for the existence of the Essenes was awful thin. So I was interested to see that a scholar got up and said the same thing (except in stronger terms than I would use).
Rant of the Week: 3/15/09-3/21/09
This week’s rant is “Non-Compete Clauses for Churches? Makes Sense to Me.” The title tells you all you need to know.
How much is a trillion?
There are numerous people on the internet trying to help us understand the magnitude of the money that’s been talked about these days. I found this illustration helpful. It helped me visualize the order of magnitude shift between billion and trillion.
Roman Engineering in the Middle East
Roman engineers chipped an aqueduct through more than 100 kilometers of stone to connect water to cities in the ancient province of Syria. The monumental effort took more than a century, says the German researcher who discovered it.
From later on in the article…..
“Amazing” is the word that the researcher uses to describe the achievement of the construction crews, who were most likely legionnaires. The soldiers chiseled over 600,000 cubic meters of stone from the ground — or the equivalent of one-quarter of the Great Pyramid of Cheops. This colossal waterworks project supplied the great cities of the “Decapolis” — a league originally consisting of 10 ancient communities — with spring water. The aqueduct ended in Gadara, a city with a population of approximately 50,000. According to the Bible, this is where Jesus exorcized demons and chased them into a herd of pigs.
I am skeptical about the 100 year figure. They seem to have a good idea of when this project started. But reading between the lines, I don’t think they have that good of an idea of when it ended.
A Good Week For The Economist
In the last couple of weeks it has seemed like the Economist was not worth the time it took to read. But this week I was reminded of why I read the magazine. Some of the highlights…..
The article on Japan called Rebalancing act. The article suffers from the usual Economist foible of trying to spin something as positive what is a total disaster. Take this paragraph, for example. . .
JAPANESE households used to be among the world’s biggest savers and, as a result, the country ran a massive trade surplus. But no longer. They now save less of their income than American households, and Japan’s trade balance moved into deficit last year (see top chart). A long-overdue—and painful—economic rebalancing is under way.
Rebalancing is such stupid word for spending down your savings in the face of economic disaster. For years I have had to suffer through listening to fools arguing that Japan’s problem was that its people saved too much. Now that the savings rate in Japan is practically zero (see the charts in the article) things are going just dandy, right?
But if you can get past the fact that the facts presented in the article are completely at odds with the idea that Japan is going through some kind of positive “rebalancing,” the article is a very interesting read.
Another interesting read is the article entitled The bees are back in town . You can read the article as both refuting some of the wilder fears about the collapse of the honey bee population and as a warning on the dangers of extreme mono cultures. Though it is clear that the writer’s intent is only the former and not the latter.
The article entitled About face was also interesting. It made me wonder how creditworthy I looked. It also made me think of Abraham Lincoln’s famous contention that after a certain age you could blame a man for how he looked (meaning their moral character would start to show through, not that people should all be handsome. He had enough self knowledge to know that nobody could accuse him of being handsome).
Those are only the highlights of this week’s Economist. There were other articles that I found interesting as well. But you can scan what is in this week’s edition for yourself if you are so inclined.
My apologies for anyone who struggled through reading this before I whacked off his worse grammatical errors. Please remember that even the brilliant Albert Einstein occasionally forgot where he lived; just because our Ape Man cannot always remember the difference between “passed” and “past” does not necessarily indicate he is in the habit of drooling. We apologize for the technical difficulties, and we hope that you will find his ideas worth reading in spite of his occasional struggles with coherency.
Sincerly,
The Troll
We could ask China
PLANS TO refurbish Trident nuclear weapons had to be put on hold because US scientists forgot how to manufacture a component of the warhead, a US congressional investigation has revealed.
The US National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) “lost knowledge” of how to make a mysterious but very hazardous material codenamed Fogbank. As a result, the warhead refurbishment programme was put back by at least a year, and racked up an extra $69 million.
Rumor has it that China stole everything there was to steal when it came to making of the US strategic arsenal. Maybe they can help use remember how to make Fogbank.
Worth Repeating
Most people (ironically those deemed psychologically healthy) have an optimistic bias and generally assign too high odds of things working out well (the mildly depressed make more accurate assessments. I have often wondered which way the causality runs: do they make better assessments BECAUSE their unhappy state strips away the rose-colored filter, or are they mildly depressed because they keep giving more realistic assessments, which makes them a drag to be around, and they are depressed because they encounter social rejection?).