This week’s rant of the week is Taleb’s Warning from the Belmont Club
Rant of the Week: 10/26/08-11/1/08
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Category Archives: Knowledge
Almost enough to make you forget the boring parts of Chemistry
From in the Pipeline (on Triazadienyl Fluoride)….
Now this is a fine substance. Also known in the older literature as fluorine azide, you make it by combining two other things that have already made my “Things I Won’t Work With” list. Just allow fluorine (ay!) to react with neat hydrazoic acid (yikes), and behold!
Well, what you’re most likely to behold is a fuming crater, unless you’re quite careful indeed. Both of those starting materials deserve serious respect, since they’re able to remove you from this plane of existence with alacrity, and their reaction product is nothing to putz around with, either.
The rest of the post details how they made the stuff without getting killed. I imagine that nobody got bored in the process.
Rant of the Week: 10/19/08-10/25/08
This week’s rant of the week is The Persistent Myth of Pre-Taliban Anarchy
Essay of the Week: 10/19/08-10/25/08
This week’s essay of the week is the pomocons, Freddie, and god.
The Great Depression is not the only parallel
Perhaps the most remarkable feature of the crisis of 1914 was the closure of the world’s major stock markets for up to five months. The Vienna market was the first to close, on July 27. By July 30 all the continental European exchanges had shut their doors. The next day, London and New York felt compelled to follow suit. Although a belated settlement day went smoothly on November 18, the London Stock Exchange did not reopen until January 4. Nothing like this had happened since its foundation in 1773. The New York market reopened for limited trading (bonds for cash only) on November 28, but unrestricted trading did not resume until April 1, 1915. Nor were stock markets the only ones to close in the crisis. Most U.S. commodity markets had to suspend trading, as did most European foreign-exchange markets. The London Royal Exchange, for example, remained closed until September 17. It seems likely that, had the markets not closed, the collapse in prices would have been as extreme as it would be in 1929, if not worse.
(h/t the Belmont Club)
Agreed
“We found that vitamin D insufficiency may have a unique association with Parkinson’s, which is intriguing and warrants further investigation,” Evatt says.
I would think that vitamin D insufficiency would be caused by the affects of Parkinson’s itself. If you have Parkinson’s you probably don’t go outside as much for one thing. But if that was true why don’t Alzheimer’s patients demonstrate a similar high level of vitamin D insufficiency?
Overall this study will probably lead to nowhere. The study is small enough that the statistics probably do not mean anything. But it is still worth looking into.
Essay of the Week: 10/12/08-10/18/08
All too often intellectuals, whether they are believers or skeptics, treat the Bible as some kind of engineering document. They argue over the Bible as if it were a blue print for building a plane and every particular must be examined in order to determine if the plane will fly. The whole question of the Bible becomes a question of utility with the believer arguing that it is useful and the skeptic arguing that it has no use.
Rarely will you see the Bible treated as a work of art in which the intentions behind it matter as much as the particulars. Rarely will anyone ask the question “what effect is the Bible trying to achieve?”
Like all manmade distinctions, this distinction that we are trying to make is a little bit artificial. You cannot really divide people’s approaches to the Bible so neatly. Yet if you read G. K. Chesterton’s Introduction To The Book of Job perhaps you will understand what we are trying to say.
One might not agree with everything that G. K. says. But as an artist himself, he knew something about how to approach a work of art.
Europe's real problem
For the fifth year in a row, emigration from the Netherlands exceeded immigration last year, reaching 123,000 emigrants, which amounts to 7.5 emigrants per 1000 inhabitants. Dutch media has repeatedly reported this phenomenon because it caught demographic forecasters by surprise. The last emigration wave occurred fifty years ago, and at present the Netherlands is the only Western European country experiencing net emigration, although similar trends are visible in the UK (Salt and Rees, 2006) and to lesser extent in Germany.
According to Baron Bodissey, a comparable outflow in the US would be 2.3 million people leaving the country. Most of these emigrants are moving to other places in Europe so some might argue that this not really a problem for Europe as a whole. But this attitude overlooks the real problem.
There seems a growing trend in Europe of the professional classes feeling little attachment to their native soil. Thus, they are more and more willing to uproot and go to where they think they can get a better deal. In the long run this is going to make it even harder to sustain Europe’s social model. It is hard to tax the better off to support the less well off if better off are willing to leave.
Pratchett on Alzheimer’s
Dad saw the cancer in his pancreas as an invader. But Alzheimer’s is me unwinding, losing trust in myself, a butt of my own jokes and on bad days capable of playing hunt the slipper by myself and losing.
You can’t battle it, you can’t be a plucky ‘survivor’. It just steals you from yourself.
And I’m 60; that’s supposed to be the new 40. The baby boomers are getting older, and will stay older for longer.
And they will run right into the dementia firing range. How will a society cope?
Especially a society that can’t so readily rely on those stable family relationships that traditionally provided the backbone of care?
What do you make of this?
This is Christian from Defense Tech’s take….
My thought is this: First of all, NO DUH they denied your plan to approach Tora Bora from Pakistan…the risks, both diplomatic and military were too much to contemplate. It’s one thing to have planes flying out of remote bases; another to have an “invading” ground force try an Alpine assault from an area teeming with AQ and their sympathizers. Also…LAND MINES!? Come on, you HAD to have known that would never fly. As if Afghanistan doesn’t have enough of them littering the landscape already. What are we, the Soviets? (their potential words, not mine)…
And here is more info from Defense Tech.