Tuesday, March 27, 2007

Ethanol a red herring

A lot of news items have come from Bush's trying to 'encourage' automakers to make E85 compatible cars. But where is all the ethanol for these cars going to come from? More subsidies for corn which is already heavily subsidized? Several articles have stated that the economics of ethanol as a fuel aren't good. We have to heavily subsidize the crop and in actuality put in 75% or more of the energy we get out of it. Perhaps this can be drastically improved, but aren't we putting the cart before the horse. Shouldn't we make it economically viable without subsidies before encumbering automakers with switching costs.

The Sierra club says that automakers get out of the CAFE (fuel efficiency) standards with an E85 loophole. This is a very bad thing.

-- Updated April 2

Well now that I think about it, perhaps 25% efficiency isn't too bad. But you are trading off huge amounts of potential actual food production for ethanol production. I still think it only sounds good if there's more like 50% or better efficiency. Somebody should do a full on cost/joule on solar vs wind vs ethanol taking into account fixed costs like solar panels, turbines, farm machinery.

Hillary Clinton

From what I've heard Carter was a nice guy. Ford got some important things done in his short time in office. I have a respect for Reagan's accomplishments. But what can I say, Bill Clinton is still my favorite President. Still, you can like Bill and not like Hillary, or vice-versa. But I think I am willing to give Hillary another listen. For some reason, I don't think I like Barack Obama. Perhaps, it's his more lukewarm responses on gay rights questions, his smoking (despite his current stance that he is trying to quit), or just his unattractive face (sorry guy) -- a young President should at least be good looking as compensation for the lack of experience. Of course, Hillary probably isn't terribly attractive, but I guess that doesn't matter to me. Al Gore could run, but he's gotta lose a lot of weight to have a chance, I think. It's getting to be too late for him. I'm not even looking at the Republican candidates.

Monday, March 26, 2007

Climate change in Arizona highlands

Link More fires, droughts, endangered species, and higher temps potentially point to climate change. Like the poles, it seems high altitude ecosystems can witness massive changes with small temperature shifts.

Northern Ireland agreement = Iraq in 30 years?

Link It's a strange parallel, but perhaps if the Americans leave Iraq and dangle financial incentives to cooperate that's what would happen?

Friday, March 23, 2007

NYT editorial says laws likely broken in prosecutor firings

Link David Brooks, a NYT columnist, said probably no laws were broken. But another editorial in the Times says there may have been.

Wednesday, March 14, 2007

Politically motivated prosecutor firings obscured by lies

Link Another case of lying and stupidity on the part of the Bush administration. Of course, Bush has the prerogative to get rid of the prosecutors he doesn't like. But in an attempt to hide the political nature of the firings, the administration decided to bad mouth some reasonably good prosecutors by saying the firings were performance based.

Apparently Reagan and Clinton conducted purges of all of the justice prosecutors at the start of their terms. W apparently did the same, but had second thoughts about these eight. Doesn't this mean he and/or his administration has poor judgment?

Updated 3/15
Economist story

Monday, March 12, 2007

Article tries to explain the reason why CT screening for lung cancer isn't good for you

Permalink The complexities of overdiagnosis and mortality rate improvement are explained.

Biofuels could be created efficiently by adding hydrogen

Link Hmmm, interesting ideas on biofuels. You could perform electrolysis on water to get hydrogen and then use it to convert biomass to alcohol?

Laughter as a social lubricant

Permalink A study shows the reason why a nervous laugh can be normal.

My brief take on earlier and later DST

It's a nice idea to try to save power. I think it would have been fine except that we have a bunch of electronics that does this change for you, but around the first week of April. Everything I've read says to manually change the time on things that didn't do it automatically for you last Sunday, but nobody wants to talk about how things will be screwed up in the first week of April and in the fall when some of your electronics will set you forward and back again if you leave DST turned on on those devices. My problems are with my digital watch and my vcr and old WinME PC. I was thinking to turn off DST on all of those items, although the old WinME PC is on so infrequently it probably won't matter as long as I remember not to rely on the time.

Friday, March 09, 2007

Climate change affecting property values?

Permalink Some serious thoughts about property around Manhattan and how it might be affected by storm surge.

Thursday, March 08, 2007

La Nina coming

NOAA says La Nina may come in the next couple months. This could increase the possibility of hurricanes in the Atlantic back to 2005 level.

Sunday, March 04, 2007

60 minutes on US Financial Troubles

Link The story provides some food for thought. I've heard there are economists who say trade deficit isn't a problem. It just means were trading dollars for goods that we want. But this piece seems to take a different tack. It seems to say that we won't be able to afford social security and Medicare for the boomers because we will need to pay interest on all our debts. I guess that means interest on the treasury bills? I'm a little confused, but the other way is to devalue the dollar, meaning we could just print more money. But if we have runaway inflation we'll be in trouble, right? It could lead to stagflation or recession. I wonder if I should be buying Euros or something.

Saturday, March 03, 2007

Warmer winters bring reduced maple syrup yields in US

Permalink Another global warming impact. Maple syrup production may entirely move to Canada.

Iraq Partition?

Permalink NYTimes piece on how physical and social interactions between Sunni and Shiite have become so dangerous they are entirely cut off in Baghdad. I can't help but wonder if the next likely step is one like Northern Ireland, a wall and partition.

NYTimes prints the anti-gay f-word slur from Coulter

Permalink Weird. Just a little while back, with the Isaiah Washington statement, NYTimes refused to actually print the word. Now when Ann Coulter says it about John Edwards, it's okay to print. Maybe it makes sense, but then I don't know what the rules are. Hopefully they can enlighten us.

Anyway, it's just incredible that Coulter decides to use the word.

But what was her reasoning behind using the word? She seemed to say she was intending to use it as in insult and not to say that he is actually gay. But that he is a weak, effeminate man. That is really the most offensive use of the word regardless of whether it is applied to a gay man or not.

More or less erudite reasoning on the matter here.