Archive for January 2009
Is Sarah Palin is shopping a book for $11 million?
Daylife/AFP/Getty Images
If you thought being governor of Alaska and a new grandmother would be enough to fill the cold, dark nights in the Arctic state, you underestimate Sarah Palin, the failed vice presidential candidate.
Palin has reportedly enlisted the services of Robert Barnett, the Washington lawyer who represented President Obama, would-be President Hillary Rodham Clinton and former President Bill Clinton in their multimillion-dollar book deals.
Barnett declined to comment. But a variety of published sources, including the Hollywood Reporter, said that Barnett was on board in helping to sell a Palin book. Presumably, the book would tell her side of the 2008 presidential election, when the GOP nominee, Sen. John McCain of Arizona, plucked Palin out of relative obscurity and offered her the vice presidential spot. Though she was a darling of conservatives and ignited the Republican base whenever she appeared in public, Palin has made it known that she had a difficult time with McCain’s strategists…
Sources close to Palin today rejected the reports of the $11-million figure and said the governor had not talked to any publisher or given any number…In any case, there is more than money at stake. Palin has been trying to stay in the spotlight, presumably with an eye on 2012, and a book could help her extend her reach beyond Alaska.
Poisonally, I hope she stays in the forefront – along with all the other rightwing populist-pretenders – in control of the Republikan Party through the 2012 elections. Should help Obama get a second term – and hopefully clear out more R&D deadwood along the way.
Thank, Mr. Justin
Shock revelation of sources of South Asia’s Brown Cloud
Daylife/AP Photo by Sucheta Das
A gigantic brownish haze from various burning and combustion processes is blanketing India and surrounding land and oceans during the winter season. This soot-laden Brown Cloud is affecting South Asian climate as much or more than carbon dioxide and cause premature deaths of 100 000s annually, yet its sources have been poorly understood.
Uh, if there’s anyone who doesn’t have a clue about the origins of this Brown Cloud they must work either in newspaper publishing or for one or another government of half-wits.
In the journal Science Örjan Gustafsson and colleagues at Stockholm University and in India use a novel carbon-14 method to determine that two-thirds of the soot particles are from biomass combustion such as in household cooking and in slash-and-burn agriculture.
Brown Clouds, covering large parts of South and East Asia, originate from burning of wood, dung and crop residue as well as from industrial processes and traffic.
These findings provide a direction for actions to curb emissions of Brown Clouds. Örjan Gustafsson…leader of the study, says that the clear message is that efforts should not be limited to car traffic and coal-fired power plants but calls on fighting poverty and spreading India-appropriate green technology to limit emissions from small-scale biomass burning. “More households in South Asia need to be given the possibility to cook food and get heating without using open fires of wood and dung” says Gustafsson.
South Asia has to deal with the worldwide whine – based in Wall Street and Washington, DC – which uses the Brown Cloud as an excuse for reactionary nationalist politics.
Some of us recall exactly the same brown cloud over Glasgow and London when they still were urban centers of cesspool-level air quality – because half the population cooked and heated in their homes with open coal fires [as does China, today]. It took decades but the “Auld Reekie” syndrome eventually dissipated with access to sufficient electricity and gas for cooking and heating.
No doubt Asian nations will achieve the same.
Sanyo Electric and Nippon Oil announce joint solar venture
Sanyo’s Solar Ark solar generator
Daylife/AP Photo by Katsumi Kasahara
Japan’s Sanyo Electric and Nippon Oil announced they would collaborate to produce thin-film solar cells for large-scale power generation. The 50-50 joint venture will spend roughly 20 billion yen (226 million dollars) to build a factory in Japan that can annually produce enough solar cells to produce electricity worth 80 megawatts.
The venture should have capacity of one gigawatt by March 2016 and two gigawatts by March 2021, when the companies estimate the solar cell market will be worth 10 trillion yen.
“The solar power market is showing temporary flat growth for now due to the global slowdown, but we expect the market to grow significantly in the medium- to long-term,” Sanyo president Seiichiro Sano told a news conference.
The venture will initially target markets in Asia, the Middle East and Oceania. They will include the United States in their goals if and when Congress and the White House ever get beyond panicking over the economy.
The current global economic crisis should not pose significant problems, as the venture focuses on long-term projects, Nishio said. “The current economic situation will eventually improve. We are not concerned about the effects of the current economic condition on the management of this company,” he said.
Ain’t it something to hear from some of the Big Boys outside the U.S.? Instead of whining about the next two quarters of Wall Street crumbling, they’re focusing on how to make long-term money from manufacturing sensible infrastructure products.
U.S. businesses invent roadblocks to using cellphone as credit card
Consumers in the United States will not be able to pay for purchases by waving their mobile phones in front of a reader anytime soon because of a dispute over how to split the revenue.
The Japanese have been using the technology for five years to pay for train tickets, groceries, even candy in vending machines. And in small trials around the world, nearly everyone has liked using this form of payment.
“In Japan it was easier,” said Gerhard Romen, director for corporate business development at Nokia. “It was just the major guys saying, ‘This is how it will be.”‘ A single carrier, NTT DoCoMo, accounted for more than half the Japanese market at the time the system was rolled out and thus had significant leverage with financial institutions and phone manufacturers…
This is not the case in the United States. For such payments to work there, cellphone manufacturers, carriers, financial institutions and retailers must all play roles. There must also be a trusted intermediary to activate the virtual credit cards inside the phone…
“At the end of the day, the question is, ‘Who pays whom and how much?”‘ Romen said. “The carriers and the banks need to get their act together on payment.” He called the back-and-forth a necessary step in the creation of a complex system…
It is completely possible nothing will happen in mobile payments in the next five years”…because each greedy bastard is afraid someone else will make a penny more than they do.
Think it’s easy to slow down a production line?
Click on photo to see a series around the Western world
Thanks, Mr. Justin
An American Car
What has technology taught the Next Gen kiddies?
Which finger do you use to press a doorbell? Your answer will reveal your age almost as accurately as wrinkly hands, the way you dance, whether and where you’ve been pierced, and if you think “being poked” means a) a jab in the ribs, b) saying “hi” online, or c) something unmentionable.
If you’re over 30, you’ll probably press a doorbell with your index finger, while anyone under 30 may well use their thumb. That’s because they’ve spent so much time flexing their thumbs when sending text messages on cellphones and gunning down baddies on games consoles. Thanks to all of that exercise, those thumbs have become stronger, nimbler and more dexterous, which is why they’re likelier to use them more than their index fingers.
Frisky thumbs aren’t the only legacy of the latest round of design innovations. The type of products and technologies we use not only affects the development of our physical skills, but mental skills too. Mostly it does so surreptitiously, because we make the necessary changes instinctively.
Just think of all of the skills that, if (like me) you’re over 30, you learned years ago, but rarely use now because something else does the job for you. Who needs to learn how to spell when you can use spell-check software? To read a map in the age of sat nav? To be good at math when there are calculators? To remember exactly where that great antiquarian bookstore is in Paris when it’s so easy to Google it? Those old skills haven’t suddenly become useless, just less useful than they would have been 10 years ago. What have we replaced them with?
Multitasking, synthesizing, visualizing…are some of the qualities Rawsthorn offers for further discussion; though, she seems transfixed by dextrous thumbs.
What dilettantes call multi-tasking I think best describes people with the attention span of a cricket.
Sunrise frost
Click on photo for larger view
Yesterday, we reached fairly high humidity – for when it’s not snowing – here in the high desert. 57%. Down behind our back meadow in the bosque of the Santa Fe River we had a rare frost form. And out walking with the dogs, this morning, I caught that moment just before the frost turned into a bit of mist, rising and disappearing in the morning sun.
Doctors make no bones about corpse shortage
Whatever happened to tradition?
Scots medics urgently need donations, but in this case they’re not talking about cash, blood or even organs. From students of medicine to the most experienced surgeons, they need whole, dead bodies.
The number of people donating their mortal remains to medical science needs to double “with immediate effect”, according to the man with the imposing title Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Anatomy for Scotland. Professor Bertie Wood needs 300 bodies a year to keep pace with developments in training that offer new hope to the living.
One of the key new demands is from surgeons who specialise in operating on the joints to help arthritis sufferers and other patients with debilitating conditions related to their limbs. These already highly-trained doctors need a steady supply of bodies on which to hone their skills.
Around a dozen body parts recently had to be imported from the United States because there were not sufficient numbers available for use in training surgeons in complex shoulder surgery techniques.
Perish the thought that Scots medics-in-training should have to cut through those extra layers of fat.
What’s your Paleofantasy?
Remember when life was simpler, and diets weren’t full of processed food and chemicals? No, not the 1950s. Increasingly, we are developing nostalgia for a much earlier epoch: the Pleistocene, when humans lived in small hunter-gatherer groups and didn’t worry about high cholesterol…
In short, we have what the anthropologist Leslie Aiello called “paleofantasies.” She was referring to stories about human evolution based on limited fossil evidence, but the term applies just as well to nostalgia for the very old days as a touchstone for the way life is supposed to be and why it sometimes feels so out of balance…
Instead, evolution lurches along, with successive generations sometimes unchanged, sometimes better suited to their surroundings in some ways but not others. At any one point, adaptations take place: individuals who can endure heat or cold or famine leave more offspring than their less hardy counterparts. But there is no one point when one can say, “Voilà! Finished.”
You might argue that hunter-gatherers were better adapted to their environment simply because they spent many thousands of years at it. That’s true for some attributes, but not all. Evolution isn’t the creaky old process we used to think it was. Increasingly, scientists are discovering that the rate of evolution can be fast (sometimes blindingly so) or slow, or anything in between…
