by Cheryl Rofer
My winter jasmine is blooming, and all sorts of other things are coming up or, if they were green over the winter, perking up. A couple of little cactuses that collapsed into small piles of spines over the winter are back to showing green between the spines, the iris are growing the shoots that stayed green, the daylilies are sprouting, and a few hapless tulips and daffodils that didn't do at all well are pushing green through the soil.
And an orchid is blooming indoors. As soon as the bloom I bought it for died, a new stem started vigorously. This is the result.
So many topics to blog about, so little time! Here are a few I've been thinking about lately.
The Smart Grid that President Obama has been talking about will be really important for the country. The Washington Post explains the energy-saving aspects of it pretty well, but I think that two other factors will be extremely important. One is that it will be much more robust to power failures, isolating them to where they happen, rather than propagating them, as the current grid tends to do. The other is that it will allow back-and-forth power trading. So if you build a windmill in the back yard and you don't use all the power, you'll be able to sell it to the power company. Of course, that last will require legislation as well, to require the power company to buy electricity from its customers. A few states have this, but not all.
Update: Much, much more about the smart grid at Knowledge Problem: Parts one, two, three, and four of a five-part series. The rest of the blog has even more about energy and economics. Check it out.
Banking While Muslim. Of the two banks I deal with, one just lets anyone in off the street. The other one has a sign ordering me to remove hats, sunglasses and whatever. The New Mexico air is cold and the sun is bright, so I freqently wear sunglasses and hats. Now a Southern Maryland credit union, one of the pickier ones, has insisted that Muslim women remove their headscarves before entering. Isn't this another of those dumb things, like the TSA, that fear is imposing on us? Isn't it time to end it? Or maybe the more frightened bankers could just go back to the cell-like architecture of banks past
Since I have decided to join the physicists and become an analyst of the economic scene, I was fascinated by this New York Times article and Kevin Drum's suggestion that both physicists and quants are driven by testosterone. I think there's something to that, but I also think that some of Kevin's commenters are right that physics uses mathematics in somewhat the same way that analyzing derivatives and the market do. But physicists usually want to get to the bottom of things, the ultimate reason for the universe or whatever, and I don't think they're doing a very good job of that with the market. That's what I'm trying to do in my "quant" posts. Although some may be doing that when they're not trying to make money.
But it is not so easy to get new ideas into the economic literature, many quants complain. J. Doyne Farmer, a physicist and professor at the Santa Fe Institute, and the founder and former chief scientist of the Prediction Company, said he was shocked when he started reading finance literature at how backward it was, comparing it to Middle-Ages theories of fire. “They were talking about phlogiston — not the right metaphor,” Dr. Farmer said.
President Obama has nominated Charles (Chas) Freeman to head the National Intelligence Council. This has led to many objections, which seem to boil down to one: that he is not an unquestioning supporter of Israel, that he may even have criticized Israel. I don't know Freeman and haven't been much aware of him. James Fallows is doing a good job of defending him from charges that look pretty absurd to me. The question I'd like to ask, though, is why it would be so important that the director of the NIC be loyal to Israel, other than the usual preference of some lobbies for that mental set. Could it be that unquestioning acceptance of Mossad-supplied intelligence is also felt to be desirable by those lobbies and their allies?
Updated: Max Blumenthal says that the objective is to lay the groundwork for bombing Iran with a scary series of NIEs.
Updated again: "Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair announced today that Ambassador Charles W. Freeman Jr. has requested that his selection to be Chairman of the National Intelligence Council not proceed. Director Blair accepted Ambassador Freeman’s decision with regret." Freeman's statement here.
And then there's the budget bill that the Senate may pass someday, or maybe not. Earmarks are in it, throwing the MSM and cable news into a tizzy. I would just like to point out that this bill is for running the government and all the agencies it funds for this fiscal year, which is now more than half over. Having suffered under this kind of caprice, I will say that this is one of the ways that the government wastes our money: stop-and-go funding that keeps project managers in the national laboratories, for only one example, guessing about their budgets and juggling numbers so as not to have to stop work and start up again later.
Added later: Andreas Persbo gives a nice summary of Iran's uranium mining activities. I would add that the open-pit mine can be monitored by satellite. It's not hard to calculate volumes removed from the pit, although this doesn't indicate how much uranium is in the material removed.