“This is kind of the equivalent of the Golden Spike”

by Orange County Archives

Space Station crew likes new SpaceX transport vehicle
[Via Alaska Dispatch]

The crew of the International Space Station got its first look at the inside of its newest visitor – Space Exploration Technologies Corporation’s Dragon cargo ship – Saturday morning and pronounced it a keeper.

The craft made aerospace history Friday by becoming the first commercially built and operated spacecraft to rendezvous and dock with another spacecraft on orbit.

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Just as the the Golden Spike commemorated the linkage of America by rail, the docking of the Dragon Capsule to the ISS is a huge milestone for the linkage of Earth to outer space.

The transcontinental trains permitted cargo to transit the US in both directions.

So too can the Dragon capsule. It is the first cargo capsule for supplying the ISS that can also take material back to earth. It moves cargo in both directions.

The discovery of America was important but we would not be where we are today without the Golden Spike. I truly believe that in 100 years they will see this docking in a similar light.

The end of the NFL could be beginning

by somegeekintn

NFL’s concussion concerns hit home for parents of young players, clouding football’s future
[Via The Washington Post ]

Already uneasy about the idea of letting her 7-year-old son Jason start playing tackle football, Elizabeth Giancarli made up her mind when former NFL star Junior Seau committed suicide.

While many of her son’s friends are moving on to tackle, he’ll be playing another year of flag football.

 “I just couldn’t put him in tackle football, only because of everything that’s been going on,” Giancarli said. “I think that the Junior Seau suicide really hit home, too. So we decided to put him in another year of flag, because the impact is significantly less.” 

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I wrote about this earlier - the loss of fresh faces playing football could dry up the pool of talent for the pros.

The next step will be insurance and liability suits. Then we might see High Schools dropping football.

And we are seeing pro football players becoming leery of their own children playing football. That’s going to have a huge effect.

Until we get a better handle on the exact path of problem, these might be the sorts of actions we see.

More bullies get their come-uppance

by Eddie~S

New Jersey mayor, son, arrested on charges they nuked recall website
[Via Ars Technica]

The mayor of a small New Jersey hamlet has been arrested, along with his son, on federal charges that they shut down a website advocating the mayor’s recall after breaking into the online accounts of political foes.

According to federal officials, Felix Roque, mayor of West New York, New Jersey, and his son, Joseph Roque, were arrested early Thursday morning by FBI agents. In February, the pair planned and executed the silencing of www.recallroque.com by gaining unauthorized access to the GoDaddy account used to control the domain name. An FBI special agent filed documents with these allegations in a New Jersey federal court. The father-and-son team also obtained e-mails and messages sent among opponents after gaining unauthorized access to e-mail and Facebook accounts.

“I have always treated you with respect and courtesy, but I have copies of everything sent to the website and communications with names,” Mayor Roque wrote in an e-mail to one of the opponents, whose identity had remained unknown to the Roques until they gained illegal access to the accounts. “Remember, I am in the Army with many friends.”

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Hope they go away for awhile.

One thing about our new transparent society – bullies are also shown in the light of day. Communities have had ways of dealing with bullies since humans evolved. It is just that current society allows them to hide quite well.

At least society before the internet.

Just remember, Hustler is no friend of women, ever.

We Are All S.E. Cupp, the Conservative Pundit Bullied by Hustler –
[Via Duly Noted]

Hustler ran a photoshopped image of conservative pundit S.E. Cupp with the headline, “What Would S.E. Cupp Look Like With a **** in Her Mouth?”:

S.E. Cupp is a lovely young lady who read too much Ayn Rand in high school and ended up joining the dark side. Cupp, an author and media commentator who often shows up on Fox News programs, is undeniably cute. But her hotness is diminished when she espouses dumb ideas like defunding Planned Parenthood. Perhaps the method pictured here is Ms. Cupp’s suggestion for avoiding an unwanted pregnancy. [Hustler via Mediaite]

This is beneath contempt. This time the victim is a conservative pundit who is being humiliated for her outspoken views on reproductive rights, but this kind of bullying can happen to any woman who speaks her mind. Remember when tech blogger Kathy Sierra was harassed with “satirical” images of herself in pornographic poses?

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This is every bit a horrible as what was done to Sandra Fluke. Printing made-up, humiliating pictures of women, then trying to state that it is done for political reasons does not pass the smell test.

Bullys are destructive no matter how they try and couch their reasons.

This is true:

We value women’s reproductive freedom because we value women’s freedom in general, including the freedom to express unpopular, offensive, and just plain ignorant views. Using sexualized attacks to silence women is antithetical to the struggle for reproductive rights.

Reducing someone to sexually degrading pictures is a way to sell magazines. Hustler simply decided to use the Photoshop technique to couch their business model in some sort of political terms.

Printing humiliating pictures of models is one thing. But to simply take a women in the public eye and reduce her to a sexualized thing.

It would be nice if there was some judicial route for her. But Hustler’s lawyers are pretty good. Maybe someone needs to get pictures of the editors and photographers of Hustler and print really humiliating pictures of them.

The only thing bullys understand is strong, direct approaches.

Why police hate being photographed – it reveals that they lie and do so often

 

by conner395

Citizen Video Evidence Helps Two Arrested Photographers Have Their Cases Dropped
[Via Techdirt]

Just as we’ve seen the DOJ come out and scold police for taking away people’s rights by arresting people photographing or videotaping police, we have two separate stories (found via PetaPixel) of photographers who were arrested by police for taking photos of public protests, both of whom had their cases dropped due to videotaped evidence from others that was posted to YouTube.

The two cases were unrelated, but have a similar fact pattern (and one not particularly different than previous stories we’ve seen). One case, in Seattle, involved a photographer named Joshua Garland, who started photographing recent protests in downtown Seattle, and was arrested and charged with third degree assault supposedly for “grabbing a police officer’s hand and twisting his arm.” Garland’s lawyer, Andrea Robertson, went on YouTube and was able to piece together videos of the incident, which she then showed to prosecutors, saying that the video footage made it clear “there was absolutely no way that the officer’s account of events is what actually happened.” Because of that, police dropped the charges.

Meanwhile, dealing with a similar issue in New York, photographer Alexander Arbuckle actually went to trial, where, once again someone else’s YouTube footage helped exonerate him (and show that the police appeared to lie). In this case, he was charged with “disorderly conduct” (which we see a lot in cases where police arrest photographers for photographing or videotaping them. The police officer claimed, under oath in court, that Arbuckle was in the street and blocking traffic, leading to the arrest.

Thankfully (or, if you’re the police, unfortunately), there was a lot of evidence contradicting that statement. This included Arbuckle’s own photos, which were taken from the sidewalk, and (more importantly) a Ustream video from a guy named Tim Pool “showed that not only was Arbuckle on the sidewalk, so were all the other protestors.” As the Village Voice notes, “the only thing blocking traffic on 13th Street that night was the police themselves.” Here’s the video, with the key section being from 31:50 until about 35:00.
As Petapixel points out, this certainly suggests that the police lied under oath.

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Yep, documented evidence that the police lied and did so under oath. In fact, many times their lying has been revealed by ubiquitous cameras.

So no wonder they want to violate the Constitution to stop them. And even then, they have been shown to lie on their reports and to lie on the stand.

And they would have continued to get away with this lying if not for other cameras.

I imagine a lot of cops hate the fact that these cameras now force them to be a little more honest and not lie as much. But that is the only way to keep bullies drunk on authoritarian power in check.

I hope these cops get charged with perjury and fired. Maybe then other cops will focus on doing their job instead of lying.

Making electricity from viruses

Sheets of Virus Generate Electricity when Squished
[Via Ars Technica]

Squishing a stack of virus sheets generates enough electricity to power a small liquid crystal display. With increased power output, these virus films might one day use the beating of your heart to power a pacemaker, the researchers behind them say.

Piezoelectric materials build up charge when pushed or squeezed. These materials may be familiar to you: they generate the spark in a gas lighter, and motors powered by such materials vibrate some cell phones. Piezoelectric materials made of metals or polymers require large inputs of energy to build up a charge. Bone, DNA, and protein fibers are weakly piezoelectric, but it’s hard to efficiently organize these materials on a large scale to yield electricity.

To handle this organizational issue, Seung-Wuk Lee, of the University of California in Berkeley and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and his colleagues looked for a biomaterial that had intrinsic order and was easy to make. They settled on the M13 bacteriophage, a rod-shaped virus that only infects bacteria. One bacterium can produce one million copies of the virus within four hours, so starting material isn’t a problem. And the virus neatly arranges itself in stacked rows when spread on a surface.

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Pretty cool use. These viruses can only affect certain types of bacteria. Nothing to be afraid of.

I wonder if they ever will be made into something useful?

Tech CEOs say dumb things because …

Why Tech CEOs Seem So Dumb. (It’s a trick question.)
[Via Dave Winer's linkblog feed]

Why Tech CEOs Seem So Dumb. (It’s a trick question.)

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Nice to have some recent examples of really dumb things said by the 50-something leaders of tech companies.

Here is how Steve Jobs put it and he is exactly right:

“I have my own theory about why the decline happens at companies like IBM or Microsoft. The company does a great job, innovates and becomes a monopoly or close to it in some field, and then the quality of the product becomes less important. The product starts valuing the great salesmen, because they’re the ones who can move the needle on revenues, not the product engineers and designers. So the salespeople end up running the company.”

Thus we have the head of Time-Warner cable who does not understand Air Play and also displays his ignorance of Apple TV, something that could potentially directly compete with cable.

I would go as far as to say do not invest in any tech company whose head is not ‘of’ the company. Ballmer is a sales guy. Tim Cook is a manufacturing guy. Which one really has a firm understanding of the tech underpinnings of the company?

I’d go with the guy who really understands how the things are built over the guy who really only understands how to market and sell the thing.

Surveillance of a treehouse by a Quadcopter

Quadcopter video tour of treehouse in BC Canada
[Via Boing Boing]

[Video Link] Here’s a quadcopter video tour of a treehouse somewhere in BC, Canada. (Via Llyod Kahn’s blog)

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Just a sample of how quadcopters can take some amazing videos. As long as private people can also use these, they will be amazing tools.

But if only authorities are allowed to use them, then we are well on the way to oppression.

“Wall Street is capitalism in its purest form, and capitalism is predicated on bad behavior.”

Fables of Wealth –
[Via NYTimes.com]

THERE is an ongoing debate in this country about the rich: who they are, what their social role may be, whether they are good or bad. Well, consider the following. A recent study found that 10 percent of people who work on Wall Street are “clinical psychopaths,” exhibiting a lack of interest in and empathy for others and an “unparalleled capacity for lying, fabrication, and manipulation.” (The proportion at large is 1 percent.) Another study concluded that the rich are more likely to lie, cheat and break the law.

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Not much to comment on. I just want to have this on my blog so I can come back to it when I read the latest atrocity by JP Morgan or the glory of a totally free market.

Wall Street is capitalism in its purest form, and capitalism is predicated on bad behavior.

It can harness some of our baser emotions – greed, pride, vanity – to produce some positive things for society.  But we should not be surprised that it also attracts people who are very greedy, very prideful and very vain.

And that those people are just as happy doing things that hurt society as a whole.

Dinosaur farts had no lasting detrimental effect on the climate

by IvanWalsh.com

Grats! A new wingnut zombie lie is born
[Via The Zingularity]

Let’s follow the arc of just one wingnut whopper. It starts as a seed in the form of a flatly untrue headline by none other than Fox News shouting out ‘scientists say dinos farted themselves to extinction’. Ahem:

(PZ) — But the paper makes no such claim, instead suggesting that the mass of herbivores during the Mesozoic would have made a substantial, but stable, contribution of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere that may have been partially responsible for the warmer, moister climate of the era …

But the truth doesn’t matter, facts are so unimportant we can’t even stop to check; we are witnessing wingnuts getting busy, hotly engrossed in zombie baby-making! Dozens of news sites get sucked in. Next up RushBo takes the false headline and pollinates it, mocking climate scientists for ‘claiming dino’s farted themselves to extinction’. Worldnut Daily and other large sites soil themselves congratulating Rush for ripping scientists who say ‘dinosaurs farted themselves to extinction,’ and throw in some zippy one liners.

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It is much easier to lie if you never know the truth. So Fox starts it off by being misleading and it goes from there.

And people like to remember lies that fit what they want to believe. So it becomes easy to continue to not acknowledge climate change by believing lies about climate scientists.

This zombie lie will continue to plague us for years, being a favorite of those denialists who do not acknowledge climate change.

Charts everyone should look at

Chart Book: The Legacy of the Great Recession —
[Via Center on Budget and Policy Priorities]

The United States went through its longest, and by most measures worst economic recession since the Great Depression between December 2007 and June 2009. This chartbook will document the course of the economy following that recession against the background of how deep a hole the recession created – and how much deeper that hole would have been without the financial stabilization and fiscal stimulus policies enacted in late 2008 and early 2009.

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The data tell a mighty tale. Such as change in GDP:

Obama took over in the first quarter 2009. There has been an increase in GDP every quarter since.

The Recovery Act was passed in February 2009. Since then we see increasing employment in the private sector – 4.2 million jobs added or 163,000 a month. While the previous 12 months were all job losses. Real jobs have been created.

This one shows just how bad the job situation was. The previous recessions mostly reached bottom within 18 months. This one went out to 2.5 years.

But it would have been much worse without the stimulus. That stimulus, as small as it was, may be the thing that prevents a seconds recession, one that much of Europe is now experiencing.

The Bishops are going after the Girl Scouts

by upyernoz

Catholic bishops to scrutinize Girl Scouts –
[Via The Washington Post]

The nation’s Roman Catholic bishops are reviewing the church’s long-standing ties to the Girl Scouts of the USA after complaints that some of that venerable organization’s programs might contradict church teachings on contraception and abortion.

The inquiry by the Catholic bishops has been ongoing for two years and was prompted by persistent reports, circulated on the Internet and by some social conservatives, that the Girl Scouts of the USA has ties to Planned Parenthood or, for example, endorses material on sexuality that the church would not approve.

Girl Scout leaders have denied the claims, but the bishops decided to continue their inquiry. In a March 28 letter to his fellow bishops, Bishop Kevin C. Rhoades, chairman of the Committee on Laity, Marriage, Family Life and Youth, wrote that “important questions still remain and need to be examined.”

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Apparently if you are friends with people who work with other people that the Bishops don’t like, they can cut you off. Almost  20% of the Girl Scouts are Catholic. Are they going to expell them if they stay in the group?

But there is a strong push among the bishops to ensure that no church organization has even remote connections to doctrinally problematic groups.

They ignored child abuse of boys and girls for decades but they have the moral authority to investigate the Girl Scouts to make sure they are not working with the those who are disreputable? They want to create a purity barrier that prevents any interactions with “doctrinally problematic groups”  even as they protected child molesters?

When a group like the Girl Scouts is to be investigated because they are not pure enough and may have connections with “doctrinally problematic groups,” I have to wonder how the Bishops would have felt about a certain great teacher from 2000 years ago – one who ate, drank and worked with the very sort of people the Bishops wish to purify themselves from?

The founder of their religion consorted with the disreputable His whole adult life. He preached the benefits of doing just that rather than creating a purity barrier. He chided the Pharisees for using doctrine and dogma to cut off the “doctrinally problematic groups”.

Perhaps the Bishops should reread Luke 18:9-14. Or perhaps Matthew  9:10-13. Jesus consorted with sinners in order to save them. He did not cast them away and remain ‘pure’ by separating himself from them. That is what the Pharisees did.

Perhaps the Bishops should reread the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5, 6 and 7; Luke 6), particularly the part about motes, beams  and eyes. Or reread the two Great Commandments, with the second one being restated many, many times in the gospels in order to drive the point home.

“Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.”  Whether Christ was the Son of God or not is an unfathomable question to prove. But he was one of the greatest teachers in human history. He provided a way around the revenge-oriented approaches so many religions take, especially the Abrahamic ones. They project a harsh world – an eye for an eye – one where everyone is constantly at each other’s throats and strong efforts must be made to show the outward purity of each group, the righteousness of its cause. One can only kill one’s enemies if one is wholly separate from them.

And the warfare can never stop until all of one’s enemies are dead. The entire religion becomes one of separating people into bucket : those like us – the pure, the righteous; and all the rest – the sinners. Purity and righteousness become a public display to demonstrate which group one belongs to.

But Jesus taught a way to short circuit that by using the approach of the Golden Rule to eventually suck out the poison that the other religions had. The world is a reciprocal place, where my actions produce actions in others. If I treat others as myself, they will eventually treat me the same way.

We are all one.

We are not separate. Instead we are the same. The lack of purity is something we all share, a recognition that we are all humans trying to survive in the real world and worry about what happens next. Jesus taught that the only way to make it through is not so separate into a bunch of pure buckets – all fighting over who is most pure and who is not – but to coalesce into one group of all humanity that recognizes our faults and tries to do better – to ourselves and to others.

I think the Bishops are falling away from the path Jesus taught. They are creating a purity approach, where they separate themselves wholly from those who are not as pure as they and then destroy those enemies as quickly as possible. Anyone who is not with them 100% becomes an other. They seek a small Church of pure, righteous followers rather than a larger Church of believers and sinners. They seem to be following the Old Testament teachings more than they are following teachings of the Gospels.

I think they will fail in their efforts. I think Jesus would approve of that failure.

We’re all mutants now

We’re all mutants now
[Via Ars Technica]

The field of study called population genetics has played a critical role in the development of modern biology, helping unite Mendelian genetics and Darwinian evolution into one coherent framework. In most genetics classes, though, it typically gets plowed through in a simplified form in a single lecture. I suspect this is because it involves a lot of math, and most biologists like being in the field precisely because it’s generally possible to avoid all but the simplest math.

Nevertheless, population genetics has some critical insights to offer in the area of modern genomics, as evidenced by a paper that appeared in this week’s edition of Science. Some population geneticists have looked into the results of the search for mutations in genome data. Their conclusion: the human population explosion has led to the appearance of many new, rare mutations in the human population, and it’s throwing all the math off, which has some serious implications for medical research.

At the simplest level, population genetics can help us predict how often a mutation should be present in a specific population. Feed its equations things like the population size, how harmful or beneficial the mutation is, the typical mutation rate, and so forth, and it will spit out a nice prediction of what the final frequency of the mutation should be. It nicely demonstrates why even harmful mutations stick around at low levels in a population, even as evolution is doing its best to get rid of them.

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Important point – in a rapidly expanding population, there is not much fixation of mutations. This means that DNA changes have not spread very far around the population because there has not been enough time. So the changes we see are pretty much tied to families and nothing else – the so-called founder effect. For complex traits, there may not be a set of genes that are all changed the same way. There may be a lot of genes that are all changed somewhat differently. This makes finding out what is going on much tougher.

The stock market does not understand Apple

Back to the balance sheet
[Via asymco]

I first noted a correlation between Apple’s share price and its balance sheet a year ago. In February, when I last checked, Apple’s share price was priced nearly at 4.6 times its cash value. The stock has had a brief rally but has returned to the trend line it’s had since late 2008.

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Warren Buffett this weekend explained that Wall Street just doe not understand Apple or other 21st century companies.

• “I would not be at all surprised to see them be worth a lot more money 10 years from now but I would not buy either one of them.”
• “I sure as hell wouldn’t short them either.”
• “We couldn’t predict what would happen to Apple 10 years ago and we can’t predict what will happen to it 10 years from now.”
• “The chances of being way wrong in IBM (IBM) are probably less, at least for us, than the chances of being way wrong in Google or Apple.”
• “I just don’t know how to value them.”

The inability of the stock market to fairly value Apple on any fundamental sense is an easy proof of the inefficiency of the market. It is not perfect, especially with disruptive companies such as Apple.

The figure above shows the price of Apple correlates with the amount of  cash it has on hand. The important aspect of this is that there is no fundamental reason for why this should be. None. An efficient stock market should not value a company based on this measure.

Then we have this, from the same article. It looks at fundamentals and shows just how far off from expected they are for Apple:

 

The P/E ratio is supposed to be a measure of the future value of the company. Amazon has a P/E ratio of about 190. The market expects its stock price to increase a lot. Apple’s P/E ratio is about the same as a utility. The stock market does not expect Apple’s earnings in the future to grow much.

The PEG ratio is a somewhat crude measure of how efficient the market values a company. The P/E ratio should be a measure of growth. If we divide that by growth, we get the PEG ratio. A value of 1 indicates a close approximation of future growth with real growth.

Apple over the last 5 years has never been close to a ratio of 1. The market has substantially undervalued Apple and not properly predicted growth. Apple is almost ridiculously undervalued right now with a PEG ratio less than 0.2

Perhaps one reason it is worth going into debt to get a college degree

Underemployment rate of workers age 16 and older by education, 1994-2012 |
[Via State of Working America]

Updated April 23, 2012 This National Jobs chart is an Economic Indicator, updated when new data is released. Data is current as of April 23, 2012.

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The rates for college graduates are only about 1% higher than the overall rate. But if they have a High School degree, the rate more than doubles.

And it is worse the less education they have. College graduates are underemployed. So they might not be making a great wage right now but they are taking jobs away from the less educated, substantially increasing their employment rates.