Why the Government Fails to Maintain Anything

I commend to your attention this essay by Jim Powell on (obviously) why the government fails to maintain anything. First, since Powell mentions Hurricane Katrina it is timely for those who watched When the Levees Brokeon Prime TV a little while ago. Second, the points raised are by Powell, being universal, are applicable here. The main lesson, and one that a Libertarian will hammer home until the end of time, is that incentives matter.

Sunday Science

Gentle Reader, I need your assistance. There is something about the Space Shuttle that bugs me because I can’t work out why it happens. Let me explain

Sunday Science

Some things in the Universe are a lot bigger than we are…

Of related interest, the star Betelgeuse, a Red Supergiant in Orion has shrunk 15% in the past 15 years which – for a star with a radius that would take it out to Jupiter – works out at a continuous shrinkage of 770kmph for 15 years (effectively the same distance as the radius of Venus, 108 million km, Jupiter otbits at 780 million km.).

Betelgeuse via the Hubble Space Telescope

Maybe this is a precursor to a supernova?

One can only hope so, apparently if Betelgeuse does blow up she will be brighter than the full Moon

A Supervova in Galaxy NGC 4526 – almost as bright as the galactic center.

The Year of the Cat

You know the old saying “Dogs have owners, Cats have staff”? Well it is true as this article on the evolution of the domesticated cat explains.

“…whereas other domesticates were recruited from the wild by humans who bred them for specific tasks, cats most likely chose to live among humans because of opportunities they found for themselves.”

They aren’t hierarchical, like dogs, so humans can’t become an “alpha male”. They can digest only meat, a rarity for 99% of humanity for 99% of our history, and whereas you can’t teach on old dog new tricks, you can’t teach a cat anything. What is intriguing is just how recent the introduction of the cat to Europe is.

By 2,000 years ago, when the Romans were expanding their empire, domestic cats were traveling with them and becoming common throughout Europe. Evidence for their spread comes from the German site of Tofting in Schleswig, which dates to between the 4th and 10th centuries, as well as increasing references to cats in art and literature from that period. (Oddly, domestic cats seem to have reached the British Isles before the Romans brought them over—a dispersal that researchers cannot yet explain.)

It took the Roman empire to spread cats. Meanwhile, halfway around the world, domestic cats reached China where there were no wild populations.

Then something interesting happened. Because no native wildcats with which the newcomers could interbreed lived in the Far East, the Oriental domestic cats soon began evolving along their own trajectory. Small, isolated groups of Oriental domestics gradually acquired distinctive coat colors and other mutations through a process known as genetic drift, in which traits that are neither beneficial nor maladaptive become fixed in a population.

This drift led to the emergence of the Korat, the Siamese, the Birman and other “natural breeds,” which were described by Thai Buddhist monks in a book called…

Seriously, wait until you hear the title of this book!

“…the Tamara Maew (meaning “Cat-Book Poems”) that may date back to 1350.”

Saturday Videos

If you are having a bite to eat, why not settle back and watch this nature video of a caterpillar hatching.*

Nature can be horrible, red in tooth and claw. For something more uplifting watch this video of the Hubble being released from the Space Shuttle, it is simply glorious.

Back down to earth, I have succumbed to “season flu”, and have also discovered this game created by the UK Clinical Virology Network…

…the object of which is to infect as many people as possible with all sorts of diseases.  Also worth is look is “Pandemic 2“

* The caterpillar is hatching wasp larvae.

Sex Education

I add nothing, the story does half the telling, the picture even more. 

SPRINGFIELD – A Marysville mother was arrested on Friday, May 15, after police found her having sex with a man in the front seat of a car while her two young children sat in the back seat, according to police reports.

Danica A. Wallace, 24, was charged with two counts of endangering children as well as public indecency, drug paraphernalia and driving while intoxicated and taken to Clark County Jail, according to a Springfield police report. Her 3-year-old son and 1-year-old daughter were taken in by family.

Police said they found Wallace engaged in sexual activity with Eric Welch, 29, of Springfield. Wallace told police that she had been driving, but pulled over to have sex with Welch because they could not have sex at the friend’s house where they had been, according to the police report.

Wallace admitted to drinking and failed a field sobriety test; and police found open beer bottles and a piece of foil with marijuana residue in the vehicle, according to the report.

Welch, of 275 W. Fifth St., was charged with public indecency, according to the report.

 

[HT The Flint Skinny]

 

If you were a good Parent, how about a Frank Lloyd Wright Lego set?

 

Mt Albert – Vote Pistorius.

There is a by-election next week that, unforunately I am ineligable to vote in – not living in the elctorate and all.  But if I did my ornage tick would go to one man, and one man only. Julian Pistorius.

Why Julian? Because there is no reason to vote for any of the others. Contrary to being “the best of a bad bunch”, Julian is the only good man in a bad bunch. Melissa Lee doesn’t want the job, she’s in the race to come second. And she’s already an MP, as is Russel Norman and John Boscawen. John was ACT’s candidate for my electorate in the General Election and despite his sterling work fighting the EFA has succumbed to St Johnnysburg and was last seen voting for the ridiculous banning of gang patches.

Concentrating on the two major parties, you wouldn’t think of voting for Labour after their nine year failure to, by their own standards, get us back in the top half of the OECD.

National also are if best a disappointment and at worst dishonest after their cancelling of promised tax cuts, aforementioned gang patch legislation and überstadt.  I said to a friend during the last election campaign that Labour would fair if they attacked John Key, and that a far better idea for them would be to attack the people behind him like the odious Nick Smith who when campaigning was happy to complain about “Nanny State” (a Libertarianz term he does not have the mana to use) bossing us on water pressure, but when in power took of the transparent mask to suggest nannying our grocery shopping with a tax on plastic bags.

Our man Julian will have none of this.  He could find enough chaff in the budget to give you a tax cut of which dreams are made.  Speaking locally he would also have the common courtesy to ask you first to see if he would like to put a motorway through where your house now sits – and most importantly would respect your wishes if you answered no.

But what better way is there to promote Mr Pistorius than with the man himself…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When you think about it there really is no other choice.  Read his Blog, join the Facebook group, enlighten yourselves further with the offerings below from my Libertarian colleagues Scott and Peter, and most importantly Vote Pistorius!

Peter’s opening salvo.

Scott’s opening salvo.

The Day Today: Tuesday 19th May 2009

Reading through this excellent editorial by Eamonn Butler of the Adam Smith Institute, I was struck by these paragraphs:

The United States has had four big tax cuts over the past century. In 1921, President Coolidge cut the top rate from 63 per cent to 25 per cent. Five years later the top earners (people on incomes over $100,000) were paying 86.3 per cent more than they had before. The economic boost fuelled the Roaring Twenties.

In 1964 President Kennedy cut the top rate from 91 per cent to 70 per cent. Two years later the top 5 per cent of earners were paying 7.7 per cent more in taxes, while the bottom half were paying 9.2 per cent less.

When President Reagan cut the top rate from 70 per cent to just 28 per cent between 1981 and 1988, the share of revenues paid by the top 1 per cent of taxpayers rocketed from 17.6 per cent to 27.5 per cent. He cut capital gains tax as well, from 28 per cent to 20 per cent – and again, revenues leapt by half, from $12.5 billion to $18.7 billion in only two years. The cuts launched the longest period of wealth creation the world has known. And under George Bush’s cuts too the wealthy ended up paying more, not less.

So taxes have had to be cut from astronomical highs, well over 60 percent four times in the past century?! Trying to keep government down really is like pushing water uphill with a rake sometimes, when Jefferson talked of “eternal vigilance” he wasn’t kidding.

Boffins have discovered that oxygen created by bacteria 2.5 billion years ago caused Earth’s first ice age.

Geologists may have uncovered the answer to an age-old question – an ice-age-old question, that is. It appears that Earth’s earliest ice ages may have been due to the rise of oxygen in Earth’s atmosphere, which consumed atmospheric greenhouse gases and chilled the earth.

Two and a half billion years ago, before the Earth’s atmosphere contained appreciable oxygen, photosynthetic bacteria gave off oxygen that first likely oxygenated the surface of the ocean, and only later the atmosphere. The first formed oxygen reacted with iron in the oceans, creating iron oxides that settled to the ocean floor in sediments called banded iron-formations – layered deposits of red-brown rock that accumulated in ocean basins around the worldwide. Later, once the iron was used up, oxygen escaped from the oceans and started filling up the atmosphere.
Once oxygen made it into the atmosphere, Kaufman’s team suggests that it reacted with methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, to form carbon dioxide, which is 62 times less effective at warming the surface of the planet. “With less warming potential, surface temperatures may have plummeted, resulting in globe-encompassing glaciers and sea ice” said Kaufman.

That’s why we need to keep on pumping out that carbon. Bacteria are doing their darnedest to pump out oxygen and cool the planet down so we freeze to death, our survival depends on neutralising their pernicious photosynthesis.

Μη μου τους κύκλους τάραττε!

As might be obvious to followers of this Blog your correspondent is a great fan of science. Those that give him the most solace are the biological sciences, thanks to a steady diet of Attenborough (which we shall leave to one side today), and astronomy. Since there was no Attenborough of space readily available in New Zealand (Carl Sagan, Patrick Moore) this love had to be self-guided with special mention going first to this book and the fantastic illustrations within (the web does not do it justice).

And second to my telescope in my possession since youth. Hartmann’s drawings added with the imagination of a young boy makes for powerful stuff, and to see the Galileans (Jupiter’s four main moons) or Saturn’s rings for yourself is also breathtaking. Here’s Jupiter and her (his?) four main moons called the “Galileans” through your average backyard telescope. Again this picture might not look like much on the screen but observed through your own telescope pointed at a speck of light, and with a little reflection on just what it is you are looking at, the distances and sizes involved, that is what gets you

Man cannot live by science alone, he needs a bit of the humanities. For my humanities I very much like the Classical world of ancient Greece, Rome, and Egypt. Give me a time machine and I would ignore everything past Constantine. The testosterone in me would love to sit on a hill and watch an old-fashioned set-piece battle with swords and shields, horses for tanks, and arrows for bullets. Just as interesting would be to watch people living with a completely different worldview, without the yoke of monotheism we have been saddled with for the last few thousand years. Without knowing the full extent of the earth, and where the undiscovered peoples and lands are not a few tribes in New Guinea but whole continents and civilizations. As much as I love all that we have discovered since the Enlightenment, going back to a time when everything was undiscovered has a certain appeal

Astronomy and the Classical world connect. Without television there was not much else to do but study the skies and/or compose Homeric epics. The word “Planet” comes from the Greek “to wander” for example, due to some stars not remaining in a fixed position and seeming to wander around. The most obvious connection though is that the Planet’s names are those of ancient gods:

Mercury – The Roman messenger God
Venus – The Roman Goddess of love
Mars – The Roman God of war
Jupiter – King of the Roman Gods
Saturn – The Roman God of agriculture and harvest
Uranus – The Greek God of the Sky
Neptune – The Roman God of the Sea

The Romans feature quite heavily (the only planet named after a Greek God was discovered in 1781) so one might presume they were a great scientific empire? Alas, apart from engineering, no. They did bugger all.

The Babylonians were giants of astronomy, as were the Egyptians. The Greeks also with their expert mathematical prowess did a great deal of astronomical theorising. Philosophy is impossible to study without some coverage of what a Greek said. We still use Pythagoras’ Theorem and Euclidian Geometry. Erastosthenes worked out the circumference of the Earth with great precision. One could go on at great length with almost countless examples of Greek thinking but you get the idea. In almost every field of study the first few pages of the stage 101 textbook has an obligatory reference to an ancient Greek who made the first tentative steps.

It seems a little unfair that the unscientific Romans get all the glory in a field where they had no input whatsoever, but all is not lost. Thanks to one of the fathers of modern astronomy, Johannes Kepler, the Greeks have taken back a portion of what is by rights more theirs than the Romans.

Kepler worked out three laws of planetary motion, after the Ptolemaic theory whereby the planets moved in perfect circles was discredited.

Kepler’s Third law states that “The square of the orbital period of a planet is directly proportional to the cube of the semi-major axis of its orbit.”. Meaning that planets further out from the Sun travel slower than those closer to the Sun, and this law gives that fact a bit of precision. To give the Wikipedian example “For example, suppose planet A is four times as far from the sun as planet B. Then planet A must traverse four times the distance of Planet B each orbit, and moreover it turns out that planet A travels at half the speed of planet B. In total it takes 4×2=8 times as long for planet A to travel an orbit, in agreement with the law (8^2=4^3).” But we needn’t delve further into this.

Kepler’s Second Law – “A line joining a planet and the sun sweeps out equal areas during equal intervals of time.” – is explained by this handy picture and again, we needn’t go further.

It is Kepler’s First Law that interests us. “The orbit of every planet is an ellipse with the sun at a focus.”

Of course, we have given names to the points where an object is nearest and farthest from the body is is orbiting. We’ll start with the Earth. Anyone who fishes or who spends much time out on the water would be aware of when the Moon is at its closest or farthest – Apogee and Perigee respectively – because of how the tides change. In those two words though, we can see a Trojan Horse for Greece to reclaim a foothold in what is rightfully hers.

Apogee and Perigee both have Greek prefixes “Apo” and “Peri“. It would be weird even for a mongrel language like English to have one part of a word from one language and another part from another language and so after “Apo” and “Peri” we have a derivative of “Gaia” – the Greek Godess of the Earth to give us the “-gee” ending. If we were to use the Latin we might have “Apiterra” and “Periterra“, not really a starter at all. But Greece is in! and this principle is used for those two points for any orbit.

Everything orbits the Sun with a Perihelion and Aphelion, Helios being the name the Greeks gave the Sun.

Mercury is a straight God-swap with the “-hermion” ending coming from Hermes, the Greek Mercury for Perihermion and Aphermion. As is Mars with “-areion“, Saturn “-krone“, Neptune “-poseidion” and the planet formerly known as Pluto, “-hadion“. Uranus is Greek to begin with so unsurprisingly has Periuranion and Apouranion.

Venus, if you guessed something akin to”aphrodition” you are mistaken. Were Venus to have a moon it would orbit with Pericytherion and Apocytherion after Cytheria, one of the places which claims Venus’ birth. The Moon has no satellite, but for the times during the Apollo Project when it did “-cynthion” from Cynthia, a sometime name for Artemis who was herself a sometime moon goddess.

Some justice at last then for the long suffering Greeks. Even better news is that astronomical naming conventions are incredibly broad and now throughout the Solar System mountains, valleys, and craters are named after mythological creatures, people, and places from around the world, not just the BCE Mediterranean, but those conventions are a story for another day.

The mosaic at the top of this post is of one of the greatest scientists in antiquity, Archimedes, just before his murder by the barbarian Roman hordes for continuing with his scientific work instead of meeting a Roman general.

The Day Today – May 2nd 2009

I, for one, welcome our new Robotic overlords. We have also invented a machine that shits.

I know this isn’t Livejournal, but “How Science Fiction Found Religion Once overtly political, the genre increasingly employs Christian allegory.”

Five minutes of fun. Star Formation…The Game.

Charles de Gaulle, made it clear that he wanted his Frenchmen to lead the liberation of Paris…Allied High Command agreed, but only on one condition: De Gaulle’s division must not contain any black soldiers.

Depressing that this sort of bullshit happened within living memory (and of course, even at all). Of note is the death of American historian John Hope Franklin who suffered much the same prejudice throughout his lifetime:

The day he was told by a white woman whom he was helping, at 12, across the road, that he should take his “filthy hands” off her. And the warm evening when he went to buy ice cream in Macon, Mississippi—a tall 19-year-old student from Fisk University, scholarly in his glasses—only to find as he left the store that a semi-circle of white farmers had formed to block his exit, silently implying that he should not try to break through their line.

Still though, who’d be disabled? This poor guy in a wheelchair just gets talked “through” sort of and ignored at the same time. God only knows the thought processes of the security guard. [HT Uncertain Principles, who has a good story of his own of his son being ignored]

I was waiting patiently in the airport, quietly watching people go by. My luggage was stacked up next to me and I felt that I looked like quite the world traveler. Suddenly this illusion was shattered when a security type guy came with a luggage cart and began loading my luggage. I sputtered a protest,

‘Hey, that’s my luggage.’

He looked at me, annoyed and said,

“Luggage can’t be left unattended.”

“I AM attending it,” I said incredulous.

“You don’t understand, SOME BODY needs to be in possession of the luggage,” he said and I didn’t get his implication, not yet, I was still too startled.

“I am in possession of this luggage, it is MINE,” my voice is rising.He looks at me with exaggerated patience,

“SOME BODY (long pause) needs to be attending the luggage.”I got it then, I wasn’t SOME BODY,

“Are you suggesting that I can’t supervise my own luggage because I’m in a wheelchair?”"You need to settle down, sir.”