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• Trouble with Airline Codes
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• Fact-Checking the Apocalypse
• Skier Outjumps Avalanche

 

TED-ing This Week

I'm at the TED conference in Long Beach this week, so posting may be even more sporadic than its usual sporadic self. If you're here at TED, by all means track me down -- I love to find out what people are up to.

Yesterday's quick TED highlights:

• Robert Hammond talking about New York's High Line
• Nathan Myhrvold's nutty discussion of his new mega-cookbook
• A personal, impromptu hallway demo from Matt at Push Pop Press -- super impressive stuff

 

Today's Meta-Horoscope

A meta-horoscope of 22,000 horoscopes using the most common words:

[via IIB]

 

Field Notes

• Pro Sports vs. the Web Pirates (Source)
• Older Audience Makes Its Presence Known at the Movies (Source)
• Troubling article about a record year of lobster captures. Mesopredator release, anyone? (Source)
• Historical Oil Shocks (Source)
• ‘Volcano of Rage’ in Middle East (Source)
• Do you need ideal conditions to do great work? (Source)
• Free Kindle this November? (Source)
• Capitalist science (Source)
• Signal vs noise (Source)

 

Avalanche Hits Car on Way to Tahoe

I have never seen anything like this: At 45 seconds into this video, an avalanche hits a car on the way to Tahoe today. Incredible -- with language that is NSFW.

And only 315 views? This is going to go very viral.

 

Inside Sina Weibo -- China's Twitter

Good deck from Bill Bishop looking at Sina Weibo, China's Twitter. As Bill says, it is not fair to merely call Sina Weibo a Twitter clone as it is more like a full social networking service.

 

Field Notes: Shuttle, Oil, Snow, Dams. etc

• Why you really can’t swap Libyan oil for Saudi (Source)
• Melting Snow and Ice Warm Northern Hemisphere : Image of the Day (Source)
• Oil could hit $220 a barrel on Libya and Algeria fears, warns Nomura (Source)
• 3 Great Ways to Watch the Last Space Shuttle Missions (Source)
• Coveting thy neighbors fitness as a means to resolve social dilemmas (Source)
• The influence of large dams on surrounding climate and precipitation patterns (Source)
• Small Nuclear War Could Reverse Global Warming for Years? (Source)
• Anthropocene: Age of Man (Source)

 

Don Rumsfeld, Goldbach's Conjecture and the Oak Island Mystery

Perhaps my favorite arm-waving, fix-everything-you-see executive memo ever. Only thing missing is something about solving Goldbach's conjecture, and maybe a directive to get to the bottom of the whole Oak Island pirate treasure thing. [-]

Source: Atlantic Wire

[Update] You can read more from the deranged Don Rumsfeld memos-to-Doug-Feith canon here.

 

Japan's Phillips Curve Looks Like Japan

No idea how I missed this, I am in awe at this finding: Japan's Phillips curve looks like Japan. Suddenly all of economics is put in a new Rorschach-ian light.

Source: Smith, G. Japan’s Phillips Curve Looks Like Japan. Gregor Smith. Queen’s Economics Department Working Paper No. 1083, Queen’s University

 

Bear Grylls: Pull the Rip Cord Earlier

From a new Men's Journal interview with Bear "Man vs Wild" Grylls:

What advice would you give the younger you?

Pull that damned reserve cord earlier, idiot.

More here.

 

 

Freeman Dyson on "The Information"

In the latest New York Review of Books Freeman Dyson reviews James Gleick's latest, The Information. A review excerpt on the myth of "heat death":

The visible growth of ordered structures in the universe seemed paradoxical to nineteenth-century scientists and philosophers, who believed in a dismal doctrine called the heat death. Lord Kelvin, one of the leading physicists of that time, promoted the heat death dogma, predicting that the flow of heat from warmer to cooler objects will result in a decrease of temperature differences everywhere, until all temperatures ultimately become equal. Life needs temperature differences, to avoid being stifled by its waste heat. So life will disappear.

...The belief in a heat death was based on an idea that I call the cooking rule. The cooking rule says that a piece of steak gets warmer when we put it on a hot grill. More generally, the rule says that any object gets warmer when it gains energy, and gets cooler when it loses energy. Humans have been cooking steaks for thousands of years, and nobody ever saw a steak get colder while cooking on a fire. The cooking rule is true for objects small enough for us to handle. If the cooking rule is always true, then Lord Kelvin’s argument for the heat death is correct.

We now know that the cooking rule is not true for objects of astronomical size, for which gravitation is the dominant form of energy. The sun is a familiar example. As the sun loses energy by radiation, it becomes hotter and not cooler. Since the sun is made of compressible gas squeezed by its own gravitation, loss of energy causes it to become smaller and denser, and the compression causes it to become hotter. For almost all astronomical objects, gravitation dominates, and they have the same unexpected behavior. Gravitation reverses the usual relation between energy and temperature. In the domain of astronomy, when heat flows from hotter to cooler objects, the hot objects get hotter and the cool objects get cooler. As a result, temperature differences in the astronomical universe tend to increase rather than decrease as time goes on. There is no final state of uniform temperature, and there is no heat death. Gravitation gives us a universe hospitable to life. Information and order can continue to grow for billions of years in the future, as they have evidently grown in the past.

 

 

Field Notes: Cascades, Civilization, Diseases, Fisker Karma, etc.

• Contrasting cascade effects of carnivores on plant fitness: a meta-analysis (Source)
• Adam Smith on the cyclicity of the rise and fall of civilization (Source)
• Emerging diseases in freshwater systems (Source)
• First Drive Review of Fisker Karma (Source)
• Why Saudi is now in play (Source)
• Niall Ferguson: Visionary (or) crank? (Source)
• Albert Pujols and Linear Dollars Per Win (Source)

 

It's Full of Farms!

To a first approximation, the center of the U.S. is all farm. Interesting figure showing the shape of the farming heart of the country:

 

Food Share of Spending Around the World

While a little dated, I doubt the general shape of this has USDA figure of food spending as a percentage of consumer spending around the world has changed much since 1997. Remarkable ramp as you exit the developed world.

 

Palms and Snow

 

QOTD: Youth and Risk and Slackers

From WSJ today:

It's remarkable what you can achieve when you're too young to realize your limitations, or even to know that limitations exist.