Reckless, Unconcerned Humans Are Basic Cause of Whale Deaths

An interesting article in Scientific American reported on the human cause of whale death despite some protections. There are only 460 Atlantic right whales still alive.

Not that anything like extirpating species is meaningful to most Americans-really its not. The price of gasoline matters as well as tax cuts for the middle class so they can have the rich pay for it.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=most-whale-deaths-in-past-40-years-were-caused-by-humans

I read an interesting book on temperature in the Universe and found that some scientists think that there was a great planetary freeze that killed about all life on Earth may 560 million years ago. The entire world was covered by ice before some volcanoes poked through and issued enough global warming gasses to start a huge melt and let life once again get started.

http://www.nero.noaa.gov/prot_res/mmv/Guide%20to%20reporting%20Whale%20Sightings.pdf

There is a history of global warming and cooling on Earth that is rather radical, yet few would care enough to let humanity itself have a best chance to remain alive as a species. Rats may inherit Washington D.C., yet the new Earth for the saved may follow dirtocratic Armageddons of global warming, or not of course. One should read the fine print on those prophetic, scientific and religious concerns.

image credit: N.O.A.A.

Obama Team Squeezes Out Slightly Less Than 8% Unemployed Report

Unemployment and Obamacare; the unemployment situation is still very bad. More than 40% of the unemployed are long-term unemployed.

The Obama D.O.L. revised jobs created upward 86,000 jobs for July and  August  in a revision of their first reports. They had to get that unemployment rate below 8%. I suspected they would. Its a lawyer's administration and they may think its like a legal argument for publicity purposes they can win re-election with.

For the long term unemployed and for those without good health care who are injured or sick and have lost their retirement property to pay for medical and can't find work the Obamacare  paper-improvements are of little consolation. One wants a healthy economy and not one moribund, sick and trying to stagger over the election day finish line before collapsing into recession.

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-18563_162-57527161/job-numbers-up-but-recession-unemployment-persists

Forty-seven % is a number many can remember yet there are other employment and taxed statistics. Ones the unemployed are concerned about differ from those of Mandarin Obamanites.

According to the Depart. of Labor employment summaries released today the participation of non-institution Americans in the work force is just 63.9%-in other words 47% of non-institutionalized aren't employed and hence aren't paying taxes on work-that is a remarkable number.

Sure some of those people don't need to work, some can't find a job or aren't welcome to work facing discrimination against age or geographic origin or unpopularity with NPR (maybe), plainly though the Obama administration hasn't prioritized getting jobs for the poor and has failed to take adequate measures to assure that the poorest and out of work longest go to the front of the hiring line through tax incentives.

Good government supports realistic opportunity for all people to work at least part-time so citizens can have cash earnings instead of food stamps. Obama programs tend to work against free enterprise for the poor . Obamacare functions as a middle class bureaucratic dream scenario foisted on the poor to burden them with impossible to satisfy bureaucratic work on-line. There are many working age Americans that cannot use a computer and they will have to buy one, buy Internet service or libraries will need to have free computer numbers increase a lot as well as free instructors to train the semi-literate migrant farm workers how to use them as they go from state to state and need an exchange for insurance that isn't really located in Nigeria or Eastern Russia.

I cannot imagine what nightmarish difficulties a traveling, poor, journeyman painter or laborer will experience with Obamacare moving from state to state frequently in pursuit of work on a bicycle or motorbike. The lazy that will not travel are rewarded more than those that struggle to find work anywhere it is hiding in America. Bureaucrats expect citizens to be happy locals that move only with a Mayflower Truck and negotiations with the state department of the state they are relocating to.
Each state where he was will deny that he has a 'domicile' there because he sleeps under the stars without a pillow.

A good politician would support free walk-in public medical care for the poor in expanded VA hospitals and let the middle class pay for their own insurance from their sufficient prosperity.
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm

"In 2012,
employment growth has averaged 146,000 per month, compared with an average
monthly gain of 153,000 in 2011."

"Employment in financial activities edged up in September (+13,000), reflecting
modest job growth in credit intermediation (+6,000) and real estate (+7,000).

Manufacturing employment edged down in September (-16,000)"
The majority of people favor repeal of Obamacare...
http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/current_events/healthcare/health_care_law

In engineering, technology, economics and social sciences constructing models of systems structures is generally a better way to go than to simply build a system willy nilly. In aircraft and ship design one make construct a model to fulfill the best way of achieving particular goals. Obviously my mention of a health care system for the poor that would expand the existing V.A. system and treat all poor citizens for free is a model of a structure that would create simultaneously better health care for veterans, the poor and create a larger emergency preparedness infrastructure for national emergency. I believe it would be the most cost effective as well.

I am not the best social scientist. I got a score of 99% on the CLEP General Social Sciences and History Exam and have followed U.S. politics about 50 years so my perspective on how the U.S.A. might develop a functional, practical medical infrastructure to treat the poor and veterans while keeping taxpayer costs as low as possible while delivering effective treatment is made  less expertise than some. Even so the Obamcare system seems particularly onerous and patched together with vast potential cost overruns. In fact its purpose may really be to create jobs and profits for Americans that don't manufacture anything. In the September DOL report financial sector jobs went up while manufacturing dropped by more than 10,000. The same old trends are returning.

The Obamacare program is something like Richard M. Nixon's medical program as you may know. It  followed Romneycare in Massachusetts (that state wanted it) and I would think that since Mitt's father was a 68 presidential candidate as well as Nixon that the source of Obamacare actually is Richard Nixon.

Nixon was a forward thinking guy. He didn't envision an America transformed by networking and financial schemes with computers and fiber optics, quantitative trading in Dark Pools and so forth-I think the plain practical approach of physical hospitals and clinics for the poor and veterans would be far cheaper than the convoluted vast potential for corruption of Obamacare.

Global Warming & Four Points to Support U.S. Green Energy Development

The fundamentals of global warming are well known. The Earth has three proximal cycles named the Milankovich cycles affecting the amount of sunlight reaching the Earth. The 100,000 year cycle is the eccentricity of the orbit of the Earth around the sun. The 41,000 year cycle is the Earth obliquity, and the 22,000 year cycle is that of the precession of the poles.

There are other factors that warm the planet. One is radiation from the Earth's core. I wonder of plate tectonics-not just volcanism but the configuration of the continental plates in relation to the Milankovich cycles, don't also affect global heating-cooling.

I have been reading a good popular physics book on temperature recently by Segre' that is quite informative. I think the most interesting point I learned recently was that the atmospheric gases 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen and 1% argon don't trap solar radiation or infrared radiation from the Earth. Instead it is the trace elements such as Carbon dioxide that trap long-wavelength radiation warming the atmosphere.

The amount of sunlight arriving at the Earth should radiate off the planet back into space in equal measure conserving energy. If it did the Earth temperature should be 0 degrees F. It is that trace Co2 that provides the extra 60 degrees of warmth above zero that is the average temperature of the world-so if high-tech efforts to get rid of Co2 were too successful the world temperature would drop. It's a narrow, knife edge balance easy to change.

I can think of three simple legislative measures that should be done to stimulate the economics of green energy. One is to end the oil depletion allowance, second is to set a federal minimum sales price for gasoline high enough to let electric cars and other rivals have a stable mark to compete against, third is the extension of tax credits for alternative energy ten years, and forth is funding of research and development of thorium rather than uranium nuclear power. Only the last measure would cost anything directly. it is too bad the Obama administration did not prioritize these simple legislative goals in 2009 as they, more than the stimulus for government union workers, would have provided lasting economic development and a less Co2 producing industry for the United States. Simply giving large loans to particular businesses tends not to be as effective.

image credit :WillowW-GNU license

Junk Ideas On Electrical Generation With Thermal to Mechanical Energy

In reading a book on the physics of temperature I developed a couple of ideas on the topic of converting thermal to mechanical energy, or rather of exploiting that principle. Of course these are simply junk ideas since I am not a physicists however I like to write them down anyway instead of letting them just disappear back into neuron space.

Mechanical energy can be converted 100% into thermal energy yet no vice versa. Well,the sunshine is free for use in heating trapped gases that expand with heat energy input so wouldn't it be possible to expand gas in a bladder with sunshine indirectly and use the increased lift to pull on a tether attached to a generator-the gas bladder would be under the water so getting the surface heat to it would require some additional engineering.

The principle of using thermal energy to store mechanical energy should be more broadly used to generate electrical power too-even some sort of gas bags expanding and compressing some mechanical items geared over toward generating power should work.

Maybe there are many more low-tech ideas for generating electrical power converting thermal into mechanical energy that could be used.

Political Lemmings Rush Toward 'Fiscal Cliff'

The approaching December deadline for finding Congressional budget agreement challenges the political lemmings rushing toward the edge to balance the federal budget. That would require a cold turkey Popeye Doyle breaking the heroin addiction as in The French Connection 2-such a 'bite the bullet' or 'no pain, no gain' approach isn't fashionable these days in Washington D.C.

In 1994 litigation brought the Alaska Pulp Corporation Wrangell Alaska plant to close permanently. It's good times rolling days of 500 billion board feet of old growth rain forest harvested annually came to an end. Senator Kerry spoke on Alaska Public Radio and informed the people of Wrangell that they would need to 'bite the bullet'. That advice might be needed now for the nation to raise taxes on the middle class and rich and cut federal spending.

If a recession follows the prosperous and middle class will let the bulk of the negative experience fall on the poor-yet President Obama's health care bill also is designed for middle class sedentary comfort rather than to provide health care to the transient poor. During a recession the rich and middle class just need to cut back a little on luxuries, or forgo that 75,000 dollar Mt. Everest guided climb that could pay for 35 round trip airfares to India itself if one could content oneself with currie and rice in Dehli.

Fundamental higher tax rates and cutting of federal spending to pay down the budget is

 the no frills straight ahead fullback off-tackle plunge up the gut-and its probably the most realistic way to man to man bully the public debt into defeat and let the nation have a future of freedom instead of being owned by the Chinese.

Billionaire Adds More Cash to Fundamental Physics Prizes

Yuri Milner has added more cash value to his prizes in fundamental physics. It's worth about twice the value of the Nobel Prizes, yet Milner needs to add prestige to the Physics Frontier Prizes.

Getting the Ignoble Prize Committee to put together a ceremony wouldn't be enough, so some sort of dinner-show in North Dakota might be in order.

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2012/10/01/internet-billionaire-ponies-up-more-cash-for-physics-prizes/

Fundamental physics can never have enough pioneers and inventors obviously. One wonders if an infinite number of universes and an infinite number of dimensions would need to take up any space if they were all packed together optimally.

Global & Mammalian Warming, Economic Paradigmata, Malthus, Joblessness etc

Traditional economics doesn't tend to take a long-range view of anthropogenic climate changes. If the 3.41 million sq km minimal Arctic icepack of 2012 was radically below that of even 2007-the previous record year, it seems on its way to be nearly gone in summers sooner than we think. That will bring continuing instability to economic models based on stable, predictable weather.
There are several economic paradigms today of which a synthesis of all is requisite for meaningful human social adaptation to demographic, climate and political challenges. Global warming bringing desiccation to productive agricultural areas in temperate regions requires intelligent political responses that would work to reverse the anthropogenic causality. Yet the political will to encourage free enterprise adaptations in support of global warming reduction doesn't exist in the Obama administration and that is bad for U.S. leadership prospects.
U.S. led political transformation of economic incentives to reverse global warming would need to develop within a classical economic paradigm that for Americans is a very leaky boat creating perennial down-sizing of the middle class and bringing high unemployment, vast public debt, outsourcing of industry and protracted foreign conflicts for national security and resource reasons. Many are disinterested in transforming industry and public policy including zoning with an anti-government bias. A basic free market paradigm leaning toward libertarianism tends in the modern, non-18th century context to generate corporatism and corporgovernment with all of the networking, table of ranks, neo-network ad hoc monopolization that entails.
Beyond the problems of classical economics and global warming challenges there are the plain limits-to-growth Malthusian problems based in global demographics and resource depletion. A comparatively recent academic field of ecological economics examines resources from the point of view of entropy. Basically the resources of the world are less disordered before humans use them in economic processes. An example is a tree. When one cuts it down and burns it for firewood it is an increase in entropy producing ash. Entropy is not reversible and human use of resources takes a well-ordered planet and converts it into the most disordered condition irreversible.
Probably there is an actual quantity of resource entropy level for the entire planet. The challenge is to use the resources most efficiently with the lowest possible increase of entropy. Maybe that would be in some theoretical new technology something like fusion with anything made in to anything else done by using the most disordered, highest entropy state materials for recombination into something well ordered. Of course hydrogen fusion is just .007% efficient so that isn't so excellent.
One hopes that some future President of the United States will comprehend the need of synthesizing the 3 or 4 primary economic paradigms into one outstanding domestic U.S. economic policy. The last few Presidents might have qualified for stories about drug use or alcohol binges in college so though they may be chummy and collegial they aren't necessarily thinking much about economic philosophy.
The human body temperature of 98.6 degrees is common to mammals. It is the temperature most efficient for releasing heat from the body, staying alive and keeping the brain cool enough to function. With increasing global warming driven by automobiles, ships and aircraft burning fossil fuels the demand for electricity to cool the body with air-conditioning increases driving up the burning of more fossil fuels. Recent progress in making oil from algae may keep the cost of gasoline down low enough that fossil fuel burning will continue and reinforce present global warming policy in the United States and elsewhere.
If American leadership isn't bright enough to lead to world ecospheric adaptive economic health before a crisis, it cannot be reasonable to expect the poor of the U.S. and of the second and third world to lead.  National policy that advocates 19th century forms of capitalism are badly out of touch with Adam Smith and David Hume's paradigm for improving the economic prospects of the masses. It is something like ecospheric economic drunk driving to bull ahead explaining that religion or the grace of capitalism requires only blind faith in absolute economic advantage and social leverage to produce the best of all possible worlds through evolution.