Group items tagged

We often get stuck in arbitrary things. We make excuses. We try to find shortcuts, and we try to do all these things that in the end only prevent us from reaching our goals. If you're really serious about pursuing your dreams and making them real, then you may want to read on...

1. Stopping at Uncomfortable When you start something new, it will be scary.

2. Looking for Shortcuts

At the moment, Republican leaders are trying to demonize the Affordable Care Act, so they have little incentive to point out that it's basically Romneycare plus cost controls.

Romney's position is basically that socialist tyranny is okay as long as it's imposed on a state-by-state basis. I don't see this argument winning over the GOP base.

Most of today's cars are already pretty quiet, but Ford's new electric vehicle makes practically no sound at all. In fact, the dashboard dials coming to life are the only indication that it's running. This is a reminder that the car runs on a 300-volt Siemens AC induction electric motor and not a fuel-fired internal combustion engine.

The Transit Connect Electric has just a single-speed automatic transmission, so in addition to not hearing the hum of an engine, there's no shifting between gears

Cost might also be a factor. Ford hasn't announced pricing, but it is expected to far exceed the $21,000 for a gas-powered Transit Connect.

Earlier this month, the European Commission reported that the EU was on track to get 20 percent of its electricity from renewable sources by 2020.

A "super-smart" grid powered by solar farms in North Africa, wind farms in northern Europe and the North Sea, hydro-electric from Scandinavia and the Alps and a complement of biomass and marine energy could render carbon-based fuels obsolete for electricity by 2050, said the report.

Under a variety of business-as-usual scenarios, the EU's projected to import about 70 percent of its energy by 2050, including loads of natural gas from Russia, which hasn't always been the most stable of suppliers. So the EU has plenty of reasons beyond climate change to want to decarbonize.

Whether life exists elsewhere in our universe is a longstanding mystery. But for some scientists, there’s another interesting question: could there be life in a universe significantly different from our own?

There, I think, is a possibility of many kinds of life that might be radically different from what we’re looking for because we only know how to look for what occurs to us. And a large part of what occurs to us comes from what we see looking around the Earth. So we assume it’s carbon-based, we assume it’s water. Those might be good assumptions. I believe there is other carbon-based life elsewhere. I don’t know if it’s all that way. But when you come to the possibility of other chemical basis for life, if you think of life as just maybe some kind of self-propagating, evolving system that forms in certain conditions of complexity and flow and chemical interaction, then maybe it doesn’t have to be carbon-based – in which case I can imagine the possibility of life in much hotter, much colder places: on stars, in interstellar clouds, in comets, in the atmospheres of planets very different from our own. And then, if you want to get even farther out, maybe you can talk about life at very different scales. What about interactions amongst subatomic particles that somehow have some kind of complexity where civilizations rise and fall in a nanosecond that we never know about because they’re inside of our particles? Or on a huge scale, galaxies that are somehow living, orbiting, sandwiches of things forming complexity. You can get pretty far out there if you wanted.

This week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, paleontologists say they’ve studied the period about 200 million years ago when dinosaurs first came to power, and found that while catastrophic volcanic activity may not explain dinosaur extinction, it could have explained why dinosaurs’ competitors disappeared and the terrible lizards took over the planet.

The scientists examined how two different isotopes (or forms) of carbon fluctuated during these volcanic eruptions. They found that the “heavy” form of carbon was depleted relative to the “light” form. They say this reflects disturbances in the carbon cycle at this time, including a spike in atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) and aerosols (fine solid particles)

The modern concept of Geoengineering (or Climate Engineering) is usually taken to mean proposals to deliberately manipulate the Earth's climate to counteract the effects of global warming from greenhouse gas emissions.

Certainly I don't think Tom Friedman makes a great foreign policy analyst, but I'm not willing to write off the profession's ideas any more than I'm willing to write off those of IR scholars or other political scientists or anthropologists or sociologists or soldiers or career diplomats or intelligence officers or, for that matter, business people or philosophers or graduate students who blog.

The key, then, isn't so much for publications to stop asking journalists to do their foreign policy analysis, but to get a better mix of people from all kinds of relevant professions to help enrich their content.

They could be staring us in the face and we just don’t recognize them.

The earth is currently surrounded by a 50 light year-wide “shell” of radiation from analogue TV, radio and radar transmissions. According to Drake, digital TV signals would look like white noise to a race of observing aliens.

Milan Cirkovic of the Astronomical Observatory in Belgrade, points out that the median age of terrestrial planets in the Milky Way is about 1.8 gigayears (one billion years) greater than the age of the Earth and the Solar System, which means that the median age of technological civilizations should be greater than the age of human civilization by the same amount.

American politics now seems condemned to an extended period of intense polarization, with an expanding army of aroused conservatives fighting to halt and reverse what it sees as the deplorable Europeanization of our economy and society. I doubt that a politics so configured will be able to address our long-term economic problems—until a crisis forces us to. I hope I’m wrong.

It remains the case that Washington is more polarized than the nation as a whole. The most recent analysis using the standard political science scoring system  found zero ideological overlap between Democrats and Republicans in either chamber of Congress. Which means that in both the House and the Senate, the most conservative Democrat is more liberal than is the most liberal Republican. In the electorate, Democrats who consider themselves moderate or conservative still overlap with similar Republican identifiers. But as Republicans have shed liberals and moderates over the past generation, the overlap has diminished.

Cato's Will Wilkinson predicts that a generation of younger, libertarian-leaning voters will takeover the Democratic Party and push it in a libertarian direction

Despite Wilkinson's description of younger voters as "libertarian-ish," the reality is that young voters are far more pro-government than any other generation. This can be seen in the Pew Survey report (PDF) on Millenials, entitled "A Pro-Government, Socially Liberal Generation.

if George W. Bush couldn't convince Americans to privatize the program in 2005, after a 25-year bull market when stocks were widely assumed to be lucrative and safe, I don't see how anybody who lived through the current crisis is going to come around.

This week marks three related anniversaries. April 12, 1961: Yuri Gagarin becomes the first man in space. That was 49 years ago today. April 14, 1970: An oxygen tank disrupts on Apollo 13, causing a series of catastrophic malfunctions that nearly leads to the deaths of the three astronauts. That was 40 years ago this week. April 12, 1981: The first Space Shuttle, Columbia, launches into space. That was 29 years ago today.

In 1970 Apollo 13 became our nation’s "successful failure".

But I’m old enough to remember when NASA could do the impossible. That was practically their motto. Beating the Soviets was impossible. Landing on the Moon was impossible. Getting Apollo 13 back safely was impossible.

It’s fascinating, in retrospect, that the Silent interpreted the warmth with which a war-devastated world regarded Goliath America just after WWII as genuine affection, as opposed to transient gratitude triggered by necessity.

Throughout its 5000 year history, debt has always involved institutions – whether Mesopotamian sacred kingship, Mosaic jubilees, Sharia or Canon Law – that place controls on debt’s potentially catastrophic social consequences. It is only in the current era, writes anthropologist David Graeber, that we have begun to see the creation of the first effective planetary administrative system largely in order to protect the interests of creditors.

In most times and places, slavery is seen as a consequence of war. Sometimes most slaves actually are war captives, sometimes they are not, but almost invariably, war is seen as the foundation and justification of the institution. If you surrender in war, what you surrender is your life; your conqueror has the right to kill you, and often will. If he chooses not to, you literally owe your life to him; a debt conceived as absolute, infinite, irredeemable. He can in principle extract anything he wants, and all debts – obligations – you may owe to others (your friends, family, former political allegiances), or that others owe you, are seen as being absolutely negated. Your debt to your owner is all that now exists.

A Babylonian peasant might have paid a handy sum in silver to his wife’s parents to officialise the marriage, but he in no sense owned her. He certainly couldn’t buy or sell the mother of his children. But all that would change if he took out a loan. Were he to default, his creditors could first remove his sheep and furniture, then his house, fields and orchards, and finally take his wife, children, and even himself as debt peons until the matter was settled (which, as his resources vanished, of course became increasingly difficult to do).

Mr Salam notes that Mr Auslin also "raises an important question, namely whether the fact that much of metropolitan Europe and East Asia 'free-rides' on American military power creates benefits that outweigh the costs."

China is heavily dependent on its export trade to sustain economic growth at home. It has no incentive to disrupt or “stress” trade flows or to embark on policies abroad that would lead to this.

What if Viacom's frontline production people and even its mid-level execs have a theory about how to maximize shareholder value: they will produce things, make them well known, and stick ads on them to gain profits? They will seek out every conceivable opportunity to make their productions well-known, because though it may be hard to make money from popularity, it's impossible to make money from obscurity.

a 2007 study by the Minerals Management Service (or MMS, the division of the Interior Department responsible for offshore drilling) found that this procedure was implicated in 18 out of 39 blowouts in the Gulf of Mexico over the 14 years it studied—more than any other factor. Cementing, which was handled by Halliburton, had just been completed prior to the recent explosion. The Journal notes that Halliburton was also the cementer on a well that suffered a big blowout last August in the Timor Sea off Australia.