LOCUS DEMENTIA

What does “Global Warming” really mean?  The entire planet isn’t heating up, only the atmosphere.  The temperature of the oceans isn’t increasing either, only the surface temperature is changing.  So what is “Global Warming?” Should you care about “Global Warming?” As you may know, our planet has been around for over 4 BILLION years.  That’s a very long time in the cosmic sense, because our universe is estimated to be around 13 BILLION years old.  You might say that our planet is now an “adult” planet that is reaching middle-age. There is no human alive who can fathom the gulf of time that is 4 billion years.  Our lifetime is only 72 years on average, sometimes longer, sometimes shorter.  Therefore, humans really only live for about 0.0000018% of the current planet’s lifetime. Our lifetime is to the planet as a creature living for 41 seconds is to our lifetime. How much influence can that one creature have on our live...

Long ago we all went to college and learned about the assert() function in C and later, C++. At the time, assert() was a great little tool for quickly bailing out of your program when you thought it could not finish.  I used it when my calls to malloc() would fail.  Lately, though, I’ve seen commercial software vendors proclaiming their use of assert() as a way of writing safer code.  This is madness. First of all, the assert() function is just a print and exit macro.  Your assertion message is printed to the tty, and then your application exits with an error code.  That’s it, no segmentation fault, no core dump, nothing else, just exit. Imagine your surprise when your favorite game all of a sudden just exits back to shell right in the middle of fighting the super.  You would likely not play that game again.  When there’s a GUI, the tty is redirected to the /dev/null device, which means there is no output.  ...

I recently watched Roman Polanski’s “The Tenant.” This is a 1976 horror film that is more about character development and legerdemain than modern shock-horror. If you like classic movies, such as Salem’s Lot, The Hounds of Basquerville, or the works of HP Lovecraft, then you would enjoy this film. Should you ever rent “The Tenant,” quickly track forward to time index 41:12. In this scene, the main character is moving furniture around in his haunted apartment. Pay attention to the left hand side of the screen when he places an item next to the mirror. You will see a woman’s body, with black matted hair and a gash in her shoulder. The mystery apparition is facing the character yet he doesn’t notice her. In subsequent footage of that scene, she no longer appears. The woman who haunts the apartment does not have black hair and is never really shown in the film. This mystery apparition appears to be out of context. I wonder if Roman Polanski meant this apparition as a prop to “shock...

There’s not a day in the world of money that does not report something about China and its emerging market.  Heck, why not, with a GDP of over 8 TRILLION DOLLARS, twice that of Japan, and 6 TIMES that of the United Kingdom.  China is definitely a powerhouse economy that is really heating up. Yet, today you can read about this $100 laptop that is being manufactured by a company named Quanta and distributed by Nicholas Negroponte’s One Laptop Per Child non-profit group.  What is the scandal about this laptop?  Well, nothing really, except that it is going to be distributed in CHINA, as well as India, Brazil, Argentina, Egypt, Nigeria, and Thailand.  So what, right?  Well, let’s see what the GDPs of those countries are: China: $8,859,000,000,000 India: $3,611,000,000,000 Brazil: $1,556,000,000,000 Argentina: $518,100,000,000 Egypt: $303,500,000,000 Nigeria: $174,100,000,000 Thailand: $560,700,000,000 The UK has an estimated GDP of...

The title of this entry was taken from a paper written by Thijs Kuiken, Edward C. Holmes, John McCauley, Guus F. Rimmelzwaan, Catherine S. Williams, and Bryan T. Grenfell. This paper appeared in SCIENCE Volume 312, pp 394 – 397. If you have the gumption to really know how viral infections cross the species barrier, then this is the paper for you. It’s written as a “perspective” rather than as a technical publication, which means there isn’t a bunch of jargon in it. You can also contact the authors of the paper at t.kuiken@erasmusmc.nl . A particularly interesting quote taken from the paper: “It is well established that, as the proportion of susceptibles in the population, s , drops (as individuals become infected, then recover), the number of secondary cases per infection, R , also drops: R = s * R0 . If R is less than 1, as is currently the case for H5N1 virus in humans, an infection will not cause a major epidemic.” (pg. 312) The value, R0 , “is the number of secondary cases produced...

Have you seen the television shows lately on The Bird Flu Pandemic? You can’t miss them; they were running like gangbusters for a couple of weeks. Apparently people are going to wash-up on the shores of Hawaii when this bird flu reaches pandemic proportions. Whales look out, you’ve got competition from beached humans! There have been past cases of apparent bird flu transmission from human to human. These cases have been investigated in Southeast Asia. In one case reported in a SCIENCE magazine article, a family member contracted the bird flu while caring for another family member who was sick, and eventually died from it. The other care-giving person in this case survived the evil and devastating bird flu infection. This was reported in 2005. Now, CNN reports a “cluster” of 7 family members all perishing at the wrath of H5N1. Guess what? The family was living in “very cramped quarters … many living in [sic] one room.” To date there have been 124 deaths links to H5N1. How many peo...

The latest tape from Osama bin Laden claims originality in their plot to use airplanes as weapons in the 9/11 terrorist attack against the United States. Anyone who has read some history on the Nazi war plans to attack America will certainly roll their eyes at Osama’s blatant theft and disregard for historical truth. Towards the end of the Reich’s reign in Germany, Hitler’s cabinet planned an elaborate scheme to send airplanes to America on a bomber run. The technology at the time was for wooden frame aircraft, so the Nazi’s realized that they could not get a bomber across the Atlantic and return it home. Hitler didn’t care about that detail, so he decided to let the bombers crash into the skyscrapers of New York City. Thus was born the America Bomber project in war torn Germany. Needless to say, Hitler’s plan failed miserably. There was no German technology that would allow them to carry any payload and fuel enough to make the bombers lethal in their strike. Even with an attempt to ma...

As a business owner, I am privy to knowing tax law and loopholes. In my best understanding of taxation, though, I’ve found that its sole purpose is to encourage spending. Governments can’t continuously distribute cash to the masses, so it relies upon taxation to encourage its citizens to spend their cash and thereby reduce their tax burden. That’s a clever use of taxes by the government, for sure, but something else is going on with taxation in the modern world. The Romans levied taxes on their citizenry as a “tribute” to being Roman, and to pay for their protection by the Roman Guard. During the time of Romans, and the medieval era, there were no nifty accounting systems that allowed us to track where money was exchanged. Sure, the Incans and Chinese were tying knots on ropes as their financial records, but there was no historical archive or traceability. That meant levying taxes on the individual at a fixed rate, based upon their assets. Good thing we don’t do that anymore otherwise ...

Many of my friends are asking me how to become a consultant. The conversation always starts out as “so how much do I charge?” To that, of course, I always answer “whatever you think that you are worth.” That answer usually gets me a troubled look and a little giggle. It wasn’t until recently that I finally got smart and decided to come up with a formula to determine a consultant’s hourly rate. First you start with your current salary. If you divide that by 2000, which is the number of hours you work in a typical year, sans the 80 hours of vacation that you take each year. Also, 2000 is easier to use in division than 2080, so learn to deal with approximations and get on with consulting. Now that you have a starting hourly rate, let’s talk about costs. First there are taxes for everyone. No matter what country you call home, you have to pay taxes. Remember that the figure you already computed is a pre-tax dollar amount, so don’t start adding in taxes to that rate. What you do need to inc...

The buzz in the business world today is this avian flu. Countless experts have parlayed their opinions on how this is going to be some great pandemic. Really? When was the last time you played footsie with a chicken, or ate undercooked duck? How many people are regularly exposed to chicken excrement and do not cleanse their soiled hands afterwards? Then there are the numbers. Something like 160 people have contracted symptoms as a result of avian influenza (H5N1 to be exact) over the last two years. But where were these people? Yup, China, the worlds most heavily populated country. Claiming over 1.3 BILLION people in their country, China is definitely a contendor as ground zero for a pandemic. Yet, 160 people out of 1,300,000,000 have been affected. What does that come out to? 0.0000123% of the population. OOH, that sounds like a pandemic to me. Oh, and of those 160, or so, infected souls, only about 60 have died. 60 people dying is unfortunate and nothing to make light of...

Why do we blog? Why should I blog? Very little of what I say has any value to anyone but myself. My friends laugh at my quips and chastize me for being cynical and judgemental. I live, I question, and I form strong opinions. This blog won't be for the faint of heart, nor the needy of mindless dribble and clever euphamisms. I tell it how I see it, which is likely not the way it is. I am my own filter, my own critic, and my own inspiration. This is the trickling madness of a cynical solipsist.