More rants of a dead man

“The market is down today.”

Have you ever really thought about what they’re saying? When they say “the market” they (you know, they, the people who fix the roads… ‘they’) are really just generalizing, and are really referring to the Dow Jones Industrial Average. This is a phrase referring to a number that represents a sum of the trading value of some particular companies selected to be representative of the market as a whole.

But it’s not.  Every once in a while a company is removed or added to the list of what is used in the index calculation. On that day, the value of “the market” changes, not because anything went up or down in value, but because somebody decided some company was more or less good at representing the market on that day.

Then there’s the fact that the companies listed as part of the DJIA index are not weighted, so if a $1.00 company gains a dollar and a $100 company gains a dollar, it amounts to the same thing in the index.

Take into account that it’s all perception (I hope we all know that by now) and not actual value of companies that make up their stock price that goes into the index calculation and it’s hard to imagine how anybody can take “The market is down today” at all seriously. But people do and it affects their mood and their likelihood to spend.

Here’s another example: “Prices haven’t been this low since 1984.” That’s another brainless comment. If something costs $5.00 today,  and it cost $5.00 in 1984 are you going to tell me it was the same price and has the same value? Having the same price is a meaningless comparison because it doesn’t take into account inflation. But what you hear is that the price now has dropped to the same numerical dollar value as it was in 1984. Well, in 1984 $5.00 was worth a lot more than it is now. So in fact if the price now drops to 1984 values you gotta think we’re much worse off than in 1984. But they’re not saying that. It’s part of the farce of finance.

It’s all a big uncontrollable farce.

Crichton has a silly rant about global warming here: http://www.s8int.com/crichton.html but it starts off with a rant on SETI.

Which reminds me of something that always seemed pretty obvious to me.

We know the universe is pretty damn big. Some of us think we evolved through the wonders of chaos starting somewhere near the cellular level. If that’s so, it stands to reason that this evolution could happen elsewhere. Given the size of the universe (bigger than we can imagine) it’s not too big a reach to imagine it happening elsewhere and at some point in time, past present or future, there is likely to be another intelligent species of some kind living on some kind of planet.

But given what science has also told us about time and space travel, and given what a uninteresting part of an uninteresting galaxy we live in, it is unlikely that anybody will ever find us. Or we them.

Which is probably a good thing.

Now that the fiasco is over (although I have to say, without TV, it’s not all that noticable) it’s pretty evident that mccain lost through no fault of his own. The worst president in my lifetime sets a pretty poor stage for any follow up act. I don’t think it was possible for any republican to win, unless maybe George Bush ran as a democrat.

Let bush go down in history as he deserves, the most incompetent, government leader in living memory.

From the la times:

As Americans are turning out to the polls in record numbers, Bush’s approval rating, according to the latest CBS News tracking poll, has dipped to 20%, the lowest ever recorded for a president. His disapproval rating of 72% matches his all-time high, reached last month.

I found a bug in Web 2.0 and will be releasing a patch for 2.01 shortly.

A few weeks ago I had this idea that the way to get elected was to do something really loud media big and
noisy 3 days before the election. This is about the attention span of the average tv-watching american I figure.

I figure that’s also about how long it takes the media to ramp up to full steam over something really juicy.

McCain’s not doing too well, from what I hear, but I just figured out what he could do 3 days before election day to possibly stick it to obama (aside from blowing up a US building somewhere in the 50 states).

He could dump palin for somebody known to be competent.
That would get a lot of people to swing back right quick, just in time to vote before they had a chance to
rethink it.

I accept paypal payments for my brilliant ideas. Thank you.

It seems to me that if our evolutionary ancestors were lazy sacks of shit like we are nowadays, we’d be a lot better off.

You exercise to stay in shape and keep healthy, because humans evolved doing exercise (hunting and whatnot). If we had evolved on a couch, our bodies would be most adept at staying on couches because we would have evolved that way and we’d be a lot better off now.

I have a oil burning steam heating system in my house. The burner burns the oil, (it’s a rather cool looking flamethrower type thing) and heats up some water to turn it into steam, it floats through the radiator system eventually heating up the radiators and transferring the heat to the air around them. Wonderful.

Back when oil was a buck a gallon this seemed fine, but lots of people signed oil contracts this year at $5.00 a gallon or more and by now it seems to me the obvious failing of these boiler systems is becoming intolerably expensive. And that failing? All the heat goes up and out the chimney.

My oil guy tells me my boiler is 80 something percent efficient. He does this by sticking some testing sensor IN THE EXHAUST of my boiler. You know, where all the heat goes before it leaves via the chimney.

I can’t say how angry I get about this, and by now I can’t be the only one.

How hard or expensive is it to add a few well thought out heat exchangers to the exhaust of your boiler to transfer the heat somewhere more useful than outside your house?

I was at my parents house the other day. They have a gas fireplace. I was thinking of getting  gas fireplace insert to supplement the oil system in my house BECAUSE IT’S SO DAMN EXPENSIVE. I figure the dollar per BTU of gas and oil are not the same at any given point, so one of them has to be cheaper to run at any given time. But that would depend on the efficiency of the gas system, now wouldn’t it…

So I took a look at my parent’s gas fireplace. It’s genius. It’s got that franklin design where it pulls in the intake air from outside so it doesn’t suck the warm air from inside your house, drawing cold air in after it.

It’s got that angled top (I forget the name) so that the rising heat behind the firebox gets pushed forward out the vent thus causing it to circulate even without a blower.

We turned it on, and within 20 seconds, the front glass was untouchably hot. Heat is transferred to the room via the glass, and via air that circulates around the firebox. Heat up the firebox and the heat transfers to the air circulating around it and into the room. Brilliant.

Then I went outide, where the exhaust from the firebox goes. I couldn’t stand near the thing it was so hot. Yup, you got it, far more heat leaves the outside of the house than stays in it.

To be fair this thing is designed to be decorative first, and warm the house second, but jesus christ, for a little bit of extra money, you could put some fins on the firebox to make it transfer the heat more efficiently.

This just kills me.

I’m an efficiency freak. Given the option to make something suck or suck less, I usually pick suck less, even if it costs a little more or takes more effort on my part to make. You usually get your time and money back by having the thing last longer or save you money in some way.

So then I found out about vent free systems. PURE GENIUS. Burn the fuel so efficiently that the exhaust is breathable, thus you get almost 100% of the heat from the burn being used to heat your house.

Sounds great at first. I’m no chemist, but it’s hard to imagine even ze germans making a gizmo that burns perfectly. After a little reading it turns out they do not. The end product of a natural gas burn is water and some nasty nitrogen dioxide type thing that you really don’t want to breathe in any quantity. So that’s out.

Somebody built a gizmo for suckers who want to save money and die young. And apparently they’re selling. Just not in california, they’re illegal there. Who’d a thought.

But Nobody Seems To Want To Build An Efficient Heat Transfer System On Existing Wasteful Boilers.

I just don’t get it. It can’t be that hard. We can land a fucking man on the moon (oh, wait, we can’t) but we can’t make more efficient heating systems?

Today’s lesson on economics:

Economics 101 says if you (the government) print money it devalues very quickly because each bit is worth less because there’s more of it. Supply and demand, yada yada.

So our government is wisely not printing money. Yet.

Instead they are passing laws to spend Hundreds of Billions of Dollars on rescue programs and take-the-edge-off schemes to keep the hardest hit from getting hit harder. Okay. I’ll buy that.

But where’s all this money coming from? Well, we’re (again the govt) already trillions in debt, we don’t actually have this money. We have to borrow it.

Now we’ve been borrowing money for decades, and now we’re borrowing lots more mostly from asian countries from what I hear. They say if you owe somebody 10 dollars you’ve got a creditor. If you owe them a million you have a best friend. It’s in that person’s best interest to not let you fail so you can at some point pay him back.

Well, at this point, it seems unreasonable to assume that the U.S. will every actually pay off all its debts, and really, it should not (we need all the friends we can get), as long as we keep up paying the interest, everybody will be happy. (That only goes so far though because eventually you borrow so much you can’t make your interest payments.)

But since we have no realistic intention of actually paying back this money, how is it different from printing it?

Fascinating isn’t it.

As I was lying in bed this morning I had this curious notion. People are so good at finding patterns where there aren’t any.

Male pattern baldness follows the pattern of where you lie on your pillow when you sleep. The place you put pressure on your hair is the same place where the hair keeps growing.

Something to think about.

When I’m president, I’m going to outlaw hyphens, or at least seriously curtail their use. I imagine hyphens have their history in early printing with saving paper: if you can put half a word on a line then over the course of an article, you’ll save a few lines and therefore a bunch of paper. Surely you wouldn’t use that extra space to place a larger ad, no siree bob.

You see this mostly in magazines and newspapers, though I see it in books sometimes too. Newspapers and magazines have very skinny columns so there is more word breaking required whereas a book you can spread the extra space across many words. I imagine in publishing there are terms for all this. Kerning is probably not one of them. Neither is ‘ihatehyphens’.

But what about the people, you know, us humans. Let’s take the words ‘economist’ and ‘economics’ for example. Both common use words but they read completely differently based on the last 2 letters of the word. If these words were hyphenated, those last two letters would end up on the next line. So you’d have a 50-50 chance (depending on the context I suppose) to get the word right the first time, and if you were wrong, you’d read the next line realize you got it wrong, and it would ruin your train of thought reading the sentence. At least it does for me. So I get a lower quality of reading from the newspaper because they want to save a tiny bit of paper which, lets face it, they’re not really saving anyway.

It’s just another example of cases where people have forgotten that the tool exists to aid the human and not the other way around. Why do people go out of their way to make things harder for no good reason.

If there were good reason, like there was when mass printing was first invented, I can see it, but nowadays, there’s really no justification for annoying the human, because nothing substantial is gained. They’re just annoying.

I hate hyphens.