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  • The Walking Desk is Here!!

    George Rebane

    This comes to you from our ‘Live Long and Prosper’ department.  In this morning’s WSJ I saw an ad that elicited a “Sumbich!  They finally did it.”, and a startled “What?!” from Jo Ann.  Someone is introducing a walking desk into the workplace to keep us all healthier (more info here)

    WalkstationAbout ten years ago a friend convinced me to get a heavy-duty treadmill (True 550), and I started dividing my running between the outdoors and indoors.  Along the way more birthdays brought more joint creaks and injuries, so I started throwing in some walking sessions on the treadmill.  I was immediately hit by the utter boredom of the experience and understood why people stare at TVs while so engaged.  Not a big TV fan, but an avid reader, I built a simple PVC pipe frame to which I attached the top of a music stand that held a stained plywood book stand.  I built this stand with an array of peg holes that lets me put a book or magazine up there, and with a couple of appropriately placed pegs it will hold a wide variety of books open at any page and allows the pages to be turned easily. 

    Friends who looked at it thought it strange that I built this PVC gizmo and asked why I didn’t just buy the manufacturer’s book stand.  Well, those kinds of stands are rickety, poorly designed, and attached to the treadmill which makes things jiggle with the footfalls of my powerful body.  I explained that I wanted a rack that was completely separate from the treadmill and therefore very steady.  Some years passed with my being able combine reading with exercise at any time of day or night.  An added benefit of such a setup is that it really makes time pass quickly.

    Gjrwalkdesk1_2I usually make notes and need to scribble ideas and stuff on a pad while I read.  No problem in a chair, but impossible on a treadmill.  So it immediately hit me that all I need is to design and build a writing surface that easily fits on the treadmill and I would have a walking desk.  Measure, measure, saw, saw, sand, sand, stain, stain, and it was finished.  I proudly showed it to Jo Ann who long ago got used to all such crazy things her husband proposes and sometimes builds.  To unsuspecting friends I often launched into my new walking desk sermon, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if you could have one of these walking desks in an office so that … .’  Well, you get the picture.  The usual response was one of mild surprise, a lightly reined-in smile, sometimes a tolerably polite interest, and ‘We are going to have some wine, aren’t we?’

    Since the treadmill lives in our game room with the poker table, my poker pals immediately saw the real use for the walking desk as another surface to pile stuff when we clear the table at the end of our congenial dinners and prepare for a serious evening of studying the game.  But, dear reader, today I am vindicated and the philistines will have to take another tack – ‘OK, if you’re so goddam smart, why didn’t you patent it and … ?’

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  • Don’t Blame the Oil Companies

    Michael McDaniel

    Yes. I said don’t blame the oil companies for excessive prices at the pump.  For months now I have put up with comments attacking the companies that provide fuel for our vehicles.  I do concede that oil company management teams both past and present may be to blame for a portion of the prices we are paying at the pump. However, I contend that the oil companies cannot be solely blamed for the high prices.  An examination of facts…

    The Devaluation of the US Dollar:

    • Blame the United States Federal Reserve.  First and foremost our very own FED has been implementing a monetary policy that continues to crush the value of the US dollar (both via inflation and weakness versus other nations currencies).  As our currency becomes worth less, countries selling us oil require us to pay more. 
    • The current ill health of our banking system (an extremely important variable in any economy) decreases the demand for US Dollars. Would you be eager to invest in a foreign country which is taking historic means to keep their banks solvent? As our currency appears to be more risky, countries selling us oil require us to pay more.
    • Growth in other countries have proven to decrease the demand for US Dollars.  With the global economy growing at a faster pace than the US it is natural to see other currencies strengthen versus the US Dollar. As our currency becomes worth less, countries selling us oil require us to pay more.

    Supply and Demand:

    • Increased demand for oil by India and China (and the rest of the developing world) force prices higher.
    • Our leaders continue to ignore the resources available here at home, ANWR anyone? I expect most cultures are confused that the USA would rather go to war and kill humans in search of oil, rather than put our Alaskan wildlife in jeopardy. 

    Education, Values, Ambition:
    Where have all the Scientists gone?  Didn’t we get a glimpse of the threats/addiction to oil in the 1970’s? Am I to old fashioned to expect that the greatest country in the world could design a solution to this issue over the past 30 years? Again I ask, where have all the scientists gone?  We cheer our athletes, actors, musicians… maybe it is time to give some hype to our future scientists/technicians knowing full well that it will be one of them that will answer the call and save the day. 

    Profit Margins:

    • Where do the energy companies stand in terms of Profit Margin? For every dollar of sales or revenue how much do their owners earn in "profit?"
      • Exxon Mobile owners manage to take home approx 10 cents on every dollar of total revenues, or a 10.85% profit margin.
      • Johnson and Johnson is often noted atop lists for exemplary ethics, their profit margin is 18.64%, owners of JNJ profit approx 19 cents for every dollar of total revenues.
      • Microsoft owners earn over a 28% profit margin.

    Though I do not give the oil companies a full pardon, I hope these insights provide a more productive discussion than just pointing fingers at the oil companies.

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  • Ruminations – 8jun08

    George Rebane

    • A Democrat agrees with George Will
    • TechTest2008 Awards Coverage
    • Trillion dollar ‘Stupidity and the State’

    A notable Democrat agrees with George Will (but just this once).  My friend Dick Dickenson took a look at the latest from syndicated columnist George Will on Obama choosing his VP.  Will writes a short and compelling piece – ‘Obama’s choice can’t be Clinton’ – about Obama making up his own mind and Hillary disappearing into the night quietly.  I asked Dick to comment, not knowing what to expect from a dedicated Democrat and former political editor of The Washington Post.  With his permission I share with you his reasoned, revealing, and somewhat testy observations.  (Would love to be at a lunch table with these two gentlemen.)   

    This is one of the rare Will columns with which I agree.  He wastes so much of his intelligence, erudition, and articulateness on being just dead-ass wrong most of the time (I would add intellectual arrogance and all the problems that entails to his list of qualifications) but he does hit the mark on this one.  It’s inevitable that we all waste some time on Hillary’s run and her future ( ! ) because she is not the run-of-the-mill candidate–how much would we be talking about John Edwards or Chris Dodd at this point?–but she after all is the loser.  I think Obama has made the right moves so far.  He has been totally unmoved by the idea of even considering naming her to the ticket at this point.  He’s making it clear that it’s his decision and he’ll do it on his own schedule.  He’s also not responding yet to McCain’s self-serving proposal of informal "town meeting" debates, the only format in which McCain is adequate, and not letting McCain set the agenda for the general election.  My final thought on Hillary as vice presidential candidate: Who in his right mind would choose as his running mate the one person in the U.S. who can unite the Republican party?  It certainly isn’t John McCain.

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  • Ozone Politics

    George Rebane

    Yesterday a lot of government scientists, state bureaucrats, and local politicians got together for the Sierra Ozone Summit (SOS) in Grass Valley.  This was a well-prepared and executed event put together Sos by a coalition of elected officials, Save the Air in Nevada County, and the Northern Sierra Air Quality Management District.  Its purpose was to again highlight the ozone pollution problem in northern California and the Sierra foothills.  A notion oft-repeated during the day was that solving the ozone problem should be bipartisan since we all breathe the same air.  Well, it turned out to be a very political and partisan gathering for those who were paying attention.

    For the distant reader, Nevada County in the Sierras is the downwind recipient of Sacramento and Bay Areas’ ozone pollution as the prevailing winds blow it and its precursors into the mountains.  By any reasonable measure there is little that folks in Nevada County can do to affect local ozone levels short of convincing people in the Central Valley and Bay Area to stop driving their cars and trucks.  But there are many things we can do in these foothills to support and advance the road to collectivism.

    The SOS audience was predominantly left-of-center and sensitive to that possibility as witnessed by the spontaneous applause that it gave to speakers and questioners proposing greater controls imposed by the state and feds.  The biggest hand was given to the proposition that land-use planning and ordnances – the lynchpin of American local governance – be removed from the cities and counties, and made another instrument of state diktat.  The apparent wisdom underpinning this sentiment was that ‘the movement of air knows no boundaries’.

    So, as Supervisor Ted Owens implored in his introductory remarks, the objective would be to “develop strategies” and “regionally based solutions”.  This immediately begs the question of why we (in the foothills) as the sparsely populated recipients of pollution would ever want to impose on ourselves the same solutions as would be needed for densely populated pollution generators.  The audience, of course, loved the regional approach.

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  • OPEC – “Thank you America!”

    (I received this piece from a Nevada County friend and a community leader.  Its author is anonymous, and I post it here with a few edits as a message that should be doubly on our minds today.)

    Sobieski31 Any Islamic OPEC minister could look you in the eyes and state:

    “Islam is at war with you infidels. We have been since the embargo in the 1970’s. You are so arrogant you haven’t even recognized it, and so dumb that you don’t even know that Vienna 1683 was just halftime. You have more missiles, bombs, and technology; so we are fighting with the best weapons we have and extracting on a net basis about $700 billion/year out of your economy.  Now halftime is over, we have resumed our offensive, and you idiots still think that you are fighting ‘terrorism’.  We will destroy you! Death to the infidels!

    And while I am here I would like to thank you for the following:

    Not developing your 250-300 year supply of oil shale and tar sands. We know if you did this, it would create millions of jobs for US citizens, expand your technology and engineering capabilities, and keep the wealth in the US instead of sending it to us to finance our war against you bastards.

    Thanks for limiting Defense Department purchases of oil sands from your neighbors to the north. We love it when you confuse your allies.

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  • Ruminations – 31may08

    • Sue Horne for State Assembly
    • Al Gore challenged by Vaclav Klaus
    • Will we Napa Grass Valley?
    • Sad exit for longtime Nevada City merchant
    • I soloed yesterday

    Sue Horne for State Assembly – Jo Ann and I are financial supporters of Sue’s campaign and have already cast our absentee ballots for her.  We did so because we have found her to have the right stuff Suehorne_2 for representing and promoting our mores, values, and a future beneficial to all citizens of California.  She is honest, smart, experienced, energetic, and has the courage to pursue her ideals.  Sue promises to be resilient to the predations of character that sooner or later taint most people who choose the political profession – the professors of which must always remind us that they are “The Honorable …” when we all know that in the large they are not.  Over the years Sue Horne has shown us that she is made of sterner stuff, and we expect nothing more from her than that she remain true to herself.

    Vaclav Klaus, a trained economist who also happens to be president of Czechoslovakia, has challenged Al Gore to a public debate on the current Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) hysteria sweeping the world.  During his Washington DC visit this week he was quoted (30may08 WSJ) to have said the following –

    The basic questions of the current climate change debate are sufficiently known and well structured:
    1) Do we live in an era of a statistically significant, nonaccidental and noncyclical climate change?
    2) If so, is it dominantly man-made?
    3) If so, should such a moderate temperature increase bother us more than many other pressing problems we face and should it receive our extraordinary attention?
    4) If we want to change the climate, can it be done? Are current attempts to do so the best allocation of our scarce resources?

    My answer to all these questions is NO, but with a difference in emphasis. I don’t aspire to measure the global temperature, nor to estimate the importance of factors which make it. This is not the area of my comparative advantages. But to argue, as it’s done by many contemporary environmentalists, that these questions have already been answered with a consensual “yes” and that there is an unchallenged scientific consensus about this is unjustified. It is also morally and intellectually deceptive.

    This makes Dr. Klaus the first world leader to understand the complex and structured nature of the AGW issue who has begun asking the ‘nested’ questions all of which must be answered in the affirmative if we are to respond reasonably to climate change.  I have written a more complete piece on the entire sequence of these questions which can be downloaded from here.  Needless to say, Al Gore has ignored in silence this challenge to publicly examine the basis for the hysteria of which he is the international bandleader.

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  • Voter Managed Growth in San Francisco

    George Rebane

    Grass Valley and Nevada County in the small may look to San Francisco in the large when it comes to Voters_3 managed growth mediated by the voter vicissitudes.  The 27may08 WSJ report on Lennar’s Hunters Point project outlines the travails of both the developer and a supportive city government to build a milestone addition to house the burgeoning population.  Michael Corkery’s ‘Lennar Plans Are Tough Sell in San Francisco’ details what happens when a project must also pass through a voting booth before breaking ground.

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  • Ruminations – 27may08

    George Rebane

    * Second annual TechTest Survivor’s Breakfast
    * Killing frost tonight on the Great Plains
    * Gas prices, nationalizing oil industry, and ‘cap and trade’ in Congress
    * Michelle Obama is a terminal racist

    Last Friday Jo Ann and I had the pleasure of attending the second annual Survivor’s Breakfast for TechTest2008 sponsored by the Sierra Environmental Studies Foundation.  All of the attending Cimg5571 students had scored ‘in the money’ on the grueling test given on 5 April.  These young men and women are definitely in the superior 1% of achievers that Bauerlein reports in his otherwise depressing The Dumbest Generation (not recommended reading for today’s hopeful parents).  During our brief ceremony I, as the foundation’s Director of Research, was again allowed to pontificate a little about the role and importance of technical careers to America.  A more complete report on the occasion is on the SESF website here, and you can download a copy of the test here.

    Tonight there will be a killing frost on the northern Great Plains.  Before the latest global warming craze, scientists in the 1970s knew (and those in secure career positions still know) that Earth is overdue for another ice age.  The harbinger of this climate change has been widely acknowledged to be a June killing frost on the American Great Plains that wipes out the summer cereal crops.  Bloggers Russ Steele and Anthony Watts have been reporting the cooling trend that has been recorded and acknowledged by organizations like NASA and NOAA.  Reasoned reporting seldom penetrates the media frenzy generated by highly politicized organizations like the UN’s IPCC and promoted by Team Gore.  For the science perspective about climate change stay tuned to the non-professional weblogs like NC Media Watch.  For the hysteria component, pick up any newspaper or watch TV news – especially now as the Warner-Lieberman carbon ‘cap and trade’ bill starts its round of congressional hearings.  As for the real trend in global temperatures, Al Gore call your office.

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  • Singularity Signposts – 25may08 (updated)

    George Rebane

    Have you heard of cognition-enhancing drugs?  Well, if you drink coffee, then you’ve been taking one probably for years.  But now we’re getting into some serious new drugs coming to you from big pharma Cogenhancing_2 that promise to keep you alert, focused, and improve your concentration and memory by leaps and bounds.

    The technology notices I get from various professional societies, future studies groups, etc. have been for some time talking about the use of drugs to shift our brains into the next higher gear.  Now this news is becoming a torrent and the drug industry has a number of concoctions in the labs that they will soon (next 5 to 10 years) be offering to us.  No less than the 24may08 issue of The Economist has a major article (‘All on the mind’) detailing the need and the trend toward these mind pumpers.

    To understand what’s happening, you have to separate these drugs from the stuff the cartels are importing from Mexico, and what the do-it-yourselfers are cooking up in suburban bathrooms.  The cognition-enhancers are good for you and your mentally intensive careers.  Some scientists and academicians are already into so-called “off label” use of drugs like Ritalin and Provigil that were developed to treat mental maladies like ADD and Alzheimers.  It turns out that these drugs mess with your neural wiring in ways that also benefits healthy people.  Such extra-curricular uses are now reported in the pre-eminent science rags like Nature.

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2 comments on The Walking Desk is Here!!