And American Cardinals Are Transparent?

You know the Church has a credibility problem when you've got this:

Under pressure from Vatican-based cardinals, their American counterparts canceled their daily briefings that drew hundreds of news-starved journalists.
The clampdown was part of what is shaping up as a major confrontation over the future of the church between Vatican insiders and cardinals from the rest of the world.
Just an hour before the scheduled American briefing, an email announced it had been canceled.
In a terse statement later, the spokeswoman for the American delegation, Sister Mary Ann Walsh, said "the U.S. cardinals are committed to transparency," but due to leaks in the Italian media that breached the cardinals' oath of secrecy, she said, cardinals would not be giving interviews.
Father Thomas Reese of the National Catholic Reporter says this is a perfect example of a clash of cultures.
"The American cardinals are just more used to being open and talking to the press and answering questions in public," Reese says. "Rome just doesn't like to operate this way."
At the official briefing, Holy See spokesman Father Federico Lombardi was asked if the Vatican had put pressure on the American cardinals.
His reply, in translation: "This is a journey that is going on. The cardinals, as they get more into it, realize the importance of keeping things among themselves, out of respect for one another, the seriousness of their discussions, and perhaps came to the decision in that way. That is all we can say."

Okay, even crazier than the U.S. cardinals being a model of transparency is the idea that even though they won't give women religious any other responsibilities in the Church, they will make one their official spokesperson.  She is probably also their maid while in Rome.

The Case Against Corn

Scientific American makes it:

Although U.S. corn is a highly productive crop, with typical yields between 140 and 160 bushels per acre, the resulting delivery of food by the corn system is far lower. Today’s corn crop is mainly used for biofuels (roughly 40 percent of U.S. corn is used for ethanol) and as animal feed (roughly 36 percent of U.S. corn, plus distillers grains left over from ethanol production, is fed to cattle, pigs and chickens). Much of the rest is exported.  Only a tiny fraction of the national corn crop is directly used for food for Americans, much of that for high-fructose corn syrup.
Yes, the corn fed to animals does produce valuable food to people, mainly in the form of dairy and meat products, but only after suffering major losses of calories and protein along the way. For corn-fed animals, the efficiency of converting grain to meat and dairy calories ranges from roughly 3 percent to 40 percent, depending on the animal production system in question. What this all means is that little of the corn crop actually ends up feeding American people. It’s just math. The average Iowa cornfield has the potential to deliver more than 15 million calories per acre each year (enough to sustain 14 people per acre, with a 3,000 calorie-per-day diet, if we ate all of the corn ourselves), but with the current allocation of corn to ethanol and animal production, we end up with an estimated 3 million calories of food per acre per year, mainly as dairy and meat products, enough to sustain only three people per acre. That is lower than the average delivery of food calories from farms in Bangladesh, Egypt and Vietnam.

There's a lot of other interesting data in the article.  Read the whole thing.  One thing that caught my eye towards the end was this:

 It is important to note that these criticisms of the larger corn system—a behemoth largely created by lobbyists, trade associations, big businesses and the government—are not aimed at farmers. Farmers are the hardest working people in America, and are pillars of their communities. It would be simply wrong to blame them for any of these issues. In this economic and political landscape, they would be crazy not to grow corn; farmers are simply delivering what markets and policies are demanding. What needs to change here is the system, not the farmers.

A lot of livestock farmers really work hard.  But grain farmers who concentrate on corn and soybeans?  We'll put in a lot of hours in a compressed amount of time, but hardest working people in America?  I don't know.  I think most folks would sign up for corn, soybeans and Florida.  But, hey, I'll go along with hardest working people in America, it sounds good.

Les Habitants

Sunday's Boston-Montreal grudge match propts Charles Pierce to reflect on how he became a Canadiens fan:

The second place I learned to speak French was through a transistor radio, slipped under my pillow, from which I would listen to the broadcast of Montreal Canadiens games on the French-language station that bounced down through the atmosphere and into Massachusetts at night. Here, I learned "le but du Canadien" and a number of other phrases, but mostly, it was the names — that long litany of rolled R's and mellifluous L's. Lemaire. Laperrière. Richard. The gloriously diphthonged Yvan Cournoyer. And Béliveau. Toujours Béliveau, like the last syllable of a romantic poem.
It all started with my father, who coached high school hockey in Massachusetts. I wanted to follow an NHL team, and I didn't want it to be the Bruins because, frankly, at the beginning of the 1960s, the Bruins blew goats. They weren't just bad. They were hilariously bad. Over the first six years of the decade, they won an average of 17 games a year, and they were not as good as their record indicated. As your basic front-running little suburban weasel, I didn't want any part of that, not with the Celtics winning every year. So, one Saturday afternoon, while we were watching a hockey game from some darkened Gardens or another — in those days, the NBA played in Memorial Coliseums and the NHL played in Gardens; go figure — I asked him what team I should follow. The Canadiens were beating the hell out of someone. "Those guys," my father said, pointing to the guys in the dark jerseys on the black-and-white TV. "Watch them. They play the game right."
So I adopted the Canadiens, gobbling what news I could out of the Sporting News and listening to the games when the atmospheric conditions were proper. And I was grooving right along. Montreal won the Cup in 1965, and again in 1966, lost in 1967, but won the next two in a row.
And then transcendence fell right on my head.

Transcendence, as any hockey fan would realize, was Bobby Orr.  It is definitely a story that any fan who roots for somebody other than the hometown team could appreciate.

Chart of the Day

From OilPrice:

U.S. production remains well below the peak achieved in 1970 and below a secondary peak in 1985—a lower high, if you will—which resulted from the ramp-up of production in Alaska. But since then production has gone relentlessly downhill until just recently.
It is true that a new form of hydraulic fracturing—high-volume slick-water hydraulic fracturing—has made available sources of oil not previously accessible. But it is also true that the industry’s hyperbole doesn’t square with the evidence. The U.S. Energy Information Administration’s (EIA) latest estimate of technically recoverable oil from so-called tight oil deposits—the ones made accessible by this new type of hydraulic fracturing—is 33 billion barrels (see below). It sounds like a lot. But, in fact, it would only supply the United States for about 6½ years (assuming current net annual consumption of about 5.1 billion barrels). Not bad; but not a world-changing number, especially when you consider that all oil goes onto a world market where 33 billion barrels would last a little over a year. Beyond this, the estimate says little about how much of that oil will ever be economically recoverable. Wherever it isn’t, no one is going to extract it.......The EIA projects that U.S. oil production will peak later in this decade—a little below the previous secondary peak in 1985. That would result in a tertiary peak, or yet another lower high. In the meantime the extra supply promises to lower America’s bill for oil imports. But the modest turnaround in America’s oil fortunes won’t solve the larger problem of worldwide oil depletion which, despite American gains, has kept worldwide oil production on a bumpy plateau since 2005.

But opinions differ.  Somebody is going to be right, and somebody is going to be wrong.  Recent gains in production from the Bakken and the Eagle Ford have been impressive, but my natural inclination is to side with the pessimists versus the optimists.  I'll guess we'll have a clearer view of things in about 3 to 5 years. I will say that oil will probably be with us for a long time, but that consumption in developed economies have probably peaked, and I don't anticipate tight oil availability to change that.

Worst Forecaster Ever?

Jonathan Chait calls out former Bush advisor Michael J. Boskin, who just penned an op-ed in the WSJ predicting Obama will torpedo the economy, after doing the same during the Clinton years:

As it happened, literally every Boskin prediction turned out to be the opposite of reality. The economy grew much faster than predicted, revenues surged by a much greater amount than forecast, and the deficit shrank by a much greater amount than Clinton forecast.

Following the utter repudiation of the Clinton years, Boskin decided to take his talents back to Washington. He had spotted a brilliant new economic mind in Texas governor George W. Bush.

"These people were immensely impressed with him, how quick he was to pick stuff up," Boskin said. "His instincts were all very good, very much market-oriented; that created a very, very favorable impression."

Boskin went to work as a Bush adviser, and thus, unfortunately for the historical record, had to limit his ability to make terrible predictions in public forums. He did return to public punditry to insist that George W. Bush’s tax cuts would reduce revenue by far less than the official forecasts predicted. (“I don't think it's going to cost anywhere near $674 billion.”) This was another natural outgrowth of Boskin’s worldview — just as it was necessarily true that Clinton’s tax hikes on the rich must reduce the work incentive and hamper economic growth, Bush’s tax cuts for the rich must do the opposite. Naturally, tax revenue declined by far more than the forecasts predicted.
Now, in defense of Boskin, he is probably suffering from a large dose of bad luck on top of a horrendously wrong ideology. He is probably not universally and inherently wrong. If you chained a thousand Boskins to a thousand keyboards for a thousand years, eventually one of them would make a correct prediction.

If the man is a worse pundit than Dick Morris, he is doing something tremendously wrong.  Or maybe he's trying to be wrong.  Anyway, the whole thing is worth reading as a guide to totally dismantling a public figure.

China's Ghost Cities

60 Minutes goes to visit some of the massive empty developments of the world's second largest economy:




That just blows me away. I can't image so many empty buildings. Is there any way that doesn't end badly? I just don't see how it couldn't.

A More Powerful Surveillance State?

Via nc links, MIT releases video enhancement technology to analyze invisible changes in recorded data:

Scientists at MIT have developed open-source software that can reveal details in videos that are otherwise invisible. This software — which works with videos on YouTube or DVD — can reveal the blood pumping beneath someone’s skin, with such detail that you can accurately measure their heart rate. The software could also be released for mobile devices, such as smartphones or Google Glass, so that you can see the heartbeat of those around you in real time — a boon for gamblers, FBI lie detection agents, and doctors alike.
The underlying technology used by the software is called Eulerian Video Magnification (EVM), which essentially tracks the variation of individual pixels over time — and then exaggerates those differences. As your heart pumps blood around your body your arteries swell with bright red blood, which changes the color of your skin slightly. To the human eye, no matter how long and hard you stare at your wrist or someone else’s face, you would struggle to detect a change in color (unless they blush, of course). For a computer, however, the tiniest per-pixel fluctuations (between white and slightly-redder-white, say) are easy to detect. In the case of detecting someone’s heartbeat, EVM picks up these slightly redder pixels and exaggerates them, turning them violet.
MIT originally developed the software to measure the vital signs of neonatal babies without physical contact, but as you can see in the video, there are other, far-ranging applications. Not only can EVM detect changes in color, but it can also exaggerate movements — such as a crane or building swaying in the wind, or the tiny movements made by your eyes as they scan an environment. The scientists at MIT say that their software might act as an early warning system, if the crane is swaying too much, or if a bolt is working its way loose from a machine.
In an interview with The New York Times, Michael Rubinstein, co-author of the EVM research paper presented at Siggraph last year, says he has been asked if it would be possible to run the software on Google Glass. “People wanted to be able to analyze their opponent during a poker game or blackjack and be able to know whether they’re cheating or not, just by the variation in their heart rate,” he says. The research was partly funded by Royal Dutch Shell, too, so presumably the EVM algorithm can help with oil exploration — though we’re not entirely sure how.

Wow.  The possibilities of this could be terrifying.  And it is open code.  Nothing bad can come of that.

Karst Country

Karst Country - infra-red timelapse from Glen Ryan on Vimeo.

From Black and White to Color

David J. Michael reviews the work of David Foster Wallace, and focuses on a little piece in The Pale King about boredom:

The new book was to be set at an IRS processing center in central Illinois and would follow around a group of low-level IRS examiners tasked with auditing tax returns. To prepare, he took several classes in accounting, and assembled hundreds of pages of research on boredom. One of the characters describes the boredom of this work as "boredom beyond any boredom he'd ever felt," another as "soul murdering." But Wallace wanted to show what lie on the other side of boredom:

Ability to pay attention. It turns out that bliss—a second-by-second joy + gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious—lies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom. Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find (tax returns, televised golf), and, in waves, a boredom like you've never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it's like stepping from black and white into color. Like water after days in the desert. Constant bliss in every atom.

If such bliss after boredom does exist, Wallace wasn't able to find it. The writing was dragging on without end. Unsurprisingly, a book dramatizing boredom was difficult to write, more difficult than he'd imagined.

I'm currently partway through my annual Lenten diet/fast.  It started out years ago as a spiritual sacrifice, limiting myself to one small meal a day with no snacks, 6 days a week, throughout Lent.  It got rid of most of my favorite bits of junk food, and made the meals much more, well, boring.  As it has gone along, and my faith has wavered, it has turned into a starvation-style diet to try to offset eating way too much bad food and drinking too many beers and not exercising all of the rest of the year.  But one of the little pleasures I have noticed is that even when I am eating what amounts to pretty bland food, it seems so damn good.  Kind of that water after days in the desert.  I think that would also be represented, even though I don't plan to experience it anytime soon, by the "runner's high."  Kind of a pleasure through pain sensation.  My conception doesn't make total sense, but I think that is kind of what Wallace is getting at with this bit about boredom.  To paraphrase Jim Morrison, it is about breaking through to the other side.

Art Humor Rains Down

The Atlantic Cities:

You got to give props to artist Richard Jackson for staging an exhibit where attendees could get peed on by a 28-foot-tall Labrador Retriever. In the gift shop, are museum umbrellas flying off the shelf?
Jackson's "Bad Dog" sculpture, tacked together from matte-black parts reminiscent of a disassembled stealth bomber, towers above the Orange County Museum of Art with one leg raised in the classic dog-urination stance. Every so often, a spray hose inside the massive canine unleashes a fountain of yellow paint onto the wall of the museum. The fake pee dribbles down the wall to pool on the ground, where curious museumgoers appreciate it with the classic but is it art? posture.
"Bad Dog" is the first thing people see when traveling to the Newport Beach museum's retrospective of Jackson's work, titled "Ain’t Painting a Pain." The meaning of the micturating puppy is cryptic. Exhibition materials don't shed much light on what inspired the artwork, and the media are throwing out all kinds of differing explanations. KCET calls it a "cheeky statement about Jackson's views on the art world." The OC Register goes with "not a joke. Nor is it an insult to the museum." The Daily Pilot doesn't take a critical stance, but notes that it is a "favorite of children who visit the museum."

I'm with the kids, that's cool.