The 0.001%

From an article in The Guardian, not really "news" per se, but some startling numbers:

A global super-rich elite has exploited gaps in cross-border tax rules to hide an extraordinary £13 trillion ($21tn) of wealth offshore... for many developing countries the cumulative value of the capital that has flowed out of their economies since the 1970s would be more than enough to pay off their debts to the rest of the world...

...almost £500bn has left Russia since the early 1990s when its economy was opened up. Saudi Arabia has seen £197bn flood out since the mid-1970s, and Nigeria £196bn...

The sheer size of the cash pile sitting out of reach of tax authorities is so great that it suggests standard measures of inequality radically underestimate the true gap between rich and poor. According to Henry's calculations, £6.3tn of assets is owned by only 92,000 people, or 0.001% of the world's population...

"These estimates reveal a staggering failure: inequality is much, much worse than official statistics show, but politicians are still relying on trickle-down to transfer wealth to poorer people...."

An illegal front-yard kitchen garden

Illegal because of the town code of Drummondville, Quebec.   Found at Rogerdoiron, via BoingBoing.

The White House kitchen garden

Res ipsa loquitur (click to biggify).  Via Roger Doiron.

A Venzone mummy

For hundreds of years, a mystery surrounded the cathedral of Venzone, a small city in the province of Udine, Italy. Instead of decomposing normally, bodies buried in the tombs beneath the cathedral were perfectly preserved and still recognizable decades later, a fact which led the townspeople to periodically retrieve and commune with their dead loved ones. In modern times, scientists finally traced the source of this wonder to Hypha tombicina, a microscopic, parasitic fungus that rapidly dehydrates the bodies before decomposition can even begin. 

That's the explanation at Wondercabinet, repeated at several other sites in my brief search.  Personally I find it hard to understand how a fungus can dehydrate a corpse; I prefer this explanation at Virtual Tourist:

They were already found in 1647 during works in the cathedral.  Venzone lies atop limestone bedrock. Groundwater in such regions is usually alkaline, an environment hostile to putrefaction. During floods, alkaline waters likely seeped through dirt floors in tombs 1 to 10, preserving the cadavers. Vaults 11 to 17 had sealed stone floors. Moreover, floodwaters in tombs 1 to 10 drained quickly through the porous limestone. Coffin wood from those vaults possessed just 7 percent water. In such aridity, water-soaked humans would have dried rapidly into mummies.

Venzone is not at high altitude, but desiccation as a preservative would accord nicely with the cloud mummies of the Andes and some that I seem to remember from Artic locales.

What's most intersting to me is not the mummification per se, but the respect accorded to the mummies by local villagers.   Some of the photos seem to be from a museum, so part of this may be tourist-income-related, but the respect predates that.

Incidentally, for those interested, Virtual Tourist got its information from a web page entitled "The Mystery of Holy Incorruption" which offers modern interpretations of the "mysterious preservation of saints' bodies."  That looks blogworthy on its own - bookmarked for the future (sigh...).

More photos at Pas Un Autre.

From the obituary of Tom Davis

In his own words:

As an old-school Malthusian liberal, I’ve always believed that the source of all mankind’s problems is overpopulation. I’m finally going to do something about it.

He was a schoolmate of mine, though enough years younger that I didn't know him personally.

An "a-salt" weapon

YouTube link.

It's real. Here's the Indiegogo link.  Via Reddit.

"Highly transparent" solar cells

UCLA researchers have developed a new transparent solar cell that is an advance toward giving windows in homes and other buildings the ability to generate electricity while still allowing people to see outside. Their study appears in the journal ACS Nano.

The UCLA team describes a new kind of polymer solar cell (PSC) that produces energy by absorbing mainly infrared light, not visible light, making the cells nearly 70% transparent to the human eye. They made the device from a photoactive plastic that converts infrared light into an electrical current.

"These results open the potential for visibly transparent polymer solar cells as add-on components of portable electronics, smart windows and building-integrated photovoltaics and in other applications..."

Very cool.  It's developments like this - not more drilling - that can most effectively and permanently decrease dependence on foreign oil.

More at the UCLA Newsroom and the Reddit discussion.

Objection

From the weekly collection at The New Yorker.

I seem to be losing my memory

For the past few weeks my blogging has slowed down because my computer has slowed down.  It's gotten to the point now where it's frankly unpleasant to surf the 'net looking for material.  I will probably have to take some time off to get this figured out.

I search for blogworthy material using tabbed browsing on Firefox (14.0.1) on an iMac (2 GHz processor, 1 GB memory, running OSX 10.6.8).  When I turned it on this morning, I looked at the Activity Monitor utility and found the numbers embedded at top.  I don't know if there's anything ominous there, but I do know that as soon as I turn on Firefox and open just one tab, the free System Memory drops from 300+ MB to about 100MB:

And after checking my mail I then open my first set of 12 tabs to check the news of the day, and...

... the memory plunges to 10-20 MB.  I've noticed some sites that seem to slow things down more than most (Salon being the biggest offender for me), but by the time I'm able to get through about eight of the tabs, Firefox is using about 750 MB of memory and is "not responding."   If I go to breakfast and let the iMac sleep, the situation improves...

... but that's only temporary, and pretty soon I'm once again waiting for pages to load or scroll.

I suppose I could have acquired malware somenhow, because I do wander the fringes of the 'net looking for material, but my basic antivirus program hasn't detected anything.  I never used to have problems (visiting the same sites 12 at a time), and I think this has developed after upgrading to Firefox 13 and then 14.  It seems to not "let go" of RAM after I close tabs.  Or perhaps there are some caches somewhere that are full that I don't know about?

It may be that I need to get some new apps to clean up my rather old iMac.  Perhaps I should download OnyX or something equivalent.  I'm dreading digging through my system files, but I'll need to do something to get back on track.  Fortunately I do have some time this weekend, as my invitation to play in The (British) Open seems to have been lost in the mail.  And perhaps I'll use this downtime to do some selling on eBay.

If I don't get this solved this weekend, what I'll probably do is go full "retro" and start posting some of the thousands of bookmarks I've saved over the years but never used, or transcribe some material from magazines like Smithsonian, Harper's, and The Atlantic.

I'm open to suggestions, but wanted to post this for now to let people know the reason for my current absence from the blogosphere.

Nietzsche's views on race

I've just finished reading Forgotten Fatherland, and was surprised to encounter the following passage about Friedrich Nietzsche's views on racial (im)purity:

There is no racial type in Paraguay, no 'pure' races except a few thousand Indians in the remote north and west, quickly being wiped out and their forest felled.  With at least twenty Indian women apiece, gifts usually from the local Indian caciques, the conquistadors had mixed their Spanish blood so fast that Paraguay was not a hundred years old before a mestizo race was a fact.  One enlightened governor even encouraged the races to mix, but it wasn't really necessary.  Like ink in a bucket, the Spanish blood rippled outwards from the capital, sometimes through marriage to noble Indian women, but more often through rape and concubinage.  Other immigrants added their genes to the cocktail - European adventurers, negroes and the mamelucos, fierce Portuguese-speaking land-pirates from Sao Paulo, part-Indian, part-negro, who descended on the Jesuit missions and carried off the Indian neophytes as slaves.

Nietzsche had applauded mixed races, using the Greeks as his example; he thought they produced the hardiest, most productive artists and minds.  The racial distinctions in Europe he wanted to subsume into the model of the 'good European'; though he spoke of a master race, he did not have a specific race in mind and certainly not the German.  He envisaged a group of individuals displaying masterful qualities, not a race as we would recognise it, for it is clear that his ideal men can arise in any race at any time: no one race is supreme.  For all his championing of the 'prowling blond beast', the creature of conquest, he would have found in the hardy mestizo culture something admirable and enduring.

My limited knowledge of Nietzsche (from collegiate reading lists decades ago) would not have predicted that paragraph; I guess I've been misled by popular culture linking him with the National Socialists in later years. 

And I certainly would never have predicted him using Greece as an example of mixed race culture.  I know that all nations and cultures are ultimately melting-pots, but Greece would not have popped to mind as the prototype of such.  Is it? Or was it in his day, moreso than other European nations?

The medieval stained glass of Coventry Cathedral

The West Midlands city of Coventry was a prosperous town during the Middle Ages, a major center of the textile trade, and by the 14th century the fourth largest city in England. It had two churches, the 12th century cathedral in St. Mary’s Priory, which was destroyed in Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries in 1539, and St. Michael’s, a 14th century Gothic church that was the largest parish church in the country. The guilds saw to it that St. Michael’s was packed with top quality stained glass...

In 1939, with World War II looming on the horizon, the stained glass panels were removed from the cathedral windows as a precaution to prevent their destruction in any German bombing raids. Coventry was replete with industrial targets both civil and military, so there was little doubt that it would see action. The glass was packed into 30 crates and stored in the cellar of the rectory in the small village of Hampton Lucy...

Coventry Cathedral suffered multiple direct hits. Firefighters were able to put out the first fire of the evening, but as the bombing progressed that night, the fires became impossible to contain. By the time the all-clear sirens rang the next morning, there was nothing left of Coventry Cathedral but smoldering ruins. A few walls and the tall spire were all that remained. Those ruins are still on the spot. A new cathedral was built in Modernist style right next to it, with the ruins as a consecrated garden space dedicated to peace and reflection...

Thanks to a joint fundraising project by World Monuments Fund Britain and Coventry Cathedral that raised £250,000 ($388,000), conservators will begin work on the medieval stained glass of Coventry Cathedral this summer... 

Digital imaging software will be required to reconstruct window images, because the panes were removed and stored without annotations of their original placement.  More details at The History Blog.

I found the image at a fantastic site for those of you interested in art or in the medieval era - Vidimus "the only on-line magazine devoted to medieval stained glass."  Their extensive discussion of the Coventry stained glass restoration is in Issue 33.

For other interesting material, just click on their "back issues" and then "feature."  Enjoy.

CEO is paid $44,000,000 for one day's work

That's not quite accurate - he actually was CEO of the merged companies for only 20 minutes:

Pressure is building on Duke Energy Corp.to explain the abrupt departure of Bill Johnson as chief executive this week, as former Progress Energy board members break their silence and express outrage at what they term a calculated deception.

At the same time, the North Carolina Utilities Commission, which last week approved the merger between Charlotte, N.C.-based Duke and Raleigh, N.C., Progress with the understanding that Johnson would be Duke's CEO, is deliberating whether to investigate Duke officials over possible false statements about their intentions.

For less than a day's work, Johnson is entitled to a hefty exit package that could amount to about $44 million, according to a securities filing...

Details emerged Thursday revealing that Johnson was asked to resign Monday afternoon, shortly after the merger closed that day at 4:02 p.m., suggesting to some that his ouster was choreographed in advance. The merger had received final approval from South Carolina regulators earlier Monday. Johnson signed his employment contract with Duke on June 27, days before the merger closed.

He was CEO of the combined company for about 20 minutes, Mullin said. After the merger closed, Duke's board went into executive session and voted to request Johnson's resignation, Mullin wrote.

Additional details in the Los Angeles Times.

Squid chromatophores

YouTube link.

Squid rapidly change colour when the muscles surrounding a chromatophore-filled sac contracts and expands -- when it contracts, the pigment appears denser, when it expands the colour becomes muted and disappears. The squid changes its colour according to exterior factors -- such as a threat or the presence of a potential mate - because each chromatophore is linked to a nerve ending.

Via Wired and Neatorama.  The background version of Pachelbel seems rather plodding, but the visual images are interesting.

Dolphin tries to save its dead baby

In this heart-breaking photo, an adult dolphin is seen carrying the body of its dead baby on its back. The scene was witnessed by tourists during a boat tour in the sea near Qinzhou in southern China's Guangxi Province. Wang Bin, who took the photo, said that during the three minutes they watched, the baby slid from its mother's back several times but each time the mother would dive again to pick up her baby and keep going. Picture: Quirky China News / Rex Features

The lesion on the baby's abdomen looks to me like a wound from a boat propellor.

Image and caption via The Telegraph.

Lobster prices plunge

A story at the Wall Street Journal reports that a bumper crop of lobsters has caused the wholesale price to plunge:

Harbors up and down the coast of Maine are filled with idle fishing boats, as lobster haulers decide that pulling in their lobster pots has become a fruitless pursuit.

Prices at the dock have fallen to as low as $1.25 a pound in some areas—roughly 70% below normal and a nearly 30-year-low for this time of year, according to fishermen, researchers and officials. The reason: an unseasonably warm winter created a supply glut throughout the Atlantic lobster fishery.

Those prices have officials and lobstermen concerned about the fate of one of the state's most vital industries. "For some people it will be disaster, they are going to go bankrupt," said Bob Bayer, director of the Lobster Institute at the University of Maine.

Retail lobster prices in Maine have started to fall along with the glut, and Mr. Bayer said that some fishermen have begun selling lobsters out of their trucks for as low as $4 a pound. But consumers elsewhere in the U.S. aren't likely to see bargains. The Maine lobsters that currently are in season can't be shipped long distances due to their soft shells, and retailers have other fixed costs that limit big price drops.

The story reminds me that many years ago my wife and I have vacationed (twice) at Mount Desert Island in order to hike and bike the trails of Acadia National Park.  We prefer to eat "where locals eat" rather than in tourist restaurants, and we discovered a fantastic place for lobster - the West Street Cafe.  I think we had the "early bird special" every night for a week.  A big lobster and a bucket of butter.  We have very pleasant memories of those vacations - especially bicycling the carriage trails.

BTW, according to the story, the reason for the population surge isn't just warmer ocean temperatures.  There has also been "overfishing of cod and haddock, their main predators."

p.s. - those of you who live in the area or visit frequently, if you have tips for dining, feel free to leave them in the Comments, in case we ever go back...