Tidbits From The Web #37

The house of the future has no wires...
Is there a Planet X?
There is a hot planet in our midst...
Interesting facts about the human brain...
Melon mouth...
White Wedding hillbilly style...
Things your supermarket doesn't tell you...
The first F5 ever documented in Canada...
Champagne supernova in the sky...
One cake to fill them all...
And the undead Hello Kitty cake...
80 foot buzzer beater...
Sorry Superman...Lois has got a new man...
Superhero of the religious right...
16th Century graphic designer's portfolio...
Lower Manhattan circa 1847...
Moon Ray and Comanchero...WTF?!
Video game characters that are probably delicious...
Armored animals...
Introducing artist Patrick Segui...
Fastest Bentley to run on biofuel...
Materials you may find in future products...
Companies come and go...these ones will last another 100 years...
A water spout in Italy...
When a parent films their kid on drugs...
Get your extremely scientific clock here...
What the web knows about you...
London nightlife from above...
The night lights of the Aurora Borealis...
Unicorns barf rainbows...
Houseboats are cool real estate...
Why is marijuana illegal?
If at 1st you don't succeed in the US...Thai Thai again...

"Honest Abe"

We celebrate Abraham Lincoln's birthday annually and we should. Lincoln was one of the few great men who really was great. Before he became president, Lincoln spent twenty years as an unsuccessful Illinois lawyer -- at least he was unsuccessful in financial terms. But when you measure the good he did, he was very rich indeed. Legends are often untrue, but Lincoln was the real thing. George Washington never chopped down a cherry tree, but Abraham Lincoln was honest. During his years as a lawyer, there were hundreds of documented examples of his honesty and decency.

For example, Lincoln didn't like to charge people much who were as poor as he was. Once a man sent him twenty-five dollars, but Lincoln sent him back ten of it, saying he was being too generous. He was known at times to convince his clients to settle their issue out of court, saving them a lot of money, and earning himself nothing.

An old woman in dire poverty, the widow of a Revolutionary soldier, was charged $200 for getting her $400 pension. Lincoln sued the pension agent and won the case for the old woman. He didn't charge her for his services and, in fact, paid her hotel bill and gave her money to buy a ticket home!

He and his associate once prevented a con man from gaining possession of a tract of land owned by a mentally ill girl. The case took fifteen minutes. Lincoln's associate came to divide up their fee, but Lincoln reprimanded him. His associate argued that the girl's brother had agreed on the fee ahead of time, and he was completely satisfied. "That may be," said Lincoln, "but I am not satisfied. That money comes out of the pocket of a poor, demented girl; and I would rather starve than swindle her in this manner. You return half the money at least, or I'll
not take a cent of it as my share."

Honesty makes you feel good about yourself and creates trust in others. It improves your relationship with yourself and with others. It's not much in fashion these days to talk about the benefits of honesty and decency, but the benefits are there and they are valuable and worth the trouble.

Lincoln didn't talk much about religion, even with his best friends, and he didn't belong to any church. But he once confided to a friend that his religious code was the same as an old man he knew in Indiana, who said, "When I do good, I feel good, and when I do bad, I feel bad, and that's my religion."

Honesty. It may be corny, but it's the finest force for good in the world, and it always will be.

Do some honest good in the world.

This is Kristos, reminding you when you are challenged by a situation involving honesty and integrity, first be honest to yourself. In your gut, you know what is the right thing to do, but what you may not know is that you will actually feel good doing the right thing.

Molecular Expressions, Exploring the World of Optics and Microscopy

'Welcome to the Molecular Expressions website featuring ... acclaimed photo galleries that explore the fascinating world of optical microscopy.' You can now go 'where no microscope has gone before' as you view 'one of the Web's largest collections of color photographs taken through an optical microscope (commonly referred to as "photo-micro-graphs"),' compliments of Florida State University in Tallahassee, Florida. The Photo Gallery contains 'images covering just about everything from beer and ice cream to integrated circuits and ceramic superconductors.' Start with the 'Microscopy Primer' for your introduction, then explore at your own rate learning the intricacies of the microscope as you browse the subjects captured. Be sure to click on the 'Secret Worlds, the Universe Within' and take the journey through the Milky Way 10 million light years away, automatically zoom in toward earth in powers of ten to finally arrive at an oak tree outside the lab in Florida. Here's creation in all it's glory captured for your viewing pleasure!



"Change will not come if we wait for some
other person or some other time. We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are the change that we seek."
- Barack Obama

Today's Quote

We ask ourselves, "Who am I to be
brilliant, gorgeous, talented and
fabulous?" Actually, who are you not
to be? You are a child of God.

-Marianne Williamson

No one has an exclusive on opportunity.
When the sun rises, it rises for everyone.
-- Chinese Proverb

Opportunities are never lost. The other fellow takes those you miss.
-- Anonymous

Death of a Salesman...

A little old lady answered a knock on the door one day, only to be confronted by a well dressed young man carrying a vacuum cleaner. "Good morning" said the young man.

"If I could take a couple of minutes of your time, I would like to demonstrate the very latest in high powered vacuum cleaners." "Go away", said the old lady. "I haven't got any money. I'm broke", and she proceeded to closer the door.

Quick as a flash, the young man wedged his foot in the door, and pushed it wide open.

"Don't be too hasty", he said. "Not until you have at least seen my demonstration." And with that, he emptied a bucket of horse manure onto her hallway carpet.

"If this vacuum cleaner does not remove all traces of this horse manure from your carpet, madam, I will personally eat the remainder."

The old lady stepped back and said, "Well I hope you've got a good appetite, because they cut off my electricity this morning."

Whiskey & Gunpowder
By Doug Casey
January 19, 2009
Stowe, Vermont, U.S.A.

Foundations of Crisis

“Don’t know much about the Middle Ages, look at the pictures an’ I turn the pages. Don’t know much about no rise and fall, don’t know much ‘bout nothin’ at all.”

— “Wonderful World,” Sam Cooke

The lyrics quoted above probably describe the average American’s knowledge of history about as well as any academic study. Not only don’t they know anything about it, and think it’s irrelevant, but what they do know is inaccurate and slanted. And they must not think very much about the future either if the amount of consumer debt out there, mostly accumulating at 18% interest, is any indication.

One point of studying history is that it gives you an indication of what’s likely to happen now, if you can find an appropriate analog in the past. This is a tricky business because as you look at factors contributing to a trend, it’s not easy to determine which ones are really important. Making that determination is a judgment call, and everyone’s judgment is colored by his worldview, or Weltanschauung as the Germans would have it.

Let me briefly spell out my Weltanschauung so you can more accurately determine how it compares with your own, and how it may be influencing my interpretation of the future.

I’m intensely optimistic about the long-term future. It seems to me a lock cinch that the advance of technology alone — and nanotechnology in particular — will result in a future of incredible abundance and prosperity, and that alone will solve most of the problems that plague us. Space migration, intelligence increase, and life extension will be commonplace realities. These things, plus the growth of both knowledge and its accessibility and the concomitant rise of the individual from the group, will constantly diminish politics as an element of life. The future will be much better than anything visualized on Star Trek, and will arrive much sooner. That’s the good news.

The bad news is that within the longest trend in history, the ascent of man, there is plenty of room for setbacks, and much of history is a case of two steps forward and one back. My gloomy short-term outlook, and my reasons for maintaining it, is recounted here monthly. Whether it’s right or wrong, from an investor’s point of view, the short term is more relevant than the long term. Notwithstanding Warren Buffett’s great success in going for the long term, Keynes was right when he said that in the long run we’re all dead. History shows that goes for civilizations as well as people. The problem is that our civilization is probably just now on the cusp of the long term.

Hari Seldon: Where Are You When We Need You?

Isaac Asimov’s classic Foundation trilogy centers around a scientist, Hari Seldon, who invents a science called psychohistory, which allows the fairly accurate prediction of broad trends in society going for centuries into the future. Seldon lives on Trantor, the planetary capital of a galactic empire; the entire planet is covered with a high-tech version of Washington, D.C., devoted to nothing but taxing and regulating the rest of the galaxy. Seldon forecasts that the empire will collapse and Trantor turn into a gigantic ghost town. And of course that’s what happens, because it’s a novel, and that makes for a good story. It’s a good story because it’s credible, and it’s credible because people know nothing lasts forever, and there is a cyclicality to everything; birth, youth, maturity, senescence, and death. These stages are shared by everything in the material world, whether it’s a person, a city, a civilization, or a galaxy. It’s just a question of time and scale.

From that point of view everyone knows the future, i.e., we all know that everything eventually dies. But we’d like a bit more precision on the timing of their lifecycles. Some gurus believe, or appear to believe, they can actually predict the details of the future; I consider them knaves. People who actually do believe them should be considered fools. That said — Nostradamus, astrology, channeling, tea leaf reading, and the like aside — I do think the best indicator of what will likely happen in the future is what has happened in the past. That may seem like an obvious statement, but it’s not. There have traditionally been three ways of looking at the problem; call them theories of history.

Oldest is what might be termed a chaotic view, which presumes mankind doesn’t have any ultimate destination but is wafted on the wings of Fortune or hangs by the thread of Fate. Subject to the arbitrary will of the gods, whether it’s the Old Testament’s Yahweh, or Homer’s Zeus, the future is unpredictable, and prophecy or an oracle gives you as good a read as anything else. I discount this theory heavily.

A second ancient view is that everything is cyclical, and therefore somewhat predictable. History may be viewed like a giant sine wave that’s possibly headed somewhere, but the direction is unknown. Or history is really a circle, constantly repeating itself, much like the four seasons of the year. There’s a lot of wisdom to the cyclical view.

The third view sees history as a linear sequence, one that’s actually headed somewhere. That view holds a special appeal for followers of evangelically oriented religions, particularly Christians (many of whose beliefs have an apocalyptic tinge) and Marxists (who were, until lately, given heart by the “scientific” inevitability their views would prevail). The linear view ties in with the idea of Progress, that (more or less) every day and in every way, things are getting better and better — although there’s also a subculture populated mostly by deep ecology, animal rights, and anti-technology types who believe things are headed to hell in a hand-basket. But they all believe we’re headed somewhere in a more-or-less straight line. There can be a lot of truth to the linear view, certainly if you look at the technological progress of mankind over the past 10,000 years, and this view prevails today.

My own view is a synthesis of the cyclical and linear theories. I see history evolving towards an incredibly bright future, but cyclically suffering setbacks, cyclically repeating the same patterns along the way. To me history looks like a spiral, heading off in a specific direction, but always covering the same ground in a different way with each revolution.

That’s one reason The Fourth Turning (Broadway Books, NY, 1997) by William Strauss and Neil Howe got my attention; we’re all drawn to those who see at least part of reality the way we do. The book is an extrapolation of their last work, Generations, and notwithstanding its literary faults, is simply brilliant. I’ve never met Howe, but did have lunch with Strauss once about five years ago. The way I see it, although they’re both conservatives, neither of them has any particular economic, political, or social philosophy, and they’re not trying to grind an ax. Their books are a value-free look at U.S. history, and their conclusions are more credible as a result.

Their basic hypothesis is one I suspect Hari Seldon would recognize, and my thoughts are built on the research Strauss and Howe have done over the years. I suggest you get a copy of The Fourth Turning while it’s still in the stores. That’s also true for my own Crisis Investing for the Rest of the ‘90s, which has several chapters on related subject matter, and Arthur Herman’s just-released The Idea of Decline in Western History, which also bears on the subject. With 50,000 new books published every year, very few stay available for more than a few months. If something has appeal, you should buy it now, because it may be hard to come by when you have the chance to get into it. (Of course, I was wrong on that point — websites such as Amazon and Alibris.com now make it easy to pick up many older books.)

Peace, love and happiness...until next time...