Tidbits From The Web #47

Savage thinking... (listen carefully to the audio)
Dirty water is a killer...
Today's astronomy pic...Thor's Helmet!
Photo manipulation...
32 songs in 8 minutes...
Calvin grows up...
The incredible nonedible egg!
Something to scare you...
Totally radical man...
Mapping the NYC sitcoms...
For those who may have lost someone...
Old age starts after 27...wait what?!
Anybody claiming this old man?
Still think polar bears are cute?
Prepare for civil unrest...
Retail stores are closing...past places we miss most...
Can you go with the flow?
America facing adversity to say the least...
Periodic table of cartoons...
Inside the body...microscopically...
Top 40 video game covers...
Some women are naive...
And so too is the general public...stop H.R. 875!
Good job there Mr. RV salesman...
What a baby would say to our government...




Virtual Hospital, the apprentice’s assistant

Finally, a site for both health care providers and patients. Tour the Virtual Hospital for any medical questions that you might have. You’ll find patient educational briefs browseable by organ system or by a topical list, a collection of peer-reviewed and annotated Web resources, an internal search engine, as well as links to the Atlas Anatomy. For you health professionals needing continuing education credits, here’s your resource. As Sir William Osler stated, "Variability is the law of life, and as no two faces are the same, so no two bodies are alike..." However, the sameness allows for the medical profession to treat patients. Keep this address in your files. You never know when you might need a Virtual Hospital.

Machine vision focuses on eye disease

Researchers at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, TN, have borrowed a machine-vision technique used to find defects in ICs to seek out retinal diseases in patients. This technology could be widely applied to other diseases of the eye and other organs. Full Article

Stalking the Mysterious Microbe

This educational resource was developed in conjunction with National Public Radio's Talk of the Nation: Science Friday Program. On the site you'll be able to 'Meet the Microbes' such as Virus, Alga, Bacterium and Protozoan. You'll find what it takes to become a microbiologist, if you're so inclined. The 'Did You Know?' section has several interesting pages, including microbes 'Every Day Roles' and 'Gross: You Didn't Wash Your Hands?' Here you can check out the real reason your mother taught you to 'wash your hands' (there's even a quiz for this section just to make sure you understand the facts). Who would ever think Bacteria are this fascinating!




FRIENDS


Don't make friends who are comfortable to be with. Make friends who will force you to lever yourself up.

Thomas J. Watson, Sr.


Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends.

Virginia Woolf

HUNG BY THE TONGUE
by Gary Eby

Some people just have a knack for saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. They are being, "Hung By the Tongue!"

A state trooper pulled a man over for speeding on a deserted road. Since the road was clear and the weather fine, the trooper had indicated that he may not give the man a ticket, and let them off with a warning. He even complemented both the man and his wife for wearing their seat belts. At that point the woman leaned over and said, "Well, officer, when you drive the speeds we do, you have to wear them." That's when the trooper wrote the ticket. Hung By the Tongue!

Gene and Carolyn were entertaining for the first time since the birth of their baby. Everything ran smoothly until one of Gene's buddies arrived with his new girlfriend-a woman whom Carolyn did not particularly care for. She beckoned her husband upstairs with the excuse that they had to check on the baby. In the privacy of the nursery, she spoke freely of her disdain for the new guest. When they went downstairs to rejoin the party, they were greeted with an awkward silence-except for the occasional murmuring of the sleeping baby that came from the infant monitor sitting on the table. Hung By the Tongue!

There is an ancient Japanese proverb that says... "A tongue three inches long can kill a man six feet tall."

If you are continually being "hung by your tongue", you can be "loosed from the noose" if you would just learn to engage your mind a little bit before you speak! Here's the process... think... then speak! I believe that we need to make our words sweet... just in case we have to eat them!

The words of your mouth are a creative force. They play a big part in predestining your future. Your words are the architects of your life. The tongue is like a tool. We need to use our tools of the present to build our future we desire.

You see, your future will someday be your present. Your present will someday be your past. You can chart the course of your future by your compass... your tongue. It will guide you like a rudder... into either troubled waters or a calm sea. But, don't be misled... it WILL guide you.

If you can change what you think about, you can change what comes out of your mouth. What comes out of your mouth will someday be in your future.

The words you speak create an atmosphere. If you are going to have a meeting and you really pump it up and build it, what happens? People come with expectancy! They come excited. Your words have set the stage for success! One of the foundational revelations of a wise leader is to learn to control his or her words!

Remember, Samson slew 1,000 Philistines with the jawbone of an ass. Way too many businesses, lives, and relationships are destroyed with the same weapon...

Be loosed from the Noose! Refuse to be... Hung By the Tongue!

ASKING

"When I hear somebody sigh, "Life is hard," I am always tempted to ask, "Compared to what?" -- Sydney J. Harris

"Asking is the beginning of receiving. Make sure you don't go to the ocean with a teaspoon. At least take a bucket so the kids won't laugh at you." -- Jim Rohn

"Before beginning a hunt, it is wise to ask someone what you are looking for before you begin looking for it." -- Winnie the Pooh

"Ask for what you want. Ask for help, ask for input, ask for advice and ideas -- but never be afraid to ask." -- Brian Tracy

"I don't necessarily agree with everything I say."
- Marshall McLuhan

	Today's Quote Never mistake knowledge for wisdom. One helps you make a living, the other helps you make a life. -Sandra Carey

Whiskey & Gunpowder
By Dan Denning
March 18, 2009
Melbourne, Australia

Huge Inflation

What an absurd old world we live in. The Bank of England is worried about deflation, but only so it can justify the massive inflation it’s cooking up. Barack Obama is outraged about US$165 million in bonuses at AIG and will use all legal means to stop them. Like he doesn’t have anything better to do. Here in Australia, local shares will probably follow New York’s lead and head down. Stocks on Wall Street finished up four days in a row, but couldn’t make it five. There was no Earth-shattering earnings news. That left plenty of room for grandstanding and other chicanery.

Before we get to the chicanery, what’s shaking in the local market? The banks were up. Australia’s banks never had the chance to gorge themselves on the stuff that’s choking their counterparts in Europe and North America. They were stuck, instead, with large portfolios of residential mortgages. Plus, you can’t short sell them anyway. So how low could they go?

Markets are still in a kind of suspended animation, waiting to see if there is any coherent, intelligent, effective response by the financial players or their regulators to...you know...solve the problems. It could be a long wait.

All hole and no donut. That about sums up the response of the economists and officials trying to un-freeze credit markets and get the economy going. Why on Earth is the President of the United States taking time to sort out how much people at AIG get paid? Probably because he wants to distract attention away from how much money he plans to spend, and spend ineffectively.

Look, there’s Elvis! Hey king!

That’s what distractions are, attempts to change the subject or divert focus.

Distract from what? Huge inflation. Yes. Yes. We know. There is no huge inflation now. In fact, industrial production in the United States fell for the fourth month in a row. It hasn’t been this low since 2002. But then, why would output grow when demand is falling and credit remains tight?

Money supply is not falling. Yet the good people who write the Bank of England’s Quarterly Bulletin are still warning of a “debt deflation trap.” You’ll find all the good stuff beginning on page 39. The Bank warns that the cost of debts is rising relative to everything else, making it harder for heavily indebted Britons to pay off debts. Britons are, by the way, heavily indebted.

But are falling prices really so inherently evil? Really...whoever complained about a cheaper cheeseburger? When was the last time you bellyached about the ever-declining price of a pint of beer?

The Bank study resurrects the last period of sustained deflation and connects it with the economic misery of the times, in the 1930s. Then, too, output collapsed. The world’s productive capacity far exceeded its demand. And money supply, for a time, briefly shrank as banks (who create most of the money in the fiat system) went out of business.

But all of this talk about the evil of falling prices is just a ruse. Excess capacity exists because the preceding inflationary bubble helped build factories to produce goods sold to people who bought them with credit. The demand was illusory. Unfortunately, the factories were real...it took real labour, real energy, and real raw materials to build them. They remained idle and unproductive unstill something else came along (World War Two) to reignite demand and the need for wartime production.

Falling prices aren’t inherently evil. If prices fall low enough, low cost producers of a given good or service are driven out of business. Supply tightens. Prices rise.

No...what the BoE and the Fed are doing is evoking the nightmare of the Depression to justify the coming inflation. The fiat money system can’t function without just a little inflation. The gradual erosion of purchasing power is what makes it unnoticeable and thus tolerable to private citizens. They don’t really notice it 2-3% at a time.

The trouble for the global system now is the tower of debts looming over the public and private sector in many economies. It’s all well and good if the general price level falls. But it’s no good if, while asset values like stocks and homes fall, debts remain fixed. An increase in the preference for cash makes debts a lot harder to pay off.

Of course, as you know by now, the preferred government answer is to inflate. This is what made the Chinese nervous last week as they reviewed Obama’s budget. But the BoE and the Fed have been quite clear about their intentions. They will inflate as much as they need to in order to get nominal asset prices stable.

There are some investors who buy the Fed’s bogus line that it can withdraw liquidity and sterilize its money printing before it leads to inflation in the economy. Believing this is a serious mistake that could cost you a lot of money.

The hedge against these inflationary policies (including here in Australia) is to invest in assets priced in dollars which cannot be created by a printing press. That includes oil, precious metals, and other energy commodities. The nominal price of these assets should rise as the money supply rises.

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