Comments | zaimoni: Warning shot over the bow from Mother Nature

zaimoni

Warning shot over the bow from Mother Nature

Nov 09, 2009 10:27

Roughly two days for Switzerland to have been safe from naked singularities (both point and ring), should Einstein be right. (From somewhen Nov. 3 2009 when the avian deployed a baguette to de-energize the cooling for sectors 7-8 and 8-1, to somewhen in the evening Nov. 5 2009 ( Read more... )

Comments 29

yechezkiel November 9 2009, 17:03:18 UTC

This has been very interesting, to say the least.

torakiyoshi November 9 2009, 17:17:19 UTC

( ... )

sir_dave November 10 2009, 01:01:39 UTC

Haha :D

theheretic November 10 2009, 00:48:21 UTC

Why are people afraid of the LHC? Neutrons and Protons are Hadrons. Its just a classification, not something exotic. We're not smacking antiprotons or positrons with matter here. I get the feeling people just want something to panic about because they're xtian, not because they understand science.

sir_dave November 10 2009, 01:02:41 UTC

I tend to agree (as a Physics graduate) but this sort of thing provides a better class of panic :D

theheretic November 10 2009, 01:18:37 UTC

Like the panic over the earth passing through Halley's comet tail in the 1800's? They claimed it would be the end of the world then, from the poison gases of the comet entering our atmosphere. Its ALWAYS the end of the world for the paranoids. We shouldn't give them equal time for their theories when real science will prove nothing happens to the universe.

Hell, if you REALLY want to screw with them, do the math on the likelihood of the universe containing aliens and then point out that many of them will be older and more advanced than us, which means they did their own LHC experiments and since the universe is still here, it proves the LHC experiments are safe for the universe. Circular reasoning, but they're dumb enough to buy it.

sir_dave November 10 2009, 01:28:04 UTC

Alternatively one could use the anthropic principle to say that we can only observe a universe that hasn't already been fouled up by cleverer aliens. Thus if LHC was going to cause big trouble (if!) then one could say with equal validity that this showed we were the most advanced race yet (in our galaxy at least ( ... )

Thread 20

sir_dave November 10 2009, 01:04:09 UTC

Nice to see you again :)

Friends in Iceland tell me interesting stories, otherwise the end of the banking world as we know it seems to have gone rather cold.

I am working like fury on the rewrite of my time travel novel. It's going well, but the effort involved is enormous.

zaimoni November 10 2009, 04:15:55 UTC

The jury is still out on U.S.$ hyperinflation/deflation, unfortunately. Helicopter Ben has been working on his Roman transformation into a (pagan) god non-stop, and displaying a truly unexpected willingness to destroy the U.S. money supply as well as increase it.

U.S. unemployment statistics just hit U3 10.2%, U6 17.5% (U6 is pretty much pre-Clinton unemployment statistics; it includes underemployment and people who have been demotivated into not looking for non-existent jobs), and credit card interest rates for the subprime market [mine!] have spiked 3% in the past two months. (That said, the rates I'm monitoring are a bit more closely related to the London interbank rates than the U.S. Federal Reserve.)

Of course, forget theoretically knowing how much of this deviation from pre-election prediction is absurd optimism in the baseline, and how much of it is a critical failure of Keynesian theory caused by fiat currencies without even a formal tie to precious metals in value.

sir_dave November 10 2009, 04:57:42 UTC

Here the recession is still an official fact despite previous expectations that it would be over this quarter. That is now presumed to be because finance is such a large part of our economy (we have no manufacturing worth the name any more) that it has distorted the figures ( ... )

zaimoni November 10 2009, 05:20:03 UTC

If by the "great crash" you mean 1929: that is not a reassuring analogy.

By strict analogy with 1929, the Dow Industrial 30 bottoming at 6,500 could recover to ~11,000 (relative to a peak slightly over 12,000) while remaining completely consistent with its price behavior in the Great Depression. Headway has to be made on unemployment first. (Unless roboticization/automation takes off dramatically, in which case the U.S. is facing structural unemployment of 20%+ if not 50%+. But the technological solutions for energy have to become politically non-toxic first.)

While I don't think any modern U.S. unemployment statistic is directly comparable to statistics from the 1920's, I think U6 is "closer" than U3.

Thread 6