Ascription is an Anathema to any Enthusiasm

The virtual antique typewriter museum is a delight.  This example was built at the very end of the 19th century.

Notice that it has cylindrical type ball.   This same vendor also made an electric version.  That one had a lock.  I wonder what the salesman would say about that lock and key; kind of bad actor, waste, or impulse that lock and key where intended to address.
The teletypes like those I used when interacting with a timesharing system back in the 1960s has a cylindrical type head.  They could also read and write a punch tape.  You’d use that to prepare data before making your phone call.  I used to carry a carefully folded punch tape in my wallet to initialized my sessions.

I like to call my cell phone pda “my box of daemons”.  Maybe I should call my laptop “my secretary”.  While neither have a lock and key; they have lots of passwords instead.

I have a great affection for agents, middlemen, deal makers.  They sit at the hubs, build the bridges, keep the traffic flowing.  I get a cranky when people who haven’t ever made a deal, built a bridge, or created a new solid connection betwen two diverse things start whinning about agency problems.

So my ears perk’d up at this bit over at Talking Point’s Memo.  This appears in a quote from, we are told a very shrewd Republican.  He’s reacting to a the other evenings Republican presidential debate.

Mitt Romney, just to try to figure out what he is thinking as he goes through this process. I don’t really know, but here’s a guess: to Romney, getting elected President is a lot like putting together a business deal. The details of getting the deal done matter, because the deal doesn’t happen without them, but the main thing is getting the deal done. I think Romney has personal beliefs, but not political principles; he wouldn’t do anything in this campaign that would hurt his family or someone he cared about, but he’ll change positions the way most people change socks. Whatever it takes to get the deal done.

Getting deals done is real work.  It has it’s own ethical framework.  I like to say that middleman’s problem is that he has to love both sides.  Which can be hard because the sides don’t love each other; if they did you wouldn’t need to build the bridge.  That makes the middleman appear two faced, since each side finds it deeply suspicious if they find out he likes the other side.

As an aside.  My saying “love both sides” isn’t actually right.  The middleman has to adopt some attitude about both sides, maybe not even the same one.  He can hate them both for example.  He can be delighted by one, and have high respect for the other.   There are lots of choices.

I think that insight about Romney is reasonably correct.  The presumption that he will do anything to get the deal done.  I don’t know about that.  I suspect it maybe right, some deal makers anchor their ethical house on the foundation of maximizing deal flow.

That said I think Romney also has a streak of boarding school brat.   Poor adult role models combined with a arrogant attitude about the kids off campus.  A tendency to think the uniform makes the man.  I firmly believe his attitude about the voters is he doesn’t particularly like them.  They just keep getting in the way of closing the deal.

Good politicians, i.e. the ones you should support, like the voters.  One at a time, in groups, and all together.

Good map showing where the world’s oil is. Hope that clears up some of the confusion.

It is worthwhile to compare that to this cartogram showing the crude oil exporters.

As if he were reminding himself of a fish that got away the speaker spread his hands wide apart to suggest how much discovery remained before it would be practical.  He held them closer for a second technology.   Turning them from the horizontal to the vertical he spoke of the engineering work.  He was answering question about what was needed before commercialization, spanning a big imaginary box of risk.

He was wrapping up his talk.  I had come to hear the next talk about deep water windmills for electric power generation.  The day’s topic was energy, the track was renewable energy, and the talk about windmills at sea was pure engineering.  Hardly a wiff of discovery is required.  I got the impression the only hard part might, and even this wasn’t clear, making the turbines robust over a 20 year life span when they must stand one or two hurricanes each year.  The speaker appeared convinced that he can deploy these for a cost commenserate with current natural gas fired electric power plants.  That’s delightful news.

I like that one would measure the amount of discovery v.s. the amount of engineering in a scheme.  Wet fish and hand spans seem like a good framework.

This is horrible. Tropical Cyclone Sidr is forecast to hit the low lying and extremely densely populated regions of Bangladesh. The track shown at right will bring the worst, right side, of the storm over the area. The storm is currently a category 4, and is forecast to weaken a bit before striking.

This is an amazingly densely populated region. The next map shows the low lying areas in reds, and those over 10 meters above sea level in green. The deepest colored areas have over a thousand people per square kilometer. Dhaka, the urban center here, holds 12 million people.
This next chart shows the forecasted storm surge, i.e. the water pushed in front of the storm. It’s small but the only comfort to be had is the storm surge isn’t 10 meters, but only 4-5.

This is extremely similar to the cyclone in 1970 that killed a half a million people, lead to a civil war, and the founding of Bangladesh (formerly part of Pakistan).

Finally this next map shows the population of West Bengal, the area of India that borders Bangladesh. This area includes Kolkata, the planet’s eight largest urban area (14 Million people).  The next map is like the the one above, but for West Bengal, with the outlined area showing Kolkata.