Ascription is an Anathema to any Enthusiasm

“… man … was killed and his wife injured when a tornado rolled their double-wide mobile home …. tornado swept up a cow and carried it close to a mile.  Its owner says the animal was uninjured. …”

Cows and double-wides.

Unsurprisingly all the driver’s licenses in the US, which are nominally issued by the states, are actually coordinated through a centralized hub.  We know because it broke.  I love puzzling out where these hubs are.  For example there is another one for medical information, that I gather is here in Boston.

I’d be very interested to know how much these hubs talk to each other.  I.e. how much the driver’s license data pool mixes with say the credit rating data pool.

It’s hypothetical, but seems like a safe bet that the breakdown was associated with the new year and probably an big risky upgrade required by the Real ID boondoggle.

When hanging out in the world of ideas created by Ainsle’s work Emerson’s cliche “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” offers a nice perspective. Possibly Emerson’s point was that given a larger mind you can house yet more than one hobgoblin.

In related news I see that when they cleaned up the data from Google prediction market they discarded some trades, including “self‐trades (which resulted from the fact that the software allowed traders to be matched with their own limit orders).” I wonder how much of that goes on in real markets. It’s clearly a sign of the temporal inconsistency which Ainsle’s work focuses on.

These trades took place between the hobgoblin that decided to place a limit order, and a later hobgoblin that decided to make a trade at that moment. It isn’t clear to me exactly why it’s best practice to remove the trades between these hobgoblins just because they were housed in the same person’s corporal body.

There is a wonderful classic poem, Goblin Market, here’s a bit of one of the many beautiful illustrations it’s engendered over the years. In this scene the heroine, after attempting to act as a middleman, has drawn down upon her the rage of the merchants.
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Some years ago this chart from the DOE convinced me that solar power was in trouble; that 4-5$/watt was about as good as it gets.  Bad news, given that coal is substantially cheaper than than.  It was beyond my wit to know what the source of this problem is.  It might be market forces - that the floor looks like it was hit just about the time the pulse of money generated by the 70’s oil crises is thought provoking.   It might be a technology limit of some kind, something in the physics say.

In any case it appears there is good news.  Because these folks are claiming they will hit a dollar a watt soon.  “we believe will make us the first solar manufacturer capable of profitably selling solar panels at as little as $.99/Watt.”   That’s the future tense, and it doesn’t include the rest of the capital equipment involved in the installation.   Good news none the less.

It’s weird that they are shipping them to East Germany; you’d think they would prefer someplace sunny.

I have an affection for the stories about great standards battles, like the ones around the battle betwen AC and DC (including particularly the electrocution of an elephant). I also have an affection for all the plumbing we build to convert between forms. The adapters from this to that. I particularly love the attachement for your PC that provides it with a cigarette lighter plug, like the one’s found in automobiles, so you can then plug in all those gadgets for your car. So it is with some delight I pass along this letter from the IEEE spectrum magazine.

Can there be any more absurd idea than the Coleman Powerworks power inverter for cars [Resources, November]? There’s something very wrong with this picture: the engine’s alternator generates alternating current (ac), which is converted to direct current (dc) to recharge the battery and is also distributed to a cigarette-lighter receptacle, into which we’re supposed to insert a cigar-shaped plug to send that dc power to an inverter to change it back into ac so that we can plug in our laptop’s power converter, which changes it back to dc to power the laptop! To recap: ac to dc to ac to dc. That doesn’t seem like sound engineering. It’s more like Edison and Tesla are still fighting it out in the backseat of my car.

You can get a gadget (with cup holder) to put in one of your PC’s drive bays so as to provide a cigarette lighter plug on the PC. So there is hope of making this chain longer. A quick search shows I can find many adaptors from a cigarette lighter to a power’d USB cable, but I’ve not found an adapter from a USB cable to cigarette lighter plug.