Something's comin'

Teaser video for the 2010 Toyota Prius. I WANT this car, man!

Santa Claws

I love cats because they've always got an attitude and they're just so photogenic. This one's particularly awesome =)

Dumb and dumberer

So yesterday U.S. President George W. Bush announced his plan to offer a bridge loan to the Detroit auto manufacturers, which allocates roughly $9bn to GM and $5bn to Chrysler immediately. So far I had spoken against it but in fact, as it stands, the latest deal is actually quite reasonable the for time being. Indeed, handing out a crumbling auto industry to a new administration would not be a good thing at all and in any case the loan is conditional on the two automakers coming up with a restructuring plan by March. Otherwise the loans will be called and the U.S. Treasury will have first priority over other creditors to recuperate its assets. Unlike with the deal to buy bad mortgage securities, in this case the U.S. is making sure it cannot lose money in the end, which is a very good thing indeed.

On the whole, though, this changes nothing to the fact that one cannot turn GM into a Toyota overnight, especially at a time when even Toyota itself is experiencing its first losses in over seventy years. So the question is, what next? this is of course where things get very tricky, as there are no good options I see for the Big 3 right now. Indeed, one cannot imagine the U.S. Treasury having to dole out $2bn a month to each one of the Detroit 3 over the next five years. This would amount to burning as much cash as for another Iraq invasion. Sadly enough both George Bush and Barack Obama seem to be paying heed to this phoney argument that bankruptcy would mean the end of the car companies, because if they go bankrupt then oh-my-god nobody will want to take the risk to buy their trucks anymore because they might not be able to honor their warranties if they go bust for good. On the contrary, it seems to me this would be a perfectly good time to have GM file for Chapter 11, as nobody is buying their gas guzzlers right now anyway.

Yet in these tough economic times it is hard to see how one could possibly revive talks with Renault-Nissan for a buyout of either GM or Chrysler, which would have been the best solution for them. Undoubtedly it would really take a Carlos Ghosn at the helm to restructure the Detroit automakers and precisely what GM really needs is oversight from a parent company or a partner that really know how to build small, fuel-efficient vehicles that the public want to buy. Either Renault-Nissan or Toyota would be the very best suitors to this end-there are not many others to begin with. Or perhaps-Tata, anyone?

Which brings me to the totally depressing realization I am going through in this end of 2008: that the Bush administration has been an economic and diplomatic disaster for eight years but my early doubts about Barack Obama's economic (and even diplomatic) know-how are now becoming very real. Mr Obama seems intent on bailing out the U.S. economy by having the U.S. Treasury manage the restructuring of GM and generally bailing out everybody else by spending lots of money on infrastructure and public service.

The problem is, determining what the long-term infrastructure needs of America precisely are is not so easy as it seems and in spending too much money too quickly one is running the risk of building plenty of bridges to nowhere. Civil engineering is not a trivial task, although in some cases it can be a very good thing. But rather than spending money on infrastructure I would call for the U.S. government to save as much money as it can, as follows:

1. pull out of Iraq and Afghanistan immediately. Neither of these wars can be 'won' in the long run and in fact a prolonged American presence in two conservative muslim countries will only serve to keep the Jihadi movement going forever. Bin Laden managed to escape to Pakistan and you won't catch him there, so get over it and send the troops home.

2. cut military spending drastically. It's not like Canada and Mexico are about to invade the U.S. and this would also be a good opportunity to get back to nuclear disarmament negotiations with both the Russians and the Chinese. Then refocus the government labs like Los Alamos and Livermore to researching energy problems of the peaceful kind, e.g. solar energy and fuel cells.

3. tax the rich! even Warren Buffett is advocating this and it only makes sense. Instead of asking the rich to lend money to Uncle Sam, it is much cheaper for the Treasury to simply tax them more. This is done most effectively by taxing luxury goods and capital gains on Wall Street above a certain limit. In the end this is a good deal even for the rich themselves, as a crumbling financial system is doing them no good anyway.

4. cut down drastically on social security and medicare. This generation of seniors and the upcoming Baby Boomers have had it too easy their whole lives, they've stashed plenty of money on the side and it's totally unfair that my own generation should have to pay to keep their decadent lifestyle going. And if people insist on drinking beer and eating plenty of sugar and bread, it's their problem if they get diabetes when they hit 50. Just don't make younger, health-conscious people pay for your stupidity, fellas!

5. if you're going to invest public money into the American industry, at least invest it in the most reliable and productive way possible. That is, invest it into promising business sectors. Like, don't invest in GM, invest in Google and solar energy companies. Even oil companies are a better investment, as oil is not about to go away as an energy source and it's really burning coal that's causing global warming for the most part!

Explaining metallic glasses

This most fascinating article on physorg.com is reporting progress made in researching the properties of glassy metals, an exceptional state of matter not normally found in nature.

A team of materials scientists from MIT, led by Carl V. Thompson of the Materials Processing Center, have built a microscopic array of cantilevers on which they have deposited alloys of the same two metals in slightly varying proportions, in order to compare their properties side-by-side.

Glassy metals are produced by quickly cooling, or 'quenching' as this is called, a molten metal alloy, in order to prevent its atoms from aligning themselves into a crystal lattice. Glassy metals have unusual magnetic and mechanical properties. Their magnetism is 'soft', which means it is easy to reorient and so for instance they can be used as cores in high-voltage electrical transformers. Glassy metals are also exceptionally hard and have a high degree of springiness, which means that they can get back into shape quickly after suffering a mechanical shock. For this reason they make excellent golf clubs!

The Mactini

Hilarious spoof Apple ad =)

Kim's alive and kickin'!

Well it looks like North Korea's Dear Leader Kim Jong-il is back and totally rockin' the Communist homeland with his parka and dark glasses as usual.

김 정일이 돌아왔어요!!

Last week, Francois-Xavier Roux, a French neurosurgeon at Saint-Anne Hospital in Paris, told a French newspaper that Kim had suffered a stroke, but is now better. The doctor said he last treated Kim in late October. Great so now we know for sure the guy's literally lost his mind!

Sock and awe

I just stumbled upon this hilarious web game that puts you the player in the shoes of the Iraqi journalist who threw his pair at the U.S. President. Have fun!

The KLF-Justified and Ancient

Another classic trance track featuring the beautiful voice of country singer Tammy Wynette, who passed away ten years ago.

Antikythera reconstructed

London Science Museum curator Michael Wright demonstrates his reconstruction of the Antikythera mechanism, an ancient Greek astronomical computer.

Interview with John Doerr

An interview with venture capitalist extraordinaire John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers, in which he discusses the state of the high tech industry in the U.S. today, as well as immigration issues and the financial crisis.

Iraqi throws shoe at George Bush

Well, it doesn't get any better than this!

Barack 'Santa' Obama

Here's the new and positively hilarious cartoon from Kal, the cartoonist for The Economist magazine. I thought I really should share it, as it brilliantly summarizes why I'm still not completely a fan of Barack Obama, although the man certainly has a lot going for him. Trouble is, compared to the outgoing president, almost anyone would look good-even myself and whoever will one day be my mother-in-law.

Don't get me wrong, I do appreciate that Barack Obama has a good personality and is willing to listen to other people's points of view. Also Mr Obama does not despise Europe and the rest of the world and he has just picked a Nobel prize-winning physicist, Dr Steven Chu, to head his Department of Energy, which bodes very well for his environmental and scientific policies.

However, when it comes to his strategy to revive the U.S. economy-and the economy supposedly is the strength of the Democrats-I do remain more than a bit skeptical. First Mr Obama said nothing to criticize, even constructively, Henry Paulson's plan to bail out Wall Street bankers by directly  buying bad mortgage securities. Now he has approved another $800bn to inject into the consumer credit market and he is also readying what is reportedly another trillion dollar so-called 'stimulus' package to be spent on building projects, education and other popular-sounding job creation schemes.

All of a sudden a trillion dollars has become the new billion dollars.

I would definitely be more than a bit cautious about engaging America so emphatically into a direction of bottomless government spending, which basically has all the appearance of America attempting to lift itself up by pulling its own straps. This is the kind of gravity-defying stunt that could very well end up making the lives of my generation of workers extremely miserable in the long run, all the more since America is already heavily in debt. And that precisely is what worries me most: America has a mountain of debt, its economy is suffering its worst recession in perhaps thirty years and that could last the entire length of Mr Obama's tenure and yet the President-elect is enthused by the idea of spending trillions of dollars without an afterthought.

Supposedly Mr Obama's economic team of advisors, headed by Larry Summers, are great academics and financiers who are the best of the best. Fair enough, but at the end of the day economics has a lot more to do with common sense than academics and technical competence. Unfortunately, more often than not common sense and intuition is what great academics and former bankers tend to lack completely. And my own common sense tells me that George Bush and Barack Obama are both setting America on a course that may very well trade an economic and financial crisis for another crisis, of a fiscal nature this time, that might potentially bankrupt the U.S. Federal government altogether.

Then in the event of a real emergency, such as a catastrophic bird-flu pandemic, an 8.0 earthquake in Los Angeles or even a group of islamic fanatics from Pakistan or Iran stealing and then detonating a nuclear device in some Western capital, America would have no money left to respond in an effective way...

How to: watch Colbert online from London

Since the guys at Comedy Central apparently have a deal with FX UK that restricts Eurosurfers from watching Colbert on the internet, I would like to suggest fellow Colbert fans in London the following trick: access The Colbert Report site through an anonymous proxy site such as the-cloak.com. Just click here and there you go-nothing shall stop the march of Colbert's Truthiness!

Balloon diplomacy

I was just reading this great article in the LA Times, which recounts the exploits of Mr Lee Min-bok, a North Korean defector who is now sending propaganda flyers back to his homeland with helium balloons flown across the heavily-guarded DMZ.

"Dear North Koreans," one begins, taking aim at Kim. "So he's a General who eats rice gruel together with the people? But how could he get love handles and a double chin if he eats rice gruel? People are starving to death, but why does the country spend so much for Kim's [extravagances]?"

재미 있어요!

United States of France

A while back, rather as a joke, I sent a couple of my friends this article from Time Magazine, entitled 'How we became the United States of France,' in which author Bill Saporito pens a hilarious comparison of how U.S. capitalism is on the verge of becoming even more neo-socialist than the French economy. Two months ago the U.S. Treasury and the Fed bailed out Wall Street, and in the process they nationalized America's big banks and its largest insurer, AIG. At the time I decried that as making little economic sense, especially the way they were doing it, by having the Treasury directly buy bad mortgage securities from the banks.

Today the U.S. is nationalizing its Big 3 carmakers, GM, Chrysler and Ford, through ginormous loans with complete oversight from the government attached to them. This of course makes little economic sense either, as that money would be better spent on education and heck-the U.S. might just as well invest it in Google and other tech stocks at a bargain price today. The justification behind it is of course the threat of losing 5m jobs tied to the auto sector. But even this is nonsense, as according to that logic you might as well bail out the entire U.S. economy. What about small businesses having to lay off their hard-working, non-union employees? they too might like to get bailed out, somehow. Plus, I do think bankruptcy would be the best way to force the automakers to restructure at once anyway.

But big shareholders would lose out big time and the U.S. goverment once again can't get used to the idea of letting fat investors lose their poorly-invested money. On top of that, this bail out of American car companies is sending a terrible message to their foreign competitors such as Toyota and Honda, who now build their cars in assembly lines located on U.S. soil and have created just as many jobs as GM has-and their cars don't totally suck.

Just to entice the reader, here's quoting the first paragraph of Saporito's hilarious sendup of America's new-found love of socialism:

How we became the United States of France

by Bill Saporito

This is the state of our great republic: We've nationalized the financial system, taking control from Wall Street bankers we no longer trust. We're about to quasi-nationalize the Detroit auto companies via massive loans because they're a source of American pride, and too many jobs — and votes — are at stake. Our Social Security system is going broke as we head for a future in which too many retirees will be supported by too few workers. How long before we have national health care? Put it all together, and the America that emerges is a cartoonish version of the country most despised by red-meat red-state patriots: France. Only with worse food.

Have a good laugh, read the rest =)

O Jail

I won't comment at length on the news today that O.J. Simpson was sentenced to a maximum of 33 years in jail for the foolish armed robbery of two sports memorabilia dealers in Vegas-you can read it all in the press I suppose. But let me just tell ya this joke I once heard from a homeless man in L.A.: you wanna know what's the difference between the Lion King and O.J. Simpson? one's an African Lion and the other's a lyin' African!

Resuscitating squeletons

I always love to post Steve Bell's cartoons but Martin Rowson's also very funny =)

Pounded

£1 = €1.148! and a number of English politicians are now having regrets about not joining the euro, as the UK would probably be weathering the financial crisis better. As Tony Blair would say, it's all the fault of Gordon's "five shitty little tests." Well I suppose this is a classic example of the British wanting to have it both ways with the EU. Call it to have your ridiculously expensive scone and eat it too...

First superconducting transistor

The Dec. 3 issue of the excellent New Scientist features a number of extremely interesting articles, in particular this brief on research being done on the world's first superconducting transistor, a holy grail of microelectronics. For the first time in decades solid-state physicists have been able to build a working prototype superconducting transistor. This paves the way for much faster electronic chips, as resistivity of conventional semiconductors remains the principal obstacle to higher switching speeds for transistors.

This groundbreaking work was achieved by Andrea Caviglia and his colleagues at the University of Geneva in Switzerland. They did so by growing a single crystal containing two metal oxides, strontium titanate and lanthanum aluminate, forming two separate layers inside the crystal. At the interface of these two materials the team found a dense gas of free electrons and at 0.3 kelvin, just above the absolute zero, these electrons can flow completely without resistance, and so form a superconductor.

This device can act as a transistor by applying or switching off a voltage at the interface, which has the effect of turning on or off the superconducting behavior of the electron gas. The crystal can therefore mimic the properties of a Field Effect Transistor (FET), a common component in electronic circuits. In a conventional FET the switching speed is limited by the heat that results from the resistance to the flow of electrons through the semiconductor channel. But with a superconducting transistor one could conceivably achieve much higher frequencies than the gigahertz range currently reachable with existing transistor technologies.