Pincers

More specifically, as pince-nez seem to go on eBay for sixty to eighty dollars, you'd think some chinese workshop could turn them out for about five, sell them for forty, and do OK. They're pretty simple mechanically.

Spanish Flu

Yglesias asks why nobody remembers the Spanish Flu, which killed more people than WW1. A number of comments point out that he's exaggerating, but even so.
It is the case, though, that
(a) the public impact of deaths is potentiated where they happen in close proximity (as on battlefields) rather than everywhere evenly (as in the flu). That's why 11/9 with its three thousand dead is so much more of an outrage than 42,000 annual traffic deaths,
(b) flu deaths are merely one point in a wider shift of risk to our present post-WW2 situation where infectious diseases are just a rounding error in death statistics. It's like saying "A lot of men used to wear panamas, and now they don't," when what people notice, as far as they notice it at all, is "People used to wear hats, and now they don't."

Can't go back to Thailand, then

Well, this is about time to express solidarity with Nicolaides and decry lese-majeste prosecutions. I was going to repeat the offending para, but it's available on Wikipedia. You can also get the entire novel at http://psydj.tv/text/verisimilitude-harry-nicolaides.pdf. A pretty terrible novel - written in the first person and then find-and-replaced changed into the third, with a few botched edits remaining to prove it. Mind you, it appears to be a paranoid expansion of some inter-academic arguments he had over student marking, leading to a theory on how the tentacles of American intelligence had him denied promotion; what his conspiracy theories are going to be like after this hardly bears imagining. There's certainly a book in it, though - might even sell more than seven (the Wikipedia editor notes censoriously that this needs better referencing - one source apparently says ten) copies.
Anyway, where was I? Oh yes. Solidarity. The Crown prince is a nasty piece of work and an anus-faced loser with it. The leavings on Bhumipol's plate.

Of course, at seven readers that's probably six more than this blog (five, if you count me), but I haven't gone to all the trouble of publishing.

Oh, and did you know that nobody's making pince-nez any more? You have to buy antiques and fit new lenses. Odd - you'd think there's be a tiny but solid market.

Long national nightmare, yadda yadda

OK, he's sworn in with an address that gives cheerios to American exceptionalism and militarism (Khe Sanh? WTF?)and leaves Lincoln's second unchallenged. Still, the heat's off for another four years and I can start purging my blog list.

Apricot season over for another year, too. Most of them unpicked - too high to reach, and my climbing days have been forcibly ended since falling (a) out of that tree and (b) off that ladder. I need a telescopic pole with a picking attachment: I must look on ebay. I did enquire about pruning it down to reachable distance, but was informed that I'm twenty years too late; procrastination....

Had another try this Xmas getting the lights up. Slightly better: this time they broke just at the last letter.

I think I know what I did wrong, too. Next year it'll be perfect. Unless I get an attack on conscience and hold out for the same thing in LEDs so as to minimise global warming.

Turducken

To the shops to get meat thermometer. Panic: is it too short to reach the the radius of a large turkey? I get a (longer-shafted) pizza oven thermometer which does, however, cover many more degrees and thus has much less accurate fine gradations.
Also kitchen thread, needle, and boning knife.

With global warming, John, the question is surely not "Is 2 degrees plus global warming if we do nothing certain?" but rather "Is there more than a 5% chance that 2 degrees plus global warming is coming if we do nothing?"
In view of the unequal balance of pro and con in the scientific community I'd find very it hard to say that the chance was less than 5%. If it's at or over 5%, that's warrant for strong action. In any case, I think the first step in any dispute over this is for some kind of numbers to be applied to statements of probabilities. What's your estimate?

Ponzi

There is a theme in the articles on Madoff of people asking where the 50 billion went to. With no actual knowledge on the details, isn't a classic Ponzi scheme largely redistributional, the money from new customers going out to old customers? You get the finagler's cut not so much by taking a percentage off the top as by heading off to Rio in the middle of the enterprise. A quick Excelling of a scheme where investors are paid 10%, there are no investment profits, there are no administration costs, and there's a constant flow coming in every year shows that the business goes into deficit in year 20. Anybody who's been in Madoff's funds for more than ten years has already broken even.

And on the financial front, isn't the problem with the boom pundits the same problem that comes up with Rudd's climate plans - the systematic downplaying of the possibility of low-probability catastrophic events in the belief that any such catastrophe is most unlikely to come along before the manager has taken his rewards and moved on? The chance of a total wipeout isn't factored in to anybody's structure of incentives.

Melbourne and Sydney may be lucky: we can always put a dyke across the heads. If we were Dutch we would have done it already.

Miller time

Has there in the history of the world been a worse decision than the choice of Frank Miller to bring The Spirit to the screen?

Though, to be fair, the Rudd decision to shoot for only a 5% carbon cut must come close.