Now in those days ...

In church, some passages in the Bible are read so frequently that we only need to hear the first phrase to know what will follow. One of those phrases is "Now in those days".

Christmas. Luke 2.

Now in those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus, that a census be taken of all the inhabited earth. This was the first census taken while Quirinius was governor of Syria. And everyone was on his way to register for the census, each to his own city. Joseph also went up from Galilee, from the city of Nazareth, to Judea, to the city of David which is called Bethlehem, because he was of the house and family of David, in order to register along with Mary, who was engaged to him, and was with child. While they were there, the days were completed for her to give birth. And she gave birth to her firstborn son; and she wrapped Him in cloths, and laid Him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn.

In the same region there were some shepherds staying out in the fields and keeping watch over their flock by night. And an angel of the Lord suddenly stood before them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them; and they were terribly frightened. But the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid; for behold, I bring you good news of great joy which will be for all the people; for today in the city of David there has been born for you a Savior, who is Christ the Lord. This will be a sign for you: you will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger.” And suddenly there appeared with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying,

“Glory to God in the highest, And on earth peace among men with whom He is pleased.”

When the angels had gone away from them into heaven, the shepherds began saying to one another, “Let us go straight to Bethlehem then, and see this thing that has happened which the Lord has made known to us.” So they came in a hurry and found their way to Mary and Joseph, and the baby as He lay in the manger. When they had seen this, they made known the statement which had been told them about this Child. And all who heard it wondered at the things which were told them by the shepherds. But Mary treasured all these things, pondering them in her heart. The shepherds went back, glorifying and praising God for all that they had heard and seen, just as had been told them.

Luke 2:1-20 (NASB)

Merry Christmas

More Fedora Set-up

Now, back to that ToDo list:

1. How to put the system in standby mode
   

   Click your name in the Top Bar and select Suspend. The machine comes back up by just hitting the Enter key.

2. Find and install Adobe Flash plug-in
   

   Follow the instructions (more or less) in here http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Flash

3. Find PDF plug-in
   

   Not needed. Use Document Viewer, which is included by default.

4. ITunes

   Todo

5. Find VNC Server/Viewer download

   The vino VNC server/viewer is already installed. Todo.

6. Find Lexmark printer driver download
   

   Start here: http://www.linuxfoundation.org/collaborate/workgroups/openprinting http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Printing/ConfigurationTool

7. Download OpenOffice
   

   Use LibreOffice instead.
   From here, I downloaded LibO_3.4.4_Linux_x86-64_install-rpm_en-US.tar.gz
   Then follow the install instructions in the README file.
   A JVM is apparently also needed.

8. Tunneling software

   Todo

9. Customize GRUB

   Fron a terminal:
   > su -
   > cd /boot/grub
   > cp grub.conf grub.conf.backup
   > gvim grub.conf
   Use '#' to comment out unwanted menu entries
   Change the timeout value to 30
   Change the title from 'Other' to 'Windows XP'
   Swap the order of the menu entries so that Windows is first
   Save and exit
   Log out
   Reboot and test

10. Download Perl
    

    Not needed. Included by default.

11. Install git

    Similar to installing 'vim' (see below).
    Click check boxes for 'git-[version]...' and 'gitk-[version]...'

New items not on the previous ToDo list:

1. Install Java

   In Add/Remove Software
   In textbox, type 'java'
   Click 'find'
   Click checkbox for 'Java'
   Click 'Apply' button (downloads for a while)
   Additional confirmation required
   Click 'Continue' button
   Enter root password
   Click 'Authenticate' button (install proceeds)
   Pop-up for IcedTea Web Control Panel (click 'Close')

2. Install vim

   In Add/Remove Software
   In textbox, type 'vim'
   Click 'find'
   Click checkbox for 'vim-X11-...'
   Click 'Apply' button (downloads for a while)
   Additional confirmation required
   Click 'Continue' button
   Enter root password
   Click 'Authenticate' button (install proceeds)
   At pop-up, click 'Close'
   In a terminal:
   > su -c 'vi /etc/bashrc'
   add 'alias vim=/usr/bin/gvim'

3. Install graphviz

   Use Add/Remove Software, searching for 'graphviz'
   Select packages for development, PDF, HTML, demo graphs, Java, Perl, Python, PHP and Ruby

4. Install emacs

   Use Add/Remove Software, searching for 'emacs'
   Select 'GNU emacs text editor'

5. Find ATK utilities: pipescript, ox, mrhex, ez

   Todo
   

6. Install Python

   Included by default.

7. Install gcc

   Use Add/Remove Software, searching for 'gcc'
   Select 'Various compilers', 'C++ support' and 'Java support'

Installing Fedora (GNOME desktop version)

Previous experiments with Fedora are located here.

In an ongoing effort to create a Linux set-up usable by the whole family, I'm reinstalling Fedora 15 with GNOME over my previous install with the LXDE desktop.

So I begin:

1. From Windows, insert previously created Live CD for Fedora 15 with GNOME into the DVD drive.
2. Reboot
3. When the first screen appears, hit Escape button to interrupt the normal boot process.
4. Use F12 to choose a temporary start-up device
5. Select the CD/DVD drive, hit Enter
6. After a bit, a Live user session starts.
7. Double-click the 'Install to hard drive' icon.
8. Select 'U.S. English' and click Next.
9. Select 'Basic Storage Devices' and click Next.
10. Enter name of the computer and click Next.
11. Select the time zone and click Next.
12. Enter the root password twice and click Next.
13. Record the root password somewhere safe in case it's forgotten.
14. Select 'Replace Existing Linux System(s)' and click Next.
15. Receive the final 'Write changes to disk' message. There is no turning back after this point. Click Next.

The installation process starts copying files into the system and updates the screen with progress messages. Eventually you get to a 'Congratulations' message. Click Close.

From the Live session:

1. Select 'User -> Log out'
2. From icon at upper right, select Restart.

Eventually I reached the Welcome screen.

1. Click Forward.
2. Click Forward.
3. Enter user name and password and click Forward.
4. Check the time and date and click Forward.
5. Select 'Do not send profile' and click Forward. I've already sent the profile for this machine.
6. Log in with the new user id and password.
7. Click 'Activities'.
8. Click 'Applications'.
9. Click 'Software Updates'.
10. The 'Software Updates' window opens up. (402 updates available.)
11. Click 'Install Updates' button.
12. At this point I got a 'Transaction Error' message. The details indicated that one of the items required a more recent version of Fedora 15. Find that item in the list and unclick the checkbox.
13. Click 'Install Updates' button.
    
14. On the 'Additional Confirmation Required' panel, there are messages that other items need to be installed and removed. Click 'Continue'.
15. The download and install takes a long time. Eventually a message is displayed 'A restart is needed. click 'Restart computer'.

During the restart, just let the first screen go by. At the GRUB screen I noticed that two versions of Fedora are listed, followed by item 'Other' (Windows) in the 3rd position. I let the first version of Fedora listed automatically boot, which failed to make progress. After a good wait (no activity on the hard drive for 5+ minutes) I powered down.

Then when I powered up again I selected the second version of Fedora listed. Please note that it took a long time for this (good) version of Fedora to boot up. However, hard drive activity did indicate that progress was being made. Be patient at this point of the install.Eventually I got back to the sign on screen and was able to sign on. The updates were successfully loaded.

Some good Fedora resources:

• http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FAQ
• http://www.fedorafaq.org/
• http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=fedora
• http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Flash for Adobe Flash player
• http://www.gnome.org/ for GNOME
  

Test Driving Ubuntu Linux - Part 3

Continued from Test Driving Ubuntu Linux - Part 2.

Back to laptop #1
Still unable to get the external monitor to be recognized by the system. There appears to be a variety of open questions on this topic.

Update 02/04/2012: A possible solution to the external monitor problem has been posted on the Ubuntu Forums.

Attempted to use the instructions from Part 2 to download Adobe Flash. I first tried the 'sudo apt-get' command, which did not work. The Install button did work and I could watch YouTube after that point. However, no Pandora.

Searched around for this page: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RestrictedFormats, which has a 'click here' link to open 'Ubuntu Software Center' for 'Ubuntu restricted extras'. It's worth a try. After the install, I can still watch YouTube videos. Also, now Pandora does not complain about not having Adobe Flash and lets me sign in. However it does not play any music. More to research here.

Test Driving Ubuntu Linux - Part 2

Continued from Test Driving Ubuntu Linux.

After signing on you get a clean environment with several applications in the 'Launcher' on the left side, and set of system utilities in the upper right corner. Now the customization process begins.

1. In the upper right, find the Network pull-down. The wireless network is listed, so I just click on it to connect.
2. In the Launcher, Firefox is included as one of the icons. Start Firefox and restore the previously saved bookmarks. NOTE: The user interface is much like the Apple/Mac/OS X interface. That is, the frame for Firefox itself is very clean and does not contain any top bar menu. In order to find the top menu (including 'bookmarks') you need to click on the Firefox frame, then move the mouse pointer to the top bar of the entire screen. Then you'll see the menu items for Firefox. Select 'Bookmarks -> Show All Bookmarks'. Then click on that 'Library' window, go back to the top of the screen and select 'Import and Backup -> Restore -> Choose File'. Then you can find you bookmarks file on the flash drive.
3. Next, try out a few of the restored bookmarks. All of the usual news sites look good.

Software Updates

1. Use the top right System button, and select 'Software up to date'.
2. The 'Update Manager' window says that 302 updates are available. Click 'Install Updates'.
3. An 'Authenticate' window pops up. Enter password and click 'Authenticate'.
4. An error message pops up. 'Requires installation of untrusted packages'. Click 'Close'.
5. Searched Ubuntu Answers for the error. From a terminal do:
   > sudo apt-get update
   > sudo apt-get upgrade
   See UPDATE below
6. The Terminal is found by clicking on the 'Dash Home' button in the launcher and typing 'terminal' in the search box.
7. Click on the 'terminal' icon to start a terminal window.
   
8. Type the above commands in the terminal window and enter your password when prompted.
9. It takes quite a while to run.
10. After rebooting, opened up the 'Update Manager' again. Now there are only 2 items remaining in the list. Apparently these are the ones causing problems. Just click 'Close'.
11. UPDATE: Using 'sudo apt-get ...' will work around the problem, but will not fix it for next time. Instead, use the instructions here to find and use the "Select Best Server" button. Then retry updating software through the Update Manager.
    

Installing Adobe Flash

1. Start Firefox
2. Go to YouTube to view a video. This resulted in an error message that the Adobe Flash Player is needed.
3. Open 'Ubuntu Software Center' from Launcher.
4. Search for 'Flash'.
5. Click on 'Adobe Flash plugin'.
6. Click 'Install'.
7. Enter password and click 'Authenticate'.
8. This results in a error message: 'Failed to download package files'.
9. The 'Ubuntu Software Center' has a link named Developer Web Site. Click on that.
10. At the bottom of that web-page is the following information. To install, open up the Terminal and type:
    > sudo apt-get install flashplugin-nonfree
11. The Terminal is found by clicking on the 'Dash Home' button in the launcher and typing 'terminal' in the search box.
12. Click on the 'terminal' icon to start a terminal window.
    
13. Type the above command in the terminal window and enter your password when prompted.
    
14. Success. Guy on a Buffalo
15. Likewise, Pandora is good.

Keeping Apps in the Launcher

The terminal is a good thing to have handy in the Launcher. Keep it in the Launcher by right-clicking on the terminal icon and selecting 'Keep in launcher'. This works for any running application.

Test Driving Ubuntu Linux

For my next experiment with Linux, I decided to try out Ubuntu.

Laptop #1
I noticed that Ubuntu has an option to run alongside Windows. You can download the installer through the Windows Installer page, which worked fine in my newer laptop PC. Basically, you install Linux onto your machine like you would any other Windows application. When you power up the machine you get an opportunity to choose which operating system to run. I just did a quick run-through with this version. The one thing I did notice is that the external monitor for my laptop was not recognized, and I could not use it. Apparently this is a problem with some new Intel/NVIDIA set-up.

Laptop #2
Next, I downloaded the 64-bit version of Ubuntu 11.10 from the Ubuntu download page. The 32-bit version is the "recommended" version, but reading in the Questions for Ubuntu page, I found out that the 32-bit version is only recommended because it will work on either 32 or 64-bit processors. If you know you have a 64-bit processor, go ahead and download the 64-bit version.

The download went fine and the instructions for creating a CD worked fine for creating a DVD (instead of a CD). The download page also has some nice "Show me how" buttons which are useful for a first-timer.

Using the DVD, I booted up this version on another laptop. In order to boot from the DVD drive, you need to watch the first screen and use whatever key is needed to interrupt the normal boot process (the Esc on this laptop). Then, you need to find the key for boot source options, or something like that (F8 on this laptop). Then select the CD/DVD drive and hit Enter.

Here is a quick summary of the installation steps, starting from Windows7:

1. Save Firefox bookmarks to a flash drive.
2. Insert Ubuntu DVD into DVD drive.
3. The drive will autoplay. Select 'run wubi.exe' (the Windows installer).
4. Click 'yes' on User Account Control.
5. Select 'Install inside Windows'.
6. Enter a new user name and password.
7. Click 'Install'.
   
8. It takes about 3 minutes to copy the files over from the DVD to the internal hard drive. When it is finished, the DVD drive will open. Remove the disk and close the DVD drive.
9. The set-up wizard shows a 'Reboot now' option. Select that and click 'Finish'.
10. After the system reboots, you get to another install screen. About another 10 minutes is needed to copy files and configure the system.
11. When the installation is complete, you see the Windows Boot Manager screen. This is the screen where you can select to boot either Windows or Ubuntu (use the arrow keys, and Enter).
12. Selecting Ubuntu, you finally get to the sign on screen. Enter your user name and password to sign on.
    

Overall, the installation process was quick and easy. To remove Ubuntu from your system, just do the following:

1. Boot back to Windows.
2. Open 'Computer'.
   
3. Select 'Uninstall of change an program'.
4. Find 'Ubuntu' in the list of programs and click it.
5. Click 'Uninstall/Change'.
6. Click 'Yes' on User Account Control.
7. On the 'Are you sure you want to uninstall?' screen, click 'Uninstall'.

Continued at Test Driving Ubuntu Linux - Part 2.

Climategate

Everything you need to know about Climategate is addressed in this terrific book by James Delingpole.

Watermelons: The Green Movement's True Colors

What Moore witnessed was the beginning of a process which would accelerate in 1989 after the fall of the Berlin Wall: the supplanting in the Green movement of the old guard of ageing hippies with a new breed of zealots less interested in saving Planet Earth than in destroying the capitalist system. These are the “Watermelons” of this book’s title—green on the outside, red on the inside.

The book is available as a free Kindle download through Amazon. The Kindle reader for PCs is free too.

While you're at it, there are lots of other free books available too.

Emotional Intelligence

Secret social skills successful people know - Penelope Trunk

Here are the four personality types and how to inspire them.

Power. Type-A types. For a job well done, reward this person with public recognition when a task or project is finished. Reward the person with visionary, forward-thinking projects.

Relationships. The cheerleader type. This person also wants some sort of public recognition, but it should be fun. And the thank-you speech is really important to this person. Reward them with projects that are varied and well defined.

Ideals. The crusaders. This person wants to be rewarded along the way, not just at the end. Reward this person as part of their team, not alone. Show faith in their ability to build strong partnerships by giving them more work to leverage that skill.

Craftsmanship. The perfectionists. Reward this person for attention to detail, and do it in a private, one-on-one way. They don’t want big fanfare. This person wants acknowledgement that they did a good job by seeing executive management adopt their work as the standard.

Eurozone Death Spiral

Due to overspending in an environment of relatively low interest rates, many Eurozone nations are heavily in debt. As their economies have stagnated, these nations are having difficulty collecting enough tax revenue to pay the interest on the debt (let alone the principle). Attempts to raise more tax revenue through increased tax rates have caused these economies to slow down even more. (Given the higher tax rates, some businesses and individuals have decided not to undertake the risk of starting a new venture.)

As this debt burden snowballs, Eurozone nations are beginning to see their credit ratings fall. As a result, any future attempts to borrow more money or refinance current debts will be at higher interest rates, further compounding their indebtedness. Due to the increased risk of default, individuals and banks are beginning to refuse to lend to these nations at the previous low rates.

Meanwhile, the banks have already lent huge amounts of money to these debtor nations. If the nations default on their loan payments, the banks themselves are threatened with collapse. As a result, the banks are also beginning to see their credit ratings fall. If investors in the banks begin to flee, then the banks will collapse. Who then will lend to the debtor nations?

New Signs of Eurofail as Sarkozy Preps For Downgrade - Walter Russell Mead

The European situation continues to worsen as embattled French President Nicolas Sarkozy begins to soften the voters up to expect the loss of France’s AAA credit rating

Fitch warns Spain and Italy of downgrade as Moody's cuts Belgium by two notches - Louise Armitstead

The eurozone’s third- and fourth-biggest economies were warned by Fitch of a “near-term” downgrade, alongside Ireland, Belgium, Slovenia and Cyprus.

In a further blow, Belgium separately saw its credit rating downgraded two notches, to Aa3, by another leading agency, Moody’s.

Debt crisis: Brussels accord on the verge of collapse - Louise Armitstead, Philip Aldrick, and Ben Harrington

The banks that were downgraded last night include US banks Bank of America and Goldman Sachs, Barclays and France’s BNP Paribas. Switzerland’s Credit Suisse and Germany’s Deutsche Bank were also cut. The downgrade could raise the cost of borrowing for these banks.

Fitch cut the “issuer default ratings” at the banks to “reflect challenges faced by the sector as a whole”. The ratings agency said: “These challenges result from both economic developments as well as a myriad of regulatory changes”.

Left vs. Right Thinking

The Basis of Left and Right, Part 4: Moral Reasoning (or Kant vs. Aristotle Again) - Steven Hayward

Two things need to be observed about the conflicting modes of moral reasoning between left and right. The conservative’s innate caution rooted in the anchor of human nature and established experience leads him to evaluate any ideas according to the potential consequences, and especially with regard to the often counter-intuitive unintended or perverse consequences. Many liberals are averse to this mode of thought, guided instead by an often unacknowledged Kantian moral framework that values the purity of intentionality over consequences, or who think that potential adverse consequences can be overcome through the assertion of a morally pure will.... Their moral frameworks or so radically different that they may as well be speaking foreign languages to each other much of the time.

...

The second observation flows directly from this. The conservative argument against a liberalism of moral intentions is that it has no logical or practical stopping point—there is no discernable “limiting principle” to liberalism; hence liberals can never say “enough” to its political interventions on behalf of reform and equality.

...

While liberals are congenitally discontent with the pace and extent of reform, they always have a general sense of what should come next, best expressed in Samuel Gompers’ famous one-word policy: “More.” More reform, more legislation, more equality. Conservatives, by contrast, do not have a clear or uniform outline of the good society; instead, conservatives have serious divisions among themselves about what the good society should be. It is not simply a matter of opposing “less” to the liberals’ “more.” Conservatives have deep theoretical differences over the relationship of liberty and virtue...

Class Warfare

The Class Warfare We Need - Steve Conover

A proper class war would require Democrats and Republicans to admit that the distinguishing characteristic of the enemy is not the level of income or wealth; rather, it is whether that income or wealth was earned. The true heroes in our economy are the producers and earners; they can be found all the way up and down the income ladder, and class warfare should defend and reward them instead of targeting them. Conversely, the proper targets are the class that includes cheaters, predators, pirates, and parasites—who can also be found at all income levels.

If class warfare is inevitable, let’s at least go after the right enemy. Fingering “millionaires and billionaires” as the culprits is the easy way out; it might pass muster in focus groups and might fit well into campaign speeches, but it doesn’t even come close to a proper description of the true enemies of economic growth and broadly shared prosperity. If we can target the right enemy, we’ll be fighting a good war; in that case, by all means, let the 2012 class war begin in earnest.

Class Markers vs. Causes - Glenn Reynolds

One point that I haven’t blogged, but that is worth mentioning here: The government decides to try to increase the middle class by subsidizing things that middle class people have: If middle-class people go to college and own homes, then surely if more people go to college and own homes, we’ll have more middle-class people. But homeownership and college aren’t causes of middle-class status, they’re markers for possessing the kinds of traits — self-discipline, the ability to defer gratification, etc. — that let you enter, and stay, in the middle class. Subsidizing the markers doesn’t produce the traits; if anything, it undermines them.

Keeping it Simple

The peril of ‘smart’ politicians - Frank J. Fleming

The main problem may be confusing “simple” with “dumb.”

If something is simple, then dumb people will believe it. And if dumb people believe something, then soon some conclude that smart people should believe something else. There’s a flaw in that philosophy.

Why shouldn’t you touch a hot stove? There’s no complex, smart answer to that. You’ll get roughly the same answer from Stephen Hawking that you’d get from Forrest Gump: It’s hot, and it will hurt.

But say you were going to argue that you should touch a hot stove. That would have to be a very complex answer, since it defies basic logic. And some people could run with that, talking in detail about pain receptors and the brain’s reaction to stimulus, and come up with a very smart-sounding argument on why touching a hot stove is a great idea.

Others will go further and mock all those ignorant people in the flyover states for their irrational fear of hot stoves and announce, “The most enlightened thing to do is to press one’s face against a hot stove.” Those people are what we call intellectuals.

Similarly, when someone comes up with a well-reasoned argument backed by top economists that two plus two equals five, there’s no brilliant way to refute it. The only response is: “No, you’re an idiot; it’s four.” But if you say that, you’ll be called anti-smart people.

And that’s the problem with the right: All its main stances on the issues are rather simple. And when concepts are simple, it’s hard to make smart-sounding arguments for them, while the arguments against them would have to be complex, which some people mistake for meaning they’re smart.

Which reminds me of one of my favorite Reagan quotes:

They say the world has become too complex for simple answers. They are wrong. There are no easy answers, but there are simple answers. We must have the courage to do what we know is morally right.

Ronald Reagan

Eurozone Update

Europe's great divorce - Charlemagne

WE JOURNALISTS are probably too bleary-eyed after a sleepless night to understand the full significance of what has just happened in Brussels. What is clear is that after a long, hard and rancorous negotiation, at about 5am this morning the European Union split in a fundamental way.

In an effort to stabilise the euro zone, France, Germany and 21 other countries have decided to draft their own treaty to impose more central control over national budgets. Britain and three others have decided to stay out. In the coming weeks, Britain may find itself even more isolated. Sweden, the Czech Republic and Hungary want time to consult their parliaments and political parties before deciding on whether to join the new union-within-the-union.

So two decades to the day after the Maastricht Treaty was concluded, launching the process towards the single European currency, the EU's tectonic plates have slipped momentously along same the fault line that has always divided it—the English Channel.

Confronted by the financial crisis, the euro zone is having to integrate more deeply, with a consequent loss of national sovereignty to the EU (or some other central co-ordinating body); Britain, which had secured a formal opt-out from the euro, has decided to let them go their way.

Europe's blithering idiots and their flim-flam treaty - Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

This "fiscal compact" is not going to make to make the slightest impression on global markets, and they are the judges who matter in this trial by fire.

Yes, there is more discipline for fiscal sinners, but without any transforming help. Even the old "Marshall Plan" of the July summit has bitten the dust.

There is no shared debt issuance, no fiscal transfers, no move to an EU Treasury, no banking licence for the ESM rescue fund, and no change in the mandate of the European Central Bank.

In short, there is no breakthrough of any kind that will convince Asian investors that this monetary union has viable governance or even a future.

...

No doubt these dramatic events will be uncomfortable for Britain, but this will all be swept away by bigger events before long. The Europols have not begun to work out a viable solution to their deformed and unworkable currency union, and perhaps no such solution exists. The system will lurch from crisis to crisis until it blows up in acrimony.

By then, a separate cluster will have emerged (not the 10 "outs" against the 17 "ins", always a ludicrous concept), but rather a loose Anglo-Nordic-Swiss grouping that may not do so badly on the fringes and may begin to solidify into a seductively comfortable outer tier.

Eurozone banking system on the edge of collapse - Harry Wilson

Senior analysts and traders warned of impending bank failures as a summit intended to solve the European crisis failed to deliver a solution that eased concerns over bank funding.

The European Central Bank admitted it had held meetings about providing emergency funding to the region's struggling banks, however City figures said a "collateral crunch" was looming.

"If anyone thinks things are getting better then they simply don't understand how severe the problems are. I think a major bank could fail within weeks," said one London-based executive at a major global bank.

Many banks, including some French, Italian and Spanish lenders, have already run out of many of the acceptable forms of collateral such as US Treasuries and other liquid securities used to finance short-term loans and have been forced to resort to lending out their gold reserves to maintain access to dollar funding.

"The system is creaking. There is a large amount of stress," said Anthony Peters, a strategist at Swissinvest, pointing to soaring interbank lending rates.

France Has Second Thoughts About the Euro - Michel Gurfinkiel

The problem of the euro is that it is a currency, but not money. Money is largely magic. It is the sum total of what allows production, trade, work, innovation, profit. It works as long as there is confidence in it. “Give me good politics, I’ll repay you in good finance,” said Baron Louis, the finance minister of King Louis XVIII under the French restoration. In other words, see to it that everybody thinks he has a future under your government, whether he is a Royalist or not. As long as that will be the case, it will be comparatively easy to manage business, raise taxes, and balance budgets.

Baron Louis’ modus operandi was the secret of the American era of prosperity from 1945 to 2008. In a globalized world, the United States — as a benevolent hegemonic power — was providing good politics, i.e., confidence, and it allowed for good business everywhere. Whatever the theoretical state of the dollar and other currencies, the United States had iron: the will and the practical means to make war if needed. It cost the American taxpayer 4% to 5% of its GDP annually — no other Western business-oriented nation (except Israel) invested as much. Europe as a whole never took off from a 1% to 1.5% level. France and the UK never raised above 2%. And the American iron transmuted into gold.

The Europeans got weary of American leadership — especially when things were so good throughout the Reagan and then the Clinton booms — and most people forgot why they were so good. They mused about having their own currency and outdoing the dollar. They did it. They created a currency. But no money. Because they were just unable and unwilling to get together and to build up a federal European government and a federal European army. They did not realize there is no gold without iron.

Just in order to exist in front of the dollar as a mere currency, the euro had to be the most deflationist one ever, i.e., to be linked to superhigh interest rates and a rigid no-inflation policy. This in turn meant that local European economies were suffocated, and that the European welfare state was unworkable overnight. The only way out was to make maximum use of the non-European, still American-centered, globalized world. Even there, however, success was linked to inner discipline. The only eurozone country that really survived the euro was Germany, where industry workers agreed to lower wages in order to stay competitive.

Installing Linux, Part 4

I've let my experiment with Fedora Linux stagnate for a while. So I'm going to catch up with the latest version (16) first.

The last time I installed Fedora 15 x86_64 with the LXDE spin. And since the passwords have been lost, I'm going to install from scratch. Also, since I have a large enough USB flash drive this time, I'm planning to use that instead of a CD for the Live Image. This means that I'll first need to download the Live USB Creator.

Once the Live USB Creator is downloaded and installed, I selected Fedora 16 x86_64 Desktop and clicked Create Live USB. It took about an hour to download the image and create the Live USB.

On the machine where I'm installing Linux, I did the following:

1. Back up data to an external hard drive
2. Shut down the system
3. Remove the external hard drive
4. Insert the USB flash drive
5. Press the power button
6. Hit Enter as soon as the first screen appears
7. Hit F12 to choose a temporary startup device
8. Use the arrow keys to select USB flash drive
9. Hit enter

Fedora 16 automatically booted from there. Lots of applications and utilities are provided. In order to power off the machine, first you need to Log Out as the Live System User (use the pull-down in the upper right corner). Then once you are logged out, use the Power icon in the upper right corner and select Power Off.

The Live System User menu also has a Suspend option, which apparently puts the system on standby.

Change of Plan

Rather than install the Fedora 16 with Gnome from the USB flash drive, I decided to reinstall Fedora 15 LXDE from me installation CD. So I boot from the CD/DVD drive.

Then I just follow the instructions from Installing Linux, Part 2. This time I'm more careful about saving the root password. Everything went the same until step 9, where I was notified:

The partitioning options you have selected will now be written to disk. Any data on deleted of reformatted partitions will be lost.

I select "Write Changes to Disk" and the install begins. Everything appeared to go fine. The next step is to log out and then reboot.

After rebooting, I redo the steps outlined in Installing Linux, Part 3. Once I log back in, I'm able to start a terminal. I can also start Firefox, which needs to be downloaded and installed.

Now, back to that ToDo list:

1. How to put the system in standby mode. (Click Logout, then select Suspend. The machine comes back up by just hitting the Enter key.)
2. Find and install Adobe Flash plug-in
3. Find PDF plug-in
4. ITunes?
5. Find VNC Server/Viewer download
6. Find Lexmark printer driver download
7. Download OpenOffice
8. Tunneling software?
9. Customize GRUB
10. Download Perl
11. Download git

Fast and Furious Update

With Eric Holder testifying before Congress, and the release of new documents in the case, many new reports have appeared:

A Fast & Furious state of mind - Scott Johnson

Holder, Grilled on Gun Inquiry, Says He Won’t Resign - Charlie Savage

‘Furious’ twisting, Eric Holder stonewalls on - Michael A. Walsh

Sparks fly during Eric Holder 'Fast & Furious' testimony - Josh Gerstein & Tim Mak

Documents: ATF used "Fast and Furious" to make the case for gun regulations - Sharyl Attkisson

Documents: ATF Used ‘Fast and Furious’ to Make Case for Gun Control - Publius

Fast and Furious - Matthew Hoy

Rep. Matthew Hoy (R-Hoystory): Shame? Shame!? Hundreds of Mexicans are dead. Border Agent Brian Terry is dead. The department that you have authority over allowed more than 2,000 guns to cross the border into the hands of violent drug cartels and you have the gall to chide elected representatives of the American people who seek to hold you to account for your lawlessness?

Shame?

Your deputy submitted a letter to Congress that you withdrew only after subsequent disclosures proved it to be full of lies. You can split legal hairs about there being no “intent” to deceive Congress when that letter was originally submitted, but as time goes by that claim begins to look flimsier and flimsier.

Shame?

We found out just days ago that that ATF officials sought to use the violence in Mexico and the fact that U.S.-bought guns were showing up at crime scenes in that country as a pretext to push for further restrictions on Americans’ Second Amendment rights. You, of course, were ignorant of this.

Shame?

It’s been the better part of six months, or maybe 9 or 12, depending on the quality of your memory and the meaningless difference between “weeks” and “months” in your concept of time, since you knew about this operation and not a single individual has lost their job, let alone has had charges filed against them for violations of federal laws.

Hundreds are dead as a direct result of actions undertaken by your subordinates and you wish to shame Congress?

Mr. Attorney General, if you had any integrity. If you had any honor, you would fire those most responsible for this travesty and then resign yourself.

The only person in this committee room who should be feeling shame is you and what you allowed—either by design or by neglect—to happen in Operation Fast and Furious.

Speeding Neutrinos

New results show neutrinos still faster than light - Lisa Grossman

One of the most staggering results in physics – that neutrinos may go faster than light – has not gone away with two further weeks of observations. The researchers behind the jaw-dropping finding are now confident enough in the result that they are submitting it to a peer-reviewed journal.

"The measurement seems robust," says Luca Stanco of the National Institute of Nuclear Physics in Padua, Italy. "We have received many criticisms, and most of them have been washed out."

Faster-than-light neutrino update: What's going on behind the scenes? - Maggie Koerth-Baker

The publication process for a research paper about physics works a little differently than other subjects. That's because of arXiv. Funded by Cornell University, this site posts research papers, before they're formally published in a scientific journal. Unlike most scientific journals, which charge big fees for subscriptions or even to view a single paper, arXiv is free and open to the public. You can read everything published there—more than 700,000 papers about physics, math, computer science, and more. The other big difference: arXiv isn't peer reviewed. At least, not ahead of time.

A lot of the time, when you read a newspaper article about a new study in one of those fields, the study hasn't actually yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal. It's just been posted to arXiv, which sort of becomes a crowd-sourced peer review peer review of its own. Especially for headline-grabbing research making big, bold claims.

That's the background you need to understand what's going on right now with the study that claimed to find neutrinos traveling faster than the speed of light. That announcement was made in an arXiv paper. Putting those results on arXiv was as much a way of saying, "Woah, we just found something crazy, please tell us if you see something we've done wrong," as it was a formal declaration of scientific discovery.

...

That's why it's not terribly weird that you're now hearing all sorts of criticism of the original FTL neutrino findings. That's what was supposed to happen. It's also not terribly weird that the original researchers have announced that they're going to re-do the experiment themselves, taking into account some of the big criticisms brought up on arXiv.

Particles break light-speed limit - Geoff Brumfiel

An Italian experiment has unveiled evidence that fundamental particles known as neutrinos can travel faster than light. Other researchers are cautious about the result, but if it stands further scrutiny, the finding would overturn the most fundamental rule of modern physics — that nothing travels faster than 299,792,458 metres per second.

...

The idea that nothing can travel faster than light in a vacuum is the cornerstone of Albert Einstein's special theory of relativity, which itself forms the foundation of modern physics. If neutrinos are travelling faster than light speed, then one of the most fundamental assumptions of science — that the rules of physics are the same for all observers — would be invalidated. "If it's true, then it's truly extraordinary," says John Ellis, a theoretical physicist at CERN.

Ereditato says that he is confident enough in the new result to make it public. The researchers claim to have measured the 730-kilometre trip between CERN and its detector to within 20 centimetres. They can measure the time of the trip to within 10 nanoseconds, and they have seen the effect in more than 16,000 events measured over the past two years. Given all this, they believe the result has a significance of six-sigma — the physicists' way of saying it is certainly correct. The group will present their results tomorrow at CERN, and a preprint of their results will be posted on the physics website ArXiv.org.

Eurozone Watch

The Complete And Annotated Guide To The European Bank Run (Or The Final Phase Of Goldman's World Domination Plan) - Tyler Durden

"Nervous investors around the globe are accelerating their exit from the debt of European governments and banks, increasing the risk of a credit squeeze that could set off a downward spiral. Financial institutions are dumping their vast holdings of European government debt and spurning new bond issues by countries like Spain and Italy. And many have decided not to renew short-term loans to European banks, which are needed to finance day-to-day operations. " So begins an article not in some hyperventilating fringe blog, but a cover article in the venerable New York Times titled "Europe Fears a Credit Squeeze as Investors Sell Bond Holdings." Said otherwise, Europe's continental bank run in which virtually, but not quite, all banks are dumping any peripheral exposure with reckless abandon is now on.

...

To summarize: everyone is dumping European paper, except for the ECB and Italian banks, which have no choice and instead have to double down and buy more. In the meantime, the market is going increasingly bidless as liquidity evaporates, confidence has disappeared and virtually everyone now expects a repeat of Lehman brothers. Of course, this means that when the bottom finally out from the market, the implosion of the Italian banking system, and thus economy, will be instantaneous. And when Italy goes, so goes its $2 trillion+ in sovereign debt, and at that point we will see just how effectively hedged and offloaded the rest of the world is, as contagion shifts from Italy and slowly but surely engulfs the entire world.

Incidentally, is it really that surprising that Goldman is now doing its best to precipitate a bank run of Europe's major financial institutions by "suddenly" exposing the truth that was there all along? During the great financial crisis of 2008, the one biggest winner from the collapse of Bear and Lehman was none other than the squid. This time around, Goldman has set its sights on Europe and has already made sure that its tentacles will be in firmly in control at all the right places when the collapse comes, as the Independent shows.

Guest Post: How Monetization Happens: Being at the Helm When the Ship Goes Down - Tyler Durden

Via Lew Spellman of the Spellman Report

How Monetization Happens: Being at the Helm When the Ship Goes Down

The consequences of excess debt are now facing the leaders of Europe head on, and a monumental decision must be made whether explicitly or implicitly. Excess debt leads to a long chain of D words: Deleveraging in an attempt to retire debt results in a depressed economy and declining asset prices. The depressed economy breeds private debt defaults that in turn produce distressed banks. The chain then runs through depositor flight from the banks, producing a financial crisis and in turn a devaluation of the currency as capital flees. When foreign goods become more expensive there is a declining standard of living as import prices rise faster than wages. Then in an effort to stop the government debt trap, there is a default on promised entitlements under an austerity program leading to the swift defeat of the political leaders. But ultimately there is a sovereign restructuring or a default of the government debt. Most, if not all, the D words are visiting Europe at the moment and its leaders are falling by the wayside.

There is not a precise science that tells us when the debt trap begins the downward spiral that takes the ship down, but there are some rough guidelines. Reinhart and Rogoff (This Time is Different) have found to the extent one can generalize when a country’s debt-to-income ratio reaches the 90 percent level the ship of state begins to list and currently the OECD aggregate of 30-country gross debt-to-income ratio is 105 percent.

Lots more at The Spellman Report channel on YouTube.


The Euro Zone's Deadly Domino Effect - Wolfgang Münchau

The main problem of a Greek exit from the euro zone is not necessarily the direct impact on banks. I believe our government when they say that they would be able to get that under control. The real problem is the next domino. The crisis will spread unchecked to Italy. If Greece leaves the euro zone, then owners of Greek bonds will lose their entire investment. At best, the Greeks would pay them back a small part of their investment -- in almost worthless drachmas.

Crises Must Be Solved Quickly and Decisively

So what kind of investor in his or her right mind would purchase Portuguese, Spanish or Italian sovereign bonds in this kind of situation? Not even a yield of 7 percent can make up for all the risk that Italy won't be able to pay back its debt. As things now stand, Italy's debt accounts for 120 percent of its annual GDP, growth is close to zero and the country is currently slipping into a deep recession. In fact, it's a matter of mathematical inevitability that Italy won't be able to service its loans if interest rates on its sovereign debt don't fall.

11/24 Update:
German Bond Auction Fails - Megan McArdle

Effectively, Germany and France and a handful of other tiny countries have to guarantee both the sovereign debt and the bank liabilities of the whole eurozone. Given the holes that recent events have exposed in these systems, can they credibly do that? Even if the Greeks and Italians don't use that guarantee as a blank check to avoid reform?

We may be getting an unhappy answer to that question: a German bond auction went rather badly today. In fact, a lot of commentators are using words like "disastrous". They sold just over half of the €6 billion they had put out to market, the worst such outcome anyone can remember. This comes on the heels of a Spanish debt auction in which the yields on their three month notes more than doubled to 5%. That's a higher interest rate than I pay on my credit card.

I've seen three explanations offered for this:

1. The market is pricing the euro, not German credit
2. Bund yields, at 1.98%, are too low to be attractive
3. European banks are delveraging, depriving the auction of buyers

Dexia Bailout On Verge Of Collapse, Threatens To Take France AAA Rating Down With It - Tyler Durden

Having followed the fortunes of the beleaguered Belgian bank [Dexia Bank Belgium] from before it appeared on anyone's worksheets, we are hardly surprised that the EU Commission charged with confirming the good-bank / bad-bank restructuring is concerned at the deal that Belgium has with the French (and Luxembourg) government to backstop/finance Dexia's debt. Belgium's De Standaard (and two other European newspapers) today suggests the Belgians fear the EUR90bn deal is 'not feasible' as it stands (with a Belgium 60.5%, France 36.5%, and Luxembourg 3% weighting). Given the change in market conditions the commission, according to the article, is concerned at the ability of each country to finance its respective guarantee (most obviously Belgium) and therefore can renegotiate the October bailout deal.

11/25 Update:
Death Spiral in Euroland - Jeff Carter

Europe has hit the point of no return I am afraid. Debt ratings in some countries went to junk yesterday. Italy paid record highs in their latest auction. Tell me, how is Italy not junk?

The only countries in Europe that aren’t junk are probably France and Germany. However, without knowing the true exposure of their government finances to the rest of the EU, it’s hard to know if they can maintain their status or not. As rates continue to steepen in weekly European Union debt auctions, the entire continent speeds it’s collision course with stagflation.

The only way out of their financial mess is print money or grow. They aren’t going to grow given their current economic policies.

Want to read something scary about Europe? - Michael Barone

Sarkozy is the brother of French President Nicolas Sarkozy and a high executive at The Carlyle Group; Altman is a Wall Streeter with Evercore Partners who served in the Clinton Treasury Department. Sarkozy seems to think the Eurozone countries are going to have to come up with a financial rescue package ten times the size of our TARP--and very soon.

Sarkozy: Europe's "Liquidity Run" Has Begun Because There Is An Unsolvable $30 Trillion Problem - Tyler Durden

In the meantime, Sarkozy on Europe math fail: "The math I'm working with is very simple. In the US banking sector, we had 3 trillion of wholesale funding that needed to be stabilized, got stabilized by the implementation of TARP which saw the US treasury buy $212 billion worth of preferred in the banking sector to stabilize that $3 trillion, give our banks the time to work through their problem assets. In Europe, that $3 trillion is $30 trillion. So if you multiply the $212 by 10, you get the $2.12 trillion. In my view, the issues on the European banks are bigger than the issues on the books of the US Banks. So if you want to stabilize that $30 trillion and in my view it's not that you want to, it's that you have to, you do not have a choice, you're going to have to be at least at 2.1 trillion and I suspect it may need to be more." Q.E.D. - there, the math wasn't that difficult, was it?

"Awful" Italy debt sale heightens euro zone stress - Valentina Za

Italy paid a record 6.5 percent to borrow money over six months on Friday and its longer-term funding costs soared far above levels seen as sustainable for public finances, raising the pressure on Rome's new emergency government.

The auction yield on the six-month paper almost doubled compared to a month earlier, capping a week in which a German bond auction came close to failing and the leaders of Germany, France and Italy failed to make progress on crisis resolution measures.

Though Italy managed to raise the full planned amount of 10 billion euros, weakening demand and the highest borrowing costs since it joined the euro frightened investors, pushing Italian stocks lower and bond yields to record highs on the secondary market.

Yields on two-year BTP bonds soared to more than 8 percent in response, a euro lifetime high, despite reported purchases by the European Central Bank.

Death of a currency as eurogeddon approaches - Jeremy Warner

What we are witnessing is awesome stuff – the death throes of a currency. And not just any old currency either, but what when it was launched was confidently expected to take its place alongside the dollar as one of the world's major reserve currencies. That promise today looks to be in ruins.

Contingency planning is in progress throughout Europe. From the UK Treasury on Whitehall to the architectural monstrosity of the Bundesbank in Frankfurt, everyone is desperately trying to figure out precisely how bad the consequences might be.

What they are preparing for is the biggest mass default in history. There's no orderly way of doing this. European finance and trade is too far integrated to allow for an easy unwinding of contracts. It's going to be anarchy.

Science and Engineering II

Engineering is a difficult course of study. Unfortunately the difficulties are often unnecessarily multiplied for students. The 'top' programs are usually plagued with inadequate instruction, overwhelming course loads, and a competitive atmosphere.

But worst of all is the fact that the necessary years of academic drudgery are completely detached from the real-world practice of engineering. While being a working engineer is also hard work, it is hard in an entirely different way.

First of all, as a working engineer you will work on a team with other engineers, all of whom will depend on your work and thus have a vested interest in your success. This takes the edge off the competitiveness and can even lead to a close-knit sense of camaraderie. Second, as an engineer you get the time to more fully investigate and solve the problem at hand. Your employer needs experts and if no experts are already available, you will become that expert. And third, as you develop professional expertise, the work itself becomes rewarding in a way that no throw-away student project can ever be.

So the relationships are healthier. Your expertise becomes deep and practical. And the rewards are more lasting and tangible.

And so my advice to discouraged engineering students is to hang in there. Being an engineer is a lot better than being an engineering student. If you have the gift for math and science, it can be a great career with a wide variety of rewarding opportunities. And if you are used to getting A's, do not be discouraged by B's or even C's. If you persevere, the hard work will pay off.


Confessions of an Engineering Washout - Douglas Kern

Not long ago, I showed up for my first year at Smartypants U., fresh from a high school career full of awards and honors and gold stars. My accomplishments all pointed towards a more verbal course of study, but I was determined to spend my college days learning something useful. With my strong science grades and excellent standardized test scores, I felt certain that I could handle whatever engineering challenges Smartypants U. had to offer. Remember: Kern = real good at math and science.

...

I nearly fainted when I learned that I received a 43% on the Physics final. I nearly fainted again when I learned that the class average was 38%. ... Having allegedly mastered 43% of the course material, I was now deemed fit to take even harder Physics classes. I wondered: at the highest levels of physics, could you get a passing grade with a 5% score on a test? A 3% score? A zero? Could drinking from a fire hose actually slake your thirst?

Exhausted and demoralized, I stumbled into my next semester of engineering. My new math T.A. had all of my old T.A.'s inability to teach, but half of her mastery of English. One day in class I heard myself saying: "If I understood what I didn't understand about the problem, I would understand the problem, and therefore I wouldn't be asking a question." The T.A. stared at me across a void that seemed increasingly unbridgeable.

The course was called "Discrete Mathematics." Many people thought that the course was called "Discreet Mathematics." Wrong. To clarify: "Discrete Mathematics" is "the mathematics in which Kern was getting a D at midterm." "Discreet Mathematics" is "how Kern dropped that class along with the rest of his engineering course load and signed into liberal arts classes, all on the last day he was eligible to do so, because he couldn't stand the stress, abuse, and lack of comprehension anymore." No one waved goodbye to me at the engineering door.

The United States contains a finite number of smart people, most of whom have options in life besides engineering. You will not produce thronging bevies of pocket-protector-wearing number-jockeys simply by handing out spiffy Space Shuttle patches at the local Science Fair. If you want more engineers in the United States, you must find a way for America's engineering programs to retain students like, well, me: people smart enough to do the math and motivated enough to at least take a bite at the engineering apple, but turned off by the overwhelming coursework, low grades, and abysmal teaching. Find a way to teach engineering to verbally oriented students who can't learn math by sense of smell. Demand from (and give to) students an actual mastery of the material, rather than relying on bogus on-the-curve pseudo-grades that hinge upon the amount of partial credit that bored T.A.s choose to dole out. Write textbooks that are more than just glorified problem set manuals.

Generation Jobless: Students Pick Easier Majors Despite Less Pay - Joe Light and Rachel Emma Silverman

Science classes may also require more time -- something U.S. college students may not be willing to commit. In a recent study, sociologists Richard Arum of New York University and Josipa Roksa of the University of Virginia found that the average U.S. student in their sample spent only about 12 to 13 hours a week studying, about half the time spent by students in 1960. They found that math and science -- though not engineering -- students study on average about three hours more per week than their non-science-major counterparts.

EU Crackup Begins

Strained By Its Debts, EU Is Breaking Up - IBD Editorials

Euro Zone: It's been clear for some time that the European Union is in deep trouble. But now even its own leaders admit something shocking: The EU, and its currency the euro, may soon be a thing of the past.

The EU has had a troubled existence since the euro was first rolled out on Jan. 1, 1999. Sure, the EU has advantages — a single currency, one giant market, freedom of movement for a well-educated workforce, all benefits. Still, it's impossible to have an economic union based on rules no one follows. And that's exactly what's happened in the EU.

Under the 1993 Maastricht Treaty, no EU country was allowed to run a budget deficit of more than 3% of GDP or issue public debt in excess of 60% of GDP. This was to be the bedrock of the EU's financial stability.

In recent years, Greece, Ireland and Portugal have all run deficits over 10% of GDP. Worse, the debts of Greece, Italy, Ireland, Portugal and Spain average 112% of GDP. In short, the countries on the EU's periphery have used membership as a way to redistribute wealth from Europe's rich north to its poorer south.

For a while it worked. But now the debts are enormous, and the amounts needed to bail out the peripherals from their profligacy are so large that citizens in countries such as Germany are saying "no more." By some estimates, as much as $4 trillion will be needed — a number that would bankrupt the EU.

Europe’s Disaster Is Headed Our Way - Niall Ferguson

But the third reason Americans should care about Europe is more important even than the risk of a renewed financial crisis. It is the danger that what is happening in Europe today could ultimately happen here. Just a few months ago, almost nobody was worried about Italy’s vast debt, which amounts to 121 percent of GDP. Then suddenly panic set in, and Italy’s borrowing costs exploded from 3.5 percent to 7.5 percent.

Today the U.S. gross federal debt stands at around 100 percent of GDP. Four years ago it was 62 percent. By 2016 the International Monetary Fund forecasts it will be 115 percent. Economists who should know better insist that this is not a problem because, unlike Italy, the United States can print its own money at will. All that means is that the U.S. reserves the right to inflate or depreciate away its debt. If I were a foreign investor—and half the debt in public hands is held by foreigners—I would not find that terribly reassuring. At some point I might demand some compensation for that risk in the form of ... higher rates.

Fusion Energy

What's new on the fusion front? - Alan Boyle

ITER is taking the most conventional approach to creating a controlled fusion reaction, which involves magnetic containment of a super-hot plasma inside a doughnut-shaped device known as a tokamak. The European Union and six other nations, including the United States, have divvied up the work load with the aim of completing construction in 2017 and achieving "first plasma" in 2019.

Right now, Oak Ridge National Laboratory and US ITER are testing a fuel delivery system that would fire pellets of ultra-cold deuterium-tritium fuel into the plasma.

"When we send a frozen pellet into a high-temperature plasma, we sometimes call it a 'snowball in hell,'" Oak Ridge physicist David Rasmussen said in an ITER report on the tests at the Dill-D research tokamak in San Diego. "But temperature is really just the measure of the energy of the particles in the plasma. When the deuterium and tritium particles vaporize, ionize and are heated, they move very fast, colliding with enough energy to fuse."

Italian cold fusion machine passes another test - Natalie Wolchover

In the intervening months, Rossi has built a large version of his device that combines many smaller cold fusion modules. At the demo in October, after an initial energy input of 400 watts into each module, each one then produced a sustained, continuous output of 10 kilowatts (470 kW altogether) for three to four hours.

Rossi has not published any details about the inner workings of the E-Cat because the device is not patent-protected, but other cold fusion researchers have theories as to how the process works. Peter Hagelstein, an MIT professor of electrical engineering and computer science and one of the most mainstream proponents of cold fusion research, thinks the process may involve vibrational energy in the metal's lattice driving nuclear transitions that lead to fusion.

Fast and Furious vs. Wide Receiver

Under oath, Holder discredits 'Bush did it too' excuse for 'Gunwalker' - Kurt Hofmann

In 75 seconds of pointed questioning of Attorney General Holder (see sidebar video), Senator John Cornyn has perhaps left the excuse makers scrambling for something better. In that time, he asked Holder if he knew that Operation Wide Receiver (the Bush-era operation) actually did involve an attempt to track the firearms, while Fast and Furious did not. Cornyn then asked Holder if he knew that Operation Wide Receiver was run in conjunction with the Mexican government--Fast and Furious was kept secret from not only Mexico, but from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (BATFE) attaché to Mexico, Darren Gil. Gil, in fact, after discovering on his own what was going on, was basically pushed into retirement when he balked at the near act of war of "walking" guns into Mexico without the Mexican government's knowledge or permission.

Holder was eventually forced into the position of having to put the "Bush did it too" excuse out of its misery himself:

Senator, I have not tried to equate the two--I have not tried to equate Wide Receiver with Fast and Furious. . . . Again, I'm not trying to equate the two.

Follow the link for many other related articles.

‘Furious’ excuse-making - Michael A. Walsh

Blame Bush. The latest defense is that Fast and Furious grew out of a superficially similar Bush-era operation, Operation Wide Receiver, which also sought to trace illegal firearms in Mexico.

Yet the differences are crucial: The Bush op was tightly controlled, with the illegal purchases conducted under tight surveillance, and was a joint Mexican-American endeavor. Plus, it involved only about 500 guns, some fitted with radio tracking devices.

F&F, by contrast, involved thousands of guns, whose purchases were actively encouraged by federal officials and whose transfers across the border went deliberately unmolested. And it was kept secret from our Mexican allies.

Eurozone Update

Barclays Says Italy Is Finished: "Mathematically Beyond Point Of No Return" - Tyler Durden

Euphoria may have returned briefly courtesy of yet another promise for a resignation that will likely not be effectuated for weeks or months, if at all, and already someone has done the math on what the events in the past several days reveal for Italy. That someone is Barcalys, the math is not pretty, and the conclusion is that "Italy is now mathematically beyond point of no return."

European Wheels Spin Faster, Still No Traction - Walter Russell Mead

Even as Prime Minister Berlusconi announced his impending resignation, the yields on Italian bonds rose above seven percent, the highest level yet, and a level that just about everyone agrees will force Italy into a bailout sooner rather than later.

While Italy may not be too big to fail, it is too big to bail out; the IMF and the EFSF can’t handle the consequences of an Italian collapse. An Italian failure would force both Germany and France into massive bailouts of their domestic banking systems, destroy France’s credit rating and generally wreak unspeakable havoc on the increasingly fragile underpinnings of both the single currency and the European economy.

Idiot's Guide to the Euro Crisis - Simon Edge

So what went wrong?

As we discovered in the New Labour years, politicians find it very easy to spend their way into their voters’ good books, knowing that paying the debt back will be someone else’s problem.

In Greece and Italy much of the borrowed cash went on public-sector wage rises.

In the global financial meltdown that followed the collapse of Lehman Brothers bank in 2008 all economies contracted and it became painfully clear that the governments of the weakest countries in the eurozone had precious little means of paying back the money.

The debt totals in question are massive. While Britain’s entire debt is around 63 per cent of gross domestic product, Italy’s is 120 per cent and Greece owes 160 per cent of GDP.

That’s like having an income of £20,000 a year and debts of £32,000 on your credit card. And the point of bonds is they need paying back on a specific date. Not doing so is defaulting.

Science and Engineering

Why Science Majors Change Their Minds (It’s Just So Darn Hard) - Christopher Drew

Studies have found that roughly 40 percent of students planning engineering and science majors end up switching to other subjects or failing to get any degree. That increases to as much as 60 percent when pre-medical students, who typically have the strongest SAT scores and high school science preparation, are included, according to new data from the University of California at Los Angeles. That is twice the combined attrition rate of all other majors.

...

Professor Chang says that rather than losing mainly students from disadvantaged backgrounds or with lackluster records, the attrition rate can be higher at the most selective schools, where he believes the competition overwhelms even well-qualified students.

“You’d like to think that since these institutions are getting the best students, the students who go there would have the best chances to succeed,” he says. “But if you take two students who have the same high school grade-point average and SAT scores, and you put one in a highly selective school like Berkeley and the other in a school with lower average scores like Cal State, that Berkeley student is at least 13 percent less likely than the one at Cal State to finish a STEM degree.”

...

It is no surprise that grades are lower in math and science, where the answers are clear-cut and there are no bonus points for flair. Professors also say they are strict because science and engineering courses build on one another, and a student who fails to absorb the key lessons in one class will flounder in the next.

After studying nearly a decade of transcripts at one college, Kevin Rask, a professor at Wake Forest University, concluded last year that the grades in the introductory math and science classes were among the lowest on campus. The chemistry department gave the lowest grades over all, averaging 2.78 out of 4, followed by mathematics at 2.90. Education, language and English courses had the highest averages, ranging from 3.33 to 3.36.

Ben Ost, a doctoral student at Cornell, found in a similar study that STEM students are both “pulled away” by high grades in their courses in other fields and “pushed out” by lower grades in their majors.

Stemming the Tide - Walter Russell Mead

Georgetown’s latest education report names Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) the safest bets for high wages and consistent demand. It reads:

High and rising wage premiums are being paid to STEM workers in spite of the increasing global supply […]

Demand for the [STEM] core competencies is far greater than the 5 percent traditional STEM employment share suggests, and stretches across the entire U.S. job market, touching virtually every industry. Since 1980, the number of workers with high levels of core STEM competencies has increased by almost 60 percent.

The deeper you dig into the report the better it gets for STEM graduates. Both undergraduate and graduate STEMS earn roughly 50% more than their non-STEM counterparts.

...

But something else emerges from this important study that students and parents need to keep in mind. What you study is more important than where you study it; students who take solid courses at solid schools will often learn more and do better than students who take empty classes as flashy name schools.

STEM Executive Summary - Carnevale, Smith, Melton (Georgetown Univ.)

Stein's Law

Herbert Stein's Wikipedia Page

Stein was the formulator of "Herbert Stein's Law," which he expressed as "If something cannot go on forever, it will stop," by which he meant that if a trend (balance of payments deficits in his example) cannot go on forever, there is no need for action or a program to make it stop, much less to make it stop immediately; it will stop of its own accord. It is often rephrased as: "Trends that can't continue, won't."

The Glenn Reynolds paraphrase: "If something can’t go on forever, it won’t."

Five Delectable Examples of "Steins Law" - John Mauldin

Dr. Woody Brock:

The most basic statement of Stein's Law says: "If something cannot go on forever, it will stop". More specifically, the late Herb Stein stressed that, when a trend cannot go on, it always stops--even when nothing is done about it. This yardstick of common sense is particularly apposite today, as we see in the following five examples of trends whose time has come and gone.

1. Mean Reversion in US Wealth Growth: A March 7 front page headline of the Financial Times proclaimed, "Fed Data Alarms Markets - Wealth of US Households Contracts". We have written about "mean reversion in national wealth growth" for the past five years, and explained why it would soon have to occur. In this regard, one of the most fundamental of all theorems in economics tells us that national wealth must (and empirically does) grow over the long run at the rate of GDP growth.

Well, wealth reversion has now arrived, and will be with us for far longer than most anyone expects. First, wealth has already contracted by $500 billion in 2007. Second, wealth contraction will continue to occur until mid-2009 when house prices reach their trough. And third, wealth growth will probably be sluggish up to and beyond 2020, running at about 3%. One reason why is that most baby boomers have their money in their houses--not in traditional defined benefit pension plans. Accordingly, the only way they will be able to retire in the style they expect is to sell their houses to one another. Next joke.

How remarkably this new 2.5% wealth growth regime of 2007-2020 will differ from the previous regime of 1981-2006! During that period, US net worth soared from $10 trillion to $57 trillion--an arithmetic average growth rate of 18% and a compound annual growth rate of 7.2%. For readers who doubt what we are arguing, note that the average growth of wealth across the two regimes being analyzed compounds at exactly 5.5%. This is precisely the long-run growth of nominal GDP. And all the Golden Rule Theorems in Growth Theory require that wealth growth and GDP growth converge to the same growth rate in the long-run.

This will fundamentally change both American politics and daily life. In particular, it will be the final nail in the coffin of hopes of early retirement for most baby-boomers. In short, "wealth reversion" is finally coming home to roost. What cannot go on does not go on.

Europe Confronts Stein’s Law - Desmond Lachman

The late Herb Stein was fond of observing that if something cannot go on forever, it will stop. This aphorism appears particularly apt for the current Eurozone. It seems unreasonable to expect that voters in the Eurozone’s north, and especially in Germany, will indefinitely acquiesce to transferring large amounts of bailout money to the Eurozone’s south in an effort to keep those countries afloat. And it seems even more unreasonable to expect voters in the south to indefinitely endure the severe economic and social pain associated with continued euro membership and the austerity measures attached to the financing they receive from the north.

The Eurozone Bailout

Why the latest eurozone bail-out is destined to fail within weeks - Liam Halligan

By late Thursday, though, and certainly on Friday, the warning signs were there. Global bond markets, by character more sober and smarter than the excitable equity guys, were voting against the deal. This is alarming. For it is only by selling more bonds that the eurozone's deeply indebted governments can roll-over their enormous liabilities and keep the show on the road.
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The eurocrats, of course, lack the guts to trim back monetary union to a more manageable size. Too much face would be lost. So "euroquake" fears, once viewed as outlandish, are gaining pace. Despite Thursday's deal, and all the reassurances of a "durable solution", the Italian government on Friday paid 6.06pc for 10-year money, up from just 5.86pc a month ago and a euro-era high. Such borrowing costs are disastrous, given that Rome must roll-over €300bn of its €1,900bn debt in 2012 alone. A default by Italy, the eurozone's third-biggest economy, and the eighth-largest on earth, would make Lehman look like a picnic.

Unrest Grows in Greek Government With Debt Deal in Doubt - AP

Papandreou's decision upended a deal that was the product of months of work by European leaders who were trying, sometimes opposed by their own people, to agree the details of a second bailout for Greece and shore up their own economies in the name of saving the euro, the common currency.

The deal would require banks that hold Greek government bonds to accept 50 percent losses and provide Greece with about $140 billion in rescue loans from European nations and the International Monetary Fund.

But Greeks have been outraged by repeated rounds of tax increases and salary and pension cuts imposed as the government struggles to meet the conditions of a first, $153 billion bailout the country has been relying on since May 2010. With Greece facing a fourth year of recession next year, unions have held frequent strikes, and protests have often degenerated into riots.

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In New York, the stocks of major banks like Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase were hit hard. The value of the dollar rose, and bond prices jumped so dramatically that analysts said they were stunned.

Analysts said the bond action reflected fears that the turmoil in Greece would tear at the fabric of Europe's financial system and create a crisis that could engulf the entire European Union, which together forms the world's largest economy.

"This brings all of the concerns about Europe back to the front burner," said Scott Brown, chief economist at Raymond James. "If this ends up turning into a financial catastrophe in Europe, then no one will escape it."

Student Loan Bubble

Here is a perfect example of the law of unintended consequences. The original problem is that college education is expensive. The government intends to solve this problem. The "solution" is to provide easy loans to students so that they don't have to worry about paying tuition while enrolled. This increases demand for enrollment. College administrators, being rational actors in a free market, increase tuition accordingly.

Note that all of the incentives are in favor of initiating the loan. Lenders love it because the loans are non-bankruptable and they get their fees up front. Colleges love it because they are seeing both increased enrollment and increased tuition rates. They now have extra money to spend on all the great programs and projects they have been dreaming about. And besides, high tuition rates bring prestige to the college, and that is always a good thing. Government bureaucrats love it because they get to be the heroes. Parents love it because they get to enroll their child without having to worry about affordability. Even students love it initially.

But eventually the loan is just a loan and not a grant. It must be repaid. And unfortunately it must be repaid when the new graduate is just starting out in a career (assuming they have graduated and were wise enough to actually prepare for a career). Even without student loan debts, this is a period of increased financial pressure due to housing, transportation, food and medical costs now being borne directly by the graduate.


Screw U. Government inflated the college loan bubble, but Obama isn’t fixing it - Glenn Harlan Reynolds

The real problem is that we’ve been running a higher education bubble, one that -- like the real-estate bubble -- has been pumped up by cheap government money. Since 1999, student loan debt has increased by 511%, while disposable income has increased by only 73%.

That’s because when the government subsidizes something, producers respond by raising prices to soak up as much of the subsidy as they can. College is no exception. Tuition has been increasing much faster than disposable income, and families -- believing that a college education is a can’t-lose investment, much as they used to think houses were -- have been making up the difference with debt. After all, we’re told, student loan debt is “good debt,” because a college degree guarantees more earnings.

Tell it to the Occupy Wall Street protesters, many of whom note that they’re deep in debt for fancy degrees that didn’t get them jobs.

The problem is, “college” isn’t an undifferentiated product. Companies can’t hire enough mechanical engineers, but there’s no bidding war for majors in Fine Arts or Women’s Studies, degrees that cost just as much, but deliver a lot less in terms of employment. In an economically rational market, it would be harder to borrow money to finance fields of study that were unlikely to produce enough income to pay back the loans. But since the federal government subsidizes everything -- and makes student loans un-dischargeable in bankruptcy -- there’s no incentive for lenders to care, and even less incentive for colleges and universities to care. They get their money up front, after all -- just like the people who wrote the subprime loans that fueled the housing crisis.

Chart of the Day: Student Loans Have Grown 511% Since 1999 - Daniel Indiviglio

Obviously the number of students didn't grow by 511%. So why are education loans growing so rapidly? One reason could be availability. The government's backing lets credit to students flow very freely. And as the article from yesterday noted, universities are raising tuition aggressively since students are willing to pay more through those loans.

This student loan growth sure looks unsustainable. But it's hard to see how this bubble's inevitable pop might look. Ultimately, it might look more like a balloon slowly deflating, if a large portion of college graduates decide to strategically default on their debt over time.

All this college debt could put the U.S. on a slower growth path in the years to come. As Americans grapple with high student loan payments for the first few decades of their adult lives, they'll have less money to spend and invest. All that money flowing into colleges and universities is being funneled away from other industries where it would have been spent in future years. Of course, this would be a rather unfortunate irony: higher education is supposed to enhance a nation's growth, but with such an enormous debt burden, graduates might not be able to spend and invest enough to allow that growth to occur.

Some great charts at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

Rather than rack up a bunch of debt, maybe just go to MIT for free.

More free online resources: 12 Dozen Places To Educate Yourself Online For Free

State Budget Troubles

Rhode Island: Athens of America? - Walter Russell Mead

Rhode Island is looking more and more like Greece, and not in a good way. That is one message of this important piece by Mary Williams Walsh in the New York Times. Years of blue social policy have wrecked local and state government finance in the country’s smallest state, and now the bills are coming due. Services are being cut to the bone and elderly retirees are losing money they thought was secure.

In Rhode Island, it is Democrats, not nasty union-hating Republicans, who are doing the dirty work. Democratic mayors are telling their unions that there isn’t any money — not because they are vicious corporate stooges who hate working people and want to see them suffer, but because There. Isn’t. Any. Money.

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Rhode Island politicians, government and union officials have done everything possible to conceal the true state of affairs from the voters, the bondholders, retirees and even themselves. Unrealistic assumptions about rates of return helped hide the ugly truth about the looming pension meltdown — and anybody who tried to raise the alarm about the coming crisis was hooted down as an enemy of the workers. Even now the true blue firing squads are assembling to shoot the messenger; Mary Williams Walsh can expect angry push back from a whole sector of American political life that thinks this whole problem will go away if we tax the rich, clap our hands and all say together, “I believe in government”.

But “objectively”, as our Marxist friends would say, the union leaders and their political chums were the worst enemies of the workers: they told state workers that their benefits were secure even as it became increasingly obvious that, as a matter of arithmetic, they were not.

Let’s be crystal clear about this. To tell a 50 year old pretty lies about the soundness of a pension plan is one of the most wicked and irresponsible things you can do without actually shedding blood; people who believe these phony promises will not make the extra savings, work the extra years or otherwise take steps to protect themselves until it is too late. Telling those pretty lies is exactly what Rhode Island’s establishment has been doing for some time; it is what Ostrich Party legislators, trade unionists, journalists and governors are still doing across much of the country.

AP Newsbreak: Brown to seek sweeping pension cuts - Juliet Williams

Gov. Jerry Brown will propose sweeping rollbacks to public employee pension benefits in California, including raising the retirement age to 67 for new employees who are not public safety workers and requiring state and local employees to pay more toward their retirement and health care, according to a draft of the plan obtained Wednesday by The Associated Press.

The governor will also propose Thursday a mandatory "hybrid" system in which future retirees would get their retirement from a guaranteed benefit and a 401(k)-style plan subject to market whims. For employees with at least 30 years of service, retirement benefits would aim to replace about 75 percent of an employee's salary through retirement funds and Social Security, according to the draft.

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A report last year by the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research said that retirement funds for 2.6 million California teachers, state workers and university employees together faced long-term gaps of over $500 billion. The California Public Employees' Retirement System has $75 billion in unfunded future pension liabilities, and the state is on the hook for an estimated $51.8 billion in unfunded retiree health care costs.