Myke's Weblog

Kevin Richardson: Master Animal Behaviouralist, Loved by Lions

Beautiful Image: Canyonlands Sunset

Photo by Sean Reidy at http://1x.com/photos/popular/week/30860/

Beautiful Image: Virginia Barn

Photo by Fred First

Link: Fragments From Floyd - Photos and Front Porch Musing from Floyd County Virginia

Mahavishnu Orchestra: Jazz-Rock Fusion

I saw this group in the early '70s at the Carolina Coliseum in Columbia, SC. They were NOT a rock & roll band.

Steve Jobs Should Shut Down Apple – Michael Dell's Recommendation

Jobs had a public war of words with Dell Computer CEO Michael Dell, starting when Jobs first criticized Dell for making "un-innovative beige boxes." On October 6, 1997, in a Gartner Symposium, when Michael Dell was asked what he would do if he owned then-troubled Apple Computer, he said "I'd shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders." In 2006, Steve Jobs sent an email to all employees when Apple's market capitalization rose above Dell's. The email read:

Team, it turned out that Michael Dell wasn't perfect at predicting the future. Based on today's stock market close, Apple is worth more than Dell. Stocks go up and down, and things may be different tomorrow, but I thought it was worth a moment of reflection today. Steve.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs

Now...

Apple’s market cap — it is an astonishing $186.7 billion dollars — that’s bigger than:

Google $172B
Cisco $131.7B
HP $117.5B
Intel $110.4B
Verizon $85.7B
Amazon $51.7B
Research In Motion $34B
Dell $26.5B

Source: http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2010/01/5-questions-about-the-apple-islate/

Imagination

"Your imagination is your preview of life's coming attractions."

Albert Einstein

Bottlenose Dolphins Are Smart!

A pod of bottlenose dolphins off the coast of Florida have developed a remarkable hunting strategy in order to catch fish. Strangely, only one female in the pod can create this ring.

From the first episode (Challenges of Life) of the new BBC series Life. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00lbpcy

 

via John Harmon

Lessons from History

"If every Jewish and anti-nazi family in Germany had owned a Mauser rifle and twenty rounds of ammunition and the will to use it, Adolf Hitler would be a little-known footnote to the history of the Weimar Republic."

Aaron Zelman, co-founder of Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership

Home-made High Efficiency Wood Stove

It's not pretty but it's efficient and effective. Dave may be the real Red Green!

via Chris Kliemt

Permaculture: A Guide to Sustainable Living

Holmgren's 12 design principles of permaculture

These restatements of the principles of permaculture appear in David Holmgren's Permaculture: Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability:

Your Precious Metals Could Be Confiscated by the Government

This is very troubling to me. It makes me want to move out of Georgia.

From Mark Nestmann, who is an expert on wealth preservation and international tax planning solutions. He is the author of many books and reports dealing with these subjects.

Link: Keeping Precious Metals Offshore.

An increasing number of Americans are concerned enough about the threat of precious metals confiscation to want to store gold or silver overseas. But laws in effect in 21 states may stand in their way.

I learned about these laws last year when one of my subscribers in Arizona called.

He wanted to buy gold from a foreign dealer for storage offshore, but the dealer refused to sell to him. The reason: the Arizona Model Commodities Act. After some research, I learned that 21 states have enacted the MCA or some variation of it: Arizona, California, Colorado, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Maine, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oregon, Utah, and Washington.

Practical Solar Energy Advice for Homeowners

Gail the Actuary provides a forum for home owners with experience to offer advice to home owners who are considering solar energy additions.

The questions below were the focus for the responses.

Link: The Oil Drum

1. Is it best to work with someone who both sells and installs solar PV panels? Or is this something that people end up doing themselves, using a variety of vendors?

2. What brands/ types are best?

3. How much maintenance is required?

4. What experiences have people had who purchased solar PV, then moved to another home? Did the addition of solar PV help the resale value?

5. What have buyers experience with battery back-up been? Is a small amount worthwhile, even if a homeowner is on the grid?

6. Are there any particular issues with inverters that readers should be aware of?

7. If you have purchased solar PV, are you generally happy with it?

8. Where does one find good material to read regarding solar PV?

http://campfire.theoildrum.com/node/6123

Doug Landis: Quadriplegic Artist

Beautiful Image: Winter Storm

 

Bad Weather by Doug Thompson

Beautiful Image: Mt Shukasan

 

Mt Shukasan From Picture Lake In Winter by Kevin McNeal

Kevin McNeal - Photos

Foreclosure Snake

A woodpecker returns home to find its house has been seized.

via Mike Combs

Belief and Blind Spots

The moment we want to believe something, we suddenly see all the arguments for it, and become blind to the arguments against it.

George Bernard Shaw

Climate Change and Politics in Copenhagen: We Won't Get Fooled Again?

I'm so tired of being misled by our leaders that I search for people who don't sugarcoat what they see happening. This leads to inner conflict: the satisfaction of getting a somewhat realistic view of the problems that we face up the creek, and anger from realizing that how skilled our leaders are at promising to solve problems to gain power.

John Michael Greer doesn't sugarcoat what he sees. Below are some excerpts from his recent essay on the politics of climate change conference in Copenhagen. Don't read this unless you enjoy dark humor and you want to become more cynical. The realization that there are no easy solutions is always very difficult to swallow.

Link: The Archdruid Report: The Human Ecology of Collapse.

The question that has to be asked is whether a modern industrial society can exist at all without vast and rising inputs of essentially free energy, of the sort only available on this planet from fossil fuels, and the answer is no.

...will somebody please explain to me someday how a head of state got given the Nobel Peace Prize while he was enthusiastically waging two wars?

Meanwhile the socialists are insisting that it’s all capitalism’s fault and can be solved promptly by a socialist revolution, never mind the awkward little fact that the environmental records of socialist countries are by and large even worse than those of capitalist ones; other radicalisms of left and right make the same claim as the socialists, often with even less justification.

Learning from Ants

Eldon Taylor (Dec 15, 2009, InnerTalk InTouch, The Least Among Them) describes how ants have provided insights into life, from the time he was a boy. I can relate.

Years ago when I was but a mere 8 or 9 years old, I spent several consecutive days burning ants in my back yard. It is embarrassing to think about it now, but at the time I missed the meaning of what I was doing. I would dig up large anthills, and we had many, shoot some lighter fluid on the area and light a rolled sheet of wax paper that I used like a torch to spread the flames. Sometimes I would place small milk cartons on the hills and pretend they were houses going up in flames.

I had friends who did similar things to pass the summer days away so somehow I didn't think of what I was doing in any light other than normal and "so what?" Then one night I had a dream. In the dream the ant leaders came to speak with me. They were very courteous and formal, like grown ups, and they showed me the devastation I was bringing to their families and their young. I had wrecked their homes and tortured family members and they had dragged back to their graveyards the burnt and twisted remains of brothers and sisters. They also showed me around their homes as they were before I had started my fires and digging, sticking, drowning and otherwise tormenting these creatures. In the days before my boredom executed this pastime, the ants lived in harmony. They worked together to build, store and foster good works to create a strong future for their young and unborn. Their strength, courage and work ethic were most impressive even to a small child like myself.

The Two Root Problems that Plague the United States: Too Much Debt and Corporate Influence in Politics

Nathan Martin sees two major problems clouding the future of the United States.

Link: Nathan's Economic Edge: FREEDOM’S VISION – Introduction….

There are currently two ROOT PROBLEMS that plague the United States:

1. Our current money system is comprised almost entirely of debt backed money. This system is only 38 years old and yet it has already reached the limits of mathematical growth. The economy, on every level, is saturated with debt. There is not enough income to mathematically EVER repay this debt, and thus CHANGE IS GOING TO HAPPEN, whether we like it or not, or whether we believe it or not. Any system that is designed in such a manner is mathematically destined to fail from conception.

2. We have lost sight of the purpose of CORPORATIONS. The concept of a corporation first came about when Europe was exploring the new world. This was a very expensive and risk filled proposition, wealthy individuals could lose everything by losing a ship at sea and subsequently having family members of the deceased sue them. Thus the necessary capital for exploration and advancement dried up. And out of that came the concept of limited liability. Thus the Corporation was born as a way to serve mankind so that exploration could continue.

Today, corporations seem to have risen to a special place, one that is higher than man. This is because capital has concentrated so greatly that corporations use their money to influence politicians and to write laws in their favor. Yes, this is an extension of the Golden Rule, whereby those with the gold make the rules. But it is now at such an extreme that politicians on the national stage cannot get elected without massive infusions of their money – and thus there is a circle that feeds into them and makes them even larger and more powerful.

Stevie Ray Vaughn Channels Jimi Hendrix

Stevie Ray -- another great guitarist who died early. His great skills are clearly evident in this video.

Both Sides of the Global Warming Debate Are Wrong

John Michael Greer, one of my favorite sources of intelligence, describes why the global warming debate is so polarized, with scientific "evidence" being used by both sides. He suggests that we should be more concerned about Peak Oil, which is less controversial and more predictable, but not very marketable. Excerpts below.

Click on the link below to read the whole essay. The comments are very interesting also.

Link: The Archdruid Report: Hagbard's Law

...Hagbard’s Law is a massive factor in modern societies. Coined by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson in their tremendous satire Illuminatus!, Hagbard’s Law states that information can only be communicated between equals, since in a hierarchy, those in inferior positions face very strong incentives to tell their superiors what the superiors want to hear rather than ‘fessing up to the truth. The more levels of hierarchy between the people who gather information and the ones who make decisions, the more communication tends to be blocked by Hagbard’s Law; in today’s governments and corporations, the disconnect between the reality visible on the ground and the numbers viewed from the top of the pyramid is as often as not total.

Many of my readers will be aware that two examples of this sort of figure-juggling surfaced in the last couple of weeks. From somewhere in the bowels of the International Energy Agency (IEA), a bureaucracy created and funded by the world’s industrial nations to provide statistics on energy use, two whistleblowers announced that the 2009 figures that were about to be released had been jiggered, as past figures had been, under pressure from the US government. The reason for the pressure, according to the whistleblowers, was that accurate figures would be bad for the US economy – as indeed they would be, for much the same reason that a diagnosis of terminal illness is bad for one’s prospects of buying life insurance.

Of course news stories about the leaks brought a flurry of denials from the IEA. Doubtless some people were fooled; still, the gaping chasm between the IEA’s rosy predictions of future oil production and the evidence assembled by independent researchers has been a subject of discussion in peak oil circles for some years now, and it was useful to have insiders confirm the presence of fudge factors outside analysts have long since teased out of the data.

The Magazine Cover Jinx Hits Tiger Woods

Tiger Woods’s image as a clean-living sports icon is in tatters - adding irony to the front cover of Golf Digest magazine’s January issue, which went to press before the sex scandal broke.

This is another chapter in a long history of magazine covers signaling a major trend change. For example, Business Week picked Enron as the most successful business in American just before it disintegrated. Being on the cover of Sport Illustrated has seemingly jinxed athletes and teams many times.

Magazine cover appearances may signal the Peak of Hubris for the fallen idols.

Link: Best man speech could draw Tiger Woods out of hiding - Times Online.

The magazine features a mocked-up picture of Woods acting as caddie to President Obama, to illustrate an article headlined “10 Tips Obama can take from Tiger.” The feature, now causing some embarrassment at Golf Digest, suggests that the President, struggling to turn around a recession, could learn the art of “the quick recovery” from the famously adept golfer.

“Woods is a good role model...because he has always been able to pull himself together after setbacks,” it notes, also observing: “Woods never does anything that would make himself look ridiculous.”

I doubt that Obama will be getting any advice from Tiger.

Beautiful Sights: Video of Natural Wonders

Watch in High Definition: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WtNsXjk2YUM

via Chris Anderson

Rush Down the Mountain - Buggy Rollin'

Buggy Rollin' is a fledgling sport that takes in-line skating to the extreme by adding wheels to a full-body armature so that every possible point of contact between you and the ground is covered.

Watch the video in full screen.

via Bill Voegeli