Income tax interactive graph

For future reference:

http://www.heritage.org/federalbudget/top10-percent-income-earners

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Hahahahaaaa!!! That is ME laughing at YOU, cruel world.

    -Jordan Rixon

I could not love thee, dear, so much,

Loved I not Honour more.

Welfare spending now 25% of budget

http://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/restoring-a-true-safety-net 

I didn't know this. I was still thinking of the budget in 2008 terms, from the Death and Taxes poster.

The Obama years have seen unprecedented growth in spending on what used to be known as the federal "anti-poverty" or "welfare" programs: means-tested initiatives to provide food, health insurance, housing benefits, and income support to the poor. These programs certainly grew during the Bush administration, with spending increasing by a total of about $100 billion over that eight-year period ($12.5 billion per year in 2010 dollars). But that spending increased another $150 billion in just the first two years of the Obama administration.  

The scale of these increases is staggering. In three years, from 2008 through 2010, total annual spending on welfare programs (in 2010 dollars) increased from $475 billion to $666 billion — a 40% increase after accounting for inflation. At a combined annual cost of two-thirds of a trillion dollars, these programs are now on the same scale as the defense budget ($693 billion), Social Security ($700 billion), and Medicare ($551 billion).

--

Hahahahaaaa!!! That is ME laughing at YOU, cruel world.

    -Jordan Rixon

I could not love thee, dear, so much,

Loved I not Honour more.

Organ regeneration

Extracellular matrix + stem cells = regeneration. I wonder how far you can push that. Could you regrow whole limbs? How much capability for regrowth does a human adult retain, or is there something special about the prenatal environment that makes it only work once? (What happens if you try regeneration therapy on a Thalidomide child who didn't grow limbs right in the womb? Can it work correctly this time?)

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/17/health/research/human-muscle-regenerated-with-animal-help.html?pagewanted=all&_moc.semityn.www 

-Max

--

Hahahahaaaa!!! That is ME laughing at YOU, cruel world.

    -Jordan Rixon

I could not love thee, dear, so much,

Loved I not Honour more.

Marchetti's constant

J.,

You may find this interesting. Apparently the 30-minute commute may be a universal human constant. :)

http://persquaremile.com/2012/09/13/marchettis-constant/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+psm-articles%2Ffeed+%28Per+Square+Mile%29 

-Max

--

Hahahahaaaa!!! That is ME laughing at YOU, cruel world.

    -Jordan Rixon

I could not love thee, dear, so much,

Loved I not Honour more.

Taste of science

May interest you both: smell (and therefore taste) is directional.

The phenomenon is down to the fact that, although we have sensors on our tongue, eighty per cent of what we think of as taste actually reaches us through smell receptors in our nose.

The receptors, which relay messages to our brain, react to odours differently depending on which direction they are moving in.

"Think of a smelly cheese like Epoisses," Prof Smith said. "It smells like the inside of a teenager's training shoe. But once it's in your mouth, and you are experiencing the odour through the nose in the other direction, it is delicious.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/9528936/Why-does-coffee-never-taste-as-good-as-it-smells.html 

-Max

--

Hahahahaaaa!!! That is ME laughing at YOU, cruel world.

    -Jordan Rixon

I could not love thee, dear, so much,

Loved I not Honour more.

Speeding up Gmail

K.,

I don't know if this guy is right about large mailbox sizes causing Gmail slowdowns (http://jackg.org/gmail-as-a-facade%20) but I know you have a huge Inbox. If Gmail is slow for you, you could try archiving everything. Do it like this:

1.) Go to the search box.
2.) Type "in:inbox" and hit Enter. It will show you everything in your Inbox. This may seem pointless but see point #4.
3.) Now, click on the arrow next to the checkbox and hit "All". (See screenshot.)

4.) Because you are in a search and not just the inbox, selecting "All" gives you the option to select everything, even if it's not in your Inbox. Do so.

5.) Hit Archive and wait, perhaps for a long time, for it to finish archiving your thousands of messages. They will still show up in searches of course.

6.) Your Inbox is now empty, without you having to painfully archive one screenful (20-50 messages) at a time.

Note that you can also search for "is:read" and "is:unread" instead. "in:chat" is also sometimes useful because chats don't normally show up when you search.

Hope that's interesting, whether or not you end up actually choosing to clean out your Inbox in fact.

-M.

--
Hahahahaaaa!!! That is ME laughing at YOU, cruel world.
    -Jordan Rixon

I could not love thee, dear, so much,
Loved I not Honour more.

Note to Mr. Romney

Dear Mr. Romney and Romneyites,

I've been a lukewarm Republican in this contest up until now, but after reading the debate at (http://www.nature.com/news/obama-and-romney-tackle-14-top-science-questions-1.11355) you now have real credibility with me as an effective President. I just want to say good job, and I hope that same style comes through in the debates--if it does you will clean Obama's clock. :)

Good luck!

-Max Wilson

P.S. The web form I am entering this in is broken in Chrome and IE. It smashes all the text together. (http://www.mittromney.com/forms/other) You might want to have someone look at that.

--

Hahahahaaaa!!! That is ME laughing at YOU, cruel world.

    -Jordan Rixon

I could not love thee, dear, so much,

Loved I not Honour more.

Global warming/positive feedback

From a comment on Judith Curry's blog comes the best explanation I have ever read of how CO2 actually affects atmospheric temperatures. (It's not through the "greenhouse effect," which is basically about restrictiong convection. Instead, it's through raising the altitude and thus lowering the temperature of the CO2 photosphere.)

-Max

http://judithcurry.com/2012/08/24/a-modest-proposal-for-sequestration-of-co2-in-the-antarctic/

Vaughan Pratt | August 27, 2012 at 2:31 pm |

Near-IR video cameras aren't much different from visible-light ones. The one in this clip looks pretty sophisticated by comparison.

However I have to agree that the demonstration is nowhere near quantitative enough to infer much about absorption by CO2 of thermal radiation from Earth's surface. A far more accurate method is to calculate it line-by-line from theHITRAN line spectra tables.

However mere absorption of surface radiation is only about 6% of the impact of CO2 on global warming even in the no-feedback case. This is because what heats the Earth is reduction in outgoing longwave radiation (OLR) from the top of the atmosphere (TOA). Only 6% of that radiation is emitted by the surface, the rest is radiation from clouds and greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

Clouds are not water vapor but droplets, which unlike water vapor but like the surface are much closer to being black body radiators. Although there is somewhat less CO2 above the clouds than above the surface (the difference being the amount of CO2 between the clouds and the surface), it's quite enough to absorb the same bands emitted by the clouds as those emitted by the surface.

Radiation from the atmosphere's greenhouse gases is narrow-band, even at sea level but increasingly so at higher altitudes as the effect of pressure-broadening decreases. Every greenhouse gas emits its own set of lines, and absorbs the same again, so there's a lot of emitting and absorbing going on in the atmosphere.

Looking down from above the atmosphere, a thermal imaging camera sees only the "top layer" of all this radiation. This layer is not sharply defined but rather is a separatephotosphere for each wavelength of IR. To quote the Wikipedia article, "The photosphere of an astronomical object is the region from which externally received light originates." Wavelengths that are absorbed more strongly create more opaque and therefore higher-altitude photospheres. The further below the photosphere, the lower the probability that a photon from that depth will escape to space. The probability is nonzero however no matter how deep, whence the indistinctness of each photosphere.

What increasing any greenhouse gas does is to make it more opaque, thereby raising the altitude of the photosphere associated with each wavelength at which that gas absorbs and emits. The higher you go the colder, namely 10 C/km for dry air (the Dry Adiabatic Lapse Rate or DALR) all the way down to 5 C/km for saturated air (the Moist Adiabatic Lapse Rate or MALR) when very warm. Hence a higher photosphere is colder. And since radiation follows the Stefan-Boltzmann law, the amount of radiation falls off as the 4th power of this decreasing temperature.

Higher temperatures raise the water vapor in the atmosphere. Hence heating the atmosphere by increasing the CO2 will increase water vapor, another greenhouse gas, which in turns heats the atmosphere even more. This vicious cycle is called a positive feedback, and is believed to add considerably to the basic no-feedback greenhouse effect attributable to CO2.

Richard Feynman said of quantum mechanics that if you think you understand it then you don't. The greenhouse effect is not quite that bad, but it runs a close second. John Nielson-Gammon has offered "The Best Ever Description of the Atmospheric Greenhouse Effect". I don't know if my account above is as good, but it's only half the length.

--

Hahahahaaaa!!! That is ME laughing at YOU, cruel world.

    -Jordan Rixon

I could not love thee, dear, so much,

Loved I not Honour more.

Gold standard

A little bit over my head for casual reading. I need to think through the ramifications--anyway, I thought it might interest you.

http://www.econbrowser.com/archives/2012/09/return_to_the_g.html 

But the essence of a gold standard is that the units used in the above graph would become the units in which wages and prices would get reported and negotiated. Under a gold standard, a dollar always means the same thing in terms of ounces of gold that it would buy. So for example, if the dollar price of gold today was the same as it was in January 2000 ($283/ounce), and if the real value of gold had changed as much as it has since then, the dollar wage that an average worker received would need to have fallen from $13.75/hour in 2000 to $3.45/hour in 2012.

And the problem with that is, for a host of reasons ranging from minimum wage legislation, bargaining agreements and contracts, institutions, and human nature, it is very, very hard to get workers to accept a cut in their wage from $13.75/hour to $3.45/hour. The only way it could possibly happen is with an enormously high unemployment rate for a very long period of time. This strikes most of us as a pretty crazy policy proposal.

[snip: discussion showing that gold demand is not U.S.-driven, and thus that a gold standard for the dollar would not have prevented this depreciation]

-Max

--

Hahahahaaaa!!! That is ME laughing at YOU, cruel world.

    -Jordan Rixon

I could not love thee, dear, so much,

Loved I not Honour more.