Results for “water” 1132 found
The future of ports and vessels
It is a fun game to write out only the last paragraphs of good books:
Where vessel size had once been limited by the locks in the Panama Canal, containerships had grown so large that twenty-first-century naval architects were constrained by the Straits of Malacca, the busy shipping lane between Malaysia and Indonesia. If a containership ever reaches Malacca-Max, the maximum size for a vessel able to pass through the straits, it will be a quarter mile long and 190 feet wide, with its bottom some 65 feet below the waterline. If it should sink, it will take nearly $1 billion of cargo with it. Its capacity will be 18,000 TEUs, or 9,000 standard 40-foot containers, enough to fill a 68-mile line of trucks each time it arrives in port. Where it will call is a serious question, because few ports anywhere are deep enough to accommodate it. The answer may well be brand-new ports built in deep water offshore, with Malacca-Max ships linking offshore platforms and smaller vessels shuttling containers to land. If they ever come about, these enormously costly ships and ports will create yet more economies of scale, making it still cheaper and easier to move goods around the globe.
That is from Marc Levinson’s The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger. Here is a link to Virginia Postrel’s post on the book. Here is a photo of a Malacca-Max ship; sadly there is no elephant nearby.
My favorite things Louisiana
Ah, to be on the road again… Most of my reporting from Louisiana will likely appear in another venue (links in due time); for now you must be content with these notes:
1. Favorite song: King Porter Stomp, by Jelly Roll Morton. I didn’t think about this one much, though many Louis Armstrong songs are fair contenders. To sort through music more generally would take hours. In addition to jazz, Cajun music, zydeco, and "swamp pop," there is Jerry Lee Lewis, Leadbelly, Mahalia Jackson, Little Walter, Buddy Guy, Lucinda Williams, and yes Britney Spears.
2. Movie, set in: Southern Comfort remains underrated. Interview with the Vampire was better than expected. Water Boy has a few funny jokes. There is also Streetcar Named Desire (not my thing), Big Easy, The Drowning Pool, The Apostle, and last but not least The Blob was filmed in Abbeville.
3. Writer: I don’t much like Truman Capote, though I can see he was important at the time. John Kennedy Toole is a good pick, don’t forget Kate Chopin, plus I will confess a weakness for the best of Anne Rice; Witching Hour and Lasher are my favorites. Elmore Leonard rounds out a strong category, and I am likely forgetting some notables.
4. Artist: John James Audobon did some of his work in Louisiana, plus he was born in Haiti. Does that count? Clementine Hunter is one pick from the Naives. Here is another picture by her.
5. Dish: Boudin blanc or peppered, boiled crayfish. Overall I prefer the simple rural food to the New Orleans Creole style and its heavier roux-based sauces.
6. Architecture: There are many wonders, try this typical and not even extraordinary house from the Garden District.
The bottom line: Riches await you here.
Philosophical implications of inflationary cosmology
Recent developments in cosmology indicate that every history having a nonzero probability is realized in infinitely many distinct regions of spacetime. Thus, it appears that the universe contains infinitely many civilizations exactly like our own, as well as infinitely many civilizations that differ from our own in any way permitted by physical laws. We explore the implications of this conclusion for ethical theory and for the doomsday argument. In the infinite universe, we find that the doomsday argument applies only to effects which change the average lifetime of all civilizations, and not those which affect our civilization alone.
Got that? Here is the paper. Here is brief background.
It seems if you count all possible universes (or call them parts of our multiverse, whatever) as normatively relevant, none of your actions matter in consequentialist terms.
As to how our world, and our decisions, matter at the margin, we delve into the murky waters of infinite expected values. With an infinity of alternatives out there, our little add-on doesn’t seem to make any difference for the grand total. Why should even you raise the average outcome across universes? (TC yesterday: "No, Bryan, we are not leaping up Cantorian levels of infinity, it is just one version of you getting another Klondike bar.")
One option is that only our universe, or some other "in-group," matters. The other universes cannot count for less, rather they must count for nothing. I recoil at such a thought, but it does avoid the mess of infinities. Alternatively, we might embrace some version of Buddhism.
On the bright side, philosophic talk about modality is no longer so problematic but rather refers to facts about other existing universes. Since that problem threatened to bring morality to its knees anyway ("what do you mean, you "could" have done something different? You did what you had to do."), maybe I don’t feel so bad after all. And who should care if I do feel bad? The other me feels fine. Infinity has its benefits, and there are many worse problems.
You should lower your probability that God exists, since the Anthropic Argument will dispense with the Argument from Design. Only the ordered pockets of the multiverse can wonder about why we are here and why things seem to run so smoothly.
That’s a lot to swallow in one day, but it seems the probability of all those propositions just went up.
Addendum: Have I mentioned that inflationary cosmology and its implications fit my crude, pathetic intuitions? Since we have a universe, I feel it must somehow be a kind of cosmic "free lunch." And once you open the door for free lunches, why stop at just one? There is no good reason to rely on our locally-evolved common sense intuitions when doing philosophic cosmology.
Department of !
Saturn moon spewing water vapor. Or so it seems…
Interesting links
1. David Friedman has a novel coming out.
2. Here is another good reason to have sex.
3. Contracts for everything, a’ la Mary Blige.
4. Long compound German nouns.
5. Bird flu, standing on one foot, by EffectMeasure. Here is a good analysis of avian flu in cats.
6. How baseball statistics confuse the transient and the permanent, pointer from Robert Schwartz.
7. George Lucas: "I predict that by 2025 the average movie will cost only $15 million."
8. How to moderate a panel, pointer from Chris Masse.
What I’ve been reading
1. Land of Plenty: A Treasury of Authentic Sichuan Cooking, by Fuchsia Dunlop. The other night I made a sauce with five chopped green onions, blended to a smooth paste with one tablespoon sichuan peppers (first dunked into hot water). Add three tablespoons chicken stock, one teaspoon light soy sauce, one and one half teaspoons sesame oil. Apply to cooked chicken. More generally, buy Chinese cooking wine and black (Chinese) vinegar and you are almost ready to go.
2. Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD, seventh edition. This is not just a reference work, it is also the best book on jazz, period. The main drawback is a lack of material on Norwegian jazz, a recent interest of mine.
3. This NYT article on previously-covered Dana Schutz. Or try this article on nuns and the origins of reggae.
4. Recent books by Julian Barnes and Zadie Smith, while entertaining enough, won’t attract interest thirty years from now. Question: What is the optimal lag time before deciding a work of fiction is worth reading? Few novels require urgent reading, so how about fifteen years? Why do I violate this rule so regularly?
5. Swallowing Clouds: A Playful Journey Through Chinese Culture, Language, and Cuisine, by A. Zee. This unique book lives up to its subtitle; it teaches you how to make sense of Chinese characters, how the Chinese think about food, and how it all fits into a bigger picture.
Funes, the Memorius
A wonderful short story by Borges, appropriate for today, and it is much shorter than you might remember. Thanks to Alina Stefanescu for the pointer.
Plus ca change…
I had the same reaction as Pablo Halkyard at the PSD Blog to yesterday’s article in the NYTimes on Bolivian water privatization so here is his post:
Juan Ferrero’s
article in today’s New York Times discusses the poor results of water
privatization and nationalization in Bolivia, as well as the country’s
turbid future as it struggles to reform.After
days of protests and martial law, Bechtel – the American multinational
that had increased rates when it began running the waterworks – was
forced out. As its executives fled the city, protest leaders pledged to
improve service and a surging leftist political movement in Latin
America celebrated the ouster as a major victory, to be repeated in
country after country.Today, five years later, water is again as cheap as ever, and a
group of community leaders runs the water utility, Semapa. But half of
Cochabamba’s 600,000 people remain without water, and those who do have
service have it only intermittently – for some, as little as two hours
a day, for the fortunate, no more than 14.The sad
part is that I have read the exact same article by Juan at least four
times in the last two years – although sometimes the names of Peru or
Ecuador are plugged in for Bolivia, or electricty/gas replaces water as
the featured sector.
See also my earlier post on some surprising benefits of water privatization.
Tyler Cowen begs for hate mail
Twenty years ago I lived in Freiburg, Germany and I often crossed the border to Colmar for the smoked pork. Mexican pork — corn-fed and free-range — knocks my socks off. To put it rudely, I thought the pork at Lexington #1, supposedly the finest bbq in NC, was only slightly better than the carnitas at a good branch of Chipotle. Yes, that is the Chipotle which is owned by McDonald’s and found in the Virginia suburbs. Lexington pork was often too dry, a bit bland, and too frequently doused in sauce, albeit delicious sauce.
Only three or four of Lexington’s twenty or so "barbecue" restaurants still use the classic fired pit. The sadder truth is that it doesn’t matter anymore. The classic pit places will keep their pork either heated or frozen for at least a day and sometimes up to a week. Lexington #1 proudly told me that they don’t let their pork sit any longer than a day…or, after slight hesitation, "sometimes overnight…sometimes we mix it with the pork from yesterday." The pork is also a bit cold, since reheating it thoroughly would dry it out.
Compare this to the best places in Lockhart, Texas, where they pull the meat out of the pit before your eyes and cut it with a butcher’s knife. If they run out of their best dishes by 1 p.m., so be it, that is the price of quality. Did I mention that first-rate barbecue is not always economical?
I can make tastier pork at home. Take some pork ribs and rub in cumin, salt, pepper, and Mexican (not Italian) oregano. Cook them in the oven with a cup of milk, a few cloves of garlic, a few sprigs of thyme, and perhaps a little water. The ambitious will add a bit of fresh lard. It depends on your cut, pot, and oven, but 1 1/4 hours at 300 degrees often works, figure it out yourself. Take the pork out, and let it sit a while for the juices to settle. Scrape the pork off the bone, and then cook it at high heat, using the residue from the ribs as the cooking medium. Add more fresh lard if you want. Cook it for a minute or two, until it starts to brown and get crusty. Remove it immediately at that point; don’t let it get crusty. Yummy, yummy, yummy.
Oh yes, the dipping sauce is to take one white onion, two tomatoes, two cloves garlic, and a few ancho chilies, fry them all a bit in a neutral oil and then blend them in a food processor. If you have the time hydrate the fried chiles for thirty minutes in water before blending. Fresh handmade corn tortillas can be added to this mix, they are increasingly easy to find in Latin markets.
Who needs Lexington?
The Treaty of Tripoli
In the late 1790s the US was having difficulty with Muslim pirates in the waters off Northern Africa. After some difficulty, a treaty was signed in 1796 with the Bey of Tripoli promising friendship, trade and an end to hostilities. The 11th article of the treaty provides a remarkable contrast between how these sorts of issues were handled by the founders and how they are handled today. It reads:
As the government of the United States of America is not in any sense
founded on the Christian Religion; as it has in itself no character of
enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Musselmen; and as
the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility
against any Mehomitan nation, it is declared by the parties that no
pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an
interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.
The Treaty was read aloud in the Senate and approved unanimously. In his proclamation John Adams said, "I John Adams, President of the United States of America, having seen
and considered the said Treaty do, by and with the advice consent of
the Senate, accept, ratify, and confirm the same, and every clause and
article thereof." The treaty was published in a number of leading newspapers. It never aroused any opposition.
Why Americans are fatter
…Americans are not consuming more carbohydrates and trans fats because McDonald’s is super sizing our dinners. Nor is our diet changing because Uncle Sam is subsidizing corn. Rather, Americans are eating poorly because of a much more fundamental change in how we eat, specifically, the rise of snacking. In fact, the amount we eat and drink between meals accounts for nearly all the growth in our consumption of carbohydrates and fats over the past thirty years. Perhaps the biggest source of America’s recent weight gain and sugary diet is not so much the value "meal" but the simple snack.
…the free market has caught up with American food culture…With snacking, food is no longer about sustenance or even sociability: it is about amusement and self-medication. We now eat to relieve our stress, to alleviate our boredom, or simply make ourselves feel better. Food, in short, has become our drug of choice. And the types of foods that are best suited for these psychological tasks are the very ones that cause us so many health problems, that is, sweets, fats, and refined carbohydrates. In other words, the ultimate source of the changing American diet goes beyond McDonald’s, corn syrup, or the food pyramid; the ultimate source is the American way of life.
That is from J. Eric Oliver’s excellent Fat Politics: The Real Story Behind America’s Obesity Epidemic. Here is Steve Levitt’s positive review. Here is an LA Times review.
What about me? I am not going to exercise beyond my current levels of tennis, basketball, and walking are enough. So I could become thinner in three ways. First, I have recently switched from Raisin Bran to Spelts cereal in the morning. Second, I prefer mineral water to Coke, but Szechuan restaurants do not serve the former. I am waiting for Markets in Everything, and in the meantime I am not willing to give up Dan Dan Noodles or eat them with plain ice water or tea. Third, in the last year I have started snacking on high-quality dark chocolate. I have yet to decide whether I wish to fight this new source of additional calories…
Addendum: Comments are now open…
The Oracle At Delphi Worked, When Independent
A student and a colleague of mine, Colleen Berndt and Larry Iannaccone, have an interesting paper on the Oracle at Delphi. It turns out that the Oracle’s prophecies tended to be pretty accurate:
The long journey some made to reach Delphi, combined with the long waits for a consultation, indicate a greater opportunity for information to make its way to the priests and pythias. In addition to the information circulated at the local watering holes, the priestesses were able to aggregate information gleaned from petitioner.
On political subjects, it was especially important for Delphi to be independent of political influence:
When Delphi gained its independence from the Phocians, it began to benefit greatly from a perception of fairness. Lack of control by any one state meant that Delphi could operate free from any political pressure.
Since the Oracle charged by the question, it was important to think carefully about the questions one asked. This is also good advice for those creating prediction markets today. The cost of creating a market is largely independent of the topic, while the value varies greatly by topic. So for the best cost-benefit, ask the biggest questions.
Freakonomics of the sea
"Before the 1880s, it was unusual to see lobster on menus," said Jones. "It was considered trash fish that people didn’t want"
Glenn said his interest in menus as historical resources evolved from a project in which he assigned students in a coastal resources class to study seafood price data based on prices in a 1950s restaurant menu he came across.
Besides documenting the rise and fall in popularity and prices of fish and mollusk species in restaurants, menus also provide scientists with serious documentation of the economics of commercial fishing over the decades, he said.
"Sea scallops don’t show up on the menus until the 1940s," Jones said. "Before that, it was all bay scallops on menus. Now, bay scallops are pretty rare and the ones you get are real small"
Other U.S. seafood resources are depleted as well, Jones said. Industry records show oyster harvests from Chesapeake Bay are down 96 percent from annual hauls in the early 1900s, he said.
In recent decades, American consumers in particular have chewed their way through two trendy delicacies, Jones said.
"In the 1970s and 1980s, orange roughie starts showing up on menus," Jones said. "But it’s a very slow-growing species and they were harvesting it much faster than the species could replace itself so it’s becoming commercially extinct"
Fishing boats simply shifted from chasing roughie in waters around New Zealand and Australia to pursuing Chilean sea bass in the southern Pacific and southern Indian oceans.
"They just moved on to another species," Jones said, citing catch statistics. "Now, the same thing is happening with the Chilean sea bass"
The same type of progression took place among Atlantic ocean species from the 1850s into the 1900s, Jones said.
Analysis so far has included menus mostly from coastal cities like New York, Boston, San Francisco and Providence, R.I., Jones said.
Here is the full story, and thanks to Dylan Alexander for the pointer. Here is another summary, try this one too. In Colonial America, servants wrote contracts specifying they would not be asked to eat lobseter (how fresh? and did they give you a bib and that little fork?) more than twice a week. Here is a Canadian summary of the work.
Did I mention that we are running out of many species of fish, and that we will be consuming lower and lower items on the marine seafood chain? I favor private ownership of fish stocks, to alleviate the commons problem, but a) this is not always technically feasible, and b) where possible, it would cause current prices to skyrocket, making those fish a luxury good. Quotas can be a second best solution but they are hard to enforce. I hope you like seaweed.
Biloxi Boom!?
Land prices in Biloxi are up. The reason? Mississippi is a poor state and so historically even homes with water views were modest. When the coast boomed, due to gambling and tourism, the land became a lot more valuable in alternative uses like hotels, casinos, and vacation homes for the rich. But it’s costly and takes a long time for developers to buy up small lots and bundle them into bigger packages. The hurricane, however, acted like nature’s form of eminent domain. With the small houses destroyed there are many sellers, bundling is becoming easier, and everyone expects that zoning will be changed to favor the developers.
Absurdly, CNN paints the speculators as almost as bad as the hurricane itself:
But what Katrina spared, the real estate rush now imperils. The arrival of speculators threatens what’s left of bungalow
neighborhoods that are among the Gulf’s oldest communities, close-knit
places of modest means where casino workers, fishermen and their
families could still afford to live near the water.
But while there is a certain sadness in seeing an old way of life decline no one is being forced to sell and those who do sell must be very pleased that there are eager buyers.
Thanks to Edward Johnson for the pointer.
Markets in everything: putting the homeless to work
It is called Bumvertising.
Bumvertising™, or the use of sign holding vagrants to advertise, is a development of PokerFaceBook.com’s
most recent advertising campaign. Homeless men are able to provide a
valuable and tangible service to a company, while receiving an
additional revenue stream in combination with their normal donations
from begging.
Here is a photo gallery of ads. Here is the company’s "economic analysis" of the practice. Here is some nasty language directed against the founders. And it seems you pay the bums with barter:
Through his own effort and the assistance of his marketing team, Mr.
Rogovy developed signs and accumulated the resources that most bums
would find attractive. Money, sandwiches, chips, apples, water, and
other beverages have all been dispensed in order to compensate the
homeless in the Seattle Bumvertising™ campaign.
I have no direct information on how real this practice is, or if it violates minimum wage laws, but the web site appears legitimate. Thanks to Curt Gardner for the pointer. Comments are open if you know more.