New perpetual motion breakthrough discovered!

In an article published on The Australian website, Roger asks “Why cant the pressure of the ocean be used too drive the salt water thru a filter and down a man made tunnel creating freash water and driving turbines too create endless power.”

Now I wonder why nobody ever thought of that before.

I’ve been trying find something to say about this, but in the face of such cluelessness I admit defeat.

source: DigitalGlobe-Imagery

Aside: I went looking for a photo to illustrate this entry on Flickr. And by a strange coincidence, The Australian used the same one. They attribute it to AFP, whom I assume paid DG-I for the privilege of using it in a commercial context?

Peter Singer, One World

A long time ago Fiona gave me a copy of Peter Singer, How Are We to Live? : Ethics in an Age of Self-Interest. Singer’s name came up recently in a conversation with a friend, Scott, who mentioned that he had read One World. One thing led to another and he lent it to me.

The book is the result of a series of lectures he gave at Yale as part of the “Dwight Harrington Foundation Lectures on Religion in the Light of Science and Philosophy”.

He starts from the basis that we share One Atmosphere, and discusses global warming and the steps needed to address it.

Globalisation has led to a situation where the entire economic activity of the world may be described as One Economy. A natural corollary to that is that there is the need for One Law. Yet this does not mean he advocates a World Government (indeed he wryly acknowledges that such a beast would be an ineffectual bureaucratic monster), but that in all countries, people must be able to see that the system that globalisation has introduced is fair and just.

Finally he discusses the problem of wealth redistribution and foreign aid under the theme of One Community.

It’s an easy and enjoyable read. Of particular note is the manner in which he addresses the need for international action on climate change, and his examination of the World Trade Organisation. Yes, one can criticise some of the conclusions, but it is not a text that can be dismissed out of hand. Overall, there’s a lot to ponder.

John Sakowicz on the US economy

I’ve stumbled over two installments in this series over the past three or four months, and surprisingly there are no inter-article navigation links to get from one to the next. Which makes it difficult to read at one sitting. And that’s a pity, because it’s a good yarn. It’s as good an introduction as any to understanding how the US economy got into the situation it finds itself in today.

I managed to track most of the pages down by poking around on the website that publishes them.

I never found the first one though, since even more curiously, it’s hosted on another website altogether. Fortunately, the author’s name, John Sakowicz, is sufficiently uncommon to make web searches easy.

Now I have the links to all five eight, I’m creating a table of contents to the pages for myself, and in the hope that someone else finds it useful. I promise to update it if and when additional installments are published.

1. Hello, Alternative Universe – Junk and chumps, pump and dump, barbarians and brokers, smoke and mirrors and other assets of our risk-positive fiscal mess
2. Secrets and Lies – On swaps, derivatives and why the Bear Stearns bailout was one big pump-and-dump scheme
3. Shadow Economy – How prime brokers paved the way for the biggest bank heist in history
4. To America, with Shame – Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the free fall of the U.S. economy
5. The Fannie and Freddie Flip – More bad news from the Orwellian Office of Invisible Money
6. America for Sale – Hank Greenberg and the dismantling of the American dream
7. Dancing with the Bear – Investing for these times (and possibly the next Great Depression)
8. Too Big to Bailout – A modest proposal to restructure our financial system so that the big dogs topple when they need to

This lack of attention to navigation in multi-part installments on the web is one of my pet peeves. If one web designer reads this page and pays attention to this issue then I’ll be a happy man. Oh, and ISO date formats are the only way to go for an international readership.

Happy reading.