Coyote Blog

Kyoto and similar protocols are dying, and for entirely predictable reasons.  Story in TCS from Buenos Aires.

The conventional wisdom that it's the United States against the rest of the world in climate change diplomacy has been turned on its head. Instead it turns out that it is the Europeans who are isolated. China, India, and most of the rest of the developing countries have joined forces with the United States to completely reject the idea of future binding GHG emission limits. At the conference here in Buenos Aires, Italy shocked its fellow European Union members when it called for an end to the Kyoto Protocol in 2012. These countries recognize that stringent emission limits would be huge barriers to their economic growth and future development.

None too soon for me.

For years I have called groups like the Center for Science and the Public Interest the health or food Nazis for their continuing desire for the government to interfere with all of our individual decision-making.  They have even been google bombed with that term, it appears, so I will help -- Food Nazis!

Anyway, Reason has an interesting post linking to a study of Nazi Germany:

In a brief BMJ article, George Davey Smith describes Nazi Germany's pioneering campaigns against smoking, drinking, overeating, and other unhealthy habits. (Robert N. Proctor's 1999 book The Nazi War on Cancer explores this topic in more detail.) "It may seem paradoxical that the robust identification of one of the most important environmental causes of disease of the 20th century occurred in a totalitarian state," Smith writes, referring to Nazi research on the link between smoking and lung cancer.

Uh, no it doesn't seem paradoxical at all that totalitarians would try to micro-manage individual decision-making.

New, via Reason, comes this excerpt from an article by Milton Friedman:

After World War II, opinion was socialist while practice was free market; currently, opinion is free market while practice is heavily socialist. We have largely won the battle of ideas; we have succeeded in stalling the progress of socialism, but we have not succeeded in reversing its course. We are still far from bringing practice into conformity with opinion. That is the overriding non-defense task for the second Bush term. It will not be an easy task, particularly with Iraq threatening to consume Bush's political capital.

Reason links to the whole article.  I have said on a number of occasions that as a libertarian, one of the downsides of the Iraq war that does not get discussed much is that it diverted Bush II from promised market reforms, including tort reform and social security.  There appears to be some hope that these can be addressed in the second term.

Europe has never had the strong tradition of or protection of free speech and press that we enjoy in the US.  For years, I have criticized the use of libel laws in Europe to stifle speech -- similar things are attempted in the US, but seldom get very far in the courts.

Now comes this proposal (courtesy of Captains Quarters):

The Council of Europe has called on its 46 member-states to introduce legislation on the right of reply to correct false information on online media.

It said the Committee of (Foreign) Ministers, executive of the European human rights watchdog body, had adopted a recommendation on the right to reply for online Internet media.

This recommended that members consider introducing legislation on the "right of reply or any other equivalent remedy, which allows a rapid correction of incorrect information in online or off-line media......"

Fortunately, our government does not have any legal or constitutional right of reply in any media, though the implications for the Internet are interesting since about 20% of my readers are in Europe, if you can trust my referral logs.  So lets give it a test:  the EU is a bureaucratic, statist nightmare.  There, lets see if that gets a response.

In my post "Fisking the NEA's Improvement Ideas", I said that all of the NEA's calls for teacher certification were less about teacher quality and more about increasing the union's power and increasing salaries.  This strategy is as old as guilds from the 15th century.

Here is a study about the American Bar Association and the bar exam and its effects on quality and salaries.

A newly constructed data set on lawyers' licensing exam difficulty, candidate quality and exam results allows to distinguish the alternative theories. Public interest theory is rejected in favor of capture theory. The results imply that professional licensing has a significant effect on entry salaries. On average, licensing increases annual entry salaries by more than $20,000. This implies a total transfer from consumers to lawyers of 36% of lawyers' wages and a total welfare loss of over $6 billion.

Thanks to Volokh for the link.  This same post from Volokh also talks about how lawyers are trying to prevent non-lawyers from performing certain duties, including workers comp hearings and real estate closings.  And don't even get me started on hair braiding.

An interesting post from the Knowlege Problem.  An interesting fit with my post earlier this week on Progressives are too Conservative to Like Capitalism.

The interviewer characterizes Hayek's Road to Serfdom as "a bible for people on the conservative political side". I really must object to this characterization, and I'd like to think that Hayek would too. Indeed, one of his most powerful essays was titled "Why I am Not a Conservative".

Powerline notes that this week is the 60th anniversary of the Battle of the Bulge, or Wacht am Rhein as the Germans called it.  However, I will say that "nuts" was not my favorite quote coming from the 101st Airborn.  My favorite was the one from about every soldier in the 101 when asked how it felt to be "rescued" by Patton.  Their nearly universal answer was, and still is, that no one in the 101st ever thought they needed to be rescued.  I don't know if it is apocryphal, but as Captain Winters in Band of Brothers says "We're paratroopers, we're supposed to be surrounded."

I reported a similar story last week, but here is another:  Workers get $211,000 in back salary, their lawyers ask for $2,570,000 in fees.

I have harped on the subject of public funding of stadiums a number of times.  Here we go again, though.  Our nation's capital (which means all of us, probably) is going to pony up $ for a new sports stadium.  Reason takes it on here.

Yes, I know the Cuban government sucks.  No, I do not want to give it a moral sanction.  However, our continuing total embargo of Cuba smacks more of saving face at this point rather than a very effective strategy to end communism on the island. 

While it is important to have sanctions against totalitarian governments, cutting off all contact with the democratic nations is just counter-productive.  Cross-pollination of democratic ideas has done more to bring countries like China and South Africa closer to the democratic fold than any number of sanctions.  In particular, limitations even on intellectual contact between Americans and Cubans makes no sense any more.

OK, I am not trying to make this the global warming blog, so hopefully this will be it on the climate posts for a while, but Bjorn Lomborg, perhaps the most disliked scientist in the world for his critiques of many environmental arguments, makes the argument that global warming is a fact, but stopping it may be more expensive than it is worth.

My post here and here remind me that I should review the book I just finished --Michael Crichton's State of Fear.  In this book, a group of environmental activists are trying to help mother nature along by creating some natural disasters to draw media attention for the global warming crusade.

I really wanted to like this book.  For once, the villain was not some greedy dastardly businessman trying to increase profits of his corporation at the expense of people's lives.  I have always felt that novels with a political ax to grind were tedious, particularly when they got to the preachy parts.  Clive Cussler, for example, has gotten bad about this in his later books like Shock Wave.  In this book, like in most, the crime is usually so over the top that it is just illogical that anyone would go about business that way - the same time and money spent on less villainous activities would yield far more profit.  It's like those James Bond movie villains who create a $100 million laser satellite and underground control facility only to extort $10 million.

I had thought that the reason I did not like these books was that I disagreed with most of political polemic in them.   However, "State of Fear" has taught be a valuable lesson - I hated the polemic in this novel too, even when I agreed with it.  Crichton makes the same mistake I have railed on Cussler and others for - the cost and elaborate planning that go into most of the planned terrorist attacks make no sense in proportion to benefits.  While I might agree that too many people are mindlessly marching to the global warming drummer without any real thought or consideration of the facts, I thinking blowing some of these folks up into out of control monsters does not help make that point - it just makes you look like you have an ax to grind.  Its also unfair to give the global warming point of view such a poor advocate, the sum total of whose analytical arsenal consists of saying "well, everyone believes it".

<rant>  By the way, a quick word to all you statists, socialists, liberals, and environmental freaks who seem so worked up all over the web about the above admittedly poor literary techniques:  Get over it!  First, global warming is seldom represented by its advocates as the messy, unclear, chaotic, hard to predict thing it really is.  You advocates of global warming have constantly exagerated your case, so get over it when someone does it in the other direction.  Second, I have probably read over a hundred novels where the advocates of capitalism, markets, business, and individual responsibility are just as incompetant as the advocates for global warming are in this book.  Let me see you complain about a book with polemic that you agree with, as I have done, and then I will listen to you. </rant>

So I rank the book as OK, with some pretty good scenes and plot marred by some tedious expositions and diatribes (and remember, this is coming from someone who agrees with the diatribes!)  Tom Clancy does a much better job of evenhandedly dealing with eco-terrorists in Rainbow Six, probably his last good novel. 

By the way, if I wanted to novelize a rant against global warming's bad science, I would choose about anyone except for Crichton, whose middle name is "bad science".  I enjoy his novels, but did you ever ask yourself why all the doctors had to go through all that decontamination in Andromeda Strain, when they were never going to come in contact with the objects under study anyway?  Or, in Timeline, if they are really traveling to parallel but out of sync alternate universes, then how do changes they make in the other universes (such as the dropped glasses) propagate to our universe?  And don't get me started on the science of Prey or the use of chaos theory in Jurrasic Park.

UPDATE

Well, the emails are already coming in.  Since this is getting a lot of hits already off search engines by people who do not normally read this site, and to save writing a number of individual responses, I will give the elevator version of where I am on global warming:

• The world has probably warmed over the last several decades due to man-made CO2 production, but less than is generally reported because
  • Global warming advocates, out of several available data sets, always pick the one that shows the most warming, while other data sets show less.  The data set they choose (ground temperatures) is not without issues.
  • Advocates tend to ignore other influences that might be raising temperatures in addition to man-made CO2, including natural climatic cycles, increased solar activity, and urban heat island effects.  These effects were apparently substantial in the first half of the century.  To argue that they are not part of the story in the second half of the century, you have to argue that they stopped at the same time that CO2 began having an effect.
• The world will warm further due to man-made CO2, but the models for future warming are almost certainly overstated, for at least two reasons:
  • While I can't judge the science, I sure as heck can evaluate an economic model and the models for the amount of CO2 produced in the next century are basically economic models.  And they are hugely flawed.  The models have made assumptions that grossly overstate CO2 production in the future.  As just one example, the models assume that many of the least energy efficient nations have huge growth booms over the next 50 years, so that their economies grow larger than that of the US (for example, South Africa is shown to have a larger economy in the future than the US).  These models also assume that these countries do not get much more efficient, so you end up with models showing enormous, absurdly energy efficient economies in the future -- which of course grossly overstates CO2 production
  • As I said, I don't have the science to dispute the models in depth, but one has to be concerned when the models do not match history, and in fact predict historically a much higher temperature rise than we have seen to date.  Advocates will argue that this is fixed, but it was fixed with fudge factors, not science.  People have tried doing this with financial models as well, fudging theoretical models that aren't working to match history, and have gone broke doing so.
• When and where warming occurs does matter.  Crichton was dead wrong about this - things do not warm evenly.  Models show most warming is in the coldest areas in winter at night.  Since having warming night-time winter temperatures in Siberia does not really panic anyone, this does not get much coverage.
• The Kyoto treaty is hugely flawed, leaves out the countries causing the most CO2 production increases, is ridiculously anti-American, will cost economies a ton, and will have little affect on future warming, even by advocate's models.
• I worry that the science being done on global warming is not as good as it could be, as the field has become so politicized.  Any scientist who dares to even introduce data that might soften the global warming catastrophe message is marginalized.
• Those who report on global warming, including the media and the administration of large projects like the UN climate change project distort scientific findings, substituting complexity and questions with certainty

This is just a summary, without dueling citations.  I covered the same points, but marshaling evidence and citations here.

MORE REVIEWS

More blog reviews, both positive and nevative, linked here.  Other folks who are skeptical about global warming seem to have liked the book a lot.  I still think that this is more of a reaction to finally having a novel that is skeptical of progressive causes rather than a reaction to a quality adventure book.  I continue to maintain that it is better for action books to just stick to the action.  I will be very upset if this starts an arms race among writers to get more and more heavy handed with their politics in their novels.

If you have never checked out JunkScience.com, you should.  They do a nice job of providing balance and fact-based analysis for many science "stories" in the media, particularly those where the science is driven by political correctness or a litigation and/or political agenda.  The spend a lot of time on global warming, mainly because there is just so much bad science there to criticize, but they range all over, from the latest food Nazi threats to the latest chemical contamination panic.

Last week, they release their 10 most embarrassing moments of 2004.  One example:

10. University of Arkansas researchers attacked the Atkins Diet in January with a report linking a high-carbohydrate diet with weight loss, saying it was possible to lose weight without cutting calories and without exercising. What they didn't reveal, however, was that the study subjects who lost weight actually ate 400-600 calories per day less than those who didn't lose weight.

Never, ever, ever trust a science story in the press.  The press has no idea how to use or manipulate data (if they had been able to do math, they would not have been journalism majors in the first place).  The press generally publishes science stories by cribbing 95% of the story from activists press releases.  Even when there is data in the story, rather than just bald unsupported declarations, it is either seriously flawed, or more humorously, contradicts the text of the story.

I can't resist supporting this statement with a couple of examples from JunkScience.com.

This is a temperature chart for Central Park, NY.  It gets a lot of play in the press as a "common sense" proof of global warming, and comes right off the NASA climate site:

Now, lets ignore the fact that urbanization could be causing a local temperature increase that does not reflect a general climate trend.  Lets, however, select our time frame a little differently.  Lets take the whole data set, which goes back further, rather than this set chosen by activists to make their point.  The same data over a longer trend looks like this:

OOPS!  Gee, I am not sure Central Park looks much warmer.  In fact, you could argue it is cooler.  Hmmmm.  Ask yourself if you really think it was an accident that the year with the single lowest temperature in the middle of the second graph was used as the starting point for the first.

OK, one other, because I can't resist.  There is some debate (though perhaps not enough) about what temperature data set to use - ground level readings, satellite data, balloons, etc.  It might not stun you to learn that out of 3-5 alternative temperature data sets, global warming activists choose not the middle or the average but the single set (ground temperatures) that show by far the most warming to date.  By coincidence, this data set is perhaps the least reliable, since it never has had anything like 100% area coverage, it is subject to the most human error, and it is influenced by urban warming effects. 

However, if you want to use ground data, certainly the most reliable is data for the United States, where data has been taken over a larger coverage area for more time with more consistent standards than any other location.  Global Warming activists will love to show this chart of US temperatures since about 1978:

Wow, that looks bad - looks like a nearly one degree Celsius rise in less than 25 years.  This is the "hockey stick" climatologists refer to.  Let's leave aside that this same rise is not visible in satellite data or other measurement approaches.  Like the NYC data, lets take a longer time span.  Can you guess why this chart begins in 1978? 

So we are not even at the high's for the last 100 years - those occured in the 1930's  (you remember - drought, dust bowl, etc?)

OK, that's just a taste - check out their web site for more.  In addition, you can read my post on the Kyoto treaty to find other skeptics of global warming, as well as some specific information about how Kyoto is more an anti-American treaty than an environmental treaty.

UPDATE

Based on some responses I have gotten, its probably best that I point out that the reason for posting the charts above was not to "disprove" global warming.  It was to just make the point that you need to be careful with any science you see in the media.  If you look here or here, you will see where I am on global warming, which basically that manmade warming probably exists but is being overstated for a variety of reasons.  In fact, my whole point here is really that you CAN'T prove or disprove something as complex, chaotic, and poorly understood as climate change with 2 or 3 charts.

Football Outsiders has their week 14 football rankings up here.  Previously, I explained why I like Football Outsiders here.

The top 4 or 5 teams stay the same, though NE moves to the top, where they belong.  The amount the Philly ranking depends on special teams is still a concern, but no other team in the NFC even cracks the top 10, so Philly's route to the Superbowl looks pretty greased.  Note that while Rothlesberger gets the press, its the Pittsburgh defense that is doing the heavy lifting, moving to #1 in the league, ahead of even Baltimore. 

The underachiever award definitely goes to KC, which is apparently doing well on a play by play basis but can't win games.  Conversely, the overachieving goes to Atlanta, which falls in the middle of the rankings but is 10-3.

The overly type-A readers may note that I have two different links to TTLB ecosystem ranks below.  Apparently, this site is in their twice, once as www.coyoteblog.com and once as https://coyoteblog.com/coyote_blog/.  It is unclear to me how TTLB handles these.  From what I have read, I think they have yet to implement a merge code, and I know a while back there were folks who claimed that some rankings were pumped up by internal cross-links between URLs like these.  If anyone has any insight on this, please comment below.

UPDATE

Well, posting stuff like this can be simultaneously helpful and embarrassing.  I just got an email from a friend who pointed out that he did not know anything about TTLB, but the reason I was still getting linked via https://coyoteblog.com/coyote_blog/ URLs was that I had not turned on domain mapping in Typepad.  I checked the box, republished, and now all my permalinks, etc. are in the coyoteblog.com domain.  Yeah.  And duh.

A second email pointed me to this TTLB notice, which seems to offer a way to migrate my old URL link history to coyoteblog.com. Thanks all.

This is a little trippy, but is a pretty cool illusion.  This is interesting because it is an art form that is really unique to computers - you really could not do exactly this, with the self navigation, in any other medium. 

The Carnival of the Vanities is up at the Pryhills place, and the theme this week is getting some last minute shopping done at the mall.

By Federal law, U.S. Federal Government lands and property are exempt from state and local property taxes, just like sales to the U.S. Government are exempt from state sales taxes.  This means that, for example, the feds don't have to pay property taxes to Wyoming for the buildings and improvements in Yellowstone National Park.

Most states may sulk about this but they live with it.  However, a few of the most tax-avaricious states, including California and Washington, have found partial way around this. 

I just got my "Leasehold Excise Tax Return for Federal Permit or Lease" from the state of Washington.  What the heck is this?  First, some background.  My business runs campgrounds under concession contract with the US Forest Service in Washington State.  These concession contracts are legally like leases, in that I lease the facilities for a percentage of sales payment in return for running them for-profit.  Washington State can't charge property taxes on the campground itself, since its Federal property, so they charge a steep tax on the rent we pay to the Federal Government.  In Washington, the tax this year is 12.84% of the rent payed.

Yes, that's right.  The state only charges this special tax for rents payed to the US Government. No other rents get taxed.  The tax exists for no reason other than to get around the limitations on taxing the US Government's property.

If asked, Washington would piously state that, oh, we aren't taking any money from the feds, we are taking it from private entities.  Yes and no.  Yes, I as a private entity, I am paying it.  But, given how I bid for these leases, the state tax clearly comes right out of the Feds hands.  When I bid this project, I figured out what rent I could pay the government, and then backed out how much I would have to pay Washington State and bid the lower sum to the Feds.  In this case, Washington State is very clearly taking money right out of the US Government's pocket.

And for what?  Washington State provides no services or utilities to the campground.  The US Forest Service provides the fire protection, its own law enforcement officers, its own water and sewer systems, and its own roads.  There are no residents on the property, so no one associated with the property is using schools or other services.  And, because of sky-high sales and lodging taxes in Washington (from 10-12.5% of sales for camping), the properties are already contributing a ton to state coffers.

This "memo from the school superintendent" via Alphecca is almost too true to be satire.  Here's a sample:

6) Not all students have good handwriting and this could cause them to have low self-esteem if it is pointed out to them. From now on, student papers no longer have to be legible or even written using the letters from the alphabet. Assignments and tests written or answered using symbols or pictures will now be acceptable. Just mark them "Fabulous!".

Television and Radio have always had a very different regulatory regime than any other type of media.  Unlike, say, newspapers or cable TV companies or satellite providers, television and radio companies have to get and continue to renew licenses and are expected operate in the public interest, whatever the heck that is.  TV and radio stations get access to what has become very valuable bandwidth for free, the only cost being that they have to give regulators what amounts to a veto over their content.  Because of this regulatory structure, you get goofy stuff like this:

The Federal Communications Commission's enforcement bureau has asked NBC for tapes of the opening ceremony of the Summer Olympics, apparently in response to one or more indecency complaints.

Its fun to laugh at this stuff, and it drives me crazy, but at the end of the day the problem is not the FCC or Bush or red states or fundamentalists.  The problem is the first-amendment defying concept that the Feds should have any say in media content.  Period.  The FCC is actually in a difficult spot - by law, they have to enforce decency standards, but when they do so, they look like moralistic thugs.

I do not know the history here, but for some reason the US government, perhaps because it was in the throws of the socialist/fascist New Deal era, abandoned all of its traditional and successful models for allocating a newly discovered or accessible resource (in this case, parts of the spectrum) in favor of this public service liscencing approach.  I can think of at least three different models that the US government has used in similar circumstances and that have all worked much better:

• The Homestead Act:  This established the principal of being the first to stake out and improve a resource (in this case parcels of land) in allocating government lands in the west.  Perhaps the best piece of legislation in the history of the country.    Could have easily followed this principle in the broadcast spectrum - an individual or company would have to broadcast continuously on a certain frequency for 2 years to gain permanent ownership
• Mining Law: In some ways similar to the Homestead act, again it grants ownership of a resource to people who add value to it (in the case of mining, to the people who prospected for it and discovered it).
• Outright Sales:  The government does this all the time, including land sales, mineral lease sales (e.g. offshore oil) and more recently cell phone spectrum sales.

Lets end this regulatory structure now:

1. Grant all current licensees ownership of the spectrum they are currently using.  Drop all content-related regulation. 
2. There are many non-licensed outlaw low-power stations operating.  Create a set of homestead requirements that they can get access to their bandwidth if they meet certain requirements within a certain time frame
3. Acknowledge that technology today allows more of the spectrum to be used than channel spacing of the 1950's allowed.  Open up more of the holes in the spectrum for use.
4. Sell the newly available spectrum

I am up to here with zero tolerance policies in public schools.  Zero Tolerance policies are not designed to make rules enforcement better or safer -- the are designed to relieve school administrators of all decision-making responsibility.  Now, I am sympathetic to school districts that are constantly getting hit with all kinds of lawsuits for about any decision they make, but the answer is not to stop making decisions.  Zero Tolerance is a way to cover bureaucrats backsides from criticism while trashing the lives of individual students.  There are many many examples, but this is as good as any:

A 10-year-old fourth-grade girl at Holme Elementary School in the Far Northeast was pulled out of class, handcuffed, and taken to the local police station in the back of a police wagon earlier this week after a pair of 8-inch scissors were found in her book bag, according to authorities and her angry mother.

I have a ten year old - I can't imagine how nuts I would go about this if it happened to my kid.  You can find more examples at Zero Intelligence.  This is yet another reason why, while I might be willing to invest more public money in education, I would no more likely give more money to the current management of most public schools than I would give money to a Nigerian emailer.

This post could also be titled Reason #634 to be scared of doing business in California.  In a frightening trend, California passes yet another law giving citizens and their lawyers seeking unearned windfalls to police small, picky violations of regulations by filing large and expensive-to-fight suits (see also sue-your-boss law)  From the central Californian Santa Maria Times the story of Jarek Molski, who makes a very good living for himself suing public businesses over tiny, technical ADA violations:

Molski's suit against the Hitching Post in Casmalia alleged a wheelchair ramp was too steep, and the bathroom wasn't accessible because the toilet was a half inch too close to the wall; and the sink was three inches too high, and the soap dispenser was too high.

What do such picayune violations cost?  Mr. Molski averages a $20,000 settlement in such cases, though usually demands much more at first.  And, by the crazy Unruh law in California, targets get no time to redress these faults before up to $4000 per day per violation can be extorted sued for.

So is this an isolated incident?  Well, Mr. Molski is but one person in the ADA lawsuit business, and

As of Friday, 528 cases were listed under Molski's name in federal civil courts

Without reasonable standards, and with huge gains to be made for picayune rules interpretations, one victim summed it up this way:

"I've talked to about five people in Solvang and Cambria who have been sued twice in the last year," Stricklin said. "They're stuck. Unless you close your doors, somebody else can come along and sue you, and that's why we're fighting. If they can see that we're not going to roll over and settle, they'll think twice about going to trial."

My Proposal

So, I would like to propose my own Unruh II law.  I propose that in California, every citizen now has the right to sue any other person they observe violating any sort of traffic law.  If you observe someone speeding, doing a rolling stop at a stop sign, failing to signal a lane change or turn, with a burned out tail light, not wearing a seat belt, jaywalking, etc, you may now sue them for $4000 per occurrence. 

Coming in future posts, I will propose Unruh III to empower citizens to sue over health code violations, Unruh IV to empower citizens to sue over fire code violations, and Unruh V to sue anyone for any reason if they have a net worth higher than you do.

This site gets a good number of hits from Google, for which I am very appreciative (the Google engine still tends to give blogs a disproportionate boost, due to all the cross-linking, but I won't complain).

One of the oddities, though I guess predictable in retrospect, is that my post "spanking employees" is by far and away my biggest Google draw.  Now, I enjoy having my work read by others (why else blog?) but it is a bit frustrating that that throwaway post about a funny news story is my most viewed work.  And, come to think of it, I probably just made things worse with this post.

Maybe this is one of those things that I am the last person on the Internet to find, but here you can find a name that tune game that is customizable.  This particular one is for Led Zeppelin, but you can fill in the band or artist in the upper right, and you get a name that tune game for that artist.  Of course, you need speakers and a fast enough connection to get the streaming audio.   Thanks to Post Modern Meanderings for the heads-up.

Via Gongol, check out this site which is taking 1 gigapixel photos.  Look at the bridge in the top photo - it looks pretty detailed, but you are limited by your screen's resolution.  Now scroll down as they zoom - until you get all the way into a closeup of a man sitting on the bridge you could not even see in the first photo.  Pretty cool.