Coyote Blog

Readers will know that I have somehow been sucked into the Tesla vortex and spend too much time watching Tesla and Elon Musk's antics.  I tried to explain some of the reasons for this fascination here.  Every time I swear off following Musk, he does some new nutty thing, like his joke of a demonstration the other night of his Boring Company tunnel in LA  (as usual, Musk has come up with another idea that would look cool on the cover of a 1970's Popular Mechanics or Boys Life magazine but fails almost every engineering, physics, and business logic test).

Anyway, I am going to mostly resist writing about Tesla and discuss the strange bias many Americans (really, many Westerners) have against short-selling.  Here is a tweet from a random Tesla supporter that demonstrates what I see every day from Tesla fans:

In TSLA's case, SEC's purpose was the protect shortsellers - which aren't investors.

Bashing the SEC isn't illegal, they have no criminal authority.

— ThemeTeam (@ThemeTeamWP) December 21, 2018

lol no, shorts are not investors. They spread false information for profit and when proven wrong, they move to something else to stay relevant.

— ThemeTeam (@ThemeTeamWP) December 21, 2018

This notion that short sellers are not doing anything legitimate, that they do not deserve legal protections (or else should be banned entirely), and that they prosper only by spreading false information are not just a staple of hard core Musk fanbois, but are actually quite common attitudes.  I saw it just the other night watching the movie The Accountant again (a family favorite in part because a streak of OCD and Asperger's runs through my family).  In this scene, the guy talking is called Brax and he is a gangster and a mercenary, but for a variety of reasons the film-makers need to make him more sympathetic than the average thug.  Watch the justification he gives:

The movie-makers are expecting that the average viewer will discount his thuggery here because he is beating up a short-seller, and we all know those guys are unethical and destructive (by the way, I too would be tempted to short a company that has stuffed its workers' pension fund with its own stock, that is a big red flag to me).

Short selling, in which one is betting the value of an asset will go down in the future, is a perfectly legitimate and valuable way to participate in markets.  For those who are unsure what short selling is, here is how it works.  People who own large blocks of a stock, let's say Exxon-Mobil or XOM, can lend their stock, for a fee, to other people.  They do this as a way to generate extra income for their portfolio, particularly if they intend to hold the stock for the long term.  The people who borrow the stock then immediately sell it.  I know, this seems weird -- your neighbor who lent you his mower might be ticked off if you immediately sold it.  But folks who lend their shares know you are going to sell it.

So I borrow and sell 100 XOM shares for, say, $90.  If the price drops to $70, I can buy the stock back at that price and I make a $2,000 profit.  The risk, though, is that if the price keeps going up, I am going to have to buy back at a higher price and lose money.  If the price goes up too much, the broker is going to issue a margin call and likely force me to pony up more cash or buy back at the unfavorable price to cover my position.  If I had to sell at $110, I would lose $2000.

Note that short selling has a more dangerous risk profile than going long, or buying the stock.  If you buy 100 shares of XOM at $90, the most you can lose is $9,000 -- your losses are capped.  On the other hand your upside is unlimited -- if XOM goes up to $500, you make a fortune.  For short-selling, this is reversed.  The short-seller's gain is limited -- the most they can ever gain is $9,000 if the stock goes to zero.  But their losses are uncapped -- if XOM goes up to $500, they will have lost over $40,000.  And even if the stock shoots up to $500 and eventually falls to zero (as do many bubble companies that get shorted), it may be hard to ride the short position to the end, either due to margin calls or failure of intestinal fortitude.

Short selling makes a ton of economic sense in part because it HAS to improve markets.  First, it increases the liquidity of the market and the number and diversity of participants.  The more subtle reason is because markets and pricing are information discovery tools.  Short selling allows more people with information about a security to participate in this information exchange, which almost by definition improves the market.  As Don Boudreaux wrote years ago:

To ban short-selling of stocks is to short-circuit an important mechanism through which people share their knowledge and expectations with others.  Banning a mechanism that better allows share prices to reflect the expectation that the underlying assets are not worth as much as current market prices suggest does nothing to change the underlying reality.  Such a ban merely distorts knowledge of this reality

I like to think about economics and business issues but I am not an economist.  My layman's way of thinking about short selling was outlined in a post 10 years ago, written in reaction to a temporary ban in short selling during the market turmoil of 2008.

Someone noticed that just before certain stocks crash in value, there is a lot of short-selling.  So the US government has banned short-selling, at least temporarily.  Classic cargo-cult logic.

Boy this sure makes perfect sense in a time when we are concerned about speculative bubbles -- let's ban one of the most important tools that exist for bubbles to be shortened and made less, uh, bubbly.  Here is why (very briefly and non-technically) short-selling takes the edge off speculative excesses.

At the start of the bubble, a particular asset (be it an equity or a commodity like oil) is owned by a mix of people who have different expectations about future price movements.  For whatever reasons, in a bubble, a subset of the market develops rapidly rising expectations about the value of the asset.  They start buying the asset, and the price starts rising.  As the price rises, and these bulls buy in, folks who owned the asset previously and are less bullish about the future will sell to the new buyers.  The very fact of the rising price of the asset from this buying reinforces the bulls' feeling that the sky is the limit for prices, and bulls buy in even more.

Let's fast forward to a point where the price has risen to some stratospheric levels vs. the previous pricing as well as historical norms or ratios.  The ownership base for the asset is now disproportionately made up of those sky-is-the-limit bulls, while everyone who thought these guys were overly optimistic and a bit wonky have sold out. 99.9% of the world now thinks the asset is grossly overvalued.  But how does it come to earth?  After all, the only way the price can drop is if some owners sell, and all the owners are super-bulls who are unlikely to do so.  As a result, the bubble might continue and grow long after most of the world has seen the insanity of it.

Thus, we have short-selling.  Short-selling allows the other 99.9% who are not owners to sell part of the asset anyway, casting their financial vote for the value of the company.  Short-selling shortens bubbles, hastens the reckoning, and in the process generally reduces the wreckage on the back end.

If you want to understand the volatility of a stock like Tesla ($tsla), the issue often is not short-selling but the extremely tiny float -- only a very small percentage of the equity in the company actively trades, while the rest sit in hands of folks who are not going to trade or even lend the stock (e.g. Elon Musk).  With such a tiny float, small changes in sentiment lead to huge price swings, making it a hair-raising investment for both longs and shorts.  This situation would likely be worse without the shorts.

As for the supposed false information spread by shorts, I am sure that happens.  But information gathering by shorts is one of the reasons we should treasure short-selling.  Here is my analogy -- one of the few good things about having Donald Trump as President is that the media actually is doing its job and is skeptical of everything he says and does.  It digs into the truth of his every single statement.  And sometimes what the media comes up with is fake or wrong.  But I would still argue we are better off with this sort of accountability than we were with the media as lapdogs to Obama.  Just look at the problems and potential rights violations at the border.  The media ignored most all of this same activity when it was happening under Obama, but is rightly (finally) highlighting it under Trump.

Trump supporters hate the media, and argue that it was "long" Obama and "short" Trump, but whatever the reason, we are learning things we did not know before and knowledge has value.  Shorts play this same role in the market.  For years everyone fawned over Elon Musk and Tesla.  The dedicated EV magazines were basically house organs of Tesla, a sort of Tesla Pravda.  The longs did not want to see or hear any criticism.  Essentially, no one wanted to be skeptical of the Tesla story except the shorts.   The shorts may turn out to be wrong, but they are finding holes in the Tesla love story and that is valuable.

Postscript:  If you do not invest and want a tiny taste of the hate short-sellers engender, go find the hottest, rowdiest craps table in a Vegas casino and start betting the Don't Come line.

Most journalists become journalism majors because they had vowed after high school never, ever to take a math or science class again.  At Princeton we had distribution requirements and you should have seen the squealing from English and History majors at having to take one science course (I don't remember ever hearing the reverse from engineering majors).

It should not surprise you, then, that most media is awful at science journalism.  I held off making a comment on this for 3 days figuring it was a typo and they would quickly fix it, but apparently not.  This fits in well with my thesis that the art of sanity-checking numbers has been lost (I added the bold):

The space elevator is the Holy Grail of space exploration,” says Michio Kaku, a professor of physics at City College of New York and a noted futurist. “Imagine pushing the ‘up’ button of an elevator and taking a ride into the heavens. It could open up space to the average person.”

Kaku isn’t exaggerating. A space elevator would be the single largest engineering project ever undertaken and could cost close to $10 billion to build. But it could reduce the cost of putting things into orbit from roughly $3,500 per pound today to as little as $25 per pound, says Peter Swan, president of International Space Elevator Consortium (ISEC), based in Santa Ana, California.

LOL.  The planning for such a structure would cost more than $10 billion.  There is no way that a space elevator can be built for just 1/10 the price of a high speed rail line from LA to San Francisco.  Even at $10 trillion dollars, or 3 orders of magnitude more, I would nod my head and think that was a pretty inexpensive price.

You may not see much Tesla coverage here for a while, despite a lot of breaking news.  Here is why:

The dominoes are all lined up, and that was an interesting story (the dominoes include:  Tesla's poor management of a good product, its lack of adult supervision, its repeated failure to meet targets, its utter contempt for being held accountable to targets, its paranoid worldview, its past near-corrupt actions like the insider SolarCity purchase, Musk's irrational hatred of shorts, its running out of cash without any plan for a capital raise, the fanboys who would eat any dog food Musk served up, etc.)

The first domino has been tipped over (Musk's outright lie that he had funding secured for a $420 buyout when he had not even talked to bankers or his board yet, just to tweak the shorts for a few hours in one day).

Now, I am not sure that I find further falling dominoes that interesting -- after all, it is just inevitable physics at this point.

Note:  The crash is likely to be much slower than at Enron.  Once confidence failed in Enron, the crash came almost at once because Enron was like a large bank that was investing long and borrowing short.  Once the short-term borrowing window was closed for them, it was over.   Tesla can likely make it 6 months before they start scraping bottom and/or their debt covenants.

Update:  For the Tesla fanboys who seem super-excited about the loss of liquidity moving to a private company, here is what being a minor shareholder in a private company is like:

Three of Tinder's co-founders and several other current and former senior executives are suing the dating company's parent organizations, Match Group and IAC. According to a complaint published online, the lawsuit seeks billions of dollars in damages for allegedly manipulating financial information in order to reduce Tinder's valuation and illegally take away employees' stock options.

The complaint explains that Tinder was supposed to be valued in 2017, 2018, 2020 and 2021; On those days, employees should have been able to exercise their stock options. Instead, the lawsuit alleges that parent company IAC/Match Group inaccurately lowballed Tinder's valuation in July 2017 at $3 billion, the same as it did two years ago despite the dating app's substantial growth. Then, the parent company secretly merged Tinder into Match Group, which meant employees earned far less in stock options. Then, IAC threatened to terminate anyone who revealed how much the company was actually worth, the lawsuit claims.

For many of you, this will be a blinding glimpse of the obvious, but I see so many dumb approaches to cooling cocktails being pushed that I had to try to clear a few things up.

First, a bit of physics.  Ice cubes cool your drink in two ways.   First and perhaps most obviously, the ice is colder than your drink.  Put any object that is 32 degrees in a liquid that is 72 degrees and the warmer liquid will transfer heat to the cooler object.  The object you dropped in will warm and the liquid will cool and their temperatures will tend to equilibrate.  The exact amount that the liquid will cool depends on their relative masses, the heat carrying capacity of each material, and the difference in their temperatures.

However, for all but the most unusual substances, this cooling effect will be minor in comparison with the second effect, the phase change of the ice.  Phase changes in water consume and liberate a lot of heat. I probably could look up the exact amounts, but the heat absorbed by water going from 32 degree ice to 33 degree water is way more than the heat absorbed going from that now 33 degree water to room temperature.

Your drink needs to be constantly chilled, even if it starts cold, because most glasses are not very good insulators.  Pick up the glass -- is the glass cold from the drink?  If so, this means the glass is a bad insulator.  If it were a good insulator, the glass would be room temperature on the outside even if the drink were cold.  The glass will absorb some heat from the air, but air is not really a great conductor of heat unless it is moving.  But when you hold the glass in your hand, you are making a really good contact between your drink and an organic body that is essentially circulating near-100 degree fluid around it.  Your body is pumping heat into your cocktail.

Given this, let's analyze two common approaches to supposedly cooling cocktails without excessive dilution:

1. Cold rocks.   You put these things in the freezer and put them in your drink to keep it cold.  Well, this certainly will not dilute the drink, but it also will not keep it very cold for long.   Remember, the equilibration of temperatures between the drink and the object in it is not the main source of heat absorption, it is the phase change and the rocks are not going to change phase in your drink.  Perhaps if you cooled the rocks in liquid nitrogen?  I don't know.
2. Large round ice balls.  There is nothing that is more attractive in my cocktail than a perfect round ice ball.  A restaurant here in town called the Gladly has a way of making these beautiful round flaw-free ice balls that look like they are Steuben glass.  The theory is that with a smaller surface to volume ratio, the ice ball will melt slower.  Which is probably true, but all this means is that the heat transfer is slower and the cooling is less.   But again, the physics should be roughly the same -- it is going to cool mostly in proportion to how much it melts.  If it melts less, it cools less.  I have a sneaking suspicion that bars have bought into this ice ball thing to mask tiny cocktails -- I have been to several bars which have come up with ice balls or cylinders that are maybe 1 mm smaller in diameter than the glass so that a large glass holds about an ounce of cocktail.

I will not claim to be an expert but I like my bourbon drinks cold and have adopted this strategy -- perhaps you have others.

1. Keep the bottles chilled.   I keep Vodka in the freezer and bourbon and a few key mixers in the refrigerator.   It is much easier to keep something cool than to cool it the first time, and this is a good dilution-free approach to the initial cooling.  I don't know if this sort of storage is problematic for the liquor -- I have never found any issues.
2. Keep your drinking glass in the freezer.  Again, it will warm in your hand but an initially warm glass is going to pump heat into whatever you pour into it.
3. Use a special glass.   I have gone through two generations on this.  My first generation was to use a double wall glass with an air gap. This works well and you can find many choices on Amazon.  Then my wife found some small glasses at Tuesday Morning that were double wall but have water in the gap.  You put them in the freezer and not only does the glass get cold but the water in the middle freezes.  Now I can get some phase change cooling in my cocktail without dilution.  You have to get used to holding a really cold glass but in Phoenix we have no complaints about such things.

Things I don't know but might work:  I can imagine you could design encapsulated ice cubes, such as water in a glass sphere.  Don't know if anyone makes these.  There are similar products with gel in them that freezes, and double wall glasses with gel.  I do not know if the phase change in the gel is better or worse for heat absorption than phase change of water.  I have never found those cold packs made of gel as satisfactory as an ice pack, but that may be just a function of size.  Anyone know?

Update:  I believe this is what I have, though since we bought them at Tuesday Morning their provenance is hard to trace.  They are small, but if you are sipping straight bourbon or scotch this is way more than enough.

Postscript:  I was drinking old Fashions for a while but switched to a straight mix of Bourbon and Cointreau.  Apparently there is no name for this cocktail that I can find, though its a bit like a Bourbon Sidecar without the lemon juice.  For all your cocktails, I would seriously consider getting a jar of these, they are amazing.  The Luxardo cherries are nothing like the crappy bright red maraschino cherries you see sold in grocery stores.

Many of the folks who participated in the science march this weekend seem to have a view of science seem to have a definition of science that involves a lot of appeals to authority and creation of heretics.  Unfortunately, the video below relies on the old-fashioned cis-gendered white male definition of science, which involves using theory to establish hypotheses which are confirmed or denied through observation.  In this dated definition, there is no such thing as heresy in science.

Let me tell one of my favorite stories about scientific consensus.

Perhaps the most important experiment of the last 150 years was Michelson and Morley's interferometer study trying to measure the aether drift.  What is this?  Think of bullets fired from a moving airplane.  From the perspective of someone standing on the ground, bullets will initially travel much faster when fired forward rather than backwards, as the velocity of the plane is added (or subtracted) from the velocity with which they leave the gun.  Everyone, and I mean virtually everyone in the scientific community (WAY more than 97%) assumed the same happened with light.  M&M's hypothesis in their experiment was that light "fired" in one direction will travel at a different speed than light fired at a 90 degree angle to that, due to the Earth's movement through the universe, filled with some sort of aether (yet another of a long line of imponderable fluids proposed to explain various physical phenomena).   They found no such difference -- the speed of light was identical in every direction.   M&M has been called the most important negative result in the history of science.  Einstein and special relatively explained the result a few years later.

While we are on the topic, I want to mention something that always makes me crazy when you see popular articles about Einstein.  You will frequently see stories about Einstein being turned down for a promotion at the patent office or turned down for a teaching job or that he got bad grades.  The point of these stories is always something like, "ha, ha look how stupid these other folks were to give bad grades to the greatest mind of the 20th century."  But Einstein was never a great mathematician.  One always hears that relativity involves all this crazy math, and that is true for the later general relativity, but one can derive the basic equations for special relativity using nothing more than algebra and the Pythagorean theorem.  Seriously, I had to do it on a test when I was 17, it is not that hard.  Perhaps I will show it in a post one day if I am really bored.  Later, better mathematicians wrote papers cleaning up the math of special relativity and making it more robust, and later Einstein had to get a LOT of help with the non-Euclidean geometry involved in general relativity.

I believe (and this is a personal conclusion from reading a lot about him and not necessarily a widely held belief) that a lot of Einstein's greatness came from the fact that he had the mind of a rebel.  He was willing to consider things the science establishment simply would not consider.  It is STILL hard, even a hundred years later, for many of us laymen to accept that time is somehow non-absolute, that it changes depending on one's frame of reference -- so imagine how hard it was for someone in Einstein's time.  In the 19th century, the world of physics had become split into two worlds that folks had come to think of as incompatible and separate -- the world of physical objects governed by Newtonian physics, and the world of light and waves governed by Maxwell's equations.   Maxwell's equations implied light always had a fixed speed.  Everyone assumed this had to be fixed vs. some frame of reference.  The assumption of an aether or fixed point of reference against which light's speed was fixed was the 19th century solution for uniting these two worlds, but M&M demolished this.  It seemed that light had to be a fixed speed in every direction and every frame of reference.  Eek! Einstein asked himself how to explain this result, and thereby re-united Newtonian and wave physics, and he concluded the only way to do so was if time was variable, so he ran with that.  That is not an act of math, that is an act of a flexible, rebellious mind. And flexible rebellious minds do not do very well in schools and patent office bureaucracies.

Apparently a chunk of what looks like manufactured aluminum was dug up years ago in Romania and was dated at up to 250,000 years old.  By this dating -- given the technology required to make aluminum -- it would be unlikely to be man-made.

So of course everyone is focusing on the question of whether it is an alien artifact.  Which is the wrong question.  A rational person should be asking, "what is it about this particular metallurgy or the way in which it was buried that is fooling our tests into thinking that a relatively new object is actually hundreds of thousands of years old?"  I would need to see folks struggle unsuccessfully with this question for quite a while before I would ever use the word "alien."  I am particularly suspicious of tests that have an error bar running between 400 years and 250,000 years.  That kind of error range is really close to saying "we have no idea."

Postscript:  The article hypothesizes that it looks like an axe head.  Right.  Aliens find some way to fly across light-years, defying much of what we understand about physics, and then walk out of their unimaginably advanced spacecraft carrying an axe to chop some wood, when the head immediately goes flying off the handle and has to be left behind as trash.

I refuse to follow the ins and outs of polls and the horserace aspects of elections.  But I couldn't miss all the blog activity that somehow Nate Silver is purposefully corrupting his election predictions for some partisan reason.

A physics professor once used to tell us that if we don't even know the sign of the answer, then we should assume we have no understanding of what is going on.  Well, I don't even know the sign of the answer here.  Would a partisan inflate Obama's predicted chances of winning, thus giving him some sort of momentum?  Are there voters who just want to be on the winning side and vote on election day for whomever they think is going to win?  Or would a partisan make his man look worse in order to panic the base and make sure they get out and vote?

I have read a number of stories about how Tesla batteries become bricked if they are completely discharged.  What I have not seen is an explanation of the physics or chemistry of why this is true.  Can anyone explain it or give me a pointer to an explanation?  Certainly if this happened to, say, iPod batteries we would have had torches and pitchforks outside of Cupertino long ago.

The old saying goes, "where there is smoke, there's fire."  I think we all are at least subconciously suceptible to thinking this way vis a vis the cancer risks in the media.  We hear so much about these risks that, even if the claims seem absurd, we worry if there isn't something there.  After all, if the media is concerned, surely the balance of evidence must be at least close - there is probably a small risk or increase in mortality.

Not so.  Take cell phones.  We have heard for decades concern about cancer risk from cell phones.  But they are not even close to dangerous, missing danger levels by something like 5 and a half orders of magnitude.

Cell phones do not cause cancer. They do not even theoretically cause cancer. Why? Because they simply do not produce the type of electromagnetic radiation that is capable of causing cancer. Michael Shermer explains, using basic physics:

...known carcinogens such as x-rays, gamma rays and UV rays have energies greater than 480 kilojoules per mole (kJ/mole), which is enough to break chemical bonds... A cell phone generates radiation of less than 0.001 kJ/mole. That is 480,000 times weaker than UV rays...

If the radiation from cell phones cannot break chemical bonds, then it is not possible for cell phones to cause cancer, no matter what the World Health Organization thinks. And just to put the "possible carcinogen" terminology into perspective, the WHO also considers coffee to be a possible carcinogen. Additionally, it appears that politics and ideology may have trumped science in the WHO's controversial decision.

here.

It's a wonder how, when over "97 percent to 98 percent" of scientific authorities accepted the Ptolomeic view of the solar system that we ever got past that.  Though I could certainly understand why in the current economy a die-hard Keynesian might be urging an appeal to authority rather than thinking for oneself.

When, by the way, did the children of the sixties not only lose, but reverse their anti-authoritarian streak?

Postscript:  I have always really hated the nose-counting approach to measuring the accuracy of a scientific hypothesis.  If we want to label something as anti-science, how about using straw polls of scientists as a substitute for fact-based arguments?

Yes indeed, the number of people in the newly made-up profession of "climate science" that are allowed by the UN control the content of the IPCC reports and whose funding is dependent on global warming being scary probably is very high.  The number of people in traditional scientific fields like physics, geology, chemistry, oceanography and meteorology who never-the-less study climate related topics that wholeheartedly are all-in for catastrophic man-made global warming theory would be very different

 Decide for yourself - see my video on global warming.  Am I anti-science?

I thought this was an interesting quick and dirty social study using Google. (via Knowledge Problem)

For any individual study you can validly say that you think the estimate is too low, or indeed, too high, and give reasons for that. For instance, you might say that your sample was mainly young people who tend to be healthier than the general public, or maybe that the diagnostic tools are known to miss some true cases.

But when we look at reporting as a whole, it almost always says the condition is likely to be much more common than the estimate.

For example, have a look at the results of this Google search:

"the true number may be higher" 20,300 hits

"the true number may be lower" 3 hits

I often tell folks that the key to understanding behavior is to understand incentives. The media as institutions have incentives to sensationalize and scare (it sells papers) and as individual reporters have incentives to magnify the importance of whatever story he or she is working on.

But what I found really interesting was how the Observer effect comes into play here.  Wikipedia has this brief definition of the observer effect:

In physics, the term observer effect refers to changes that the act of observation will make on the phenomenon being observed. This is often the result of instruments that, by necessity, alter the state of what they measure in some manner.

Click on the Google hit numbers above.  I get 42,700 and 5,360 respectively, the increase presumably due in part to this article and links to it.  Its impossible to report on patterns in Google searches without the very fact of such reporting affecting what is being measured.

As both a computer geek and a WWII buff, I of course know something of Alan Turing's incredible contributions to both.  I also knew he was gay, but didn't think much about it.  What I didn't know was how horribly he was abused by the British government, actions for which the government has now appologized:

In 1952, he was convicted of "Ëœgross indecency' -- in effect, tried for being gay. His sentence -- and he was faced with the miserable choice of this or prison -- was chemical castration by a series of injections of female hormones. He took his own life just two years later.

A lot more at the link.  I am constantly amazed at how we tend to elevate the mediocre while treating the truly great so shabbily.

Postscript: The most entertaining way to learn something about Turing, albeit in fictionalized form, is to read Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, one of my favorite books.  The story is good (not great, but good) but the writing is just fabulous.  Who else could entertain one for page after page on the physics of eating Cap'n Crunch cereal?

How can you get free power?  Well, one way is to steal it from other people.  And if you steal it in small enough bites from a lot of people, they may never notice.

This seems to be the basic idea in this article in the Guardian, whose author clearly attended lots of journalism classes while studiously avoiding any class that might have made mention of the first law of thermodynamics.

"Green" speed bumps that will generate electricity as cars drive over them are to be introduced on Britain's roads. The hi-tech "sleeping policemen" will power street lights, traffic lights and road signs in a pilot scheme in London that could be rolled out nationwide.

Speed bumps have long been the bane of motorists' lives, but these will capture the kinetic energy of vehicles.

Peter Hughes, the designer behind the idea, said: "They are speed bumps, but they are not like conventional speed bumps. They don't damage your car or waste petrol when you drive over them - and they have the added advantage that they produce energy free of charge." An engineer who formerly advised the United Nations on renewable energy sources, Hughes added: "If it [the energy] wasn't harnessed by the speed bumps, it would go to waste."

The ramps - which cost between £20,000 and £55,000, depending on size - consist of a series of panels set in a pad virtually flush to the road. As the traffic passes over it, the panels go up and down, setting a cog in motion under the road. This then turns a motor, which produces mechanical energy. A steady stream of traffic passing over the bump can generate 10-36kW of power.

OK, I am willing to believe that you might be able to recover some net energy from a system with this kind of dynamic speed bump replacing an existing static bump  (but I am skeptical, and would want to see the math).  Of course, if you really have a road with a speed bump and so much traffic that it will generate this much power and repay a large investment, then you probably have a road/traffic design issue.

But the article seems to be positing that towns could install these as flat devices --"virtually flush to the road" --  that drivers would hardly notice.  Power from these devices would help the town power its lights and other devices.  But unless these guys have invented the perpetual motion machine, there is no free energy to be had here.  In fact, due to that nasty old spoil-sport, the second law of thermodynamics, there has to be a total system loss.  The device might only steal the equivalent energy of a thousandth of a gallon of gas from each driver, so the driver of each car won't really notice, but the total system expenditure of the thousands of drivers who power the device will still be there, just hidden.  This is a new stealth tax on drivers, dressed up in green clothing.

Next up:  Britain proposes to put windmills on the roofs of electric cars as a power source.  After all, when you are driving at 60 miles per hour, all that wind energy coming past your car is just lost, right?  Once you got the car up to speed, it would just generate its own electricity.  LOL.  I shouldn't laugh, there is probably a billion or so for this in Obama's stimulus bill.

via Tom Nelson.

My kids' middle school has a tradition among 5th and 6th graders that once a year each student creates a science model out of food.  The kids love it, because they get to eat them after each presentation.  But all we parents know how stressful science fair projects can be.  Trying to create a meaningful science display from only edible materials is really a pain.  We pretty much nuked the kitchen this Sunday and spent all day with this.  But it's the last one!  And it came out pretty well -- this is my daughter's "physics of the circus."

PS - TGFF - Thank God For Fondant, a material used in making fancy cakes that you can think of as edible clay.  The materials here are graham cracker, Hershey bar, and sugar wafer stands, gum drop and lemon ball audience, frosted vanilla cake for the platforms, pretzels for the posts, licorice for the ropes, donuts for the cannon and the hoop, and fondant for the animals and people.  And two full pounds of royal icing to glue everything together.

PSS - One of the things you discover about food is that despite the incredible amount of quality control on its composition and taste, there is not much quality control on its construction properties.  Pretzel rods that always seemed straight enough turn out to be, when you come to actually build something from them, more warped than picked-over Home Depot lumber.  Ditto graham crackers.  Mini donut sizes vary tremendously.  Licorice tensile strength that always seemed fine turns out to be woefully inadequate.  And don't even get me started on gumdrop repeatability.

Some thoughts on the obsession with peer review as the gold standard guarantee of climate science goodness, from Climate Skeptic:

One of the weird aspects of climate science is the over-emphasis on peer
review as the ne plus ultra guarantor of believable results.  This is absurd. 
At best, peer review is a screen for whether a study is worthy of occupying
limited publication space, not for whether it is correct.  Peer review, again at
best, focuses on whether a study has some minimum level of rigor and coherence
and whether it offers up findings that are new or somehow advance the ball on an
important topic. 

In "big
boy sciences" like physics, study findings are not considered vetted simply
because they are peer-reviewed.  They are vetted only after numerous other
scientists have been able to replicate the results, or have at least failed to
tear the original results down.  Often, this vetting process is undertaken by
people who may even be openly hostile to the original study group.  For some
reason, climate scientists cry foul when this occurs in their profession, but
mathematicians and physicists accept it, because they know that findings need to
be able to survive the scrutiny of enemies, not just of friends.  To this end,
an important part of peer review is to make sure the publication of the study
includes all the detail on methodology and data that others might need to
replicate the results  (which is something climate reviewers are particularly bad at).

In fact, there are good arguments to be made that strong peer review may even
be counter-productive to scientific advancement.  The reason is that peer
review, by the nature of human beings and the incentives they tend to have, is
often inherently conservative.  Studies that produce results the community
expects often receive only cursory scrutiny doled out by insiders chummy with
the authors.  Studies that show wildly unexpected results sometimes have trouble
getting published at all.

 As I read this, it strikes me that one way to describe
climate is that it acts like a social science, like sociology or gender studies,
rather than like a physical science.  I will ahve to think about this -- it
would be an interesting hypothesis to expand on in more depth.  Some quick
parallels of why I think it is more like a social science:

• Bad statistical methodology  (a hallmark, unfortunately, of much of social
  science)
• Emphasis on peer review over replication
• Reliance on computer models rather than observation
• Belief there is a "right" answer for society with subsequent bias to study
  results towards that answer  (example,
  and another
  example)

If you are going to lecture skeptics on science, it is probably a good practice not to begin with an analogy that gets the most basic physics incorrect (hint:  the fact that falling objects of different masses fall at the same rate has been "settled science" since the late 1500s).  Also, using the children's book "If you give a mouse a cookie..." as proof of the existence of positive feedback loops will not be very persuasive to practitioners of big-boy physical sciences and other non-post-modernist researchers.

Steve McIntyre, the statistician than called into question much of the methodology behind the Mann Hockey Stick chart, has some observations on adjustments to US temperature records I discussed here and here.

Eli Rabett and Tamino have both advocated faith-based climate
science in respect to USHCN and GISS adjustments. They say that the
climate "professionals" know what they're doing; yes, there are
problems with siting and many sites do not meet even minimal compliance
standards, but, just as Mann's "professional" software was able to
extract a climate signal from the North American tree ring data, so
Hansen's software is able to "fix" the defects in the surface sites.
"Faith-based" because they do not believe that Hansen has any
obligation to provide anything other than a cursory description of his
software or, for that matter, the software itself. But if they are
working with data that includes known bad data, then critical
examination of the adjustment software becomes integral to the
integrity of the record - as there is obviously little integrity in
much of the raw data.

While acolytes may call these guys "professionals", the process of
data adjustment is really a matter of statistics and even accounting.
In these fields, Hansen and Mann are not "professionals" - Mann
admitted this to the NAS panel explaining that he was "not a
statistician". As someone who has read their works closely, I do not
regard any of these people as "professional". Much of their reluctance
to provide source code for their methodology arises, in my opinion,
because the methods are essentially trivial and they derive a certain
satisfaction out of making things appear more complicated than they
are, a little like the Wizard of Oz. And like the Wizard of Oz, they
are not necessarily bad men, just not very good wizards.

He goes on to investigate a specific example the "professionals" use
as a positive example, demonstrating they appear to have a Y2K error in
their algorithm.   This is difficult to do, because like Mann, government scientists maintaining a government temperature data base taken from government sites paid for with taxpayer funds refuse to release their methodology or algorithms for inspection.

In the case cited, the "professionals" also make adjustments that imply the site has
decreasing urbanization over the last 100 years, something I am not
sure one can say about any site in the US except perhaps for a few
Colorado ghost towns.  The "experts" also fail to take the basic step of actually analyzing the site itself which, if visited, would reveal recently installed air conditioning unites venting hot air on the temperature instrument.   

A rebuttal, arguing that poor siting of temperature instruments is OK and does not affect the results is here.  I find rebuttals of this sort really distressing.  I studied physics for a while, before switching to engineering, and really small procedural mistakes in measurement could easily invalidate one's results.  I find it amazing that climate scientists seek to excuse massive mistakes in measurement.  I'm sorry, but in no other branch of science are results considered "settled" when the experimental noise is greater than the signal.  I would really, really, just for once, love to see a anthropogenic global warming promoter say "well, I don't think the siting will change the results, but you are right, we really need to go back and take another pass at correcting historical temperatures based on more detailed analysis of the individual sites."

I know a number of readers are tired of my writing about climate, so I am instead taking a shot at writing a comprehensive skeptic's argument on Anthropogenic Global Warming.  A free pdf will be available for download next week, with a bound copy available for purchase at manufacturing cost.

In the mean time, Luboš Motl presents one of the core skeptics arguments, that CO2 heat absorption is a diminishing return relationship to concentration, making frequent predictions of runaway climate scenarios a real head-scratcher.

In terms of numbers, we have already completed 40% of the task to
double the CO2 concentration from 0.028% to 0.056% in the atmosphere.
However, these 40% of the task have already realized about 2/3 of the
warming effect attributable to the CO2 doubling. So regardless of the
sign and magnitude of the feedback effects, you can see that physics
predicts that the greenhouse warming between 2007 and 2100 is predicted
to be one half (1/3 over 2/3) of the warming that we have seen between
the beginning of industrialization and this year. For example, if the
greenhouse warming has been 0.6 Celsius degrees, we will see 0.3
Celsius degrees of extra warming before the carbon dioxide
concentration doubles around 2100.

It's just like when you want
your bedroom to be white. You paint it once, twice, thrice. But when
you're painting it for the sixteenth time, you may start to realize
that the improvement after the sixteenth round is no longer that
impressive.

If CO2 is not responsible for all the 0.6C of historic warming (a proposition for which there are good arguments) then future warming is even less.  Read it all for more detail, or look for my paper next week which covers this topic and many, many others in more depth.  There are lots of complications - aerosols, dimming, feedbacks - that are discussed in the paper.

I am writing a paper on climate models, and an important part of that discussion is on positive feedback (most climate models get large changes in future climate through the liberal use of positive feedback assumptions).  I was looking around the Internet for a nice pithy explanation of positive feedback.  This one on Wikipedia was fine, until I got wacked in the face with the last line (emphasis added)

The end result of a positive feedback is often amplifying
and "explosive." That is, a small perturbation will result in big
changes. This feedback, in turn, will drive the system even further
away from its own original setpoint, thus amplifying the original perturbation signal, and eventually become explosive because the amplification often grows exponentially
( with the first order positive feedback), or even hyperbolically (with
the second order positive feedback). An intuitive example is "the rich
get richer, and the poor get poorer."

Wow, intuitive?  How can a statement that is wrong in at least two major ways be intuitive?  First, the poor generally do not get poorer.  In fact, the poor in the United States are in many ways better off than the richest men of the mid-nineteenth century (particular example linked is for the middle class, but many of the same arguments hold for the poor), and better off than the middle class of many nations.  Second, while it might be arguable that there is a positive feedback loop that helps the rich get richer, no such loop is even possible with the very poorest.  Without going into too much detail, the simplest explanation is that with income you can't go below zero.  What people really mean by this statement is that the poor get poorer relative to the rich, rather than on an absolute scale.  Which of course has little to do with positive feedback.  By the way, the rest of the article is equally bizarre, giving more examples of social phenomena that are only weakly linked to positive feedback (Internet echo chamber effect?) rather than physical processes.  It looks like a physics article written by a politics major.

Here are some alternative non-socialist examples of positive feedback from the physical world that actually have the virtue of being true:  Nuclear fission, some exothermic chemical reactions, and acoustic feedback.  In actuality, since positive feedback reactions are so explosive and unstable, they are very uncommon in nature, which is part of the argument against how climate models are constructed.

If you don't know the connection between climate models and positive feedback, see here. 

"Consensus" is an absurd word to apply to science.  It is more accurate to say that we have a series of hypotheses about the universe with varying levels of confidence.  LuboÃ…¡ Motl has a post to get all you physics geeks arguing:  His estimate of the probability certain hypotheses about the universe are correct.  Some examples:

• 99.999% - String theory is a mathematically consistent theory
  including quantum gravity, even non-perturbatively, at least in some
  highly supersymmetric vacua
• 99.999% - General relativity
  correctly predicts phenomena such as frame dragging and classical
  gravitational waves in the real world
• 99.995% - Black holes exist  ...
• 60% - At very high energy scales, a GUT theory with unified gauge
  interactions becomes more natural zeroth approximation: GUT is correct
• 50% - Supersymmetry will be found at the LHC
• 40%
  - The Hartle-Hawking wavefunction or its generalization that will
  require the author(s) to cite Hartle and Hawking correctly predicts
  non-trivial features of the initial conditions of the Universe...
• 0.0001% - Loop quantum gravity, with the metric as the only and
  well-defined degree of freedom and with quantized area, is a correct
  description of gravity in the real world at the Planck scale
• 0.00001%
  - One of the ESP phenomena measured in the Princeton lab actually
  exists and can be measured again with a similar equipment

Many more here.

Here are some of my own:

• 95% - Probability that the Raiders, Browns, and Lions will all botch their first draft picks next weekend
• 85% - Probability someone will introduce legislation in Congress in the next 7 days in direct response to the Va Tech shooting rampage
• 80% - Probability that man-made CO2 is contributing a non-zero effect to global temperature
• 70% - Probability that Barry Bonds will break the home run record this season
• 60% - Probability that Prince Charles will ever serve as King of England
• 50% - Probability that all-electric vehicles will make up more than 10% of the auto market in the US in ten years
• 5% - Probability that man-made CO2 will contribute more than 2 degrees C warming in the next 50 years
• 5% - Probability of meaningful earmark reform getting passed in Congress
• 5% - Probability that ethanol or other bio fuels will make any measurable reduction in oil imports.
• 1% - Probability that the costs of CO2 reduction will be less than the benefits of CO2 reduction
• 1% - Probability that a true libertarian candidate will be elected president in the next 20 years

When I was an undergraduate in physics, and later in engineering, we had this quaint process where we would conduct experiments and generate data, and from these results generate conclusions.

Climate science works differently.  First, political types and activists write the management summary in as alarming and as headlines-grabbing terms as they can, largely without the help or concurrence of the majority of the scientists involved in the study.  Then, they spend months modifying the underlying data, models, and scientific analysis to fit this management summary.

The summary of the most recent IPCC climate survey has already been released.  The body of the study, with the actual facts and models and stuff, has not been released (won't be for months) and carries this warning on the last draft:

"Changes (other than
grammatical or minor editorial changes) made after acceptance by the
Working Group or the Panel shall be those necessary to ensure
consistency with the Summary for Policymakers or the Overview Chapter."

I like reading about the history of science, and one of its more famous chapters is the debate between the Neptunists and the Vulcanists in early 19th century Great Britain.  At the risk of oversimplifying, the debate was over whether the earth's features (and life on it) were formed slowly over long periods, or relatively quickly through catastrophes.  Secondarily, it was about heat and fire vs. water as forces shaping the Earth (thus the names).  Eventually a consensus  (an actual consensus, not a declared one) developed that they were both right in some ways and both wrong in others. 

What struck me reading about this again over the weekend was that it took decades, and sometimes centuries, for this to sort out.  Take the part of this debate over extinction.  The initial consensus was that extinction was due to catastrophes, ala the Biblical flood.  Then Darwin came along and shifted the consensus away from catastrophes, showing that extinctions occurred in the normal order of species action-reaction to threats and opportunities.  And then in the 20th century, revisiting the K-T geologic layer we have come around to dinosaur extinction being catastrophic as a result of a big meteor.  Except nowadays there are scientists who think this is too simplistic.  Geology, in turn, made it all the way until the 1960's before anyone was even talking about plate tectonics, something that was still being derided in the 1970's but is fundamental to our understanding of numerous aspects of the earth today.

And so it goes in normal scientific inquiry.   Scientists expect it to take decades and generations to really shake out new theories and areas of inquiry.  Sometimes, as with Newton's laws of motion, we still accept the theory, though even here we have tweaked at the edges (e.g. relativity when things are moving fast) and exempted certain regions (e.g. quantum mechanics and the very small).  Other times, we have thrown theories that were cherished for decades completely away (e.g phlogistan).   After decades of work, string theory in physics could easily be thrown out completely and looked upon as the 20th century's phlogistan, or it could really be the theory of everything Einstein searched for in vain.

Which is all fine and expected, except when governments are standing by to make trillion-dollar choices, as they are in global warming, a scientific body of inquiry that is barely 20 years old.  Go back to any new scientific theory in its first 20-years, and think about the governments of the world betting the entire global economy on scientific understanding of that theory at that point in time.  It's pretty scary.  We'd probably have a 5-trillion dollar government controlled medical leach industry.

It would be tough for me to single out my single least favorite member of my alma mater Princeton's faculty.  However, Peter Singer would certainly be in the running.  TJIC fisks some of Singers recent writing in the NY Times.  I will leave you to read his thoughts, except I wanted to comment on this paragraph of Singer's:

"¦The rich must - or so some of us with less money like to assume -
suffer sleepless nights because of their ruthlessness in squeezing out
competitors, firing workers, shutting down plants or whatever else they
have to do to acquire their wealth"¦

I could probably write a book just from this quote, but let me just focus on two responses:

• It helps prove my long-time observation that politicians, artists, and academics of a socialist bent who frequently criticize business have absolutely no idea what they do day to day or how they make money or create value.  Most have been an artist/academic/politician since the day they left school, and if they have held a real job in the value-creation part of the world, it is seldom as any type of manager or supervisor.  Singer knows no more about wealth creation than I do about sub-atomic particles.  The amazing thing, though, is that the NY Times would never quote me on sub-atomic particles but frequently gives Singer a platform to hold forth about wealth creation.  Economics is a science too, just as much as physics.  As I said in that linked post:

Economics is a science.  Willful ignorance or emotional
rejection of the well-known precepts of this science is at least as bad
as a fundamentalist Christian's willful ignorance of evolution science
(for which the Left so often criticizes their opposition).  In
fact, economic ignorance is much worse, since most people can come to
perfectly valid conclusions about most public policy issues with a
flawed knowledge of the origin of the species but no one can with a
flawed understanding of economics.

• Read the statement, and really think about what he says, remembering that he really believes these exact words.  Forget about the squeezing out competitors part -- presumably we capitalists are just bashing each other so this is likely the least of his arguments (not to mention how many people Singer likely "squeezed out" in the competition for scarce tenure and professor positions at Princeton).  Think about his statement that the way wealth is created is by "firing workers" and "shutting down plants."  So the logical implication is that the corporation who ends up with no workers and not assets will be the richest?  And here all this time I have been stupidly growing my company by trying to hire more good people and add on productive assets. 

Singer is as qualified to write about business practices as I am to write about South East Asian mating rituals.  Each of us is equally experienced and knowlegeable about these topics.  Somehow, though, the NY Times sees fit to publish Singer and my beloved University pays him to teach.  Unbelievable.

The Onion has a dead-on spoof of how major media selects "experts" for their articles.  The spoof is worth reading in total, but to give you a taste:

Dr. Gary Canton, a professor of applied nuclear physics and
energy-development technologies at MIT and a leading expert in American
nuclear-power applications, was rejected by MSNBC producers for being
"too boring for TV" Monday....

"[Canton] went on like that for six... long... minutes," ...
"Fact after mind-numbing fact. Then he started spewing all these
statistics about megawatts and the nation's current energy consumption
and I don't know what, because my mind just shut off. I tried to lead
him in the right direction. I told him to address the fears that the average citizen might have about nuclear power, but he still utterly failed to mention meltdowns, radiation, or mushroom clouds."...

MSNBC chose Skip Hammond, former Arizona State football player, MBA holder, and author of Imprison The Sun: America's Coming Nuclear-Power Holocaust. Hammond is best known for his "atomic domino" theory of chained power-plant explosions and his signature lavender silk tie.

"Absolute Armageddon," Hammond said when asked about the dangers
increased reliance on nuclear power might pose. "Atoms are not only too
tiny to be seen, they're too powerful to be predicted. Three Mile
Island? Remember it? I do. Don't they?"

"Clouds of radiation, glowing rivers, a hole reaching to the earth's
core"”that's what we're facing, " Hammond continued. "Death of one in
four Americans! Count off, everyone: one, two, three, you. Millions of people gone. And no one's even mentioned terrorism yet. You have to wonder why not."

According to [MSNBC], Hammond was "perfect."

Dead-on.  Tell me you haven't seen this exact type of thing in stories on nuclear power, biotechnology, genetically modified crops, global warming, breast implants, Vioxx, etc etc.

I just finished reading these three books, one after the other:

• Starship Troopers (don't confuse the unsubtle movie with the classic book)
• The Forever War
• Old Man's War

In basic outline, each book has exactly the same plot, about a man joining the army in some future war.  Each have many of the classic war-story elements, including the tough over-the-top drill Sargent in basic training. 

At the same time, all three are totally different, in different universes with different physics and different politics and enemies.  And, perhaps most importantly, each with a different outlook on war and its necessity.  Each one is awesome individually but created an amazing accidental trilogy when read together.