As strong as this stuff is, I just can’t think of Superman being called “the man of paper”.
It seems that conventional paper-making methods destroy cellulose fibres — which is why paper is so fragile. Changing the pulping method to avoid damaging the cellulose fibres results in a much stronger and stiffer material.
I’d like to see a bodybuilder try to rip apart a phone book made of that stuff. (And frankly, I’d like to get published on a book printed on that paper!)
While I’m on a “not only” kick, I might as well mention a couple articles recently from New Scientist that I came across.
First, some Earth microbes may be capable of surviving on Mars. This doesn’t imply they could survive travel across space (e.g. in comets) — that’s another quantum leap in feistiness — but it does prove that life is pretty darned tenacious.
If MRSA is conventionally called a superbug, then the above should qualify as “super-duper” bugs.
MRSA is a staph bacteria that has become resistant to conventional antibiotics. It’s generally accepted that misuse of antibiotics (e.g. stopping doses prematurely) allowed MRSA to develop.
Now, American scientists recently discovered some bacteria in an old 1970’s soil sample that was resistant to Ciproflaxin, an antibiotic first marketed in 1989. The implication (and I heard this from a microbiologist acquaintance once before) is that, whatever antibiotics humans have created or will create… …many microbe species have probably already encountered and developed resistance to, in their billions-year-old struggle of escalating chemical warfare against each other.
Which kind of puts us in our place. 
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Even with the miracles of science (to use the old DuPont slogan)…
a mere 100 years of directed biochemistry
by millions (1,000,000’s) of specialist vertebrate mammals,
…probably pales in comparison to the inventiveness of…
1,000,000,000+ years of semi-directed biochemistry (directed only in the “survival of the fittest” sense)
by nonillions (1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000’s) of bacteria.
(Hat tip to Wikipedia.)
Perhaps because creationism is a meme and not a gene, it’s easy to see its evolution over time.
After unsuccessfully trying to re-brand itself as “intelligent design”, its latest metamorphosis appears to be “strengths and weaknesses”. As in, strengths and weaknesses of evolution — the weaknesses being that evolution doesn’t fit the creation mythology of the Hebrew Bible (which much of Christianity, with supercessional disrespect, unfortunately presumes to call the Old Testament.)
Listening to the radio this morning, I was initially perplexed by the vociferousness of the opposition to the BC carbon tax (which has brought together those well-known bedfellows, the NDP and the Fraser Institute, against the equally-easily-going coalition of the Liberals and the Canadian Council of Policy Alternatives.)
It was only when I realized we’re among the fortunate few who have disposable income, that I realized why people would be angry. Certainly, if we were near break-even on our cash flows, any marginal increase in expenses would be upsetting.
I suspect the highest-profile commentators (TV and newspaper) are in the same boat. Having reached the higher levels of their profession (if bloviation can be considered one) they’re unlikely to be affected by cuts to social services funding, so can only abstractly comprehend the impact of the cuts.
Raise the marginal tax rate though, and they’ll offer an earful of condemnation!
The Automatic Earth recently had a great diagram illustrating the amount of speculation that goes on in food prices, versus the food’s actual value. I’m not so brazen to argue that speculation is responsible for high prices (when clearly agricultural and climate problems are responsible for the bulk of it) but I find it hard to believe that amount of speculation would have utterly no impact on prices.
TAE didn’t attribute the diagram, but it looks like something the Economist would put out.
Mish (Mike Shedlock) has a great article on the direness of GM’s situation. Will they — and Ford — survive the depression heading the US’s way? The stock charts (in the link) don’t give reason for comfort.
The stat which most caught my attention was the rate of new car sales — within a span of a month, down from ~14 million to a mere ~12 million, the lowest rate in 15 years.
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On the topic of stock charts, GE isn’t looking too good either (hat tip again, to Mish). From what I remember, in the 90’s and early 00’s, the thinking was that GE’s financial arm (GE Capital) was the engine of its growth.
Like so many “crippling strengths” it appears GE Capital will lead GE into dire straits. If its condition at all resembles other US lenders’, GE will be in for a world of hurt. In the next couple years, I wouldn’t be surprised if GE fell from 2nd-biggest market cap company in the US (as of late June 2008) to tenth. Or worse. This link here seems to track the Dow components’ market caps…
A great piece by John Maudlin, nominally an investment-newsletter writer, on China. It offers a much better perspective on the kinds of challenges the country has faced historically. (And by extension what challenges it will likely face in the future.)
In particular, I didn’t realize that Han China effectively covers the region which receives 40+ cm of rainfall, with the other regions populated by ethnic minorities. And indeed, that the ethnic minority areas form a ring-shaped buffer around Han China (from the south, and moving clockwise: Tibet, Xinjiang (where the similarly-oppressed Uyghurs live), and Inner Mongolia. It’s not unlike the old Soviet / Russian strategy of putting up a series of satellite states as a buffer against Germany.
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Here’s a breakdown of the major areas of China, broken down by linguistic group (effectively, ethnic group)
I found Karen Armstrong’s The Great Transformation a bit uneven — I thought some of her inferences overreached a bit, and some things she got wrong.
For instance, on p261 she argued the Socratic dialectic was a form of initiation; which argument I’d politely term ‘overly generous’. On p264, she said Plato was profoundly affected by his experience attending Socrates’ trial. Unfortunately, this is impossible; he wasn’t old enough (30 years old) to attend. There were several other examples, but these stuck out most vividly, perhaps because of my prior readings and studies on classical Greece.
Still, despite its limitations, it was an extraordinarily worthwhile read. She wrote about the Mohists — whom I’d read about previously, but for years, forgotten. They were followers of the 4th-century-BC polymath Mozi (a sort of Chinese Leonardo da Vinci). He appears to’ve had a proto-utilitarian philosophy, and perceptively argued that preferential love to one’s family, clan, or country, would degenerate into egotism.
Since his philosophies upended the wisdom of the day, he devoted a portion of his efforts to the study of logic and dialectic, to defend his arguments. In this regard, he was effectively a Chinese Socrates. Sadly, while Socrates had the immensely-influential Plato to propagate his ideas, Mozi’s successors were clobbered into obscurity by the Chinese Legalists.
Even if he wasn’t well regarded in his era and area, Mozi shows that it’s NOT ONLY in the Western philosophical tradition that logic and dialectic were studied. And knowing that fact should help inoculate against the thought of Western exceptionalism (itself a form of cultural egotism, somewhat similar to what was noted above).
From the BBC, a list of loathed office jargon. And a Vancouverite has the top item — cool!
I must admit that I don’t mind being incentivized (the #4 item) — but I detest how that’s turning into being incented. Whatever happened to being motivated?
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I was a bit surprised that empowered didn’t make it on the list. Maybe it’s no longer considered gauche corporate doublespeak — or maybe it’s become passe, destined for the dustbin of business-speak…
Personally, I wouldn’t mind seeing “empowered” face linguistic extinction, being rediscovered decades from now by corporate anthropologists scouring through historical texts…
It seems Matt Simmons has updated his presentations list. Always worth a quick scan.
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The Times (London, not New York) had a nice little piece on a successful endeavour to genetically engineer bacteria to excrete oil, instead of the regular fatty acids they usually produce.
It’s nice stuff, but unfortunately won’t — can’t — be brought online fast enough to make up for supply shortfalls. They can make 1 barrel per week, per 1000 Litre process vessel.
In order to make 1,000 barrels a day (world demand is 85 million barrels) that would 7,000,000 Litres of process vessel volume. Scaling up to a million barrels would involve seven billion litres — probably all of it, freshwater.
That’s about two thousand Olympic sized swimming pools. Factoring in the need to bring the food to the bugs, and I have difficulty seeing this technology being readily scaleable, the way that wind and especially solar are.
All the same, very cool indeed…