To contact us Click HERE What is humour for? Of all the explanations, among the better supported is the idea that it acts as a mating signal. Research with heterosexuals suggests that men, in particular, use humour to show-off their intelligence and good genes to women. A similar but alternative proposal is that wit is often used to convey romantic availability, and is interpreted in this way. A new study finds support for the latter theory, in that witty people were seen as particularly suitable for short-term flings.
In a departure from the field's reliance on questionnaires, Mary Cowan and Anthony Little used real spontaneous humour, which they created by recording 40 undergrad psychology students (20 men) as they explained to camera which two items they'd take to a desert island, and why, choosing from: chocolate, hairspray, or a plastic bag. These "actor" participants weren't told that the study was about humour, but nonetheless 19 of them gave the appearance of trying to be funny in their answers.
Next, 11 "rater" participants (5 men) were played audio recordings of the actors' explanations, and their task was to rate them for funniness, and to rate the attractiveness of each actor for a short-term relationship (dates and one-night stands) and for a long-term relationship. After scoring the audio, the rater participants did the same for a simple head-shot photo of each actor, and then again for the full video version of their explanations.
A key result is that attractive actors (based on the rating of their photo) were judged to be funnier in the video than in the audio, which suggests their physical attractiveness led them to be considered more funny.
Wit also boosted attractiveness. Across audio, photo and video, men who were considered funnier also tended to be considered more attractive for both short and long-term relationships, but especially short term. The link between perceived funniness and attractiveness was not so strong for the female actors, although funniness did still go together with higher perceived attractiveness for short-term relationships. A follow-up study found that funniness ratings were very similar to ratings for perceived flirtatiousness, which further supports the idea that humour is often interpreted as a signal of romantic availability, at least among students.
The use of authentic humorous displays is to be applauded, but the study is hamstrung by several weaknesses. Above all, the sample of rater participants was tiny. Also, the attractiveness ratings all tended to low. This may be because the male and female raters (no information about their sexual orientation is given) were asked to judge the attractiveness of both men and women. For a study about people's judgements of attractiveness in a relationship context, it also seemed strange that no information was given about the gender and attractiveness of the researchers, who may have inadvertently influenced the participants' behaviour and judgments.
_________________________________ Cowan, M., and Little, A. (2013). The effects of relationship context and modality on ratings of funniness. Personality and Individual Differences, 54 (4), 496-500 DOI: 10.1016/j.paid.2012.10.020
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
To contact us Click HERE The soon-to-be-released documentary "The House I Live In" is an inside look at America's longest war, The War on Drugs, from executive producers Danny Glover, John Legend, Russell Simons. From the film's website:
"Filmed in more than twenty states, THE HOUSE I LIVE IN tells the stories of individuals at all levels of America’s War on Drugs. From the dealer to the narcotics officer, the inmate to the federal judge, the film offers a penetrating look inside America’s criminal justice system, revealing the profound human rights implications of U.S. drug policy." Here are some quotes from the trailer above:
"The Drug War is a holocaust in slow motion."
"The Drug War is a war on all Americans."
"You have to understand that the War on Drugs has never been about drugs."
From a review by US News:
Two years after he was elected president in 1969, Richard Nixon first used the phrase "war on drugs," in a tough speech on drug policy. Four decades and more than 40 million drug-related crimes later, the war on drugs is still simmering.
And now, just months before the presidential election, a new documentary "The House I Live In" explores the ways in which that war could be rethought. The film also implicates President Barack Obama, who promised a compassionate drug policy while running for president but requested $25.6 billion for drug enforcement in 2013—the highest yearly total ever.
A reviewer from The Boston Globe says "I'd hate to imply that it's your civic duty to see "The House I Live In" but guess what - it is."
To contact us Click HERE From Terry Anderson's editorial in today's WSJ "Environmental Protection Up in Smoke":
Environmental laws since the 1970s require public input into federal land-use decisions including logging on national forests. This has led to lawsuits challenging efforts by the U.S. Forest Service to prevent forest fires by thinning out trees (most of which are dead or diseased) and brush by machines and carefully controlled burns. This dead wood is the fuel that feeds catastrophic wildfires.
Removing the fuel reduces the likelihood of fires, and if fires do break out, makes them easier to fight. Meanwhile, the suppression of fires costs the federal government nearly $2.5 billion annually.
A fuels-management project to log and thin 4,800 acres in the Bozeman, Mont., watershed exemplifies the problem. This project has been held up since 2010 on grounds that the environmental-impact assessment did not adequately protect the habitat of the Canadian lynx and the grizzly bear, both listed as threatened species.
Now a wildfire threatens the watershed, burning over 10,000 acres and costing more than $2 million to fight. As one firefighter put it, "fire is the environmentalist's way of thinning the forests."
To contact us Click HERE goodbye my lover You'll never find another love like mineSomeone who needs you like I doYou'll never see what you've found in meYou'll keep searching and searching your whole life throughWhoa, I don't wish you no bad luck, babyBut there's no ifs and buts or maybes You're gonna, You're gonna miss (miss my lovin')You're gonna miss my lovin' (you're gonna miss my lovin')I know you're gonna my lovin' (you're gonna miss my lovin')You're gonna miss, you're gonna miss my lo-o-ove
Lou Rawls - You'll Never Find Another Love Like Mine : You'll Never Find Another Love Like Mine 7" Lou Rawls - Let's Fall In Love All Over Again : You'll Never Find Another Love Like Mine 7" B-side Find them both on All Things In Time.
So the one or two of you still reading might have noticed that after nearly four months absence, MISB has resurfaced, at least temporarily, for a gasp of air. It is by far the longest I've gone without sharing a song or two since it began almost six years ago (yikes, that's something like the equivalent of the Triassic period in blog years I think). Asking a magic 8 ball about its survival would reveal an answer such as "reply hazy, try again," which is to say I'm not so certain of it myself. In the meantime though, it's got a new look and a new short-term lease on life.
I settled upon a few New Year's resolutions for 2012, and when sharing them with others I prefaced them with a quote from one of my favorite authors, Henry David Thoreau: "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them."
I suppose I still have a few songs left in me to share. Happy New Years.
To contact us Click HERE They're too young to need to fib about lipstick on their collar or even their unfinished homework but a new study finds the majority of three-year-olds are already practising liars. Deception in very young children has been documented before, but this is the first time it has been systematically tested in a laboratory.
Angela Evans and Kang Lee tested 65 two- and three-year-olds (28 girls) individually in a quiet room, part of which involved them being told not to peek at a toy. Despite this instruction, 80 per cent of the kids sneaked a peek. And when they were asked afterwards if they'd looked, around a quarter of two-year-olds lied about it, rising to 90 per cent of those aged over 43 months.
Although lying was rife among these young children, most of them weren't very adept at it. When asked what the toy was, 76 per cent of the liars blurted out the answer, exposing their dishonesty.
The researchers also put the toddlers through a series of mental tests to see if any particular skills went hand-in-hand with lying. One of these was a kiddies' version of the Stroop test that involved pointing to small pictures of fruits, while ignoring bigger versions. Like the adult Stroop, success at this task is thought to require a mix of inhibitory control and working memory. Evans and Lee found that the children who excelled at the kiddies' Stroop were more likely to lie, which supports the idea that the development of lying depends on a mix of inhibitory ability and remembering the desired answer.
An important implication of this last point, the researchers said, is that the greater honesty of the younger children isn't a mark of their moral purity, but simply a side-effect of their "fragile executive functioning skills."
A weakness of the study is that it doesn't look at different types of lies or tell us anything about the children's motivation for lying.
_________________________________ Evans, A., and Lee, K. (2013). Emergence of Lying in Very Young Children. Developmental Psychology DOI: 10.1037/a0031409
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
To contact us Click HERE The soon-to-be-released documentary "The House I Live In" is an inside look at America's longest war, The War on Drugs, from executive producers Danny Glover, John Legend, Russell Simons. From the film's website:
"Filmed in more than twenty states, THE HOUSE I LIVE IN tells the stories of individuals at all levels of America’s War on Drugs. From the dealer to the narcotics officer, the inmate to the federal judge, the film offers a penetrating look inside America’s criminal justice system, revealing the profound human rights implications of U.S. drug policy." Here are some quotes from the trailer above:
"The Drug War is a holocaust in slow motion."
"The Drug War is a war on all Americans."
"You have to understand that the War on Drugs has never been about drugs."
From a review by US News:
Two years after he was elected president in 1969, Richard Nixon first used the phrase "war on drugs," in a tough speech on drug policy. Four decades and more than 40 million drug-related crimes later, the war on drugs is still simmering.
And now, just months before the presidential election, a new documentary "The House I Live In" explores the ways in which that war could be rethought. The film also implicates President Barack Obama, who promised a compassionate drug policy while running for president but requested $25.6 billion for drug enforcement in 2013—the highest yearly total ever.
A reviewer from The Boston Globe says "I'd hate to imply that it's your civic duty to see "The House I Live In" but guess what - it is."
To contact us Click HERE From Terry Anderson's editorial in today's WSJ "Environmental Protection Up in Smoke":
Environmental laws since the 1970s require public input into federal land-use decisions including logging on national forests. This has led to lawsuits challenging efforts by the U.S. Forest Service to prevent forest fires by thinning out trees (most of which are dead or diseased) and brush by machines and carefully controlled burns. This dead wood is the fuel that feeds catastrophic wildfires.
Removing the fuel reduces the likelihood of fires, and if fires do break out, makes them easier to fight. Meanwhile, the suppression of fires costs the federal government nearly $2.5 billion annually.
A fuels-management project to log and thin 4,800 acres in the Bozeman, Mont., watershed exemplifies the problem. This project has been held up since 2010 on grounds that the environmental-impact assessment did not adequately protect the habitat of the Canadian lynx and the grizzly bear, both listed as threatened species.
Now a wildfire threatens the watershed, burning over 10,000 acres and costing more than $2 million to fight. As one firefighter put it, "fire is the environmentalist's way of thinning the forests."
To contact us Click HERE goodbye my lover You'll never find another love like mineSomeone who needs you like I doYou'll never see what you've found in meYou'll keep searching and searching your whole life throughWhoa, I don't wish you no bad luck, babyBut there's no ifs and buts or maybes You're gonna, You're gonna miss (miss my lovin')You're gonna miss my lovin' (you're gonna miss my lovin')I know you're gonna my lovin' (you're gonna miss my lovin')You're gonna miss, you're gonna miss my lo-o-ove
Lou Rawls - You'll Never Find Another Love Like Mine : You'll Never Find Another Love Like Mine 7" Lou Rawls - Let's Fall In Love All Over Again : You'll Never Find Another Love Like Mine 7" B-side Find them both on All Things In Time.
So the one or two of you still reading might have noticed that after nearly four months absence, MISB has resurfaced, at least temporarily, for a gasp of air. It is by far the longest I've gone without sharing a song or two since it began almost six years ago (yikes, that's something like the equivalent of the Triassic period in blog years I think). Asking a magic 8 ball about its survival would reveal an answer such as "reply hazy, try again," which is to say I'm not so certain of it myself. In the meantime though, it's got a new look and a new short-term lease on life.
I settled upon a few New Year's resolutions for 2012, and when sharing them with others I prefaced them with a quote from one of my favorite authors, Henry David Thoreau: "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them."
I suppose I still have a few songs left in me to share. Happy New Years.
To contact us Click HERE Author and scientist Amory B. Lovins and the Rocky Mountain Institute see a bright future beyond dirty fuels... and sooner than you think
In an essay in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs and a recent interview with Yale Environment 360, Amory Lovins discusses his latest book, Reinventing Fire, written with his colleagues at the Rocking Mountain Institute, which looks at what a transition away from an economy and energy system based on fossil fuels towards one based on renewable energy would look like.
Amory B. Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute
"Weaning the United States from fossils fuels would require two big shifts," writes Lovins at Foreign Affairs, naming "oil and electricity" which he says are "distinct." He points out, "In the US, three-fourths of electricity powers building, three-fourths of oil fuels transportation, and the remaining oil and electricity run factories. So saving oil and electricity is chiefly about making buildings, vehicles, and factories far more efficient." This, admits Lovins, is "no small task."
Dwelling on the scale of the challenge, however, is not where Lovins devotes his energy. Instead, he looks at other "epochal energy shifts" that have occurred in history, like the end of the whale oil industry in the mid 19th century, where in just thirty years the whale oil industry went from bringing lighting to nearly every American household in 1850, to being essentially snuffed out by 1879, when Edison's electric lighting hit the scene. "Whales," writes Lovins, "had been accidently saved by technological innovators and profit-maximizing capitalists."
The point, of course, is not that we should look to 'profit-maximizing capitalists' to lead us to a clean energy future (though they will certainly play a role). The point is that we should definitely not expect whaling captains to lead us. And in this era, the whale ship captains are the captains of the big oil, coal, and gas companies and the politicians who do their bidding.
"The chief obstacle is not technology or economics," concludes Lovins, "but slow adoption." He writes: Helping innovations catch on will take education, leadership, and rapid learning. But it does require reaching concensus on motives. If Americans agree what should be done, then they need not agree why. Whether one cares most about national security, health, the environment, or simply making money, saving and supplanting fossil fuels makes sense."
"Wise energy policy can grow from impeccably conservative roots-- [...]
Moving the United States off oil and coal will require Americans to trust in their own resourcefulness, ingenuity, and courage. These durable virtues can give the country fuel without fear; help set the world on a path beyond war, want, or waste; and turn energy from worrisome to worry-free, from risk to reward, from cost to profit."
A Clean Energy Plan
In the interview with Yale Environment 360 senior editor Fen Montaigne, Lovins discusses how business and society can pull off this transformation even if the U.S. Congress keeps failing to act, why climate change need not even enter the discussion, and why the oil industry will ultimately forego fossil fuels and jump aboard the green bandwagon. “One system is dying and others are struggling to be born,” says Lovins. “It’s a very exciting time.”
Yale Environment 360: Given that we’re in the midst of what could only be described as a fossil fuel boom, with the discovery of new unconventional sources and new oil sources being found all over the world, how do you speed this transition and get from here to there?
Amory Lovins: Well, I’m not sure what boom you’re talking about. When I read the Wall Street Journal, I see a headline a few weeks ago about coal running out of steam.
e360: China is consuming tremendous amounts of coal.
Lovins: Hang on — I look at the data and I find that in the United States, coal’s share of the electrical services market, which is 95 percent of its market for fuel, has fallen by a quarter from 2005 through 2010, displaced by cheaper gas, efficiency, and renewables. And then when you look in the forward prices and the options market, that spread is going to keep widening. And when I hear how cheap natural gas is, I remember that it’s also very volatile. This has nothing to do with the many uncertainties around fracking, which will take a decade to resolve — if they work out well, we’ll be satisfied with a new option; if they don’t, that’s okay because we won’t need that much gas, so we won’t be very disappointed.
e360: Certainly in China, India, and the developing world there is a fossil fuel boom going on.
Lovins: But in a global context, there is a remarkable boom in efficiency and renewables in China, the world leader in five renewables. Part of the story in China is that the extraordinary vitality of renewables is coming very largely from the vibrant private sector, while all of the nuclear and half the coal business are the old state enterprises. So the story of incumbents and insurgents is partly the story of the reshaping of the Chinese economy from the old and rather bureaucratic command organizations. That is, I think, an encouraging trend.
We must use our most effective institutions to end-run our least effective institutions.
Last I looked a couple of years ago, the private sector in China was something like 50 to 70 percent of the profits, the growth, and the new jobs. Of course there is still a lot of momentum in the coal bureaucracy in China and India, which together burned half the world’s coal and account for about three-quarters of the projected increase, but I think those projections are looking quite dubious. In China, for example, they have lately retired over 70 gigawatts of inefficient coal plants, so that their coal plant fleet is now more efficient than ours. In 2010, 59 percent of their net new [electricity] capacity was coal. It used to be much higher.
e360: You feel we’re in a period where fossil fuels over the next decade or two are going to be increasingly like whale oil?
Lovins: Yes.
e360: You’ve got the president of Shell writing a foreward to your book. There are prominent quotes from the president of Texaco in one section of the book. How do you persuade these oil companies that are making billions of dollars now and into the foreseeable future to get on board with this renewable energy revolution? What is going to persuade them to be on what you see as the right side of history?
Lovins: Mainly risk management, and as a member of the National Petroleum Council, having worked in this industry for 38 years, I’ve seen a lot of concern about risk. Oil is like airlines. It’s a great industry and a bad business. Look at its fundamentals. It is extremely capital-intensive, long lead time, based on a wasting asset of which you only own about 6 percent and the rest can be taxed away or confiscated at any time. It is a business overflowing with all kinds of risk — technical, political, financial. It is unpopular politically. Its subsidies are at some political risk in this country. Put all that together and you have a magnificent recipe for headaches. Why would you want to be in a business like that?
e360: You’re making huge profits at this point.
Lovins: Well, sometimes yes, and sometimes it gushes red ink. So the smarter leaders in that industry have been trying to get out of the business since at least 1973, and have constructed some pretty intelligent portfolios of both activities and options that are getting rather rapidly diversified. Some companies that were not very foresighted, even though they were operationally excellent, are starting to smell the coffee.
I think there is a bright future for what we now think of as the oil industry in the new energy era, using its formidable capabilities and assets, but in different ways. A lot of refineries will turn into biorefineries; a lot of drilling will go to geothermal, possibly carbon sequestration and other pursuits. The fuel logistics will diversify into hydrogen — which of course is mainly a business of the oil industry right now and it’s a very big business — and into electricity and biofuels. Shell is already the world’s biggest distributor of biofuels. The average cost of getting our U.S. transport system off oil is about $18 a barrel for the efficiency and electrification part, or if you include the biofuels to run the trucks and airplanes to the extent they’re not on hydrogen, it might be at most about $25 a barrel. So I don’t much care what the world oil price is, this is a better bet and it very much better manages the risks.
e360: In the spheres that you write about — transportation, electricity generation, industry — what pieces of the puzzle need to be put in place in the coming decade or so to do this massive scaling up that’s going to be required to attain your vision of an economy that by 2050 is primarily powered by renewable sources?
Lovins: Broadly we need to pay attention to allow or require full and fair competition, preferably at honest prices. And to use our most effective institutions to end-run our least effective institutions.
e360: For example?
Lovins: Well, we use private enterprise, co-evolving with civil society and sped up by military innovation, to end run Congress. The transition we describe requires no act of Congress. It’s led by business for profit.
e360: So you want the private sector to end-run the dysfunctional political system?
Lovins: At the federal level, yes. There are policies required to unlock or speed the transition we described, but they could all be done administratively or at the state level, where most of the action is.
e360: From a technological point of view, how do you scale up wind and solar to the point where it can be generating the volume of electricity that you envision by 2050?
Lovins: The way we’re scaling it up now. U.S. photovoltaics have doubled each of the last two years. World [photovoltaic] growth last year — a difficult year for many industries — was 70 percent. And 68 percent of Europe’s new capacity last year was solar and wind. Wind, for example, is generally competitive without subsidy, even though the global wind industry will of course shift its projects in a given year to wherever they get the most subsidy, as you would expect. But even without subsidy they have a very strong business case.
e360: So you foresee in the U.S., Europe, and China a steady accretion of this scale and volume for these new sources?
Lovins: Yes, and China is leading the plummeting cost and rocketing volume of most of the renewables. They’re the world leader in five. They aim to be in all. The ones they lead are photovoltaic, wind, small hydro, biogas, and solar thermal for hot water.
So this is actually quite a big business. Clean energy was a $260 billion investment flow in 2011. Europe has now more than one million new renewable jobs. The big winner is Germany. They have more solar workers than America has steel workers. [German Chancellor Angela] Merkel bet that it would be smarter to send their energy money to their own engineers, manufacturers, and installers than to keep paying it to [Russia’s] Gazprom. She’s right, and it was a winning bet.
e360: In your book you are not counting on any sort of miraculous silver bullet technologies.
Lovins: No, no new inventions.
e360: But do you think there will be within a matter of decades technologies we can’t envision that could even further accelerate this transition?
Lovins: Oh, yes. I think there will be many, and actually although we’re not counting on any new inventions, we do give examples of emerging technologies in the lab about to get to market that are going to be quite powerful. For example, windows whose ability to transmit or block heat is a function of the temperature of the glass, and that’s a passive property. It doesn’t require any control system. That sort of thing is so revolutionary we haven’t even figured out how to use it yet. Or as another example, Tsutomu Shimomura, the computer security expert, has invented a way of controlling LED lighting in big buildings that gets rid of almost all of the wire and power supplies and controls, but gives superior control flexibility. And that should ultimately cut by manyfold the installed cost of those LED lighting systems and thus help them take over even faster in both new and old buildings. Fuel cells have already beaten the cost targets that we had expected. The list goes on.
Despite our woeful underinvestment in efficiency R&D, the technical progress here and abroad continues to accelerate with no end in sight and it’s not just in widgets. It’s also progress in new business models, new designs, ways of combining technologies more effectively to get expanding returns, not diminishing returns, new delivery channels that are rapidly maturing, new regulatory models. These things all together I think have put us irreversibly on the path to a new energy era, and a lot of it is an incumbents-versus-insurgents play where the incumbents have many intelligent ways they can respond and some dumb ways, one of which is called ostrich.
e360: Your book, in each of the main chapters, lays out detailed prescriptions — down to diagrams of factory piping — of how to improve efficiency and make advances. What has the reaction been to the book from corporations, from politicians?
Lovins: The reaction I have seen has been uniformly favorable, partly because it’s a trans-ideological approach that focuses on outcomes, not motives. Whether you most care about profits, jobs, and competitive advantage, or about national security or environmental stewardship and climate and public health — regardless of the reason, you’ll still want the outcomes. They’ll still make sense and make money, so let’s just do what we all agree ought to be done for whatever reason, not argue about what reason is most important, and then a lot of the stuff we may not agree about becomes superfluous. The military is very strongly on this track already — with both efficiency and resilient electric supply — for their own good reasons. We are not seeing so far political resistance to these ideas and we’re getting a very warm welcome in the business community.
e360: How big an impediment to your vision of how to go forward is the fact that many of the leaders of the Republican Party not only deny the existence of climate change, but belittle renewable energy. Is the political gridlock on this issue a big impediment to maybe moving forward?
Lovins: I don’t see it as a big impediment because we’re not relying on Congress to do anything. Again, you don’t have to believe climate science to think that the outcomes of Reinventing Fire are desirable. If you care about either making money or national security, either of those suffices; you may even care about both together. Then you’re twice as motivated. We are counting in the analysis all externalities — carbon [reduction] and otherwise — as worth zero, a conservatively low estimate. And we still get a $5 trillion surplus from getting the U.S. completely off oil, coal, and nuclear energy and a third off natural gas by 2050, with a 2.6-fold bigger economy. That, I think, is an attractive outcome regardless of your political beliefs.
e360: Let’s say there’s a President Santorum or a President Romney, do you think that they could be persuaded once they’re in office to embrace a vision like this?
Lovins: I don’t know, but I don’t much care. Rocky Mountain Institute is non-partisan, and we observe that most states, including many strongly Republican states, have renewable portfolio standards. The renewable leader in the nation is Texas, which is not noted for being environmentally minded, but does care a lot about making money and is very good at it. That’s fine.
e360: On the issue of climate change, do you believe the climate movement has made a strategic error by focusing so much on the issue of warming and its impacts rather than on the positive economic message you propagate in the book?
Lovins: I think you could make that case. In fact, to go back to the beginning of the modern climate debate, I think that when the bogus studies were issued claiming that climate protection would be very costly, the environmental movement fell into a trap of saying it won’t cost that much and it’s worth it. What they should have said is, “No, you’ve got it wrong. Climate protection is not costly but profitable because it’s cheaper to save fuel than to buy fuel.”
So the whole climate conversation has been distorted by this error of mistaking cost for profits and that has blocked international negotiations, because it’s so much harder to talk about cost burden and sacrifice, what is it worth to save the climate and who should pay for it, than to talk about profits, jobs, and competitive advantage, which should have been the subject all along. I think you could make that case. In fact, to go back to the beginning of the modern climate debate, I think that when the bogus studies were issued claiming that climate protection would be very costly, the environmental movement fell into a trap of saying it won’t cost that much and it’s worth it. What they should have said is, “No, you’ve got it wrong. Climate protection is not costly but profitable because it’s cheaper to save fuel than to buy fuel.”
So the whole climate conversation has been distorted by this error of mistaking cost for profits and that has blocked international negotiations, because it’s so much harder to talk about cost burden and sacrifice, what is it worth to save the climate and who should pay for it, than to talk about profits, jobs, and competitive advantage, which should have been the subject all along.
e360: When you look at your 2050 vision, yet you also look at all the carbon that’s still being burned, how do you reconcile the two?
Lovins: Well, one system is dying and others are struggling to be born. It’s a very exciting time, but I think the transitions that we need in how we design vehicles, buildings, and factories, and how we allow efficiency to compete with supply, are well under way. Most of the key sectors are already at or past their tipping point. And it’s clearest for oil, but will become clearer for coal that the stuff is becoming uncompetitive even at relatively low prices before it becomes unavailable even at high prices. It’s the whale oil story all over again. They ran out of customers before they ran out of whales.
Video
Amory Lovins at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies
The discovery by NASA rover Curiosity of evidence that water once flowed on Mars - the most Earth-like planet in the solar system - should intensify interest in what the future could hold for mankind.
The only thing stopping Earth having a lifeless environment like Mars is the magnetic field that shields us from deadly solar radiation and helps some animals migrate, and it may be a lot more fragile and febrile than one might think.
Scientists say Earth's magnetic field is weakening and could all but disappear in as little as 500 years as a precursor to flipping upside down.
It has happened before - the geological record suggests the magnetic field has reversed every 250,000 years, meaning that, with the last event 800,000 years ago, another would seem to be overdue.
"Magnetic north has migrated more than 1,500 kilometres over the past century," said Conall Mac Niocaill, an earth scientist at Oxford University. "In the past 150 years, the strength of the magnetic field has lessened by 10 per cent, which could indicate a reversal is in the cards."
While the effects are hard to predict, the consequences may be enormous. The loss of the magnetic field on Mars billions of years ago put an end to life on the planet if there ever was any, scientists say.
Mac Niocaill said Mars probably lost its magnetic field 3.5-4.0 billion years ago, based on observations that rocks in the planet's southern hemisphere have magnetization.
The northern half of Mars looks younger because it has fewer impact craters, and has no magnetic structure to speak of, so the field must have shut down before the rocks there were formed - which would have been about 3.8 billion years ago.
"With the field dying away, the solar wind was then able to strip the atmosphere away, and you would also have an increase in the cosmic radiation making it to the surface," he said.
"Both of these things would be bad news for any life that might have formed on the surface - either wiping it out, or forcing it to migrate into the interior of the planet."
Earth's magnetic field has always restored itself but, as it continues to shift and weaken, it will present challenges - satellites could be more exposed to solar wind and the oil industry uses readings from the field to guide drills.
In nature, animals which use the field could be mightily confused - birds, bees, and some fish all use the field for navigation. So do sea turtles whose long lives, which can easily exceed a hundred years, means a single generation could feel the effects.
Birds may be able to cope because studies have shown they have backup systems that rely on stars and landmarks, including roads and power lines, to find their way around.
The European Space Agency is taking the issue seriously. In November, it plans to launch three satellites to improve our fairly blurry understanding of the magnetosphere.
The project - dubbed Swarm - will send two satellites into a 450 kilometre high polar orbit to measure changes in the magnetic field, while a third satellite 530 kilometres high will look at the influence of the sun.
Scientists, who have known for some time the magnetic field has a tendency to flip, have made advances in recent years in understanding why and how it happens.
The field is generated by convection currents that churn in the molten iron of the planet's outer core. Other factors, such as ocean currents and magnetic rocks in the Earth's crust also contribute.
The Swarm mission will pull all these elements together to improve computer models used to predict how the magnetic field will move and how fast it could weaken.
Ciaran Beggan, a geomagnetic specialist at the British Geological Survey in Edinburgh, said studies have also refined our understanding of how the field reverses.
They have focused on lava flows: When these cool and form crystals the atoms in iron-rich molten rock align under the influence of the magnetic field, providing a geological memory of the Earth's field.
But that memory looks different in various locations around the world, suggesting the reversal could be a chaotic and fairly random process.
"Rather than having strong north and south poles, you get lots of poles around the planet. So, a compass would not do you much good," said Beggan.
While the whole process takes 3,000-5,000 years, latest research suggests the descent into a chaotic state could take as little as 500 years, although there are significant holes in scientific understanding.
"Although electricity grids and GPS systems would be more vulnerable, we are not really sure how all the complex things that are linked together would react," Beggan said.
The unprecedented loss of polar sea ice may lead to 'wild extremes' in the UK and northern Europe, say researchers
The record loss of Arctic sea ice this summer may mean a cold winter for the UK and northern Europe. The region has been prone to bad winters after summers with very low sea ice, such as 2011 and 2007, said Jennifer Francis, a researcher at Rutgers University.
"We can't make predictions yet … [but] I wouldn't be surprised to see wild extremes this winter," Francis told the Guardian.
This year's ice melt has broken the 2007 record by an an area larger than the state of Texas.
Polar ice experts "thought that it would be many years until we again saw anything like we saw in 2007", said Mark Serreze, director of the National Snow and Ice Data Centre in Colorado.
The unprecedented expanse of ice-free Arctic Ocean has been absorbing the 24-hour sun over the short polar summer. The heat in the water must be released into the atmosphere if the ice is to re-form this autumn. "This is like a new energy source for the atmosphere," said Francis.
This heat and water vapour will affect the all-important jet stream – the west-to-east winds that are the boundary between cold Arctic and the warm mid-latitudes. Others researchers have already shown that the jet stream has been shifting northwards in recent years. Francis and colleagues have recently documented that the jet stream is also slowing down.
"The jet stream is clearly weaker," said Francis. That means weather systems, be it rain or dry conditions, are slow to move on and last longer. Ultimately this can result in "blocking" events, such as the conditions that produced the terrible heatwave in western Russia during the summer of 2010, she said.
This year’s record sea-ice melt might foreshadow a harsh winter in parts of Europe and North America. Recent research, although preliminary, suggests a connection between late-summer Arctic sea-ice extent and the location of areas of high and low atmospheric pressure over the northern Atlantic. The highs and lows can remain relatively fixed for weeks, shaping storm tracks and seasonal weather patterns such as extended cold surges.
Ralf Jaiser, a climate scientist at the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Potsdam, Germany, found a significant correlation in 1989–2011 meteorological data between late-summer Arctic sea-ice extent and atmospheric-pressure anomalies that favour extreme weather such as prolonged cold snaps in winter. He reasons that in autumn, the open Arctic Ocean sheds heat to the high-latitude atmosphere. The warming tends to reduce the large-scale atmospheric-pressure gradient and weakens the dominant westerly winds in the Northern Hemisphere. Those winds normally sweep warm, moist Atlantic air to western Europe; their weakening leaves the region more prone to persistent cold.
“The impacts will become more apparent in autumn, once the freeze-up is under way and we see how circulation patterns have influenced the geographical distribution of sea ice,” says Judith Curry, a climate researcher at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. But, she adds, “We can probably expect somewhere in the mid/high latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere to have a snowy and cold winter.”
Ocean organisms are already seeing an impact Arctic biology is already changing, as the retreat and thinning of sea ice allows more sunlight to penetrate the upper ocean and deprives certain species of habitat, says Jørgen Berge, a marine biologist at the University of Tromsø in Norway. For example, the dominant Arctic zooplankton — the copepods Calanus hyperboreus and C. glacialis — are being replaced by Atlantic C. finmarchicus. Meanwhile, Arctic cod (Arctogadus glacialis) is increasingly being out-competed by its larger Atlantic cousin Gadus morhua.
There’s an important point that bears repeating: This is happening faster than we expected Computer models that simulate how the ice will respond to a warming climate project that the Arctic will be seasonally ‘ice free’ (definitions of this vary) some time between 2040 and the end of the century. But the observed downward trend in sea-ice cover suggests that summer sea ice could disappear completely as early as 2030, something that none of the models used for the next report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change comes close to forecasting.
These changes are happening much earlier than scientists thought, said James Overland, an oceanographer and researcher at the University of Washington.
"We've only had a little bit of global warming so far," Overland said.
As the sea ice continues to decline, the jet stream will likely continue to slow more, and shift further north "bringing wild temperature swings and greater numbers of extreme events" in the future he said. "We're in uncharted territory."
The world will end in 11 days, we've been told. That's when the Mayan calendar "runs out," causing us all to cease to exist, the story goes.
It's hoopla, of course. I guarantee we will still be here on December 22nd, and if I'm wrong and the universe really does come to an end, then, well, you can shoot me or something.
Sure, there may be some strange things happening on or around December 21st. Many people are using the Mayan calendar transition to engage in meditation marathons in order to focus on universal peace and similar vibrations. That's all fine and good. No harm in some healthy meditation...
Other people suspect that governments might actually use the day to stage something nefarious, thereby preying on the uncertainty and fear that already exists as the day approaches. This is a legitimate possibility, so if anything does happen on December 21st or 22nd, the first question to ask is: "Did the government stage this?"
The danger of investing your intention in false prophecy There's always some prophecy, it seems, warning that the end of the world is arriving on a specific date. Last year I remember a few people posting on Facebook, frantically begging me to write about an approaching comet (or secret planet, I don't remember which) that was going to collide with the Earth and destroy us all.
I never covered the topic, of course. And here we still are, amazingly.
But some people really, seriously believe in the latest prophecy fad and as a result they plan their lives around the belief that nothing will exist beyond December 21st. This does not resonate well with life tasks such as financial planning. Some people are spending away all their credit cards right now under the assumption that they won't have to pay anything back since we will all be destroyed on the magical Mayan calendar day. The Mayan Tzolkin calendar, no end because it constantly rotates, to be much better than our linear calendar
That approach to debt spending is really going to suck on December 23rd or whenever the bill comes due. In fact, it may feel a lot like the end of the world when you realize you prematurely quit your job and spent away a whole lot of money you didn't even have (and now have to pay it back without the benefit of a trillion-dollar government bailout).
There are legitimate threats to our world, but the Mayan calendar isn't one of them Doomsday is actually approaching, by the way, and there are lots of ways in which our current human civilization is utterly unsustainable.
There are legitimate threats to our civilization from GMOs (genetic pollution), the pillaging of natural resources, loss of top soils, the polluting of the oceans, rampant infertility caused by synthetic chemicals, and even threats from hare-brained scientific experiments that could theoretically create black holes which consume the entire planet.
None of those are fiction; they're very real. And on top of that, there's also the coming debt collapse which won't actually destroy the world but will make you wish it had been destroyed due to the rampant poverty and starvation it will likely unleash.
The monument nr. VI in Tortuguero, is blamed for the frenzy about the end of the world in December 2012. although it is not written any prediction of the Apocalypse on that date
But even with these real, legitimate threats, that's no reason to live your life as if it's all coming to an end, because in truth nobody knows the timetables on these things. The economic collapse, for example, could happen tonight or maybe in ten years. It's hard to tell exactly when things will reach a point of collapse. So while it's smart to be prepared for the unexpected, it's not prudent to allow your entire existence to be dominated by the thought that it's all coming to an end on a specific calendar date.
Unless God himself broadcasts a multilingual message from the heavens that announces a specific time and date that he's going to "end the simulation" and close the cosmos, you would be wise to stay on course with your life and not bet all your cards on a prophecy dreamed up by ancient humans who hadn't even developed an alphabet yet.
Yet more evidence emerges that our universe is a grand simulation created by an intelligent designer There's a lot of buzz in the news about a new scientific study that statistically supports the idea that our known universe is actually a grand computer simulation. This is mainstream science, and the idea isn't a whacky as you might first suppose. I've actually written about this several times in articles about consciousness and the nature of reality. This news, by the way, also supports the idea of a Creator who brought this universe -- and everything in it -- into existence by design.
A new scientific paper published in arXiv and co-authored by Silas Beane from the University of Bonn reveals strong statistical evidence that our reality is, indeed, a grand computer simulation. The title of the paper is Constraints on the Universe as a Numerical Simulation.
Here's what it means in layman's terms
Here's the super easy way to understand all this. Your computer display screen has a finite number of pixels available, and this is called the "screen resolution" such as 1920 x 1440. This means there are 1920 pixels across and 1440 pixels vertically.
Everything you see on your computer screen must be drawn and depicted using these pixels, and nothing can be displayed that's only half a pixel. For example, you can't draw a vertical line on the screen that exists between the pixels that are hard-wired into the screen resolution. Everything you view on the monitor -- a computer game, a website, even a video -- is essentially transposed onto the "lattice" of pixels that exist in your hardware.
Your hardware, in effect, has a hard-wired "resolution limit" which defines the smallest size of any object that can be depicted on the screen.
Now, zoom out to the "real" world in which we live. Here in the real world, we think that there are no pixels and that we can move fluidly to any location we wish. We are not digitized being, we think; we're analog beings living in a fluid world without the pixelation of a computer screen, right?
Not so fast. As it turns out, our "reality" is also pixelated, just at a very fine resolution. This study out of Bonn revealed that the energy level of cosmic rays "snaps to" the "resolution" of the universe in which we live. The very laws of electromagnetic radiation, in other words, are confined by the resolution of the three-dimensional simulation we call a "universe."
The existence of this construct, if proven, also proves intelligent design by a conscious Creator who built the universe to begin with. This is the upshot of this scientific discovery that most scientists refuse to acknowledge. But the conclusion is inescapable: If our universe is a carefully-constructed simulation, then by definition there must have been a purpose behind its construction as well as a Creator who built it.
For the record, my personal belief is that the Creator set all the physical constants in the universe and then initiated the so-called "Big Bang" and let things play out from there. I do not believe our Creator "tinkers" with the universe at a micro level on a day-to-day basis. But I do believe there very well may have been individuals throughout history who found ways to "bend the rules" of the Matrix ever so slightly and thereby perform the very kind of miracles we see described in ancient texts.
"The structure of the underlying lattice"
The authors of this new paper describe their conclusion as following: "The numerical simulation scenario could reveal itself in the distributions of the highest energy cosmic rays exhibiting a degree of rotational symmetry breaking that reflects the structure of the underlying lattice."
This "underlying lattice" is what I'm describing as a "resolution" of our physical simulation.
There's other evidence of this, too: Plank's Constant, for example, is by itself yet more evidence that the physical universe in which we live is quantized to a particular resolution. In fact, even light behaves in a quantized manner, which is why "light packets" are called quanta.
Our universe, it turns out, is digital, not analog. Heck, even your DNA is digital, not analog. You are a digitized physical being imbued with a non-material consciousness that transcends this physical simulation. Realizing this is a lot like taking the red pill in The Matrix and being shown that the universe you thought was real is actually just a grand computer simulation.
Of course, once you grasp that we are living in a grand simulation, the next obvious question is: Who built it?
Intelligent Design
One obvious answer is that we built it! Not "we" the humans here on Earth, but rather the "we" which is a highly advanced civilization of seemingly supernatural beings with incomprehensibly powerful technology. We collectively built the simulation, the theory goes, and then agreed to selectively insert our consciousness into the simulation in order to have a "human life experience" on this planet. But that's only one possibility from all this.
Another possible answer is that HE built it. Who is He? He is God, our Creator. He is a consciousness with literal God-like powers who is omnipresent and all-powerful. He created our universe (i.e. designed and then launched the simulation) while providing a mechanism for free will consciousness to "wake up" inside the simulation in the bodies of newly-born beings. Upon death in the simulation, your consciousness leaves the simulation and returns to its source, which is the actual reality that transcends this one. This is possibly why people who have survived near-death experiences consistently report their experience as being a "hyper reality" that feels like it is "a thousand times more real than life on Earth."
For the record, I have always believed in a supernatural Creator of our universe; our God. I also believe -- and have good evidence -- that God is an all-loving being and that the overriding purpose of our existence in this universe is to express our free will and thereby have a self-aware experience which advances our knowledge of who we are. More details on this below...
What would be the purpose of intelligently designing a grand computer simulation?
If our universe was consciously created, then it must have been created for a purpose. In his book Proof of Heaven, near-death survivor Dr. Eben Alexander, a neurosurgeon, describes the purpose in great detail on page 48 of his book:
Through the Orb, [God] told me that there is not one universe but many -- in fact, more than I could conceive -- but that love lay at the center of them all. Evil was present in all the other universes as well, but only in the tiniest trace amounts. Evil was necessary because without it free will was impossible, and without free will there could be no growth -- no forward movement, no chance for us to become what God longed for us to be. Horrible and all-powerful as evil sometimes seemed to be in a world like ours, in the larger picture love was overwhelmingly dominant, and it would ultimately be triumphant.
The primary purpose of life in this realm, it seems, is to experience personal growth and learn how to overcome Evil. This explains why we all seem to be surrounded by so much evil on a day-to-day basis. We are drowning in evil precisely because our souls chose to be here and learn how to defeat it.
Upon our death, we are judged by a higher power, and that judgment takes into account our performance in these areas. Did we achieve a measure of self-awareness? Did we work to overcome evil? Did we express love and compassion and help uplift others with knowledge and awareness?
As you've probably already figured out, the vast majority of humans fail these tests. They die as bitter, selfish, substance-addicted, greed-driven minions of evil who mistakenly thought they were winning the game of life while, in reality, they were losing the far more important test of the Creator.
What this means for your life So what does all this mean in terms of the way you live your life here on Earth? If you believe the universe really is a grand simulation created by a higher power, then it forces you to rethink your philosophy on the purpose of life.
Some might say this is the perfect excuse to resort to selfish hedonism and turn your entire life into one vast entertainment parade. But that seems to be the wrong conclusion from all this, precisely because it ignores the importance of personal growth. I do not believe our universe is a childish playground; I believe it is a serious test of spiritual strength. You may or may not agree with all my points, but here's my philosophy on what to do with this realization:
#1) Don't chase material things that aren't even real in the first place. You are living in a simulation that's as un-real as an old 8-bit Atari computer game. Your focus on trying to collect money and wealth in this world is about as foolish as trying to collect gold coins in a role-playing computer game.
#2) Live your life to WIN the simulation. "Winning" means persistently working to defeat evil, demonstrate love and help awaken others. Rack up your "karma" points, so to speak. Because that's how you will be judged once your earthly life comes to an end.
#3) Know that your behavior is being watched, recorded and judged. There are ultimately no secrets. You will, in time, face judgment on all your actions, and it's even possible that an entire civilization of advanced Creators will review your actions with you. (This is what is often described by those who survive NDEs.) Your actions in this simulation are recorded on your soul for eternity, so make them count. Don't do anything your soul would feel ashamed of.
#4) Know that death is not final. What matters far more than staying alive on this planet is living your life with principle. Your decisions (ethics) survive your human life! I would rather die defending principles of love and enlightenment than compromise those principles to save my own skin in this simulation. Life is fleeting, but the record of your morals and behavior lasts forever. If all this starts to sound a little Biblical, that's because the Bible is, I believe, based in part on information provided to us by the Creator of our grand simulation.
#5) Realize that your consciousness is eternal and you almost certainly "agreed" to come here and experience this life as a spiritual test. With that in mind, do your best to achieve success within the test by demonstrating behavior based in high spiritual principles.
Conclusion: Has science proven the existence of God? If all this science is true, it would mean that science has proven the existence of a Creator (as well as intelligent design).
This is certainly not the intention of science, as much of modern-day science seems to be dead-set against the idea of intelligent design. Yet even if the entire universe can be traced back to the Big Bang and Inflation Theory (with Inflatons) there is still the lingering question of "Who or what initiated the Big Bang?"
If you really look deeply into the laws of physics, by the way, you will discover that the so-called universal constants that drive the underlying mechanics and energies of our universe have been intricately fine-tuned precisely to give rise to a universe that can support biological life. Change one of these constants just slightly and stars don't form. Change another constant and the universe flings itself apart before life can form on any planets. These are at least six physical constants that appear to have been delicately tuned, selected or somehow "set" sort of like a universal control panel with properties and parameters.
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The following are the notes I submitted for today's now canceled CNBC appearance. They usually ask for a writeup of some sort and since I am on their D-list, or lower I try to be thorough.
General Market The equity market has obviously had an outstanding January so far. In thinking about the next couple of months, there is clearly momentum to the upside, the first quarter had been a good time to own stocks for the last few years and this year is starting out the same way, the Fed still has the pedal to the floor, interest rates are still very low and other than Apple the earnings season has not been a catastrophe. This sets the stage for the momentum to continue for a little while longer like the rest of the quarter. I would feel better about the momentum lasting that long if we had one bad week to work off some very short term overbought conditions. Also contributing to confidence for the next couple of months is that the S&P 500 is only 7% above its 200 day moving average which is not that much. The rest of the year may not be as good. Tech sector There has obviously been a meaningful rotation out of Apple (AAPL) and this could be very good for the rest of the tech sector. To the extent that portfolio managers are or were long AAPL, are selling that stock and will want to keep those proceeds in the tech sector then other large cap tech stocks could see serious buying. YTD AAPL is down 17% while the First Trust Equal Weight NASDAQ 100 ETF (QQEW) which is very underweight AAPL is up 7% which supports the idea that other tech stocks will benefit from the rotation out of AAPL. Our History with AAPL We had a 4% position in AAPL by virtue of our position in IYW. In late August we sold half of IYW for the express purpose of reducing our AAPL position, the stock was at $675 and on the way up when we did this. We then bought the stock directly in early November at $573 on the way down thinking the selling was overdone. From that point the story and the chart began to deteriorate at an accelerating rate and so we sold at $505 a week and half before the recent earnings report after it was reported that iPhone component ordering had been cut in half. Yahoo After years of poor execution and CEO musical chairs the market thinks that Marissa Mayer will be the person to make the company the powerhouse it once was. The stock is up 28% since she was hired in July versus a gain of 8.5% for the Nasdaq. YHOO has made great strides in content, especially Yahoo Finance. It seems like they have permanently ceded search to Google. Yahoo Mail seems to have fallen very far behind gmail which I think is can be a huge opportunity because many people have Yahoo Mail accounts but don’t necessarily use them like they once did. It also seems obvious that they will want to create some sort of presence in Social Media which could be another huge opportunity. All of this will be difficult to pull off but again the market seems to think Mayer can do it. Names we like From the top down, tech has become a great source for yield as many companies have matured into cash flow machines. One name we like is semiconductor equipment manufacturer KLA Tencor (KLAC) which we own in RRGR and for separate accounts that we manage. It is just about every segment where there are chips but not overly dependent on any single type of product. It has no net debt, it yields more than 3% and analysts have high growth expectations.
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The point of yesterday's post was misconstrued by many so must have been poorly conveyed by me. For the do-it-yourselfer;
1) Focus on the real goal which for most is having enough money when you need it, not necessarily beating any index. Having enough when you need it comes from a combination of savings and growth.
2) Someone who wants to use individual stocks but not make a full time job out of it could probably pick ten household megacap domestic names, combine that with an adequate savings rate for the next 20 years and have a decent shot of having enough money when they need it.
3) If over the next 20 years the S&P 500 goes up 400% then in my opinion picking ten stocks from the current top 40 in that index and spreading it out sector wise might give a result of up 300% or maybe up 500% (or any other number) but get the investor pretty close to having enough for retirement provided they also have an adequate savings rate. They will not be up 1000% in an up 400% 20 year period nor will they be up 50% in an up 400% 20 year period.
4) More specifically, of the ten it is likely that one company would go bust, at least one would be a huge home run and the rest would be a little ahead or a little behind the market but again, provide a reasonable chance of having enough even if the ten did not beat any index.
The reader question that prompted the post said winning with stocks was very difficult to which I replied that it depends on how you define winning. A reasonable definition of winning is having enough when you need it and that was what yesterday's post tried to explore.
I should also again point out this is not a recommendation for a strategy. It is an attempt to demystify the use of individual stocks.
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This weekend I am headed over to San Diego for a reunion for my chapter of the fraternity I was active with which is celebrating its 50th anniversary. It will be a good chance to see people who were very important many years ago and lie about how much money we make and how much we can still bench press.
On a more serious note I haven't seen too many of these guys since the 1980s (although have reconnected on Facebook and LinkedIn) so this is a milestone event of sorts. We all have these occasional milestones and they are logical times to take some kind of inventory of where we are and how we feel about where we are. Also relevant is whether we are on a path that gives us a chance of getting to where we want to go.
This has plenty of investment relevance in my opinion. I've mentioned quite a few times that when we figure out what is important to us that we then are more like to invest properly.
On a related note is this article at IndexUniverse that takes a very detailed look at how low volatility investing outperforms in the long term. This is along the lines of getting rich slowly which Barry Ritholtz mentioned just yesterday.
The way I view this is that once you get your life stuff together and can look at your big picture you can then really understand that what matters is your long term investment results. It simply doesn't matter whether you beat the market this quarter or this year because very quickly you won't remember your investment result from this quarter or this year. Without looking, how'd you do in the third quarter of 2011?
Obviously everyone comes at this differently, the above is how I come at it and obviously not everyone agrees with the above; no single approach can be right for all investors but you will make things much easier for yourself when you sort what is really important and how you should invest.
To contact us Click HERE The soon-to-be-released documentary "The House I Live In" is an inside look at America's longest war, The War on Drugs, from executive producers Danny Glover, John Legend, Russell Simons. From the film's website:
"Filmed in more than twenty states, THE HOUSE I LIVE IN tells the stories of individuals at all levels of America’s War on Drugs. From the dealer to the narcotics officer, the inmate to the federal judge, the film offers a penetrating look inside America’s criminal justice system, revealing the profound human rights implications of U.S. drug policy." Here are some quotes from the trailer above:
"The Drug War is a holocaust in slow motion."
"The Drug War is a war on all Americans."
"You have to understand that the War on Drugs has never been about drugs."
From a review by US News:
Two years after he was elected president in 1969, Richard Nixon first used the phrase "war on drugs," in a tough speech on drug policy. Four decades and more than 40 million drug-related crimes later, the war on drugs is still simmering.
And now, just months before the presidential election, a new documentary "The House I Live In" explores the ways in which that war could be rethought. The film also implicates President Barack Obama, who promised a compassionate drug policy while running for president but requested $25.6 billion for drug enforcement in 2013—the highest yearly total ever.
A reviewer from The Boston Globe says "I'd hate to imply that it's your civic duty to see "The House I Live In" but guess what - it is."
What is humour for? Of all the explanations, among the better supported is the idea that it acts as a mating signal. Research with heterosexuals suggests that men, in particular, use humour to show-off their intelligence and good genes to women. A similar but alternative proposal is that wit is often used to convey romantic availability, and is interpreted in this way. A new study finds support for the latter theory, in that witty people were seen as particularly suitable for short-term flings.
They're too young to need to fib about lipstick on their collar or even their unfinished homework but a new study finds the majority of three-year-olds are already practising liars. Deception in very young children has been documented before, but this is the first time it has been systematically tested in a laboratory.
Amory B. Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute
The Mayan Tzolkin calendar, no end because it constantly rotates, to be much better than our linear calendar
The monument nr. VI in Tortuguero, is blamed for the frenzy about the end of the world in December 2012. although it is not written any prediction of the Apocalypse on that date
