Still Waiting

The season is definitely changing here. Today was hot and humid, around 85 degrees until a cool wind just moved in and it will be dry and 50 degrees tonight. September is always a fine month up here, but you cannot stop the fall from rolling in. Luckily I have ordered an acorn picker upper tool that was suggested a couple years back but I never got around to getting it. The acorns were terrible this year.

Blog Title Selection
When I make my rounds through my reading list I always wonder how the writers selected the names for their blogs. Some make sense, others not so much. I spent a solid 15 minutes coming up with the blog title Economic Disconnect a few years ago because I felt it was the perfect description of the financial world back in 2007. I guess Oblivious and Stupid would have worked, but I was trying to be more subtle.

I will look around and see if the terms "economic disconnect" get used in main stream press articles, but it is few and far in between. My friend Mark who writes The Illusion of Prosperity has had his title used often and today even by the president himself (a commenter left the link):

"The idea was that if we had blind faith in the market; if we let corporations play by their own rules; if we left everyone else to fend for themselves, America would grow and prosper.
For a time, this idea gave us the illusion of prosperity. We saw financial firms and CEOs take in record profits and record bonuses. We saw a housing boom that led to new homeowners and new jobs in construction. Consumers bought more condos and bigger cars and better televisions.
But while all this was happening, the broader economy was becoming weaker."

Epic WIN! For another see here.

Electric Cars need to Make Noise
I do not want to get into some environmental (air pollution or sound pollution or any other) debate here. What I did want to talk about is how deadly silent electric cars and hybrids are when they are on full battery. I mean, you can barely make anything out! It is a little creepy. I find this an issue in the crazy cramped streets of Cambridge when I need to take a turn and because there are so many cars (all SUV's, just what one would expect from city dwelling liberal hippie hypocrites by the way) parked all over the place you cannot see around corners.

What I do is try and see the best I can, and I roll down the window to listen for a car. These dang things make no noise! No real close calls as yet, but I do think about it. The following article offers a solution:
ECTunes solves silent electric vehicle "problem" with directional noise system
They bring up some other points about car noise. I am all for this!

Still Waiting
I guess with a market that seems to do the most it can to frustrate the most amount of players I should not have been surprised by this week so far. I thought we would see some direction or larger volume but nothing but the same old market. Up one day big, down the next all at the open. One day the Irish banks will crash the system, the next they make loans to themselves in a show of liquidity and all is well. I am still waiting for something to happen.

We did get more baby stimulus ideas from the president today, but any infrastructure spending will not create jobs but will be used by the states to pay their own existing employees to do more wasteful work. At 50 Billion, that is not even a rounding error anymore.

For some reading material for a slow middle of the week, I offer:

Nanowire Coated Cotton Cleans Water by Zapping Bacteria to Death
Illness-inducing bacteria, meet nano-engineered cotton–and a quick death. Researchers have created a new “filter” that zaps bacteria with electric fields to clean drinking water. They say their system may find use in developing countries since it requires only a small amount of voltage (a couple of car batteries, a stationary bike, or a solar panel could do the job) and cleans water an estimated 80,000 times faster than traditional devices.

Instead of trapping bacteria in small pores like many slow-going traditional filters, the cotton and silver nanowire combo uses small electric currents running through the nanowires to kill the bacteria outright. In a paper to appear in the journal Nano Letters researchers say that 20 volts and 2.5 inches worth of the material killed 98 percent of Escherichia coli in the water they tested in their lab setup.

The authors argue that the filter’s silver nanowires and carbon nanotubes are cheap; the small amount of silver required makes its expense “negligible,” coauthor Yi Cui says in a press release, and the group chose to use cotton because of its abundance.

And it is not robotic! Seriously, some argue the next war will be fought over water and not much water purification work has been done using the newer technologies....yet.

Making Plastics out of Switchgrass Plants
Metabolix Inc. Creates a 100% Biodegradable Plastic
This is a local company that has made strides using natural products for polymer science. For more color you can try out this review paper:
Advances in the synthesis and extraction of biodegradable polyhydroxyalkanoates in plant systems – A review
NOTE: No position or affiliation with the companies or technology listed. I hold physical silver and a paper position in SLV.

Rich exoplanet system discovered
These new finds are tantalizing!

At long last, we find out what exactly the cargo was that Han Solo had to dump that got him in all the trouble with Jabba the Hutt. Skip towards end for the hilarious finish. Ah yes, Darth Sidious never fails to settle a score.

Have a good night.