My Personal Rants, Raves, and Ramblings

REDMOND, Wash. – Sept. 23, 2009 – Unlike the average person, Gordon Bell doesn’t forget.

For most people, the brain simply experiences more than it can handle. The past inevitably fades away, leaving a fuzzy picture that looms into one’s consciousness intermittently at best.

But not for Bell. For more than a decade, the principal researcher at the Microsoft Research Silicon Valley Campus has digitally archived every aspect of his life. Conversations, phone calls, photos, CDs, articles, home videos, e-mail — every piece of data Bell has created or consumed has been squirreled away into a database. In effect, he has offloaded the past 11 years of his life into a comprehensive electronic memory bank.

This decade-long data dump has convinced Bell that the frailty of bio-memory — what everyone else has to work with — is about to become a thing of the past. In the newly published book “Total Recall,” Bell and his Microsoft Research colleague Jim Gemmell outline a vision of a not-too-distant future where people can digitally record and preserve their entire lives. This ability to remember everything — “the e-memory revolution,” Bell and Gemmell call it — corrects a problem we’ve had for the past 10,000 or so years. “Lots of people say, ‘Isn’t it healthy to forget?’” Gemmell says. “It’s really a bug in human memory, not a feature.”

A memory upgrade might be just around the corner because improvements to digital storage, digital recording and digital search are converging in just the right way. In this century, people will be awash in a sea of information. Already portions of our lives are digitally captured every day. From the constant stream of e-mail to the GPS-stamped pictures we take on our Smartphones, pieces of ourselves are being stored on Facebook or YouTube or massive portable hard drives.

Bell and Gemmell have been exploring ways to record and easily access this trail of data people leave behind. Bell’s archiving adventure began in 1998, when he decided to go paperless and eliminate clutter (“You have a much freer life when everything goes into cyberspace,” he says). With help from evolving hardware — an automatic camera, an arm strap that logged biometrics, a voice recorder, a pedometer, a desktop scanner — he archived as much of his daily life as possible.

Around 2001, Bell surfaced for air and discovered he had amassed hundreds of thousands of files. The shrinking cost of storage had made the archiving easy, but that was only half the battle. “Gordon discovered he had created this big mess for himself that he couldn’t do much with,” Gemmell says. “I realized this had become a very interesting software problem.” The experiment turned into a Microsoft Research project called MyLifeBits, which Gemmell created in 2003.

Since then, the two have worked on ways to mine the data mountain of Bell’s past in ways beyond a quick search. The key to unlocking e-memory’s transformative power lies in harnessing this data to, say, create a picture of one’s overall health. For example Bell, who has a heart condition, tracks his weight daily and monitors the data pumped out by his pacemaker to get a changing snapshot of his well-being.

Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.) received a handwritten note Thursday from Joint Committee on Taxation Chief of Staff Tom Barthold confirming the penalty for failing to pay the up to $1,900 fee for not buying health insurance.

Violators could be charged with a misdemeanor and could face up to a year in jail or a $25,000 penalty, Barthold wrote on JCT letterhead. He signed it "Sincerely, Thomas A. Barthold."

Sept. 17 (Bloomberg) -- The dollar may extend its decline after sliding to the weakest level versus the euro in almost a year as an increase in America’s industrial output encouraged investors to shift funds to higher-yielding assets.

The euro gained yesterday versus the dollar as traders succeeded on their third attempt at pushing the currency past $1.4720, a technical level just above the Dec. 18 high. The Mexican peso and South African rand were two of the biggest winners against the dollar and yen among the 16 most-traded currencies tracked by Bloomberg, on increased risk demand.

“We are in an environment that is constructive for growth,” said Lauren Rosborough, a currency strategist in London at Westpac Banking Corp. “It is positive for high- yielding, high-beta currencies. We are seeing evidence that cash is moving out of banks.”

The dollar changed hands at $1.4713 per euro at 6:04 a.m. in Tokyo, after trading yesterday at $1.4737, the weakest level since Sept. 25, 2008. The yen was at 90.93 per dollar and touched 90.13, the strongest level since Feb. 12. Japan’s currency fetched 133.78 per euro.

The peso gained 0.9 percent to 13.17 versus the dollar and the rand advanced 0.4 percent to 12.41 yen on speculation investors will increase carry trades, in which they sell the currency of a nation with low interest rates and buy assets where returns are higher. The U.S. target lending rate of zero to 0.25 percent and Japan’s 0.1 percent benchmark compare with 7 percent in South Africa and 4.5 percent in Mexico.

The Obama administration has privately concluded that a cap and trade law would cost American taxpayers up to $200 billion a year, the equivalent of hiking personal income taxes by about 15 percent.

A previously unreleased analysis prepared by the U.S. Department of Treasury says the total in new taxes would be between $100 billion to $200 billion a year. At the upper end of the administration's estimate, the cost per American household would be an extra $1,761 a year.

A second memorandum, which was prepared for Obama's transition team after the November election, says this about climate change policies: "Economic costs will likely be on the order of 1 percent of GDP, making them equal in scale to all existing environmental regulation."

The documents (PDF) were obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by the free-market Competitive Enterprise Institute and released on Tuesday.

These disclosures will probably not aid the political prospects of the Democrats' cap and trade bill. The House of Representatives approved it by a remarkably narrow margin in June -- the bill would have failed if only six House members had switched their votes to "no" -- and it faces significant opposition in the Senate.

One reason the bill faces an uncertain future is concern about its cost. House Republican Leader John Boehner has estimated the additional tax bill would be at $366 billion a year, or $3,100 a year per family. Democrats have pointed to estimates from MIT's John Reilly, who put the cost at $800 a year per family, and noted that tax credits to low income households could offset part of the bite. The Heritage Foundation says that, by 2035, "the typical family of four will see its direct energy costs rise by over $1,500 per year."


One difference is that while Heritage's numbers are talking about 26 years in the future, the Treasury Department's figures don't have a time limit.

"Heritage is saying publicly what the administration is saying to itself privately," says Christopher Horner, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute who filed the FOIA request. "It's nice to see they're not spinning each other behind closed doors."

"They're not telling you the cost -- they're not telling you the benefit," says Horner, who wrote the Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming. "If they don't tell you the cost, and they don't tell you the benefit, what are they telling you? They're just talking about global salvation."

The FOIA'd document written by Judson Jaffe, who joined the Treasury Department's Office of Environment and Energy in January 2009, says: "Given the administration's proposal to auction all emission allowances, a cap-and-trade program could generate federal receipts on the order of $100 to $200 billion annually." (Obviously, any final cap-and-trade system may be different from what Obama had proposed, and could yield higher or lower taxes.)

Because personal income tax revenues bring in around $1.37 trillion a year, a $200 billion additional tax would be the equivalent of a 15 percent increase a year. A $100 billion additional tax would represent a 7 or 8 percent increase a year.

One odd point: The document written by Jaffee includes this line: "It will raise energy prices and impose annual costs on the order of XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX." The Treasury Department redacted the rest of the sentence with a thick black line.

The Freedom of Information Act, of course, contains no this-might-embarrass-the-president exemption (nor, for that matter, should federal agencies be in the business of possibly suppressing dissenting climate change voices). You'd hope the presidential administration that boasts of being the "most open and transparent in history" would be more forthcoming than this.

WASHINGTON - Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said Tuesday the worst recession since the 1930s is probably over, although he cautioned that pain — especially for the nearly 15 million unemployed Americans — will persist.

"I think Van Jones was not, this was not a big guy in the White House administration. If we're all going to focus on trying to figure out who Van Jones and his past relationships, when you go #600 down on the list of White House staff. Is that the best use of the time of the mainstream media? You know, we'll see. Clearly some on the right had objections to Van Jones and they successfully got the White House to sever ties."

Alistair Begg Pleads The Fifth (Commandment)

“We honor our parents when we repay the love and trouble they’ve taken in our lives. The Pharisees were real bad at this stuff, and they tried to justify it by their commitment to the church. They were just downright hypocritical. They were saying this in Matt. 15—if a man says to his mother and father, “whatever help you might have otherwise received from me is a gift devoted to God", he is not to honor his father with it. In this way, you nullify the Word of God."… In other words, you can’t weasel out of your commitment to your mum and dad because you’re giving to the building program at church. Don’t tell your parents you won’t be able to see them in Arizona because you’re tithing to the building plan.

…Your parents are your parents. That’s what Paul is saying. If there’s widows in your church and they’ve got children and they’ve got grandchildren, then let the children and grandchildren take care of the widows. If our churches and families were serious about this, it would be radically different. And it’s going to have to get radically different, because this system isn’t going to work. You can’t keep getting older and older and older people with less and less capacity to care for themselves and plug it up by any system except the system that God ordained.

The Chinese understand this… they’re committed to the extended family. African cultures understand this… they’re committed to the extended family. We just reject it—flat out reject it.

…Barely half of the American public believe it’s the children’s responsibility to look after their parents.

But you know what? Why would we be surprised? Do we think this is going to change? Do you think that the children who tomorrow at the age of seven months are going to be taken to a day care center, not because their dad died in the war and their mommy has to go to work, but because their mommy wants to be a “real person” and doesn’t believe in parenting and in marriage and in motherhood. She wants to be a “real” person and so she’s gonna put her seven-month-old in the care of some yahoo who ought to be staying home looking after her kids probably. And the whole thing goes down the tubes from there.

So we’ve got all these tiny little kids living in these boxes; it’s unbelievable. If you think—if we think—that children who have been dumped for the first six years of their lives are gonna somehow come through for their mom and dad in the last six years of their lives, we’re crazy!

What’s the answer? The Fifth Commandment! Given by God to Moses thousands of years ago, and relevant this morning.

There’s something sadly wrong when other cultures without Bibles are better at dealing with the long-term care of their elderly than we, with our Bibles, and our apparent commitment to Jesus Christ.

What do we do? We push people up the ladder of success fast, so that we can topple them off as quickly as we can. We don’t respect old age; we don’t respect wisdom. We just don’t. We don’t ask for their wisdom or guidance; we blow them off. We are committed to youth. We’re not committed to youth because youth is tremendously efficient or because of hard work—we’re committed to youth on the basis of image. … Youth is worshipped. Old age is taboo, dreaded, or despised. We live in a society that isolates and impoverishes those who have given their lives so that we might have an existence. This is really wrong!

…And I’ve gotta tell you, when the signal goes out, and the word is sent, and the call is made, the people who go first to respond to this are not your conservative, evangelical, committed, Bible-believing Christians. The people who go are the people with a theology that we would not embrace but with a heart that we cannot match.

The fifth commandment says to me: we better get our hearts and our attitudes and our resources in line with our convictions, that as parents we better teach the wee ones to honor us as they grow. But in our growth, we better not forget that those who have given their lives on our behalf demand our utmost commitment and respect at the end of their days. ”

Alistair Begg – “Family Life, God’s Way”

With a political arms race in full force, Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.) has raised almost $750,000 in less than 48 hours since his shout of "You lie!" to President Obama during the Wednesday address to Congress, almost matching the Internet-fueled haul of his likely Democratic opponent.

"Wilson has apologized -- and I wish he had not."

Obama credits McCain
Obama is including a proposal from his Republican rival last year as part of his plan.

Obama said he wants to help Americans who can't get insurance because they have pre-existing medical conditions. He said the government should offer them low-cost coverage to protect them against financial ruin if they become seriously ill.

Obama said it was a "good idea" when Sen. John McCain proposed it during the presidential campaign. He adds that it's still a good idea, and "we should embrace it."

Amid applause from his colleagues, McCain smiled and gave Obama a thumbs-up. 

"Cherish, therefore, the spirit of our people, and keep alive their attention. Do not be too severe upon their errors, but reclaim them by enlightening them. If once they become inattentive to the public affairs, you and I, and Congress, and Assemblies, Judges, and Governors, shall all become wolves." - Thomas Jefferson, letter to Edward Carrington, 1787

"I am resigning my post at the Council on Environmental Quality, effective today," Jones said in a statement dated Sept 5 released around midnight on Sept 6.

"On the eve of historic fights for health care and clean energy, opponents of reform have mounted a vicious smear campaign against me.They are using lies and distortions to distract and divide," he continued. "I have been inundated with calls -- from across the political spectrum -- urging me to 'stay and fight.' But I came here to fight for others, not for myself. I cannot in good conscience ask my colleagues to expend precious time and energy defending or explaining my past. We need all hands on deck, fighting for the future."

YouTube Info: "Obama's personal civilian army outside Senator Brown's roundtable at Ohio State talking it up for his health care but can't really explain much about it."

"I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man." - Thomas Jefferson, letter to Benjamin Rush, 1800