July 22, 2013

How terrible for a person to know what he could have been. How he could have gone on. But instead having to live along being nothing, and know he is just going to die and that is the end of it.

Oakley Hall  Warlock

July 20, 2013

On this date, July 20, in 1969, astronaut Neil Armstrong became the first human to walk on the moon. I was in Finland. The next day, walking around Helsinki, random people came up to me, shook my hand, and said what a great thing it was. Americans no longer travel to space because here, everything is about money, and space travel doesn’t make the right people rich enough. Greed is strangling us, and it has made us much smaller than we were.

June 20, 2013

Analysis of the earnings of the top 200 chief executives at public companies with at least $1 billion in revenue indicates another big raise last year. The research, conducted by Equilar Inc., the executive compensation analysis firm, found that the median 2012 pay package came in at $15.1 million — a leap of 16 percent over 2011.  As usual, cash pay pales next to the value of the stock and option grants they received. Median cash compensation was $5.3 million last year, while stock and option grants came in at $9 million. Stock grants are clearly where the action is, and their value can really add up. Equilar’s analysis calculates the median value of stock holdings of these C.E.O.’s at $51 million. That’s a median of $66.1 million dollars per year. Median. And you thought baseball players were overpaid.

May 11, 2013

Worldwide levels of the chief greenhouse gas that causes global warming have hit a milestone, reaching an amount never before encountered by humans. Carbon dioxide was measured at 400 parts per million at the oldest monitoring station in Hawaii which sets the global benchmark. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the last time the worldwide carbon level was probably that high was about 2 million years ago. That was during the Pleistocene Era. Other scientists say it may have been 10 million years ago that Earth last encountered this much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The first modern humans only appeared in Africa about 200,000 years ago. The measurement that was recorded is only a daily figure, the monthly and yearly average will be smaller. The number 400 has been anticipated by climate scientists and environmental activists for years as a notable indicator, in part because it's a round number — not because any changes in man-made global warming happen by reaching it. Physically, we are no worse off at 400 ppm than we were at 399 ppm. But as a symbol of the painfully slow pace of measures to avoid a dangerous level of warming, it's somewhat unnerving. "This number is a reminder that for the last 150 years — and especially over the last several decades — we have been recklessly polluting the protective sheath of atmosphere that surrounds the Earth and protects the conditions that have fostered the flourishing of our civilization. We are altering the composition of our atmosphere at an unprecedented rate", said Al Gore. Carbon dioxide traps heat just like in a greenhouse and most of it stays in the air for a century; some lasts for thousands of years. It accounts for three-quarters of the planet's heat-trapping gases. There are others, such as methane, which has a shorter life span but traps heat more effectively. Methane concentrations also are rising because of human activity such as industrial farming. Both trigger temperatures to rise over time which is causing sea levels to rise and some weather patterns to change. When measurements of carbon dioxide were first taken in 1958, it measured 315 parts per million. Some scientists and environmental groups promote 350 parts per million as a safe level for CO2, but scientists acknowledge they don't really know what levels would stop the effects of global warming. The level of carbon dioxide in the air is rising faster than in the past decades, despite international efforts by developed nations to curb it. On average the amount is growing by about 2 parts per million per year. That's 100 times faster than at the end of the Ice Age. Back then, it took 7,000 years for carbon dioxide to reach 80 parts per million. Because of the burning of fossil fuels such as oil and coal, carbon dioxide levels have gone up by that amount in just 55 years. Before the Industrial Revolution, carbon dioxide levels were around 280 ppm.

April 8, 2013

A new Gallup survey indicates people feel safer in the Twin Cities than any other major metro area in the country. Of the Minneapolis-St. Paul residents, 80 percent said they feel safe walking around at night. That is two percentage points higher than Denver and Raleigh, N.C., which each clocked in at 78 percent. The results are part of the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, which is derived from interviews with 500 people every day in 2012. The average level of perceived safety in major cities was 72 percent. “Minneapolis-St. Paul… residents have the highest sense of personal security among Americans living in the nation’s top metro areas, at least in terms of feeling safe walking alone at night in their local area,” Gallup said. Memphis and New Orleans metro areas had the lowest perceived safety scores.