Utopia, you are standing in it!

This is an introduction to amazing graphics done by Eleanor Lutz (no relation) at her website Tabletop Whale, an original science illustration blog. Above is a data-based view of Earth’s seasons. If you watch in full screen, the four corners show views of the cycle from top, bottom, and sides. Below is her map of the solar system, showing how much scientific information is represented in the illustration (H/T Real Clear Science)

An Orbit Map of the Solar System
JUNE 10 2019 · Link to the Open-Source Code

This week’s map shows the orbits of more than 18000 asteroids in the solar system. This includes everything we know of that’s over 10km in diameter – about 10000 asteroids – as well as 8000 randomized objects of unknown size. This map shows each asteroid at its exact position on New Years’ Eve 1999.

All of the data for this…

I noticed in the Herald this morning Audrey Young’s article running the line that (a) it had been a good  –  in fact, exceptional – week for the government, which had (she claimed) been governing well, and (b) that one example of this was yesterday’s reopening of the Wairoa-Napier railway line.   There was a celebratory article on the reopening in this morning’s Dominion-Post, which might better have been labelled as advertorial, and could easily have been taken straight from Shane Jones’s press secretaries.  It was, after all, only reopened with the (as yet) rather small amount of the Provincial Growth Fund that has actually been spent.  For this particular project, $6.2 million of taxpayers’ money, given to a loss-making SOE that, even running losses, had not itself considered the project viable.

This project was first announced in February 2018 and then I wrote a post about it, under…

Pope Pompous III: Now all hail and worship me, the wind & sun.

Environmentalists ready to slam never reliable wind and solar and back ever reliable nuclear are rare birds, indeed. Michael Shellenberger is such an animal.

Lauded by environmentalists in the US, Shellenberger is not so much crusading for the environment, but waging a war against the hypocritical and pompous who drive global warming alarmism; a group of virtue signalling jetsetters, dedicated to their mission of depriving reliable and affordable energy to all but themselves and their filthy rich peers.

Last week, that sanctimonious windbag, Al Gore dropped in to Brisbane to berate Australia’s ‘truculent turds’ for rejecting the Green/Labor Alliance’s plans to crush reliable and affordable energy – with a ludicrous 50% RET and crippling CO2 tax – and to wipe out coal mining and coal-fired power and the entire Australian economy, along with it.

So, it was…

Finance Minister  Grant  Robertson   could not disguise the rapture that had seized him, when   he was questioned this week in  Parliament  on reactions  to   the budget.

He  was  excited,  apparently,   because  the government  had received  an  “overwhelming”  response from the people of  NZ to the  wellbeing budget.  There had  been a   vast  amount of  correspondence.

He cited   the  Salvation Army as  seeing the budget as   “a step on the path towards lifting New Zealanders out of poverty”  and the Children’s Commissioner  likewise  believing  it “takes seriously the need for a step-change in the way we support the wellbeing of NZ children”.

Good stuff, then, even though it  may  sound a bit  weird  to Kiwis   who  had believed their  country’s living standards  rank  reasonably   well  against  those of  other  developed  nations. 

Fantastic and well-deserved news this morning with the Clark Medal being awarded to Emi Nakamura, who has recently moved from Columbia to Berkeley. Incredibly, Nakamura’s award is the first Clark to go to a macroeconomist in the 21st century. The Great Recession, the massive changes in global trade patterns, the rise of monetary areas like the Eurozone, the “savings glut” and its effect on interest rates, the change in openness to hot financial flows: it has been a wild twenty years for the macroeconomy in the two decades since Andrei Schleifer won the Clark. It’s hard to imagine what could be more important for an economist to understand than these patterns.

Something unusual has happened in macroeconomics over the past twenty years: it has become more like Industrial Organization! A brief history may be useful. The term macroeconomics is due to Ragnar Frisch, in his 1933 article on the

From the Wiki entry on the 2007 Troop Surge in Iraq. Notice that troop level start declining in 2007, then stabilize at 40,000 and then 20,000.

When I tell people about Party in the Street, they are often puzzled. They think that the antiwar movement de-escalated because Obama pulled troops out of Iraq. They do not believe that the Obama administration actually pursued a lot of pro-war policies. In other words, people often hold the common view that Obama was clearly the anti-war president and Bush was the pro-war president.

The empirical facts that motivated Party in the Street are two: First, the collapse of the antiwar movement begins during late 2006/early 2007, the point at which troop levels in Iraq were at a high point. If activism were driven solely by facts on the ground, you’d see the Surge lead to an increase in anti-war activism until…