Diary of a Mad Natural Historian

Made curious by yet another search term, I checked. At this moment in time - subject to change without notice - DoaMNH is result number one when you feed ‘teckelmania‘ into google. Time to break out the champagne!

On the topic of search terms, this screencap from April 30 makes me happy:

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Eclectic! Funkadelic!

I found the Rather Difficult Font Game (via Making Light) and, though I’m typographically illiterate, did some guessing, hoping/dreading that Comic Sans might turn up. It did.

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The screencap above is for all the residents at 62 Achewood Court.

Two new blogs I’m going to add to my Netvibes RSS feed: Diego Rodriguez(metacool)’s Unabashed Gearhead Gnarlyness and Mister Jalopy and Mark F.’s Dinosaurs and Robots. I hope I don’t need to explain Mr. Rodriguez’s new place to you; Dinosaurs and Robots says about itself, “Rather than focus on the newest trend, we will seek authentic, handy, rarefied, disgusting, illuminating, delicious, mysterious, intoxicating, commonplace, historic, intensely personal, entertaining and enlightened objects, both priceless heirlooms and exquisite trash.” Sounds good to me. Uniting both new blogs - a certain, shall we say, augmented, Ford product.

I’m testing micro/mobile blogging from the N810, using WordPy (an offline blogging client). Still thinking about the best way to get pictures from my good digital camera to Flickr - without a PC - but I know I can email from the camera in my cell direct to Flickr…

I know it’s a sign of my advanced age, but every so often I just fall over in amazement. Five years ago, posting to the web from just about anywhere in the developed world using a phone and a gadget that’ll fit nicely in a pocket? Right.

Technorati Tags: moblog

I’m trying to wrap my head around the whole Bear Stearns thing. While I’m doing that - and trying not to see it as a precursor to a financial apocalypse - happy St. Patrick’s Day!

JPMorgan Chase & Co. agreed to buy Bear Stearns Cos. for about $240 million, less than a 10th of its value last week, after a run on the company ended 85 years of independence for Wall Street’s fifth-largest securities firm. *

Value of the office building BS owns?

The 1.2 million-square-foot, 45-story structure built in 2001 is worth about $1.2 billion, based on the average $1,000 per- square-foot that comparable office space in the city is currently fetching.

Um. Wow. So the rest of Bear Stearns assets are worth in the neighborhood of -$960,000,000?

Update - Nouriel Roubini:

The response of the Fed to this run has been radical and in the form of the extension of the lender of last resort support to non bank financial institutions. Specifically, the new $200 bn term facility allows primary dealers – many of which are non banks – to swap their toxic mortgage backed securities for US Treasuries; second, the Fed provided emergency support to Bear Stearns and following the purchase of Bear Stearns by JPMorgan, is now providing a $30 bn plus support to JPMorgan to help the rescue of Bear Stearns; finally, now the Fed is allowing primary dealers to access the Fed discount window at the same terms as banks.

This is the most radical change and expansions of Fed powers and functions since the Great Depression: essentially the Fed now can lend unlimited amounts to non bank highly leveraged institutions that it does not regulate. The Fed is treating this run on the shadow financial system as a liquidity run but the Fed has no idea of whether such institutions are insolvent. As JPMorgan paid only about $200 million for Bear Stearns – and only after the Fed promised a $30 billlion loan – this was a clear case where this non bank financial institution was insolvent. *

A recent BLDBLOG post gave me the motivation I needed to do some photography and (brief) posting that has been on my ‘ought to get to that at some point’ list for six months. Last fall I noticed a lot of digging and pipe laying near home and on my drive to work. I was curious, but didn’t figure out what was going on until a story on the radio clued me in. The University of New Hampshire and Waste Management are collaborating on a project: EcoLine.

In 2008, UNH will become the first university in the U.S. to use landfill gas as its primary energy source. In partnership with Waste Management of New Hampshire, Inc., UNH launched EcoLine, a landfill gas project that will pipe enriched and purified gas from Waste Management’s landfill in Rochester to the Durham campus. The renewable, carbon-neutral landfill gas, from Waste Management’s Turnkey Recycling and Environmental Enterprise (TREE) facility in Rochester, NH, will replace commercial natural gas as the primary fuel in UNH’s cogeneration plant in January 2009, enabling UNH to receive 80-85% of its energy from a renewable source and sell additional power produced to the grid by mid-2009. Construction began in 2007 on thelandfill gas processing plant in Rochester that will purify the gas and on the 12.7 mile underground pipeline taht [sic - glad I’m not the only one taht does taht] will transport the gas from the plant to the university’s Durham campus.

I took some pictures this morning between deluges as I ran some errands - slide show is below. UNH’s cogen plant’s website is here. In a laudable bit of transparency (way to go!) they allow you to log in to a guest account on their monitoring system - the diagrams in the slideshow are screencaps of the monitor that I grabbed. If you’re really curious - I’ve mapped the pictures on Flickr - you can click through to see where this is happening.

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

• Observations on books as display items (yes, I’m thinking bowerbirds again) and on the fact that romance novels are not appropriate for this purpose - here. A hat tip to two writers of romances and a personal observation: unread books on my shelves are the result of a collision between bibliomania and the work week.

• Netvibes have just rolled out a new release (review here). One of the things the new version allows me to do is publish a public version of my portal - a ‘universe’ in netvibes-speak. I’m putting up a new category on the right margin; Alt Tentacles (yay DKs) will collect pointers to other debris I’m cluttering the web with. Flickr and Twitter get their own widgets - because they can.
• A musical interlude:

…as I argued a few weeks ago, before the monoline crisis fully blew up in public, no business that requires a AAA rating in order to be viable deserves a AAA rating in the first place. - Nouriel Roubini * (N. Roubini:macroecon::J. Kunstler:energy policy - h/t Tom)

• Friedrich von Blowhard has an interesting analysis of the ratings theater surrounding the monoline insurers here.
• John Robb posts on MEND, Henry Okah and 4GW in Nigeria.
• Reclaiming the concept of the go bag.
• Obsolete skills. Some are funny, some are (IMHO) just plain WRONG. Funny: Swapping floppy disks. Wrong: Starting a car that has a manual choke (my ‘85 LandCruiser had a manual choke - fabulous vehicle), Map Reading (tell the S&R team that map reading is an obsolete skill).

An aside - I have this cranky-old-man theory that an entire science and math curriculum could be built around teaching/learning/doing celestial navigation. (sticks head out door - “Hey, you kids, get off my lawn!”)

I’ve been tagged!

1. Pick up the nearest book (of at least 123 pages).
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people.

This really is the book that’s been near to hand for the past few days. I have it as an interlibrary loan, so if I snooze, I lose.

The Andronovo cultural zone covers an enormous portion of western Asia. Its western flank constitutes a contact zone with the Srubnaya culture in the Volga-Ural interfluvial and extending eastward to the Minusinsk depression (Fig. 3.5). Sites are found as far south as the foothills of the Koppetdag, the Pamir, and Tien-Shan mountains, whereas the northern boundary is unclear when it reaches the taiga zone. *

I tag HGP, M and/or D, Whimsy, Lex10 and Xtin (let’s see if this will cause her to emit signal).

Harbingers of the still distant thaw:

The sap is running.

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The sump pump is pumping.

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And Girl Scout cookies have made their appearance.