Re: An ideal wristwatch


"Jack Denver" <nunuvyer@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
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"Alan K.Johnson" <ajohnson117@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
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John,

Read,study and act,how you do it is your business.Another
insight connected to energy depletion and the world ecnomy below.


http://www.traderview.com:80/economiccommentary/tedbitsEconomicCommentary.asp

Best Regards
Keith
Ps. I apologize for sending a e-mail,click wrong button.


Humans have a strong instinct to observe patterns (even where no pattern
exists) because pattern detection has survival value (if you eat the
brown mushrooms with the white dots, you'll get sick). In the old days,
the ancients would look up at the stars and see groups of stars forming
coherent pictures of various gods and objects (when in reality they are
just randomly dotted across the sky). In the same way we can look at a
graph of corporate earnings and see "head and shoulders" or a "wolf
wave" - if you looked at a graph of molecular motion you'd be able to
"detect" similar patterns even though in fact the motion is completely
random.

I repeat that the idea that we are somehow "running out of energy" is
completely wrong - maybe if we just sat dumbfounded and did nothing
different, at some point we would "run out" but of course that's not
what's going to happen, any more than we sat in the dark once we ran out
of whale oil.

We are not running out of energy. We are, however, running out of easily
recoverable and cheap reserves of oil. As oil is an almost universal source
of energy, many people simplify (wrongly so) the argument.

The second simplification that I do come across with tedious regularity is
the demand that an new and alternative source of energy be equal (or better)
in all aspects to oil in order to be deemed acceptable. We may have to
shift social and technological paradigms towards a more sophisticated model
of energy generation which will use various models depending on suitability
and local conditions. Solar power, for instance, cannot be a universal
technology, but it would work very well in sunny climes or as a partial
source of electricity; ditto wind, or tidal power. I can see a future where
some of my power comes from a nuclear power station, supplemented by solar
cells on my roof and a windd turbine at the bottom of my garden. Future
cars may be powered by a combination of solar cells, hydrogen and oil. This
approach of combining sources, however, seems to be too complicated for
quite a few people.....



In the early '50s, experts estimated that the total # of computers that
would be needed in the US for the "forseeable future" was maybe half a
dozen - one for the military to do ballistics tables, one for the social
security administration, one for the census bureau, etc. Computers were
huge things with thousands of vacuum tubes that cost millions of $ and
could only be justified for the most computation intensive tasks.
Everything else - corporate bookkeeping, the typing of documents, the
measurement of time, etc. would always be done the same way it had been
done before - with adding machines, typewriters, mechanical watches, etc.
So if you were a stock analyst, you would figure that Smith Corona or
Elgin or Friden were great stocks No one has a crystal ball that is worth
a damn.

But that example simply demonstrates the old pattern that we will invent (or
discover, or develop) a resource, process or product and only then dream up
uses for it. Most people are unworried about our hydrocarbon reserves
because of their faith in a deus ex machina technology, unaware that their
belief that we have a specific need and will find a suitable technological
solution to address that problem reverses this historical principle. This
is cart-before-horse thinking.




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