Guys, whether you believe astrology is bullshit or not, she's not making predictions. Technically speaking, as far as the orientation of Earth's axis relative to the rest of the universe, she's right. This is the dawning of the age of Aquarius.

Wind idea: think of the atmosphere as you think of the oceans... they both flow around in patterns, wash up and around mountains, have layers, etc.. This is how a hurricane can build off the coast of Africa then swamp through the Caribbean and the U.S. Atlantic coast. And this is how you'll sometimes see lower clouds going one way and higher clouds going another.

The question of getting dizzy at the poles/equator... remember we're talking about something that rotates one time over the course of 24 hours. We get dizzy because our vestibular system orients us... the vestibular system is essentially tubes of saline with nerves arranged basically to sense the pressure of the saline in 3D space. Swinging your head around and then halting rapidly leaves this saline swirling a bit, and you get a vertigo-like sensation.
>> ^Contagion21:

>> ^Sagemind:
I'm convinced, without a doubt that the world is round.
But, the wind idea is interesting/facinating, and the question of would I get dizzy standing on the axis of the planet if I were used to standing at the equator, are all good questions.
Does anyone have a link that may discuss these phenomenon? ... Sometimes an explanation is more convincing that saying, "Well that's a stupid statement or opinion." Maybe someone schooled in this area (or who has more spare time than others)can guide us to some interesting reading on this.

It's a frame of reference issue.

>> ^Sagemind:

I'm convinced, without a doubt that the world is round.
But, the wind idea is interesting/facinating, and the question of would I get dizzy standing on the axis of the planet if I were used to standing at the equator, are all good questions.
Does anyone have a link that may discuss these phenomenon? ... Sometimes an explanation is more convincing that saying, "Well that's a stupid statement or opinion." Maybe someone schooled in this area (or who has more spare time than others)can guide us to some interesting reading on this. <img class="smiley" src="http://cdn.videosift.com/cdm/emoticon/smile.gif">


It's a frame of reference issue. It's harder to define mathmatically, but the view point that the earth is standing still and the rest of the universe is revolving around it is just conceptually valid.

The wind argument assumes that the atmosphere is not part of the earth and should be sitting still while the earth rotates beneath it. However, the physical planet applies more force to the atmosphere than the surrounding vacuum so eventually, the atmosphere will also rotate in sync with the planet itself based on Newton's laws.

I'm convinced, without a doubt that the world is round.

But, the wind idea is interesting/facinating, and the question of would I get dizzy standing on the axis of the planet if I were used to standing at the equator, are all good questions.

Does anyone have a link that may discuss these phenomenon? ... Sometimes an explanation is more convincing that saying, "Well that's a stupid statement or opinion." Maybe someone schooled in this area (or who has more spare time than others)can guide us to some interesting reading on this.

So if you thrust it upwardly whilst holding it, and never let go, simply pull it back down quickly, after a few seconds, it would snap a panorama while it rests in your hands since it doesn't use a gyroscope to tell where it stops accelerating. Right?

This means that if you thrust it upward quickly enough, you could pull it back and hold it there while in amongst a crowd, and when the mechanism reaches the predicted time based upon initial acceleration for predicting its apex, then it will take the photo from within the crowd. Seems like it would make more sense to detect DEceleration, as that would facilitate either an upward OR a downward motion, and it wouldn't be reliant on possible bad guesses at when it would stop moving (dependent on environmental influences such as air viscosity, temperature, wind, obstacles in the path, etc).

Cool idea anyhow. I wonder what it would look like to spin it really fast as you toss it.. Neat psychedelic blurring on MOST of the photosphere, but on the axis, it would be less blurred.

Hey thanks for the tip, it does put things a little more in perspective ;-)

In reply to this comment by hpqp:
a tip that sifter @<a rel="nofollow" href="http://videosift.com/member/bareboards" title="member since May 17th, 2006" class="profilelink">bareboards taught me: hover your cursor over the number of views to see how many unique views your vid had (i.e. how many vote-toting users saw or at least opened your Sift). You can do this for other people's vids too to see the vote/view ratio.

In reply to this comment by toferyu:
275 views of this gem and only 16 votes ????
Come on people .... :-D

a tip that sifter @bareboards taught me: hover your cursor over the number of views to see how many unique views your vid had (i.e. how many vote-toting users saw or at least opened your Sift). You can do this for other people's vids too to see the vote/view ratio.

In reply to this comment by toferyu:
275 views of this gem and only 16 votes ????
Come on people .... :-D

>> ^Payback:

The camera is on it's side. The scan lines are perpendicular to the rotational axis. By the time the camera takes one sweep of video, it's physically spun a few times, so what you're getting is a strobe effect which grabs info from all over the place.


This is what is causing the really wide angle view. It looks like the camera is catching nearly a 360 degree view of the horizon (you can see from the thumbnail pic that there's an almost complete sine wave in the horizon).

Who the hell thought this would be a good idea in the first place? And I'd love to see a video of their face when they first played this back and it wasn't just a load of blury bollox

The camera is on it's side. The scan lines are perpendicular to the rotational axis. By the time the camera takes one sweep of video, it's physically spun a few times, so what you're getting is a strobe effect which grabs info from all over the place.

Yes, the rolling shutter is part of the effect, but it won't produce the waves on it's own. Imagine the rotas turning so the axis is perpendicular to the horizon. Regardless of if the shutter was rolling or not you will get a perfectly flat horizon.

I take a lot of panoramic shots and if you aren't controlling the axis of rotation properly when taking the shots you'll get a curved horizon.

Very interesting. The sine waves are because you are seeing a very wide angle image and the axis of the blades isn't perfectly perpendicular to the horizon. The wave is controlled by the angle of the axis of the rota, not the speed. Altering the speed a little would move the position of the peaks of the wave across the image, but not alter the height of the waves.

At the points in the video where the axis of the rota is pependicular to the horizon the horizon appears as flat. This is because as the rota spins the horizon appears in the same place in the image throughout the rotation. As the helicopter learns the camera will at some points be looking below the horizon, and at others it will be looking above the horizon, hence the sine wave effect we see. The high points in the wave are when the rota is looking low, the low points when the rota is pointing high.

If the axis of rotation of the rota is parallel to the horizon you get the vertical lines of ground/sky/ground/sky, since this is what the end of the blade is pointing at as it rotates

I have come to the conclusion they where actually trying to change the axis of the Earth.

>> ^pyloricvalve:

Thanks for the reply. There were things I really didn't understand about Krugman's Hangover Theory article, especially that very point that you quote. In fact I tried to ask in a post above about this but maybe you missed it. To me it seems only natural that there is no unemployment in the boom and there is some in the bust. Both are big reorganisations of labour, it is true. However, to start with the boom is much slower and longer so adaptation is easier. Also the booming industry can afford to pay slightly above average wages so will easily attract unemployed or 'loose' labour. As it is paying above average, there will be little resistance to people changing work to it. The boom is persistent enough that people will train and invest to enter the work created by it. The information for entering the boom industry is clear and the pay rise makes the work change smooth. I see no reason for unemployment.
The bust however is short and sudden. There is no other obvious work to return to. That information of what the worker should do is much less clear. The answer may involve taking a small pay cut or on giving up things in which people have invested time and money. Many people wait and resist doing this. They may well not know what to do or try to wait for opportunities to return. Thus there is plenty of reason for unemployment to be generated by the bust.
If I hire 100 people it can probably be done in a month or two. If I fire 100 people it may be a long time before they are all employed again. For me this difference seems so obvious I have a real trouble to understand Krugman's point. I know he's a very smart guy but I can't make head nor tail of his argument here. Can you explain it to me?


I'm trying to think how to connect what you're saying to the point Krugman's making (at least as I understand it).

At a minimum, he're Caplan making the same point in less space:

The Austrian theory also suffers from serious internal inconsistencies. If, as in the Austrian theory, initial consumption/investment preferences "re-assert themselves," why don't the consumption goods industries enjoy a huge boom during depressions? After all, if the prices of the capital goods factors are too high, are not the prices of the consumption goods factors too low? Wage workers in capital goods industries are unhappy when old time preferences re-assert themselves. But wage workers in consumer goods industries should be overjoyed. The Austrian theory predicts a decline in employment in some sectors, but an increase in others; thus, it does nothing to explain why unemployment is high during the "bust" and low during the "boom."

Krugman saying the same thing in more accessible language:

Here's the problem: As a matter of simple arithmetic, total spending in the economy is necessarily equal to total income (every sale is also a purchase, and vice versa). So if people decide to spend less on investment goods, doesn't that mean that they must be deciding to spend more on consumption goods—implying that an investment slump should always be accompanied by a corresponding consumption boom? And if so why should there be a rise in unemployment?

And as a bonus, here's Brad DeLong making a similar case.

My real handicap here is that I'm not familiar enough with the fine details of the Austrian theory to say with authority what they believe. So if I misrepresent their position, it's out of ignorance.

What I gather is that ultimately the Austrian theory of boom and bust is that central banks are messing with the "natural" balance of investment and consumption goods, with a boom happening when investment is being artificially stimulated (by low interest rates), and a bust happens when interest rates eventually go back up (due to inflation, or expectations thereof).

The response from people like Caplan and Krugman is to point out that since aggregate income has to equal aggregate expenditure (because everyone's income is someone else's expenditure, and vice versa), a fall in investment should mean a rise in consumption, and a rise in investment should mean a fall in consumption. Which means we should never see an overall boom or an overall bust, just periods of transition from a rise in consumer goods and a fall in investment, to a fall in consumer goods and a rise in investment. We should never see a situation where they both fall at the same time.

But we do see a fall in both during the bust. Why?

Keynes's answer was that it happens because people are hoarding cash. Either people are themselves stuffing mattresses with it, or more likely, banks start sitting on reserves and refusing to lend out, either out of a fear of their own solvency (Great Depression), or because a deflationary cycle with high unemployment makes sitting on cash look like a good, safe investment for them (Great Depression, and now). Put simply, depressions are the result of an excess demand for money. And since money is an arbitrary thing, it doesn't have to be a scarce resource, we can always just make more...

I want Rick Perry nowhere near the executive branch of the United States. That said, the politicalmathblog post comes across as fairly even handed. The point of the first 4 graphs is to explain how a state can grow a bunch of jobs but still have a high unemployment rate. His supposition that Texas is the victim of it's own success is the only controversial statement in that section, and he clearly labels it as his own opinion.

Meanwhile your think progress article seems completely irrelevant. Since it doesn't normalize for population size, their graph is naturally going to have longer bars for larger states, so calling someone the "worst" is basically just saying, "its bar goes in the wrong direction and it's a big state." But do the directions of these bars even mean anything? Look at the "best" state on the list. It's Michigan. Is Michigan's economy doing well lately? This makes me believe that this measurement has little to do with the actual economic health of a state.

Maybe some smarty pants economist can come explain why I should care about that chart, but for now I don't, and I don't think you should either.

>> ^NetRunner:

>> ^Morganth:
The actual numbers on Texas' jobs: http://www.politicalmathblog.com/?p=1590

Thank you for a textbook example of how to lie repeatedly with statistics.
For brevity's sake, just look at the first four graphs. Note that the Y-axis in the first is the raw, numeric number of jobs in Texas. Then look at graph number four showing population growth.
Chart 4 invalidates entirely the point Chart 1 is trying to make, but the surrounding text pretends it amplifies it.
More here: http:/
/thinkprogress.org/economy/2011/08/17/297556/report-texas-ranks-dead-last-in-total-job-creation-accounting-for-labor-force-growth/

>> ^Morganth:

The actual numbers on Texas' jobs: http://www.politicalmathblog.com/?p=1590


Thank you for a textbook example of how to lie repeatedly with statistics.

For brevity's sake, just look at the first four graphs. Note that the Y-axis in the first is the raw, numeric number of jobs in Texas. Then look at graph number four showing population growth.

Chart 4 invalidates entirely the point Chart 1 is trying to make, but the surrounding text pretends it amplifies it.

More here: http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2011/08/17/297556/report-texas-ranks-dead-last-in-total-job-creation-accounting-for-labor-force-growth/