Carbon Midwife

For a long, long time these endeavors have complained that the Amazon Way cannot be sustained. The complaint boils down to a simple sentence. It's cheaper to ship by the tonne than by the each. There's a reason national stores exist: they ship from producers by the railcar load and ship to their distribution centers the same way. From there, semi-truck loads deliver to stores. Shipping by the each in 747s doesn't work. The main reason Amazon has rarely shown a profit.

Well, boy howdy, today brings news that Jeff finally concedes to the obvious.

Starting Tuesday, all Prime members in the United States will be able to select a particular day to receive a week's worth of Amazon deliveries. After a Prime member enrolls in the "Amazon Day" service, Amazon will hold everything they order throughout the week, and it will deliver the items together on the customer's selected day.

Well, d'uh.

We'll see if Amazon can sustain if its method becomes indistinguishable from Sears circa 1900. What do you think?

Sixteen Candles

If you're not watching "How the Universe Works", you must turn in your geek credentials. While "Parts Unknown" was the best show on the TeeVee, "Universe" is the most interesting. From what I can tell, each 'new' episode is cobbled together from past segments stitched with one or two new ones. Yesterday dealt with dark matter, dark energy, and the End of It All.

So, I read today's NYT, which being Tuesday has the "ScienceTimes" extra section, and there is a Dennis Overbye piece on the front page and most of the back page. Dealing with the self-same topics. Much of the text could have been from the "Universe" episode (or vice versa), which makes sense given that the science is just a bunch of facts.

Hubble discovered universe expansion in 1929, but in 1998 it was found that the expansion was accelerating. How that can be is the subject of the "Universe" episode and much of the article. What caught my attention in the article was this:

But to calibrate the Hubble constant, astronomers depend on so-called standard candles: objects, such as supernova explosions and certain variable stars, whose distances can be estimated by luminosity or some other feature. This is where the arguing begins.

For some years, I'll guess from the time I first heard about acceleration, I wondered how that could be known. Expansion is deduced simply from red shift, but acceleration requires a benchmark to make the comparison. That's the standard candle. I never bought that such a thing could actually exist, from the point of view earthlings being able to measure such. To do so we need to know both the local (to the distant object) luminance and the distance from here to there.

The article spends some time attempting to nail the standard candle down. I'll leave it to the reader to decide whether it's been nailed.

Revenge of the Server

Came across this juicy quote from a piece on 5G:

The 5G network can also act like a cloud server, performing much of the computing and storage that otherwise would have to be done by the self-driving cars themselves. That could potentially save the cars a lot of power and space.

One might also re-phrase, thus:

The 5G network can also act like a cloud server, performing much of the computing and storage that otherwise would have to be done by net-clients themselves. That could potentially save net-clients a lot of power and space.

Yet another episode in that thrilling soap opera, "Revenge of the VT-220", brought to you by TCP Productions. While many still view transaction control as a client process, that notion's never been truly intelligent, and the excuse is getting a tad long in the tooth. Toss in Organic Normal Form™, and the times they are a changing.

The Asymptote of Progress - part the fifteenth

David Leonhardt today adds some data to the assertion that Depressions are driven by collapsing aggregate demand. Using data from Piketty, Saez, and Zueman one can clearly see that growth has been held down by stagnant moolah in the hands of the many.

You can't have growth, if most of the folks don't have the moolah to buy stuff. Once again.

Alas, once again, Leonhardt makes the common mistake of comparing groups by mean/average. So, we see the 'upper middle class' tracking with per capita GDP. Of course it does!! Per capita (mean/average) tracks with the upper 10% of the income distribution!!! Income/wealth in our kind of economy is heavily right skew. What else would you expect? Leonhardt makes no reference to the meaning of the confluence. Sad.

The Asymptote of Progress - part the fourteenth

A recurring theme in these endeavors is that actual progress was/is driven by the filling out of the periodic table. Turns out that 2019 is the 150^th anniversary of the first attempt at the table. So, here's some reporting memorializing the year.

Quite literally, the periodic table and quantum mechanics explain everything that is familiar about the world. They explain water and rock and people. They explain how the air we breathe oxygenates our lungs. They explain how fires burn and why diamonds are what they are.

So, I guess it's true that progress has been driven by the filling in of the periodic table. Which, I guess, tells us about the future of progress.

I Wish I Said That

Yesterday I heard a mainstream pundit call out "Humpty Trumpty". My head exploded. Not least because I'd failed to coin the epithet. Dang.

So, off to the innterTubes to find out who did it first. Turns out there's more than one version, of course. There's also "Dumpty Trumpty", "Trumpty Dumpty", "Trumpty Dumpy", and so on.

Earliest I found was here on SNL, November, 2015. That long ago. Since I only watch the cold open, hoping for Baldwin, I guess I missed it.

What's Old Is New Again

Again.

In today's (deadtrees division) NYT Tech page, Steve Lohr makes the following assertion:

IBM cannot compete head-on with Amazon, Microsoft and Google in the big-spending game of building out massive data centers to provide the infrastructure layer of cloud computing to one and all. So it is seeking to shift the competition.

Fun factoid: it was IBM who invented the cloud way, way back in the 1960s (or, depending on how picky a definition one wishes to use, 1932) , under the name The Service Bureau (a lengthier history is here). So, yes IBM has and could if it decided to. But IBM hasn't ever really been a tech company, but a marketing machine.