Greece, a Mexican Standoff

You gotta hand it to the Greeks, they got chutzpah. They are so broke that nobody will loan them any more money. They borrowed so much that the lenders don't dare cut the Greeks off, 'cause if they do, all those Greek bonds the lenders hold will dry up and blow away, leaving the lenders as broke as the Greeks. There was a saying "Borrow one dollar and the bank owns you, borrow a million dollars and you own t he bank."
Greece has a E20 billion bond repayment coming up next month. They don't have the cash to pay it off. So the rest of Europe (Germany mostly) is talking about a Greek handout to let the Greeks make their March repayment. But the Europeans want the Greeks to shape up before handing them another E130 billion. The Greeks don't want to shape up, they have riots in the streets every time shape up (cutting back on pensions, salaries, civil servants) is mentioned.
So far, the Greeks have won a significant concession. Greece will only have to redeem it's bonds for what the owner paid for them, not at face value. Needless to say, a lot of folks have been bailing out of Greek bonds by selling them for cheap and taking a loss. The buyers are hoping for a windfall when bonds they bought for some small fraction of face value get redeemed for face value. This latest deal says "Oh no you don't." Beware of Greeks at the negotiating table. The spirit of Odysseus lives on.
Clearly some of the confusion in the Greek bond wheeling and dealing has to do with speculators who want to get rich quick.
The Economist never talks about these messy details, but the Wall St Journal does.

So what does it all mean?

Rick Santorum sweeps all three caucuses yesterday? Can he rise up and beat Romney? Is Newt really dead? Do these caucuses mean anything? What happened to Romney, coming off a solid win in FL?
Which way is up?

Charlie Bass opposes Keystone XL pipeline

According to The Hill, Charlie Bass of New Hampshire was the sole Republican to vote against a House measure to force approval of the Keystone XL pipeline.
WOW. Talk about stabbing your constituents in the back. Charlie, just in case you don't remember, ALL your constituents have to buy heating oil at $4 a gallon. Keystone XL would improve the supply and lower the cost of heating oil. Also the cost of gasoline which everyone needs to get to work (if they still have jobs). You still have a primary election to win, to say nothing of beating Kuster in November, if you survive the primary challenge. I glad I voted for Jennifer Horn over you last time.
The greenie arguments against the pipeline are totally worthless. A pipeline is the most spill proof way to move oil, many times safer than sea going tankers. The oil is going to come in one way or another, if it doesn't come by pipeline, it will come by tanker. That "environmentally sensitive" Sandhills area in Oklahoma (or is it Nebraska?), is just one more stretch of prairie already criss crossed with 25,000 miles of pipeline. One more won't matter. The Canadians will sell to the Chinese if they cannot sell to us. It doesn't make any difference to Gaea if the oil gets burned in China or in the US.

Solidarity of the Sisterhood

Andrea Tantaros of Fox News in a discussion of the Obama decision to force Catholic schools and hospitals to provide birth control pills as part of their health plans. After some heckling from a pro-Obama commentator Andrea said:
"It doesn't really matter, those poor Catholic women are too ignorant/retarded/stupid to use birth control even if was given to them free."
Ohh, Andrea. That's an unkind slam at your own gender. And it's not true. All women, rich or poor, Protestant or Catholic are aware that pregnancy is a life altering event, (to say the least) and they take all kinds of measures to prevent unwanted ones.
Andrea, that remark blew away any respect I might have had for you as a commentator.

Couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of people

Law firms are buying lots of expensive liability insurance now, because companies are more liable to sue their law firm when things don't go right. What's more, the companies zero in on the bigger law firms who actually might have some money to pay off, rather than mom-and-pop outfits that can barely make payroll.
Couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of people.

Naming Rights

Over here the Weather Bureau assigns names to "tropical depressions" aka hurricanes. They used to only do girls names, but the gender police caught up with them and now they use boys names too. In Europe, the Berlin Institute of Meteorology used to do the same thing. Then after a budget cut some brilliant German thought up the "adopt a vortex" plan whereby anyone could sponsor a name.
BMW marketing paid E199 to buy the name "Minnie" for one storm system and E299 to name another one "Cooper". (Mini Cooper, get it?). Unfortunately for BMW, "Cooper" turned into a monster bringing Arctic temperatures, dozens of storm related deaths and heavy snow as far south as Rome.
The BMW people issued a public apology for the inconvenience. It is not known if they plan to persist in this marketing effort.

Literature and Arts vs Science and Engineering

Starting in middle school, education breaks into two tracks, Literature and the Arts, and Science and Engineering. Literature is English, Latin, and modern languages. Arts are history, painting, architecture, sculpture, music. Science and Engineering includes physics, chemistry, biology, computer science, electrical, mechanical, civil, and chemical engineering. We will ignore the nothing studies like physical education, gender studies, black studies,sociology, education, political science, and underwater basket weaving.
Science and engineering requires some (sometimes a lot of) mathematics. It also leads to jobs in the private sector. Literature and Arts requires no math, and only leads to teaching positions. Of the nothing studies, at least an education major can lead to a teaching job, if the student can survive the boredom of a major with little to no intellectual content.
Looking back on it, my str0ng recommendation for new students is to pick the science and engineering track. The subjects are intellectually interesting, which is another way of saying "fun". They are intellectually rigorous, theories have to be supported by repeatable experiments and observations, which means the conclusions reached are highly likely to be true.
Note, I did not say "bound to be true". In science, we know our history, we know of many instances of new discoveries that invalidated or radically extended existing knowledge. Now a days we like to say, "it's true as far as we know today". In science and engineering it is extremely useful to know the limits of our knowledge. When troubleshooting is it valuable to be able to say "This and this and this are well understood, but that is cutting edge technology and not well understood, yet."
Pure science is the pursuit of new scientific knowledge. Engineering is the application of science to make useful devices, products, and structures. Engineering is fascinating in itself, the question "what science will make this new device work, or produce that new product, both at cost low enough to sell?" It's puzzle solving.
Mathematics is essential to a career in science and engineering. Algebra is the barest minimum. Plane geometry and trigonometry are just about mandatory, and calculus, ( from derivatives, to integrals, and then differential equations) is used just about everywhere. In high school, the wise student will keep his options open by taking the right mathematics courses. High school ought to teach algebra, plane geometry, and trigonometry. If you miss these high school courses you will be behind the power curve in college. College math ought to start with calculus, and without the algebra and trig, the calculus student is doomed unless possessed of genius level mathematical ability. The high school student who dodges the math courses, or gets sucked off into "business arithmetic" or "statistics" even "matrix algebra" has locked himself out of the science and engineering track. Algebra, geometry and trig are required, the others are not. High schools these days tend to call "pre-calculus" what they used to call trigonometry. Either way, you have to take it.