Club Troppo

From the Universe Today website. The Cassini mission has released some of the most detailed images of Saturn’s poles yet, revealing vast cyclones churning up the gas giant’s atmosphere in the north and south. These observations show very similar storms to the south pole observations imaged by the NASA spacecraft in 2006, only in far better detail. It is believed the north and south cyclones are generated by violent thunderstorms deep inside Saturn’s atmosphere; water condensing inside these storms output heat, fuelling the vortex extending 2,500 miles (4,000 kilometres) in diameter. The smallest features resolved are 120 kilometre (75 mile)-wide cumulus clouds rotating at velocities in excess of 325 mph (530 kph), more than twice the wind speed possible on Earth

Like a lot of modern libertarian types, my first in-depth exposure to economics came from the minority ‘Austrian School’ of economics. The Austrian school shares a lot in common with Chicagoan economics, but it parts ways with Chicago — and indeed most other economic schools — on the question of money supply.

Via Thoughts on Freedom comes an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal rehashing the argument, common amongst Austrians, that central banks should be abolished or downsized in favour of a return to the gold standard:

In the aftermath of this financial catastrophe, as we sort out causes and assign blame, with experts offering various solutions — More regulation! Less complex financial instruments! — let’s not lose sight of the most fundamental component of finance. No credit-default swap, no exotic derivative, can be structured without stipulating the monetary unit of account in which its value is calculated. Money is the medium of exchange — the measure, the standard, the store of value — which defines the very substance of the economic contract between buyer and seller. It is the basic element, the atom of financial matter.

It is the money that is broken…

If capitalism depends on designating a person of godlike abilities to manage demand and supply for all forms of money and credit — currency, demand deposits, money-market funds, repurchase agreements, equities, mortgages, corporate debt — we are as doomed as those wretched citizens who relied on central planning for their economic salvation.

Think of it: Nothing is more vital to capitalism than capital, the financial seed corn dedicated to next year’s crop. Yet we, believers in free markets, allow the price of capital, i.e., the interest rate on loanable funds, to be fixed by a central committee in accordance with government objectives. We might as well resurrect Gosplan, the old Soviet State Planning Committee, and ask them to draw up the next five-year plan.

There’s a lot to be said for this analysis. Of the three broad schools of economic thought I know the proverbially dangerous minimum about — Keynsianism, Monetarism and Austrianism — their downfalls have been stories of crisis. Keynsianism was mortally wounded by the stagflation of the 70s because it wasn’t meant to be possible. Monetrism will probably suffer a similar blow to its credibility in this crisis. Austrianism rejects both Keynsian fiscalism and monetarist fiddling with the supply of money; and demands free markets for both. This is a crisis almost custom made for Austrian economists, but there are probably too few for them to storm the gates of the policy-setting citadels around the world.
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This is really something IMO, but if you want an eerie and remarkable experience, just left click on this 1 minute movie to download it and travel in silence with Cassini around Saturn.

Awesome.

PS: well you’ll ‘left click’ if you use your left hand to operate your mouse like me.  Others will right click.

From the ‘being grateful for small mercies department, and from this website, here is extrasolar planet HD 209458b (also unofficially known as “Osiris”, which orbits a star in the constellation of Pegasus) revealed the strongest ever spectroscopic signature for a giant extrasolar planet, indicating Osiris is producing a huge cloud of gas. This gas is being lost from the planet’s atmosphere; Osiris is evaporating

I guess we can look forward to this as the sun swells and slowly fries us.  That is if that’s what it’s going to do.

And speaking of it heating up, over the fold . . . is the vehicle someone is hoping might be able to get around Venus to give us a detailed idea of what’s going on under those clouds. It’s not a very plausible mock up of what Venus’s surface might look like (in my wholly ignorant opinion) but it’s a cool little vehicle. (Continued)

Verily this is a cool new development.  Boeing is building super airships to double the capacity that can be airlifted around the world.  These babys will be the size of football fields (not ours but America’s) and fitted with four helicopter rotors and able to drag 40 tons of stuff.  Problem is that it has to be fairly calm weather as football field sized eggs tend to blow around a little when it gets gusty.  But I’m afraid that when it comes to engineering, big is beautiful for me.  When Melbourne was debating the Grollo tower this was regarded as very crass masculine reasoning which could all be traced back to some kind of phallic preoccupation.  Could be right for all I know, but I’d still like to see one of these things. 

Club Troppo’s own Missing Link included this item on Tuesday:

Henry Thornton examines the hurdles to shifting to another planet and concludes wed best start making serious efforts to save the ecosystem on this one (and ignore the idiot denialists).

Strictly speaking, this is not a correct deduction, for two reasons.
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I’ve written before on the need to introduce property rights over celestial objects in order to encourage ICI — intrasolar colonisation and industrialisation. Now Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit fame writes on lunar property law. For contrast see one of the original proposals in this vein, Mars: Who Should Own It.