Cardboard Spaceship

Winnowing the Financial Nutcase Sites

If you like alternative views of what is going on in the financial and hence rest of the world, you can end up reading some sites that might not be mainstream, but what to look for? 

Here is the best summary of the go-to financial nutcase sites that I have ever seen, courtesy of "And the Band Played On."  Worth a read just as a summary of the current financial perceptions of the players...

Where are Commodities Traded? The Answer Might Surprise You?

Stumbled across this article in the good old Torygraph the other day, about who trades global commodities, not a trivial subject given some of the recent rises in commodity prices, and the impacts that this has had globally, including to some points of view, the uprisings of the Arabian Spring caused by food price inflation. 

Of the top ten, Vitol, Trafigura, Gunvor International, and Mercuria are all based here in sunny Geneva, and most of the rest, certainly Cargill and others, have major offices here.  Did you know that?  I certainly didn't when I moved here. 

Funny old town.

The Day the Donkeys Came to Visit

Some friends of ours in the village had moved to the Valais for a bit, to see if they wanted to live there.  They didn't in the end, but when they came back they had two new family members, in the form of two donkeys that had nowhere else to go. 

So, we went to see them on one of our walks.  Here is Mrs Spaceship walking long the road.  It is baking hot here, and we have the mother of all droughts,  Most of the crops are burnt in the field already.  It feels like Mid-August, and it isn't even June yet...

Here are the donkeys.  Looking quite happy in their new home.

We brought carrots, which seemed to be a guarantee of new friends.

And this is me, sporting my new no hair look, as it is about to all hit the deck anyway with the chemo.  Have to sure to wear a hat outdoors, to avoid a bright pink noggin, but it makes washing in the morning a lot quicker.

Hope you're enjoying a beautiful spring, except if you are in Scotland where I am sure that you are getting gale force winds according to the news. Weird.

Kindle!

I was musing about what do with the prospective Summer of Lumps, and what would I do with 14-16 weeks of more or less enforced idleness. 

Andy Todd of Half-Cooked proposed in the comments that I might buy a Kindle, and that his filled up with a year's reading in a matter of days. 

Excellent mind reading because I did!  It arrived a couple of days ago.  I had a choice to make between the excellent iPad, and the Kindle, and I plumped for the Kindle for two main reasons.  Firstly, because of supply chain issues caused by the Japanese disaster, iPads are on back order, and secondly, at 200 CHF versus 800 CHF, the Kindle seemed like much less of a techno-gamble. 

Man, there is much to like about it, not least that you can order a book on the go with the 3G version, and it will percolate down to you wherever you are by automagically.  The actual screen is a revelation, I think it is the best screen for legibility I have ever seen.  (for wowee graphics and dogfights no, but simple text it is excellent.)

Right now, I am re-reading the whole of Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy, which is the ideal book to read on such a thing.  In fact, you might even say it was the seminal idea that made it all seem reasonable. 

I can also see how a year's reading might suddenly build up with a few incautious kindle bookstore raids.

Recommended, excellent piece of kit.

Thanks Everyone!

Lots of people have written in with encouragement and cheerful advice, so thanks for that, it really has a good effect on morale which is good to start with, and certainly makes us all feel that we have a burden shared here in the Spaceship. 

Normal economic doom and gloom reporting after the break...  (well, maybe not.)

One thing is that I know that I have 14-16 weeks of time that will not be available as normal, and require me to take it easy for very good reasons, but neither can I see myself remaining totally idle.  What do do with this unexpected bounty? 

Attack of Lumps - Ike!

Well, I have referred to an illness that I had with swollen lymph glands, as the Attack of Lumps, and it really wasn't seeming to go away.  So I had a hospital appointment for a couple of overnights in the Cantonal here in Geneva, it kind of snowballed from there. 

First they did CT scan and found lots of like minded lumps all up and down my lymph system, and so next day I had my first ever general anaesthetic, and a skilled surgeon took out a bunch of lymph nodes on my neck to try and find out what ails me.  Turns out to be some kind of lymphoma that needs classifying, and then treating.  So, suddenly, I get a bunch of tests, like a FULL medical shakedown, spine probes, bone marrow sections, PET scans, heart work ups, the lot. 

Good news.  It's an aggressive B cell Lymphoma.  It's a marker of how far treatment has progressed since I looked at this kind of thing that aggressive cancer is good, because it bites.  Imagine that a classic hard cell cancer is a kind of fish sleeping at the bottom of the pool, when you do chemotherapy, you are trying, essentially, to kill the cancer before you kill the patient, the sleepy fish doesn't eat that much quicker than the surrounding organism.  In the aggressive one, it's like dropping food into a pool of Piranhas, nothing else gets a look in. 

So, I have had my first session of chemo in hospital, supported by a truly superb team, which went very well, and now my job is to not strain the body while it, and the chemo, do the donkey work.  Six or seven more sessions to be done, likely all in out patient, and there is a likely very good prognosis, according to all my experienced, medical, and non-likely to bullshit for morale reason friends. So, going to be a quiet summer in the garden, but it could be a whole, whole lot worse, and I am feeling optimistic, whilst retaining realistic as an anchor point. 

Still, cancer?  Wasn't expecting that really...

 

 

Global Warming - a Very Necessary Read

More to the case that global warming is overstated, and mainly being talked up on economic grounds.  This report from former EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) employee Alan Carlin, whose work was at best sat on, if not actively repressed, when he was at the EPA.  He published the journal as non-peer reviewed, which was taken askance, but now here it is after peer review.

http://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/8/4/985/pdf

His conclusions, from the abstract:

"The economic benefits of reducing CO2 emissions may be about two orders of magnitude less than those estimated by most economists because the climate sensitivity factor (CSF) is much lower than assumed by the United Nations because feedback is negative rather than positive and the effects of CO2 emissions reductions on atmospheric CO2 appear to be short rather than long lasting.

The costs of CO2 emissions reductions are very much higher than usually estimated because of technological and implementation problems recently identified.

Geoengineering such as solar radiation management is a controversial alternative to CO2 emissions reductions that offers opportunities to greatly decrease these large costs, change global temperatures with far greater assurance of success, and eliminate the possibility of low probability, high consequence risks of rising temperatures, but has been largely ignored by economists.

CO2 emissions reductions are economically unattractive since the very modest benefits remaining after the corrections for the above effects are quite unlikely to economically justify the much higher costs unless much lower cost geoengineering is used.

The risk of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming appears to be so low that it is not
currently worth doing anything to try to control it, including geoengineering."

My view is clear, we have many important problems to solve: environmental pollution and degradation, resource depletion, population (over)growth, and many related factors.  They all need sorted urgently, so let's not chase the wrong hare. 

Pagan Rituals of Switzerland Part Two

Not content with Easter, we had the chance to participate in a Pagan Ritual with actually some significance.  A friend of ours in the village is a M. Benoit Junod, a very witty and engaging man, who works for the Aga Khan foundation setting up interesting global exhibitions and so on. 

He had a Shinto gate in his garden for many years, as his father, a physician, was the first foreign medical doctor to go to Horoshima after the atomic bomb was dropped.  Dr Marcel Junod wrote of his experiences, of which some extracts here at the Red Cross.

The old gate had succumbed to the seasons, and so a new one was made this time by an artist and artisan from Belgrade, where Junod Jr spent some time in the Swiss Diplomatic Corps(?) and also met his now wife there. 

Anyway, walking the dog, we happened upon Benoit driving his lawn tractor to the local stream bed to get stone, so he mentioned that the shrine was going up, and I said I would come and take photos.  (Given the Attack of Lumps at the moment, I shied away from the heavy lifting.)

Here we see it ready to be moved into place:

All ready for the raising:

Here the two Serbian chaps are putting it into working order, to my embarrassment, I cannot tell you either of their names, as Serbian names are a mystery to me.

And here we see Benoit with a tin of paint to show us what colour it will be eventually.  

It's a beautiful thing, and I think that it commemorates events of importance too.  I was glad to take part. 

Pagan Rituals of Switzerland Part One

Easter and Oestrous come from the same root concept, I discovered when reading Neil Gaiman.  Here is celebration of a very early hot spring, and sunshine, is the local Colza (rapeseed) crop in flower.

We had friends come round to hunt the Easter eggs, dropped by the friendly Easter Bunny.  Here they are under starters orders:

AND THEY'RE OFF!

Once all had been retrieved, time for some well deserved Egg munching:

The excitement was too much for some of the bigger children, and the Smallest Space Cadet of them All's Godfather had to have a wee nap.  Bless. 

So, pagan ritual one complete.

Mysterious Lumpy Nodes of... Dunno Yet?

I'm on sick leave from the day job at the moment, and have been for about ten days.  I've been feeling a bit off colour now and then recently, which is abnormal for me.  I started to have puffy lymph glands in my neck, and that then went kinda solid, so Mrs Spaceship told me to go and get it checked out, being medical and all. 

Went to see Professor of Lumps at the local hospital, and he got me in for a needle biospy which is inconclusive, so I have to go in next week and get a full node taken out for inspection as to what it might be.  I am also being regularly jabbed and blood sampled and am now tested free of a bewildering number of ailments, such as, in no particular order, Toxoplasmosis, HIV, Epstein Barr Virus, Hepatitis A, B and C, CMV, etc, etc.  I have also had checks that seem to rule out much of the cancer world, which is welcome.

That's the problem with the lymph system is that it has one indicator, ON!  After that you have to try and figure out if you are going to be dead by tomorrow tea-time with rancid blood pouring out of your orifices, or whether your body is over-reacting to some benign virus that will go away of its own accord very shortly. 

Sigh.  Well, at least the most dreadful possibilites seem to be behind us.