Soon You'll Be Able To Buy Gecko Tape At Your Local Hardware Store:   Scientists long wondered how geckos could do tricks like this.  Now that the scientists have figured it out — geckos have hair-like setae that use van der Waals forces to stick to almost everything — the scientists are planning to produce "gecko tape", not tape made out of geckos, but tape that uses the same trick geckos use.

The tape has some useful qualities:

Mr. [Kellar] Autumn and scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, were responsible for the research that enabled Mark Cutkosky, a professor of mechanical engineering at Stanford, to develop a prototype for a tape based on gecko adhesion. The tape, which is reusable, was so strong, Mr. Autumn said, that when they tested it, he was able to stick his 50-pound, 8-year-old daughter to a window with it.

That was a little more than two years ago; there are now at least 50 patent applications pending in gecko-adhesion technology, Mr. Autumn said, and he holds several patents himself.

"Imagine hanging a picture on the wall with reusable gecko tape that doesn't leave a residue or damage the wall — it's like a thumbtack, but doesn't leave a hole," he said.  "The technology is ready to move from research to development.  I think we are no more than three to five years from the first commercial products."

Gecko tape has many potential uses.  It might even be used in surgery.

(More here, including some videos.

And I should mention that the New York Times article is a useful guide to the kinds of tape that you can buy right now.)

How High Would Income Tax Rates Have To Be To Cover The Obama-Pelosi-Reid Deficit?  The Tax Foundation did a quick static analysis and came up with an answer.  Individual income tax rates now range from 10 to 35 percent.  If you increased them proportionately enough to cover the OPR 2010 deficit, they would range from 24.3 to 84.9 percent, almost 2.5 times higher.  If you accept the Obama administration assumptions, the tax burden could slowly decline after 2010, but even in 2020, the tax rates would still have to be more than 1.4 times as high as they are currently.

That analysis assumes, of course, that these higher rates would not slow down the economy, and that individuals would not change their behavior, to earn less or to shelter more of their income from taxes.

By way of the Tax Prof.

Driving In The US Is Safer Than Ever:  Trafic deaths fell nearly 9 percent last year.

The Transportation Department said Thursday that its projections show total traffic deaths declined nearly 9 percent in 2009 -- to 33,963.  That's the lowest toll since 1954.   In 2008, an estimated 37,261 people died on the roadways.

The newest numbers fit into a trend of steady decreases since 2005, when an estimated 43,510 people were killed.
. . .
The number of miles traveled by American drivers in 2009 grew by 6.6 billion, or 0.2 percent, according to preliminary data from the Federal Highway Administration.  But this follows a dip in vehicle miles traveled in 2008 and 2007, when the economy was tanking.

Still, safety officials say the rate of deaths per 100 million miles traveled also dropped to a record low.  It fell to 1.16 in 2009, compared with the previous record low of 1.25 the year before.

I blame George W. Bush.

More seriously, I wonder whether this story will get one tenth as much coverage as the Toyota gas pedal story has.  I doubt that it will.

You Shouldn't Do This while driving.   (Warning: This story may be hard to explain to younger sprogs, but is so weird I just had to pass it on.)

The Versatile HP D7560 Printer:  It isn't often that I recommend a product that I had to replace.  But I like this printer well enough so that I would recommend it in spite of having to replace the first one I bought.

The printer isn't for everyone.  If you want the very best quality photo prints, you are going to have to spend more money.  (Or take your memory card to a photo store.  I would rate the photos from the printer as having about 95-98 percent of the quality that you would get at a photo store)  It isn't an all-in-one, so if you want a scanner with your printer, you should look for a different model.  But if you want a budget printer that does a number of things very well, this would be a good choice.

Let me bring in an imaginary Jones family to show you how you can use the printer.  Mr. Jones gets up a little early on a weekday because he is driving to a business appointment with a new client.  He boots up the computer, uses a mapping program like the one in Bing, and then prints out the directions and the map.  (If you do use Bing, be sure to use the print button on the bottom left to prepare the map for printing before you print.)  Mrs. Jones is meeting a friend for lunch and wants to show off a few pictures she took at a family gathering.  She turns the printer on, plugs in her camera's memory card, and uses the little color LCD to crop and print the pictures.  That evening, after supper, Jenny Jones sits down to write her grandmother a thank-you letter for a Christmas sweater.  At her mother's suggestion, Jenny prints a picture of herself in the sweater to go with the letter.  (By the way, Jenny did not need to change paper to print the photo, since the printer has two paper trays, one a dedicated photo paper tray which can hold 4x6 or 5x7 photo paper.)  Johnny Jones has been waiting impatiently for Jenny to finish, because he wants to print another copy of his music CD.  He writes the music to the CD, prepares a label using the somewhat clumsy HP software, puts the CD in a tray, pulls down the CD/DVD holder, slides the tray in, and prints his label, which includes a flashy picture of his band.

I don't have any band pictures to show you, but I can show you four samples which will give you an idea of what the D7560 can do with printable CDs and DVDs.

(Three of them show scenes from Mt. Rainier; the fourth was an experiment using one of the templates supplied by HP.)

Many users say that the HP software that comes with the printer is clumsy.  I would agree, since I found that it was dumbed down a little too much for my tastes.  (And to make fancy CD labels, you may have to get another program.)  But it is usable, especially for those who want to do a little bit of everything with one program.

The price for the printer is quite reasonable; Newegg has been selling it for $79.99 since just after Christmas.  You'll have to buy a printer cable, if you don't have a spare, since it doesn't come with one.  Newegg is not a good place to buy paper for the printer, except for this combo, which includes 150 sheets and the four photo inks.  (The printer also has a separate, larger black cartridge for printing text.)

One last tip:  According to a number of users, the printer will often tell you it is out of ink in a cartridge when it isn't.  So, you might want to just keep printing until it actually runs dry.

(The first printer worked fine, except that it would not print centered on CDs and DVDs.  It wasn't off by a lot, about a millimeter, but it was off by enough to spoil the looks of a CD.  Searches at Amazon and Newegg didn't find anyone else with the same problem, so I assume that I was just unlucky.

Incidentally, I may have hit on a good way to resolve similar problems.  I first explained what had happened to HP support in an email — and then realized that I could attach a picture to the next email so they could see the problem.  That got me a fairly fast replacement.

HP offers four kinds of paper to use with printer, "every day", "premium", "premium plus", and "advanced".  I would avoid the first, except for proofs.  Premium plus is supposed to be higher quality than premium, and should last many years.  I can see just a little difference in quality between the two, but I have to look for it.  The "advanced" paper has about the same quality as the "premium", but dries much more quickly.)

Obama's Politically Correct Charities:  The Los Angeles Times describes the groups that are getting Obama's Nobel Prize money as "an almost perfectly balanced list of PC charities".

That's a little snarky, but correct.

The Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change Eliminated The Medieval Warm Period:  In this post, I mentioned that the Medieval Warm Period was once uncontroversial.  What I did not realize when I wrote the post is that the IPCC once accepted it, too.

This Frank Lanser post shows how the IPCC's views on the subject evolved.  (Or perhaps I should say, devolved.)

A brief check indicates a "warm MWP-consensus" before IPCC published the Mann hockey stick graph in 2001.  But after 2001, results on MWP seems to approach the IPCC viewpoint.

Lanser has some good questions about how and why the IPCC changed its mind on the MWP.  The change was convenient, to say the least, for their main argument, that climate change is a great threat.

Does Toyota Really Have An Accelerator Problem?  Regular readers know that I have my doubts about that.  And so does an expert in such matters, retired psychology professor Richard Schmidt.   Schmidt is dubious because he has seen all this before.

But based on my experience in the 1980s helping investigate unintended acceleration in the Audi 5000, I suspect that smart pedals cannot solve the problem.  The trouble, unbelievable as it may seem, is that sudden acceleration is very often caused by drivers who press the gas pedal when they intend to press the brake.

Here's why Schmidt thinks that:

I looked into more than 150 cases of unintended acceleration in the 1980s, many of which became the subject of lawsuits against automakers.  In those days, Audi, like Toyota today, received by far the most complaints.  (I testified in court for Audi on many occasions.  I have not worked for Toyota on unintended acceleration, though I did consult for the company seven years ago on another matter.)

In these cases, the problem typically happened when the driver first got into the car and started it.  After turning on the ignition, the driver would intend to press lightly on the brake pedal while shifting from park to drive (or reverse), and suddenly the car would leap forward (or backward).  Drivers said that continued pressing on the brake would not stop the car; it would keep going until it crashed.  Drivers believed that something had gone wrong in the acceleration system, and that the brakes had failed.

But when engineers examined these vehicles post-crash, they found nothing that could account for what the drivers had reported.  The trouble occurred in cars small and large, cheap and expensive, with and without cruise control or electronic engine controls, and with carburetors, fuel injection and even diesel engines.   The only thing they had in common was an automatic transmission.  An investigation by the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration found no electro-mechanical defects to explain the problem.  Nor did similar government studies in Canada and Japan or any number of private studies.

(Emphasis added.)

Consider just the point I highlighted in bold.  There were no cases of sudden unintended acceleration in cars with manual transmissions.  Granted, cars with stick shifts are less common than cars with, as we used to call them, slush boxes.  (At one time, young folks, it was widely considered unmanly to drive a car with an automatic transmission.)  Even so, there are enough of them so that, if there were some general problem with gas pedals, then we would expect some cases in cars with stick shifts.   (I believe that in some car models identical gas pedals are used with both stick shifts and automatic transmissions.  Real car guys are invited to correct me, if I am wrong about that.)

And there are more reasons to think that driver error may explain most of the incidents of sudden unintended acceleration in the rest of the op-ed.

(More thoughts on this subject from Michael Fumento.)

Fewer Americans Rode Buses In 2009 Than In 2008:  After several years of increases, ridership fell by 5.15 percent in 2009.

(Two agencies in Washington state had bus ridership increases in 2009.  One of the two, Sound Transit, may have gained at the expense of another agency, King County Metro.)

Here, as in most of the United States, bus transit has a small share of passenger trips.

The number of passenger trips taken on buses is extremely low when compared to total passenger trips in the region.  On average, there are about 14 million passenger trips per day in the Puget Sound region.   According to the APTA, regional buses serve only about 420,000 passenger trips per weekday.  This means buses only carry about 3 percent of all daily trips in the Puget Sound region.

Those numbers got me wondering how much we use mass transit now, as compared to the past.   Following the links to the American Public Transportation Association, I found this Fact Book.  According to Table 1 in the Fact Book, passenger trips by bus, heavy rail, light rail, and trolley-bus peaked in 1944-1946, with about 64 million passenger trips, per day.

At that time, the US population was less than half as large as it is now.  (For 2007, the latest year for which the historical table has data, there were about 28 million passenger trips per day by bus, commuter rail, para-transit, heavy rail, light rail, trolley bus, and other (Ferry boat, aerial tramway, automated guideway transit, cable car, inclined plane, monorail, et cetera).  Buses were used for more than half of the trips, but less than half of the miles traveled.)

The 2009 decline is mildly surprising, considering all the subsidies for bus travel, and all the public efforts to get more people to ride buses.  But it may be less surprising if we remember how far mass transit ridership has fallen since World War II.

Cross posted at Sound Politics.

Does Pelosi Have The Votes To Pass ObamaCare?  Michael Barone, who has counted a vote or two in his time, says she doesn't, and may not be able to get them.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi has indeed shown mastery at amassing majorities.  But it's hard to see how she'll do so on this one. The arithmetic as I see it doesn't add up.

The House passed its version of the health bill in November by 220-215.  Of those 220, one was a Republican who now is a no.  One Democrat who voted yes has died, two Democrats who voted yes have resigned, and one Democrat who voted no has resigned as well.   So if everyone but the Republican votes the way they did four months ago, the score would be 216-215.

But not everyone is ready to vote that way.  The House bill included an amendment prohibiting funding of abortions sponsored by Michigan Democrat Bart Stupak.  The Senate bill did not.   Mr. Stupak says he and 10 to 12 other members won't vote for the Senate bill for that reason.  Others have said the same, including Minnesota's James Oberstar, chairman of the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, and Dan Lipinski, a product of the Chicago Democratic machine.

And there are more difficulties, as Barone goes on to say, including the distrust almost all House members feel toward the Senate, and the fact that so many Democratic congressmen are vulnerable in November's election.   Forty of them hold districts that McCain carried last November, and many more hold districts that Obama carried narrowly.

These difficulties probably explain why Pelosi and company have floated the idea of skipping a direct vote through the "Slaughter rule"

House Rules Chairwoman Louise Slaughter is prepping to help usher the healthcare overhaul through the House and potentially avoid a direct vote on the Senate overhaul bill, the chairwoman said Tuesday.  Slaughter is weighing preparing a rule that would consider the Senate bill passed once the House approves a corrections bill that would make changes to the Senate version.

(Though she represents an upstate New York district, Congresswoman Slaughter was born and raised in Harlan County, Kentucky, a place famous for violence and fraud.)

The "Slaughter rule" solves one problem for the Pelosi team; they can pass the fixes to the Senate bill at the same time they pass the Senate bill.  It strikes me as a completely illegitimate rule, though I am no expert on House procedures.  It may be a sign of desperation.

All that said, the InTrade bettors are, as I write, giving ObamaCare a 52 percent chance of passing.

  Many bettors must believe that Pelosi will be able to accumulate the necessary 216 votes with gentle persuasion, and perhaps a few bribes and threats.

The Euro Has A "Fundamental Flaw"  So says Der Spiegel.

The notion that the European common currency is based on nothing but a series of lies is now taking its toll.  All of the founders of the euro knew that the new currency could only be stable if all member states committed themselves to sound financial policy and, in the long run, spent only as much as they collected in tax revenue.  But many ignored this principle right from the start.

The writers of the American Constitution assumed that political leaders would often misbehave.  That's more realistic than assuming that majorities in every member of the European Union will always behave prudently.

What is puzzling is that the European leaders who established the euro didn't understand this point when they set up the currency.  Europe does not lack for examples of governments, even very popular governments, behaving badly.

As far as I can tell, there isn't any easy way out of this mess.  The best solution would probably be to go back to national currencies, but that is unacceptable to most European elites.

Mat Welch Goes Through A Series Of Obama Fibs:  And ends by wondering whether Obama believes what he says.

And yet it smacks of something worse still.  When a politician cannot fathom opposition to his policies except as the manifestation of wicked manipulation by bad guys, remediable only by more thorough "explanations" from the good guys, it indicates an unseemly paternalism.  And if he cannot take the hint that Bush-Obama bailout-and-spend economics are deeply and increasingly unpopular, that indicates something immovable about his core economic ideology.  With those two factors as backdrop, it's hard to say which would be worse: if the president didn't really believe what he said, or if he did.

I've been wondering about that myself and finally came to the conclusion (for example, here) that Obama does not care whether what he says is true.

Everything else being equal, most of us would rather tell the truth; Obama — if I am right in this diagnosis — doesn't care whether he is telling the truth, just whether he is having the desired effect on his audiences.

This example is telling.  During the primary campaign, Obama opposed insurance mandates, in order, I have speculated, to differentiate himself from Hillary Clinton.  Now he favors them, but has never really explained why he switched.  Did he believe what he was saying then about mandates, or does he believe what he is saying now?  My answer, paradoxical as it may seem, is that then and now he said what he thought his audiences wanted to hear, without spending much time thinking about what he actually believes.

David Brooks Gives Us a chuckle. (Or possibly a guffaw, depending on your tastes.)

Then there is the larger issue of exploding federal deficits.  A few Democrats are genuinely passionate about this, President Obama among them.  He has fought tenaciously to preserve a commission that might restrain Medicare spending.  But 90 percent of the people in Congress have no emotional investment in this issue.

(Emphasis added.)

Right.  And Hugh Hefner is genuinely passionate in his support for celibacy outside of marriage.

(It is still a mystery, at least to me, why Brooks has not noticed that Obama is not a moderate conservative like Brooks, and that Obama's actions do not always match his words.  Brooks' childish faith in this Chicago politician would be touching if the object weren't so unworthy, and if the faith weren't shared by so many supposedly serious journalists.

To be fair, I should add that most of the column is sensible — which makes this slip even more mysterious.)

In Enriching Uranium, The First Step Is The Hardest:  And the Iranian regime has already made that first step.  That's the discouraging lesson in this New York Times article.

Four years ago, Iran began enriching uranium on an industrial scale with centrifuges, machines that spin extraordinarily fast to separate uranium 235 from the more common form of the element, uranium 238.   Uranium 235 is a natural rarity that splits easily in two, or fissions, in bursts of atomic energy, either in a reactor or a bomb.  Reactor-grade fuel is usually defined as uranium 235 of about 4 or 5 percent, and bomb-grade as 90 percent or higher.

The desert complex, the Natanz nuclear facility, raised the level of uranium 235 to roughly 4 percent from its natural concentration of 0.7 percent.  Over time, the facility produced two tons of concentrated material, enough, if further enriched, to make about two atom bombs.

Then, on Sunday, Feb. 7, Iran announced it would begin enriching its stockpiled uranium to 20 percent — ostensibly to make fuel for a research reactor in Tehran.  Nuclear experts said that although this might sound like a leap, moving to 20 percent from 4 percent was actually a fairly easy step — not at all as demanding and time consuming as raising the level to 4 percent from 0.7 percent.  And the ease of further enriching uranium once it is already enriched made the world take notice.
. . .
A practical illustration of nonlinearity is that Iran — or any other nuclear hopeful — needs increasingly few centrifuges to make uranium 235 increasingly potent. For instance, one industry blueprint features 3,936 centrifuges for enriching up to 4 percent, 1,312 centrifuges to 20 percent, 546 centrifuges to 60 percent and just 128 centrifuges to 90 percent — the level needed for a bomb

I keep thinking that the news from Iran can't get any worse — and then it does.  As of now, I think it unlikely that either we or the Israelis have any practical way to prevent Iran from getting the bomb.

Pelosi Has A Novel Argument for health insurance "reform".

"You've heard about the controversies within the bill, the process about the bill, one or the other.  But I don't know if you have heard that it is legislation for the future, not just about health care for America, but about a healthier America, where preventive care is not something that you have to pay a deductible for or out of pocket.  Prevention, prevention, prevention—it's about diet, not diabetes.  It's going to be very, very exciting.

But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it, away from the fog of the controversy."

(Emphasis added.)

You can sort of see what her speechwriter was trying to say with that line, but I don't think that the speechwriter found the best way to say it.  (Or were those Pelosi's own words?)

Some Are Beginning To Miss George W. Bush:  Stanley Fish, who predicted this, takes a victory lap, and infuriates the commenters at the New York Times, once again.

I know you're not supposed to, but I just love to say I told you so.

What I told you back on Sept. 28, 2008, was that within a year of the day he left office George W. Bush would come to be regarded with affection and a little nostalgia. The responses (over 300 before the comments were closed) to that prediction were overwhelmingly negative; even the very few who agreed with me attributed what they took to be a sad fact to the stupidity of the American people.  The other 290 or so said things like "No way" ; "Are you kidding?"; "Are you mad?";"What a ridiculous and insulting premise!"; "I'll miss him like a rash"; "This must be a satire"; "Bush is a sociopath"; "George Bush has destroyed this country"; "History won't forgive him"; and (a popular favorite) "I hate the man."

Well it's a bit more than a year now and signs of Bush's rehabilitation are beginning to pop up.  One is literally a sign, a billboard that appeared recently on I-35 in Minnesota.  Occupying the right side (from the viewer's viewpoint) is a picture of Bush smiling genially and waving his hand in a friendly gesture.  Occupying the left side is a simple and direct question: "Miss me yet?"  The image is all over the Internet, hundreds of millions of hits, and unscientific Web-based polls indicate that more do miss him than don't.

Some formal polls have found the same thing; though a majority of the public still rates Bush's performance poorly, he is doing better in recent polls than he did at the end of his second term.

Just to infuriate the Bush haters further, Fish ends by arguing that historians will have a "nuanced" view of our 43rd president.

Actor Sean Penn doesn't understand, or doesn't respect, our 1st Amendment.

(For the record:  I would not — yet — call Chavez a dictator, though he is a friend to many dictators, and he has taken some actions that can fairly be called dictatorial.  But there is still some chance that he can be ousted in a fair election — and might be since his policies have been disastrous for Venezuela.)

Trillion Dollar Deficits Forever?  That's what the Congressional Budget Office is projecting if Congress passes Obama's programs.

(Red bars that went down would have been more appropriate to this subject, but I am not going to take the time to rework the bar graph.)

According to the CBO estimates, the deficit would fall to a mere $724 billion in fiscal year 2014, and then begin to grow again, passing a trillion in 2018 and continuing to rise, probably forever.

Note that matters are already bad (the dark blue bars) without expanding government spending as Obama wants to do.

By way of Greg Mankiw, who links to the CBO letter, for those who want a closer look at the numbers.

Obama's Trillion Dollar Mistake.

"Our cost-cutting measures mirror most of the proposals in the current Senate bill, which reduces most people's premiums and brings down our deficit by up to $1 trillion dollars over the next decade because we're spending our health care dollars more wisely," Obama told an audience at Arcadia University in Glenside, Pa., a suburb north of Philadelphia.
. . .
But the budget office did not say the Senate health care bill would save $1 trillion over the next decade -- or even close to that figure.

It estimated the bill would save $132 billion from 2010 to 2019, leaving Obama's "next decade" estimate $868 billion short.

All right, it was only an 868 billion dollar mistake.  But we all know that estimates on these programs are almost always too low.  And I am nearly certain that the budget office got those numbers with the help of some implausible assumptions.

I sometimes get the feeling that Obama isn't entirely comfortable with numbers, especially big budget numbers.

Massa Mystery:  As I am sure you know by now, Democratic Congressman Eric Massa has announced that he is resigning, effective today.  In his resignation statement.  Congressman Massa took all the blame.   Accounts then said that he had been accused of harassing a male staffer for months.

But this weekend he went on a radio show and retracted almost all of the blame, saying that he was being railroaded over a single incident at a wedding, an incident that doesn't seem to amount to much, if you allow for the fact that all involved were drunk.  And that he was being railroaded because of his vote against ObamaCare.

He has had many more quite colorful things to say, as you know if you read Drudge regularly.  (Majority Leader Steny Hoyer is denying some of Massa's charges.)

So what actually happened?  Beats me, though I will say that his first story seems more plausible.   (Perhaps he discovered that the investigators didn't have much evidence on him, in between his resignation and this weekend.).

More:  Here's the story from the ethics committee.  It is compatible with Massa's first story, but not his second.