The Extent That the Central Bankers Distort the World

At the start of May, I did a post on James Rickards and some sage words he had on "That Whole Coming Economic Collapse Thingy". 

He'll be among the first to tell you that financial collapse could happen this week or in a decade.  It's impossible to tell.  In many ways, it's like an avalanche: it's impossible to blame the avalanche on any particular snowflake, but any one of the continuing snowflakes could cause it.  What's it look like?  The only "bank" with any solvency left is the International Monetary Fund.  The IMF has Special Drawing Rights, SDRs, that would allow it to prop up the world when the collapse happens.  His most likely scenario would be that all banks around the world, all banks, would be shuttered.  After some time, perhaps a few days, perhaps a week, everyone would be able to withdraw 250 or $300 a day for food and energy expenses. 

I mentioned his book, "The Death of Money", and have been reading it when I get a few minutes here and there.  I have to say I'm learning interesting things in every chapter.  Enough to get to the rare point of recommending it before I'm done reading it. 

The latest chapter I'm reading goes into some of the ways the Fed has been distorting the economy and markets.  

• Trying to achieve inflation.  This is the root of virtually all of it.  The prospect of an extended deflation was so terrifying to the FED that they reduced interest rates to almost zero (ZIRP) - negative real interest rates.  But the "natural" tendency for prices over the long term should be deflationary.  Why?  Productivity increases in manufacturing and continual seeking of lower labor prices should be lowering the prices on goods we buy.  The world is deflationary, yet the Fed is pushing inflation. 
• ZIRP in turn destroys savers.  Anyone saving for college, retirement: anything, earns too little on their savings to really build them.  Rickards figures ZIRP has cost American savers $400 Billion each year: "a normalized interest-rate environment of 2 percent would pay $400 billion to savers who leave money in the bank. Instead, those savers get nothing, and the benefit goes to banks that can relend the free money on a leveraged basis and make significant profits."
• ZIRP is what has dried up the loans for small businesses.  Small business loans come from bank to bank lending: big businesses either borrow from big banks or get cash easily selling stock.  But that interbank lending is unattractive to the banks because they get more profit from doing other things with their money.  Since small business is really the job creation engine in the economy, ZIRP is a major factor behind keeping the number of jobs down.  
• The whole idea of creating inflation to raise housing prices and stock prices is the so-called "wealth effect".  The idea is that consumers see the stock indices on the news everyday and know their 401k savings (such that they have) are tied to the market.  In addition they tend to know their house's price, so when those two prices are up, they feel wealthier and spend more.  The problem with this is that actual research has failed to turn up much evidence to support the idea.  Studies are all over the place so you could honestly say they not only don't know how large the Wealth Effect is, they don't even know if it encourages or discourages spending!  At the very least, they can't even calculate if the benefit is worth the cost of the market distortions they're creating.
• Another idea behind inflation, which combines with ZIRP to create negative interest, is that people who realize their savings are evaporating will spend more.  The reality is more complex.  There's evidence some savers, faced with seeing their savings not growing, double down on the saving, denying themselves even more and trying ever harder to save.  As Jim Rickards put it: "As a result, many citizens are saving even more from retirement checks and paychecks to make up for the lack of a market interest rate. So a Fed manipulation designed to discourage savings actually increases savings, on a precautionary basis, to make up for lost interest. This is a behavioral response not taught in textbooks or included in models used by the Fed."
• ZIRP has made the derivatives bubble larger as banking and investment houses try to get higher yields.  The total notional value ("face" value) of the world derivatives market is over a quadrillion (thousand trillion) dollars (that was in 2011!)  Some financial writers say the actual value is much less than that, "only" 20 to 30 Trillion.  It helps to remember Federal Spending is around $3 to $4 Trillion and the entire World GDP is only around $65 Trillion.  Quoting Rickards again: "A definitive study conducted by the IMF covering the period 1997– 2011 showed that Federal Reserve low-interest-rate policy is consistently associated with greater risk taking by banks. The IMF study also demonstrated that the longer rates are held low, the greater the amount of risk taking by the banks."  It's commonly stated that at least one form of derivative, the CDO (Collateralised Debt Obligation) was behind the 2008 crash.  A decade of low interest rate policies have only made this worse than 2008. 

A lot of this really is transferring wealth from you and me and the economy at large to the banks.  We hear people complaining about the "banksters" all the time, but I don't see banks doing anything that they're not being strongly encouraged and rewarded to do by the Fed.  The Federal Reserve and the other central banks are the real "banksters".   And they wouldn't be able to do it if not for their government enablers.  

This is just a few paragraphs from a single chapter in James Rickards' book.  It starts with a fascinating look at economic terrorism that's full of things I've never seen before.  If you find this stuff interesting, I recommend it.  

Maker Movement Infographic

I stumbled across the term "Maker" a while back while researching something or other, and found Make Magazine.  I immediately realized I had a lot in common with these folks.  When I got interested in electronics, you could pick up magazines at any grocery or drug store.  They were full of articles on how things worked and projects to build.  Popular Electronics, Electronics Illustrated and lots of others were sold everywhere (back issues can be read at those links).  A bit later, the Homebrew Computing Club was started in Silicon Valley by a few guys who had the audacity to think they could build computers in their garages.  They met regularly to share inventions and discuss new ideas. None of the members understood the historical implications of the meeting when a couple of guys in the club, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, presented their new computer, which they called the Apple. 

Today's makers are the continuation of that spirit.  With the widespread availability of cheap, single board computers, like Arduino, Raspberry PI, BeagleBone, and the (coming) "$9" CHIP, computer control of your projects becomes much easier than when you needed to program a standalone PC.  Add 3D printing, home CNC machines and more, and you get the new industrial revolution.  The projects are impossible to pigeonhole.  At one moment someone is putting colored LEDs everywhere; the next moment someone else is making CNC egg coloring robots.  Maybe that's not your thing, it's mostly not mine, but we have more in common than not.

Click to Enlarge Image



A Movement in the Making
Infographic by CustomMade

To borrow a closing from electronics trade magazine EDN:

Humans are genetically wired to be makers. The maker movement is simply the result of making powerful building and communication tools accessible to the masses. It is a grassroots subculture that is enabling engineering innovation on a global scale. By democratizing the product development process, helping these developments get to market, and transforming the way we educate the next generation of innovators, we will usher in the next industrial revolution. The world is ours to make.

Techy Tuesday - Is Relativity Relevant to Everyday Life?

Most people are aware of at least one aspect of Relativity: the famous mass/energy equivalence relationship.  This HTML format blog editor won't let me do superscripts or real math notation, so I'll write it as "E = m*c*c"; the energy obtained from completely converting matter to energy is the mass converted times the speed of light squared.  This is the energy that results from fission ("atomic") or thermonuclear fusion ("hydrogen") bombs.  A tiny bit of mass converts to enormous amounts of energy because the speed of light is an enormous speed.

There's much more to Relativity theory, including effects on the passage of time.  You've probably heard of the "twin paradox" an example of the effect of "time dilation", that time passes slower for moving clocks than stationary ones.  This effect is tiny until the speed of the clock approachs the speed of light, and wasn't really experimentally confirmed until practical atomic clocks could be constructed in the late 1950s.  Two clocks were synchronized to each other in a lab and then separated.  One stayed in the lab, the other flown around the world at the highest speeds available.  When the clocks were brought back to each other, their times were different; the one that flew was slower by the predicted amount.  This isn't a property of the clocks, it's a property of space time that Einstein deduced.  

Time can be measured very, very precisely and as the physicists have thought of better ways of making atomic clocks, relativistic effects have been verified in other ways.  The latest atomic clock at the National Institutes of Standards and Technology, F2, should neither gain nor lose one second in about 300 million years, or 1 part in almost 10 quadrillion. The clock is based on a "fountain" of cesium atoms to determine the exact length of a second.  One of the seemingly bizarre conclusions of special relativity is that clocks change the rate they run as the distance from the center of a gravitational field changes.  Clocks on mountaintops run faster than clocks in valleys.  These are very tiny effects, but NIST atomic clocks measured the difference between two clocks when one clock was raised one foot!

This sort of stuff is interesting to most people, but they never dream that relativity will ever have any effect on their lives.  The speeds for time dilation to be visible are absurdly high, and the differences in time from climbing even to the top of Mt. Everest are just too small to ever see (not counting the movie "Interstellar", which showed them quite well). And the vast, vast majority of us will never work on nuclear weapons and turn matter into energy.  (Side note: in the Star Trek universe, they routinely "freeze out" energy into matter in their replicators, creating tools, food, whatever.  Energy has to be essentially limitless for that to be remotely possible.)

It turns out that if you're like most people, you're using relativity pretty regularly.  The GPS systems, now built in to our cars, our phones, and so many other things, would not work if relativity wasn't incorporated into their design. 

The GPS system consists of 24 satellites in high orbit around the Earth. These satellites travel at about 9,000 miles per hour and orbit at an altitude of about 12,000 miles (for comparison the International Space Station orbits at around 250 miles). Each satellite carries an atomic clock with an accuracy of around 1 nanosecond. The satellites are distributed so that from any point on the Earth’s surface there is a line of sight to at least 4 satellites. A GPS receiver on the ground (or on an airplane in flight) receives timing and location data from these satellites on a 1.575GHz radio carrier signal.

Without Albert Einstein’s universe altering theories of relativity there would be no GPS. Crazy ideas like time slowing down with velocity, or mass bending the curvature of a four dimensional fabric called space-time are critical for GPS to work. Instead of an accuracy measured in feet (or inches for the military) it would be measured in miles without Einstein’s theories being taken into account. Not exactly accurate enough for driving directions! In fact, within a very short amount of time the errors would accumulate to the point of making the entire system useless.

These two major effects on the GPS system come straight from Einstein:

• Time dilation: For GPS satellites traveling at 9,000 mph, time slows about 7,000 nanoseconds per day as compared to a stationary receiver.  (Pretend there could be a stationary receiver up there at 12,000 miles!)
• Clock slowing due to position in the gravity well:  gravitational effects speed the satellite atomic clocks by about 45,000 nanoseconds.  45,000 nsec faster – 7,000 nsec slower due to time dilation means the clocks are 38,000 nsec per day faster for the GPS satellites.  Radio waves travel about 1 foot per nanosecond, so without designing for the relativistic effects included, the distance measurements to each satellite would be off by 38,000 feet (or about 7 miles) per day.  In two days, 14 miles off, and so on. 

A more detailed paper (13 page pdf) is here.

When I was growing up and then in school, we talked about this, but nobody ever talked about the GPS system requiring relativistic corrections.  No one I talked to ever assumed we'd need to adjust for relativity in our work.  

(the GPS constellation - from Wired)

Thousands Standing Around

Everyone's favorite agency, conceptually paired forever with the Patriot Act, the TSA has just turned in some wonderful performance on "Red Team" tests where agents try to smuggle guns, bombs and knives onto aircraft.

Homeland Security officials confirmed to Fox News that TSA screeners failed 67 out of 70 tests -- or 96 percent -- carried out by special investigators known as "red teams."

In one case, an undercover agent with a fake bomb strapped to his back set off a magnetometer -- but the screener still failed to find it.

Karl Denninger has a good perspective:

If there had been a mere 10 said people in this country (out of 330,000,000 people in the nation) nine planes would have been blown up and the 10th guy would have detonated himself when he got caught, blowing up the airport instead.

It also says, as Karl more or less points out, that nobody in the last 12 years has even tried to smuggle something onto a plane in America because the odds are almost certain that they would have succeeded.    

But the most important thing it's saying is that every penny spent on the TSA is a waste.  Again, the only surprise here is that they admitted it.

Cheer up, TSA.  You're not completely worthless.  You can always serve as a bad example.

FEC Member Proposing "Quotas" For Women in Elected Office

In what appears to be one of those few moments where the statists reveal their real hopes and intentions, panelists on a forum held at the Federal Election Commission headquarters (FEC) in Washington on May 12 suggested a number of solutions to the perceived problem of a lack of women participating in politics. This wasn't official FEC business, it was a "brainstorming meeting" paid for by someone else, but it's still highly instructive.  Here we have members of the FEC and some other organizations addressing how to solve the problems they think exist in the political system.  Their proposals included quotas for women in office, more public funding of campaigns, and total overthrow of the American economic system.

The forum, hosted by FEC Chairwoman Ann Ravel, has been the subject of controversy in recent weeks. Though it was paid for by the independent agency and hosted in FEC facilities, the Democratic commissioner was the sole organizer of the event and selected all of the panelists herself.

Ravel, who has served as the current chair of the FEC for four months, recently said she was going to use her position to focus on “getting information out” to voters. She noted that the goal of the forum was to “contemplate solutions to the underrepresentation of women in the political process” and to look at “the challenges faced by women in running for office.”

That link in the second paragraph is to an article in the New York Times in which Chairman Ravel said her agency would be unable to prevent criminal tampering with the 2016 elections.  Which ought to come as a surprise only in the sense that she committed a DC gaffe: she told the truth. 

“The likelihood of the laws being enforced is slim,” Ann M. Ravel, the chairwoman, said in an interview. “I never want to give up, but I’m not under any illusions. People think the F.E.C. is dysfunctional. It’s worse than dysfunctional.”

Conventional wisdom is that elections have to be won by such a substantial amount, called the margin of fraud, that they don't go into recount.  Ask Al Franken.  But back to the fun of the special conference at FEC headquarters,

“If I was really playing God, I’d probably have to completely, like, dismantle our economic system, that doesn’t value women’s work in the same way it does men’s,” said Adrienne Kimmel, one of the forum panelists. Kimmel also serves as the executive director of the Barbara Lee Family Foundation, which describes itself as working to “advance women’s equality and representation in American politics.”

Kimmel suggested that women have a diminished role in politics because they are also excluded from the top levels of the business world.
...
In addition to quotas, Norris said, campaign finance laws could be used to encourage women to run for office. In particular, she suggested, limits should be placed on “donors and caps on parties in terms of how much they can spend, and caps on candidates.”

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled such limits to be unconstitutional in its 1976 decision, Buckley v. Valeo, so Imposing expenditure limits on federal candidates or political parties would require a constitutional amendment.

“I know in America that sounds as though it’s a radical revolutionary – I won’t say left-wing agenda – but nevertheless brand new idea,” Norris went on. “If you’re in Britain and you’re running as a candidate of any party, you can’t really spend that much money – $15,000 to $20,000 maximum, basically… You can’t buy ads, so that gets rid of that. You shove a pamphlet through people’s doors, that’s it, and then you meet people,” she said.

There's a pretty stunning openness in the article.  There's no hiding the fact that they want to tear apart the country as it exists and remold it to their own desires, as the Fabian Socialists used to say.

(Fabian Socialists hammering on an Earth heated red hot to "remould it nearer to the hearts' desire")

Lightning From Uncomfortably Close

The time is September, specifically the weekend after Labor Day.  The year is 1976.  I had been a ham since February of '76, and had a few friends who were introducing me to lots of typical ham activities.  I lived in Ft. Lauderdale at the time, working in my first job as an electronics technician.  Some of these friends suggested a "road trip" up to Melbourne, for the annual Melbourne Hamfest as my first introduction.  It's about 150 miles between the cities, and in those days, Interstate 95 didn't go through.  It was interrupted in places and the trip took more like 3 1/2 or 4 hours than today's 2 1/2 hours.  Instead of spending the night, we were on the road early and heading back late in the afternoon.

I remember this so clearly because on the drive back, while crossing between back roads and where we could pick up I-95 again, I came the closest I have ever been to a lightning strike.  Even now, 39 years later, it is vividly clear in my mind.  Florida is the lightning capital of the US and Central Florida is the most active place in the state.  According to the National Weather Service, the number of annual thunderstorm days in the central Florida area are:

• East coast (Melbourne/Vero Beach) = 70-80
• Interior (Orlando) = 80-90
• West coast (Lakeland) = 90-100

As you can see from those statistics, thunderstorms are common here, especially on summer afternoons like that.  I was in the right rear seat looking out the window at the guard rails, bolted as they are to concrete posts alongside the roadway.  It was not raining extremely hard; the lightning tends not to be in the densest rain. 

Suddenly a blinding flash of light and a concrete post was hit.  It couldn't have been more than a car length ahead or so, so no more than 30 feet from where I was sitting.  The bolt looked enormous - several feet across - and painfully bright.  Then just as suddenly as it flashed on, it flashed off.  In the bolt's place in the air were what I've always thought to be little balls of glowing air.  Ionized?  Actually burning?  I have no idea.  This was definitely one of those "time freezes" moments and it felt like several seconds with the balls drifting slowly in no particular directions.   Then, BANG, the second stroke occurred, painfully bright and feet wide again.  After it flashed off, I don't recall the glowing balls of air.  During this whole event, the car was still moving, so by the time the second strike occurred, it was no more than five feet from where I was sitting. 

For the last 39 years, that has been a vivid memory.  I have never been that close again, and never seen the phenomenon of the glowing balls of air again.  Until today.  A friend sent me this 10 second video taken by the dashcam in a police car.  The strike occurs around the 6 to 7 second mark and for perhaps two seconds, glowing balls of air are visible, quickly self-extinguishing.   This frame grab shows the density of the glowing air near its peak, and they're only visible against the much darker cloud.  One or two long-lasting balls can be seen on the right, near the ground level right up to the end of the video.  

This is the closest thing to what I saw that day that I've come across in these 39 years.  It's farther away, for sure, but the contrast of how bright the lightning looks to the rest of the day looks just about right. 

That day I was as close to a strike as I've ever been, and I really don't want to get any closer.  Anyone who isn't a little bit afraid of lightning doesn't understand the problem.

About That "PATRIOT Act and New Technology" Post

If you haven't read the comment thread after the cartoon post from two days ago, you should. 

Just about the only privilege I get as the blogger here is that I get to write long, thoughtful responses to comments.  Longer than Blogger lets you readers leave as a comment.  Aside from the argument in the comments, there's some really good content there.  I honestly expected to get this kind of response to what I said about the PATRIOT act last Saturday, not to this post, which I put up as fun/profound humor. 

The way I see it?  First off, I agree with the first Anon's point that the probability of a nuclear terrorist attack, or a nuclear strike on a major Western city within the next five years is extremely high.  Maybe not if the economic collapse comes before then, and I think it will.  A nuke attack is absolutely going to usher in really bad times. (Actually, there might be a nuclear attack even if the Western economies collapse - just to finish us off).  WWIII is a real possibility. 

The point about them only storing metadata is pretty meaningless. There were several widely published articles when this whole story first broke that demonstrated just how powerful that metadata is. Likewise the point that other countries are listening and trying to get everything we say/write/text is also pretty meaningless. I expect foreign spy agencies to be trying to do that. As someone pointed out, this isn't new territory for the NSA; they've been sucking up every bit of electronic intelligence they can find for as long as they've been around. When it was expressly illegal to monitor US citizens, they had arrangements with other countries to monitor each other and exchange data, again, as someone pointed out.

The question is simply: do you really think that the government that couldn't find a couple of asshole kids that it had been warned about before they blew up the Boston Marathon; the same government that couldn't find the semi-retarded underwear bomber that it had, again been warned about before he tried to blow up an airliner (and burned his schwanz off) ... the same government that promoted and praised Nidal Hassan, the psychotic Jihadi psychiatrist who openly published papers about beheading infidels and pouring boiling oil down their throats... the government that weaponizes its IRS to go after conservative groups, pretends it lost tons of emails and records even though it has an IT staff charged with maintaining them ... that lists Tea Party members and Ron Paul voters as terrorists but considers Nidal Hassan as an innocent boob who just committed workplace violence...that traffics guns to the most violent criminals on earth so that they might get a better chance of taking away our fundamental constitutional rights... that government is going to suddenly get an attack of competence and find a well coordinated attack by professional agents of other governments?  I don't buy it.  I don't believe they could find it with a trillion NSA data centers.

To channel Milton Friedman, "if our government was put in charge of the Sahara desert, there'd be a shortage of sand in a few years".  And to throw in channeling Tam, "the only thing the government is competent at is incompetence".

But it's worse than that.  They're not just incompetent, they're crooked.  I've heard Jim Sensenbrenner, one of the principle authors of the USA PATRIOT act, saying they tried to write a law that prevented the kind of abuse we're seeing.  Whenever we grant the fed.gov any power, they stretch the laws to take more and more and more.  EPA, anyone?  So why should I trust them with even the tiniest extension of powers? 

We have a process; we have laws. Considering how useless all this data they've been collecting has been, they should go back to getting search warrants to investigate individuals. Use more intelligence (of the human kind) rather than a bigger vacuum cleaner to suck up more and more electronic fog to sort through. I don't care if they can go back and find a trail of messages after the nuke has gone off in New York. That's too late.  More police work, more warrants, finer focus, less vacuum cleaner. 

Obama's EPA - High Priests of Junk Science

As previously claimed, the EPA today released a rewrite of the Clean Water Act of 1986 to give it control of every body of water visible to the naked eye, down to and including large puddles.  In doing so, they enlarged the law from an "anorexic fashion model-sized" 88 pages to an engorged tick of 2200 pages.   They did this under the guise of "just clarifying the laws". 

In doing so, they relied on some amazingly junky science.

The Clean Water Act initially limited the federal government to regulating the “navigable waters of the United States” like the Ohio, Mississippi or Colorado Rivers, or the Great Lakes.  In 1986 the EPA expanded that definition to seize control over tributaries and adjacent wetlands. They've now expanded the law to introduce the concept of a “significant nexus to a navigable waterway”.  Insty explains: 

The agency defines waters as “significant” if they are “located in whole or in part within 100 feet of the ordinary high water mark,” or, alternatively, within the 100-year floodplain and 1,500 feet of the high water mark of waters already under the government’s jurisdiction. That’s already a lot of water, but there’s more.

The EPA acknowledges that the “science available today does not establish that waters beyond those defined as ‘adjacent’” to these significant” waters should be regulated. But forget science. The agency says its “experience and expertise” show there are “many” other waters that could have a significant downstream effect. Thus the EPA establishes an additional standard for significance that covers just about anything that’s wet.

I remember reporting on their efforts to do this years ago, and found a piece in 2013. The EPA issued a paper, which was not peer reviewed at the time, saying all waters in the world are connected.  This gives them the authority to say a puddle on your property can drain into a creek and eventually end up in the "navigable waters of the United States".

In September, the EPA issued a draft scientific study purporting to find that virtually all wetlands and streams are “physically, chemically, and biologically connected” to downstream waters over which the EPA already claims authority. Moreover, says the EPA study, even many “ephemeral streams” and “prairie potholes, vernal pools and playa lakes” that are dry most of the year can be found to have some connectivity to downstream waters.

This is the most ridiculous kind of pop eco-science, pure junk science that can be invented.  How does one measure that?  How can you be certain that water in a creek or pond hundreds of miles from one of these navigable waterways ends up in them?  How do they know it just doesn't evaporate and leave whatever they're afraid of as residue on the land?  How could they measure that movement?  How long would it take to measure that well enough to know?  Underground rivers generally move quite slowly (I know there are exceptions, but they're rare).  Ground water moves even slower. Would it take centuries to measure it?  Millennia? 

Add this to their junk science about CO2, shutting down the coal power plants for the modeled-but-never-measured global warmening, their absurd claims about freon and ozone holes, ozone pollution, regulating outboard motors and lawnmowers to be as clean as cars, or their equally absurd claims about DDT and I see an agency that clamps onto whatever junk science fad is running around and issues regulations before anything is truly known.  "We need to regulate now!  We can't wait until we have proof!!", as all the warmists used to say in the 1980s.  It's the motto of tyrants everywhere.

(mercilessly borrowed from Sodahead.com)

Where the PATRIOT Act and New Technology Inevitably Lead

If you agree that the first two graphs are correct, and that all communication via technology is monitored, the conclusion is inescapable.    

From Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, a geeky cartoon that routinely pokes fun at economists, philosophers, statisticians, psychologists and religion.

Techy Tuesday - The Future of Windmills May Be Losing the Blades

Ordinarily, when a structure shakes in the wind, it's a bad thing.  Perhaps the most famous example in history is the collapse of "Galloping Gertie", the Tacoma Narrows bridge in Washington, 1940, and that's a pretty extreme example.  Probably everyone has heard the wind cause powerlines to make sound, or felt things moving in the wind.  Everyone who has ever sailed a boat has felt it.  In virtually all situations, the wind-induced motion is undesired.  Some structures, like telescopes, spend a lot of engineering effort to eliminate that motion.  

I bet you never thought of that motion as energy that could be captured to do something useful.  Researchers in a small start-up company in Spain are working on that very idea. The company's called Vortex Bladeless, and its wind energy harvesters don't look like the giant windmills we're used to.  They look more like giant stalks poking out of the ground.

The mast design is being optimized to create vibration in the wind; at the bottom, that vibrational energy drives a mechanical alternator that turns mechanical energy into electrical.

The Vortex’s shape was developed computationally to ensure the spinning wind (vortices) occurs synchronously along the entirety of the mast. “The swirls have to work together to achieve good performance,” Villarreal explains. In its current prototype, the elongated cone is made from a composite of fiberglass and carbon fiber, which allows the mast to vibrate as much as possible (an increase in mass reduces natural frequency). At the base of the cone are two rings of repelling magnets, which act as a sort of nonelectrical motor. When the cone oscillates one way, the repelling magnets pull it in the other direction, like a slight nudge to boost the mast’s movement regardless of wind speed. This kinetic energy is then converted into electricity via an alternator that multiplies the frequency of the mast’s oscillation to improve the energy-gathering efficiency.

Why bother?  First off, there are no rotating parts, and no bearings, so maintenance costs drop like a rock.  Maintenance is a major cost for conventional wind turbines.  Vortex Bladeless says its turbine would cost around half of the traditional turbine whose major costs come from the blades and support system.  They're easier to manufacture and install than conventional wind turbines.  Plus, with no spinning blades, they won't produce the infrasonic problems the current wind turbines produce and they'll be much easier on the bird and bat populations. 

The company says they’re hoping to have their first product, a 9-foot, 100-watt turbine that will be used in developing countries, ready before the end of the year. A 41-foot counterpart to that turbine, called the Mini, will be ready in a year.  At this stage of their development, nothing appears to be said about how well it will scale up.  They say their approach extracts less energy from a wind stream, but they make up for it by being able to put up more of their masts than conventional turbines in a given space.  

One of the major problems with wind energy is its terrible costs compared to fossil fuels.  If the cost per kW could be improved (including the long tail of logistics),it might enable wind power to make economic sense. 

Dietary Guidelines Finally Admit They've Been Wrong

To some degree.  I read it as a massive attempt to save face, but The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics issued a statement about the 2015 Dietary Guidelines for Americans saying that they applaud the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee (DGAC) for "drafting a strong, evidence-based" report:

"Despite some criticism suggesting that changed recommendations illustrate concerns about the validity of the nutrition science upon which the Dietary Guidelines are based, the DGAC should change its recommendations to be consistent with the best available science and to abide by its statutory mandate," Connor said.

What exactly are they talking about?

You may have read that the new Dietary Guidelines (My Plate or Food Pyramid or the Dietary Icosahedron - whatever they're using this time) have finally admitted for the first time that the evidence for the Diet-Heart Hypothesis just hasn't turned up, despite searching for it for almost 60 years.  Not to mention carrying out medical experiments to find this link on unsuspecting Americans (and to a lesser extent, the rest of the world).

In comments recently submitted to USDA and HHS, the Academy supports the DGAC in its decision to drop dietary cholesterol from the nutrients of concern list and recommends it deemphasize saturated fat from nutrients of concern, given the lack of evidence connecting it with cardiovascular disease.  [Emphasis added - SiG]

The Fed.gov (Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Agriculture) have finally admitted that having your morning bacon, with a couple of eggs instead of a bowl of cereal isn't going to harm your health. 

Wait - it gets better.  Or worse depending on your point of view.

The Academy also expresses concern over blanket sodium restriction recommendations in light of recent evidence of potential harm to the overall population. "There is a distinct and growing lack of scientific consensus on making a single sodium consumption recommendation for all Americans, owing to a growing body of research suggesting that the low sodium intake levels recommended by the DGAC are actually associated with increased mortality for healthy individuals," Connor said.  [emphasis added again - SiG] ["Connor" is Academy President Sonja L. Connor]

Got that?  The salt intake levels that Michael Bloomberg, Michelle Obama, the FDA, and the previous versions of the Dietary Guidelines have been shown to harm people, not help!  "Sorry if we killed you, buddy.  We thought we knew what we were doing. "  Sodium is one of the most essential minerals to the body.  We all have heard the saying that someone is "worth their salt"; that's because soldiers (and others) used to get paid in salt.  It's where the word "salary" comes from!  So while it has been empirically observed that there can be a 10-fold difference in vitamin absorption between people, there's one number for the sodium every person needs?

Without going too deep into the rabbit hole, it's generally recognized that by the 1930s, obesity research was focusing on carbohydrates.  Most of this work was in Europe.  World War II wiped out those universities, and the studies were all in other languages, so that when American researchers started on diet/health issues, they simply made the wrong choice.  They could have gone after fat or sugars and they chose the wrong one.  The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics seems to address that, too:

The Academy supports an increased focus on reduction of added sugars as a key public health concern. "Among the identified cross-cutting issues, the evidence is strongest that a reduction in the intake of added sugars will improve the health of the American public. The identification and recognition of the specific health risks posed by added sugars represents an important step forward for public health," Connor said.

While it's encouraging to see the science being updated as the data changes, it's very, very overdue.  In a way, this is bad news.  It's a simplifying thing in life to have one nutritional bad guy to avoid, be it dietary fat or salt.  In reality, life is too complex for that.  Salt does effect some people's blood pressure, but that appears genetic; for the rest of us, it has no effect.  There is some correlation between various ratios of the blood lipids and heart disease, but the situation is much more complicated than "high cholesterol will kill you", an idea that's pushing 60 years old, and even more complicated than "too high a ratio of LDL to HDL will kill you", or that LDL is "bad cholesterol" and HDL "good" are ideas that are about 25 years old.  The idea that dietary cholesterol doesn't affect circulating cholesterol (much) so everyone needs to restrict saturated fat to reduce blood cholesterol goes back about 40 years.  Today, it's recognized that there are many different types of LDL that are differing degrees of "bad"; some seem to be fairly benign.  There have even been studies that showed elevated cholesterol to be associated with longer life for women and elderly people.  Not something to be avoided, it's something that's good for you.  As we've learned more, the situation has increased in complexity, and the previous dietary guidelines were too simplistic. 

There have literally been hundreds of studies on these subjects, and at least a dozen books written for the non-scientist.  If you're interested, I heartily recommend, "The Big, Fat Surprise" by Nina Teicholz; "Why We Get Fat and What To Do About It" by Gary Taubes; or "Good Calories, Bad Calories", also by Gary Taubes.  "Good Calories, Bad Calories" is the earlier book, and is mostly the science with painstaking references.  "Why We Get Fat" is a more practical book.  "The Big, Fat Surprise" is equal parts history and biographies, with major emphasis on the personalities.  The most recent of the three, she summarizes Taubes' work and extends them with interesting new data. 
 

Of course this means that the Heart Attack Grill can't use this advertising meme.  There's no association between cheeseburgers and heart disease.  Never has been.  They're just another cheeseburger in a world full of them.  

Memorial Day 2015

There isn't much signal I can add to the excellent commentaries and history I've been reading this weekend.  But I repost this photo which I find among the most haunting I've ever seen.

 In case it doesn't seem familiar:  

In a final act of loyalty, Hawkeye, the dog of slain Navy SEAL U.S. Navy Petty Officer 1st Class Jon T. Tumilson walked up to his fallen master’s casket during the funeral in Rockford, Iowa, and then laid mournfully down beside the body for the rest of the proceedings [Note: Petty Officer Tumilson was one of the 30 killed in Afghanistan in Extortion 17 - SiG]

A depressing number of government officials could use Hawkeye's loyalty.

My heartfelt thanks and gratitude to those who have served, or are currently serving.

Did I Mention I Like Clever Ideas?

While talking about the Stealth Arms 1911 jig, I mentioned I'm a big fan of clever, and switching from metalworking to woodworking, we find a piece of (Patent applied for) clever that makes creating drawers a one step operation.

The invention is a specially shaped cutter that enables you to make four cuts in a piece of plywood, fold it up, glue it up, clamp it up, and voila: you have a drawer.  Looking a little closer, it requires a table saw with a dado blade set and this new blade. 

H/T to IMAO, of all places.  I shouldn't say that.  Frank usually gets some cool videos over there.

And by the way, if you didn't read the comments on that post about the Phantom Jig, YouTube user MosinVirus posts results of running the Phantom Jig on a steel 1911 rather than aluminum.  While it took some additional hand work, the result was a fully functional 1911. 

Why I Hate Day-to-Day Politics in Three Easy Pieces

I don't want to sound like a broken record, but long time readers will have seen me say that I view following politics like cleaning the cat's litter box.  It's a dirty, nasty, disgusting job, but if you don't do it, it only gets more disgusting.  Which is where we are now, as a nation.  (and, seriously, I love cats as much as anyone, but I guar-an-damn-tee you that the guy who invented chemical warfare had a litter box in house for inspiration) 

I present three easy examples in the news from the last couple of days in no particular order.  Three stories that make me say, to borrow a phrase from the Crusades, "Kill them all and let God sort them out".

1.  Alcee Hastings Wants a Pay Raise.  

US Representative from Miami and pretty much continuous criminal Alcee Hastings says Congress needs a pay raise.  Before running for congress, Hastings was a judge.  He was convicted of soliciting bribes in 1989, impeached, and kicked out of his office.  After some time (presumably to learn better criminal skills) he ran again and has been a fixture in office ever since.  He has a constant barrage of allegations of criminal or unethical behavior against him, ranging from nepotism to sexual harassment, but he keeps getting re-elected because his Gerrymandered district in south Florida will always vote for anyone with a D after their name.  In his 2012 election, he won 85 to 15% over an NPA opponent

Hastings apparently feels the $174,000 a year he makes (legally on the books) is clearly inadequate.

"Members deserve to be paid, staff deserves to be paid and the cost of living here is causing serious problems for people who are not wealthy to serve in this institution," said Rep. Alcee Hastings during a Monday Rules Committee hearing on the upcoming year's legislative branch appropriations bill, according to Roll Call.

Leave it to Washington criminals to grow the government, causing the cost of living in DC to go up as all those new DC workers try to live there, and then say they need to take more of our money to pay for the cost increases they created.

2.  Two Party Names, One Ruling Class.

Perhaps you caught the headline on Drudge today that last night the Stupid Party gave more powers to Obama.   In what universe does "give more powers to Obama" sound even remotely like a good idea?  I don't know if you know the details on this Trans Pacific Partnership agreement that the president keeps pushing, but in case you haven't read it ... OK, that was a lie.  You can't know details and you can't have read it because the actual text is a classified document.  To follow the "even a broken clock is right twice a day" principle, I'm going to quote Elizabeth Freakin' Warren (!):

“In the past few weeks the public has heard a lot about the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a massive trade deal the U.S. is negotiating with 11 other countries. The public has heard from supporters that it is the most progressive trade deal in history, a deal that will benefit working families and small businesses. And they’ve heard it will only tilt the field in favor of multinational corporations and leave workers and everyone else behind. The public has heard a lot but in all that time they’ve never actually seen the deal itself. In fact, the press hasn’t seen the deal, economists haven’t seen the deal, legal experts haven’t seen the deal, most everyone in America hasn’t seen the deal. Why? because the administration has classified the deal making it illegal for any of those people to read it.

(side note - if you've gotten emails from GOA or NAGR (I forget which one it was) saying the TPP is going to gut gun rights, they haven't read it either.)

So the Stupid Party acted to give the president more power to work on the TPP and other agreements with the same countries on his own.  Since he already has his pen and his phone, I'm not sure why they felt they needed to formalize their bending over, but they did.  It's a strange alliance.  The president is pushing the treaty hard and alienating all his usual allies: the unions, the anti-corporate crowd, and the socialists - like Elizabeth Warren.  Instead, he's allying with the major corporate donors in what is virtually certainly going to be a trade agreement filled to the brim with more cronyism. 

In perhaps the most unusual alliance in the debate, Obama’s trade agenda will soon rest largely in the hands of Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), who was the Republicans’ 2012 vice presidential nominee.

Now chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, Ryan is leading the push to secure as many votes as possible from the Republican side of the aisle for Obama’s fast-track authorities on trade deals. He has been working with Boehner’s leadership team convening meetings with Republicans to educate the dozens of junior lawmakers who have never considered a trade deal like the potential Pacific Rim pact.

Two party names, same money-grubbing ruling class.

3.  Is it Principles or Pimping? 

Rand Paul made a very public mini-filibuster of the renewal of the PATRIOT act, talking for 10 1/2 or 11 hours.  I'm a little mixed on this because I'm against the NSA "Giant Sucking Sound" approach to this sort of intelligence.  I think targeted listening, like any other police investigation, is a much better approach rather than just collecting every bit of data criss-crossing the country and crunching it to find keywords.  We do have a 4th amendment in this country; whether it's completely dead or still on life-support, I'm not 100% sure.  Killing the PATRIOT act might well help it start breathing again.  (By the way, anyone who has not read James Bamford's "The Puzzle Palace" history/biography of the NSA really should.  It explains much about why they like to work the way they do.)

The thing about this one that gets it into my simple three examples is that while I respect Rand Paul, and might even vote for him in the primary, I got a fundraising email from him every few hours for three or four days.  Or so it seemed. 

My problem with this comes down to whether he was fighting the PATRIOT act because he's truly  opposed to it, or because he (or his advisors) think the people he wants to appeal to are opposed to it.  Was the filibuster only done because they thought that we will be more likely to contribute to his campaign if he runs the filibuster?  Was it just a glorified (and pretty much completely free) campaign commercial? 

Politics.  It's like cleaning the litter box. 

Watching the (Drone) Watchers

The Telegraph published an article this week that is one of those "well, of course!" stories.  Burglars are using widely available drones to case properties, looking for places to rob. 

It got me thinking.  It's an obvious use of the technology, and one we'd better all be aware of.  Especially if there are things on our properties or behind our fences that we'd like not to be widely known about.  Google Streetview, Google Earth, Bing Maps, and any others not withstanding.  While the mapping programs will let anyone curious know if you had a valuable car, camper or boat behind the fence on the day the picture was taken but which might be gone today, the drone will allow them to get today's information.  All the drones I've seen videos of are a bit noisy, but if you have your windows shut for some reason maybe a small drone could get close enough to take pictures through your windows.

In our location, we're technically inside a city's limits, so discharging a weapon is specifically forbidden - with the exception of self defense.  Shooting a drone looking in the window probably would be hard to sell as self defense.  As far as I know, something like this would be exempt.  They're not firearms, but whether or not they're legal to shoot in the city requires a little research.  This Ruger Blackhawk Elite will push a lightweight pellet to 1200 FPS, and you'll get the loud crack from being  supersonic.  In the real gun world, I have some subsonic 22 ammo and a couple of options that are just happy to shoot that all day, but that's depending on no one complaining they heard you shooting in the back yard. 

Offered as an intellectual exercise only, ya understand.  No actual downing of drones implied or approved.  Your mileage may vary.  Do not remove tag under penalty of law. 

What do you think, guys?  Any experience with these air rifles?  It seems the Ruger name is licensed to a Chinese factory, I'm guessing Umarex.  I've heard great things about the Benjamin Marauder, an almost $500 air rifle.  Clearly you get something more for the extra $400, but for short range/under 25 yard shots across the yard, I'd think these lower end rifles would work fine. 

Clever Fixturing For an 80% 1911

Thanks to Wirecutter at  Knuckledraggin' My Life Away, we find a link to a new way of making a 1911 from an 80% frame without a milling machine.  Designed at Stealth Arms, the new fixture, called a Phantom Jig, guides your cutting of the necessary features by hand.  The operations required to complete their version of the 80% frame are to drill a couple of holes, cut the slide rails and the barrel seat.  The Phantom Jig performs the cutting operations that would usually be done on a milling machine.

The jig with a frame in place - when you buy the jig, they include one frame.  Note the long black handle: in operation, you use this like a woodworking plane.  The cutter is lowered into cutting position by the black knob with finger grooves located next to the handle, and the handle is then used to push the cutter forward through the metal taking off - ? - "several thousandths".  The rest of the jig needs to be held in a sturdy vise to handle the forces you're going to generate on it.  Once you make a cut, you advance the cutter 1/10 of a turn of that knob and cut another pass through the frame.

Wirecutter embeds this video, but I didn't watch all of.  It's 45 minutes long - and the video author said it took 40 minutes to finish his frame.  Stealth Arms has a video on the Phantom jig's page showing how this all works. 

I post this because I like clever, and this approach just exudes clever.  If you have even a table top drill press, you can drill the two holes you need to drill.  (Seriously - get a drill press if you don't have one.)  Then all you need is this fixture, a bench vise, an hour, and some good old fashioned elbow grease.  I think I should warn that this fixture isn't going to get you there if you're trying to complete a steel frame.  I think that requires more shear force than you can generate.  Stealth Arms' frames are made of 7000 series aluminum, which is heat treated to a higher hardness than the more-common 6061-T6 "aircraft aluminum".  7075, for example, is used in high-end mountain bikes.

Making a 1911 is pretty high on my list of projects right now, and I'm keeping an eye out for a steel frame.  Since I have a milling machine, and making one without the jig is cheaper, chances are that's the way I'll go. 

Techy Tuesday - The Self Driving Car Hype

You know, being immersed in the electronics business 24/7/365, I have a tendency to think "everybody knows that" when things about the way our world works come up.  In this case, does everybody know the electronics industry pretty much runs on a hype cycle?  The Gartner Hype Cycle is 21 years old now, and it describes the progress of technologies as well as anything.  There's a good introduction at that link, but the Gartner cycle itself is a detour from where I'm going tonight, except for one thing: autonomous or self-driving cars are running right around the absolute peak of the hype cycle.  Because of that, discount virtually everything you're hearing. 

I've heard pundits say that "a child born today may never learn to drive" (aside from the phenomenon of millennials being less interested in driving).  Both Nissan and GM, as well as some other car makers, say they expect to market self-driving cars by 2020 and some pundits are saying they will be mandatory by 2035. 

A study by a professional research company called Lux Research offers market research to show that's really a lot of hype.  Note this is research they sell, so their survival depends on being right often enough to get repeat business.  Design News extracts some coverage from that report for us. 

”The $102 Billion Opportunity in Partial Automation for Cars" contends that autopilot features in vehicles will grow sharply over the next 15 years, creating huge markets for automotive sensors and software. “Partial autonomy is coming,” Maryanna Saenko, Lux Research Inc. analyst and author of the report, told Design News. “By 2030, it will very likely be common in mid- and high-level cars. But the idea of the car picking you up at your house, driving you anywhere and dropping you off -- that’s still a long way off.”

They include this graphic in the article (not very high resolution) showing that even out at the end of the projections in 2030, fully autonomous cars (darkest blue) don't even show up.  The larger, lighter blue area is "enhanced assist" technologies.

For consumers, the result will be a fast-growing variety of new semi-autonomous features, Saenko told us. “The first step is to have autopilot,” she said. “Not where the car drives endlessly in a straight line, but where it can deal with traffic, merge in and out of lanes, and find the fastest route on the highway.” In subsequent steps, engineers will develop vehicles that can handle suburban and urban driving.

Cruise control speed-regulating devices have been around for decades, and I've had one since 1990.  On long trips they make driving more like just steering; just keep it between the lines.  My first car with cruise control just kept the speed constant.  It also regulated at about 2 mph over the speed you were going when you turned it on.  My next car, in 2004, would change the speed in 1 mph steps.  I'm fairly sure that was digital cruise control.  Autopilot, even if it just kept you between the lines would be convenient, but the ability to do these other tasks she refers to get very close to chauffeur level.

Saenko said technical and regulatory hurdles will complicate the transition from partial autonomy to full autonomy, however. A “likely” scenario described in the report calls for just a handful of fully autonomous cars, operating in highly restricted environments, by 2030. “We have to address how technically difficult it is to have a car drive itself and deal with the errant situations that can happen during driving,” she said. “It’s really about the technology getting competent and reliable enough to deal with all possibilities.”

I should have said, "get very close to chauffeur level, except..."  Except that you are ultimately still in control in the car and will be responsible if it does anything wrong.  That means if your autopilot hits a pedestrian, it's the same as if you were driving.  If you're expecting a day when you can get in the car and read, play games, or conjugate Indian verbs with your girl/boy friend, that's just not happening soon.   Barring new technologies or real breakthroughs.  I actually wrote about this aspect already, so I'll reprise something from just a couple of months ago.

This concerns me because in many ways, driving a car is considerably more complex than flying a plane, yet airplane autopilots get really serious amounts of money dumped into certifying them safe.  Even with that effort and expense, aircraft automatic control systems will still get confused and do the wrong things.  Pilots talk about trying to stay alert at all times should the autopilot hand control back, but one of the disadvantages of the modern autopilots is that they're so good pilots get out of practice flying.   Will self driving cars caught in a critical moment hand control off to someone reading a book on their tablet, listening to music or otherwise engaged with people in the car? 

Driving a car in a city environment is more complex than flying a plane.  Nobody is standing around on a cloud and steps out in front of a plane.  There are no planes sitting at a corner that decide to dart in front of you.  There are no bicycles going a quarter of your speed, or old farm tractors going even slower.   The fact the aircraft on similar routes maintain separation by flying similar speeds helps reduce the chance of an overtaking accident.  Yet with all these things going for them aircraft autopilots still get confused.  We're going to have to go through some years of weeding those failures out of autonomous cars. 

A Moving Experience

Over the last couple of weekends, I've been a little scarce here.  I've been re-laying out a corner of my shop, the only corner without power tools.   One side is my reloading bench and the other I use for several tasks: gun cleaning, fishing tackle maintenance and repair, tackle making (I tie bucktail jigs and make other lures), and even rodmaking.   Between the pictures at those two previous blog posts, you can get an idea what it looked like.  After the last couple of weekends the area looks like this:

Rather completely rearranged.  The presses are in the same place, thanks to some bolts, and they're the only things in the same place.  The shelves are all in different places and everything on them has moved, too.  The left most set is newest: I built those yesterday.  They're 1x8 boards.  The shelves just right of them are second newest: I built those two weeks ago.  The other pine board shelves are 1x6 boards, so the shelves are shallower, front to back. The white shelves on the right, in the corner, were on the left where the newest shelves are.  Those are laminated particle board. 

All that's left is to get some lighting in that corner.  Probably LED lighting.  Lots of options there.  

Is That Really a Silver Coin?

If the days to come unfold as I expect them to, we're likely to reach a stage where barter and trade with something other than "legal tender, backed by the full faith and trust of the US government" is going to be taking place.  (I've long said, ".22LR, it's the dime of the new millenium!").  It may be fully out in the open and it may be black market because use of anything other than federally managed digital money is illegal.  I expect, as many others do, that silver coins and other pieces of sterling or fine silver will be used for this to some (unknowable) degree, simply because they're recognizable.  Everybody in the US knows an American dime when they see one.  It won't take too long for Ma and Pa Sixpack to know they're seeing a US denominated coin and that coins from before 1965 are more valuable than those made from cupronickel sandwiches since then.  If the grid is up and TV news is running, I suspect that the price of silver will be a daily news item. 

So how do you know if that 2015 Silver Eagle you're being offered is real?  If you want to go beyond trust, now would be a good time to look into the ways that jewelers tell silver alloys apart.  A kit like this one is a really good way to start.  It also includes test solutions for gold alloys, too.  Like most things that come from the world of jewelry, to use it well requires a bit of skill on your part.  Practice will only help.

How do the kits work?  The essential parts of the kit are a test stone and a solution of an acid.  You wipe the edge of the coin on the stone and leave a visible trail of metal on it.  It doesn't have to be really heavy, you are taking metal off the coin.  Then you add a small drop of the acid on the trail and read the color.  You've heard the expression, "the acid test"?  This is it!  Pure silver (also called fine silver) like you find in the real US Eagles, turns bright red.  Sterling silver (92.5% silver, 7.5% copper) turns a darker reddish brown, and US "junk silver" coins (90% silver) turn a little browner than sterling.  80% silver will turn pretty brown, but I don't think you'll see that.  It's a pretty crude fake.  The difference between sterling and the coin silver is tricky to see.  Side by side you can tell, but either way you can be sure they're not pure silver.

Important: there are different kits with different test solutions on the market that produce different colors.  You might get a kit with a different color system.  Same concept, different colors, so be sure to Read That F(ine) Manual!

The risk here is that if the fake is real silver that was  plated onto a base metal coin, you'll only test the plating.   There are two ways out of this.  Sometimes, all you need to do is weigh the coin.  If the fake uses something silvery in color like nickel silver (AKA German silver, which contains no silver) it could be that a reloading scale, is all you need to tell you if it's the right weight. You may have heard of counterfeit gold coins and bars on the market.  The gold bars were gold plated tungsten and they were found by measuring specific gravity of the bars.  Specific gravity compares the density of the coin to an equivalent volume of water.  There are test kits on the market, but if it's really not that hard to do it yourself using nothing but your reloading scale, a small container of water, and a small piece of wire. Finally, you may have to file into a coin to see if you can detect different colored metals inside it.  The really artful counterfeits, like some of the Chinese bars, could only be identified by high tech analysis. 

(Source)
It might be a good time to start reading about counterfeit silver coins.  They're definitely out there, and it helps to know how to tell them apart.  Remember, it's completely possible the guy offering you a counterfeit eagle thinks it's real, and someone ripped him off.  As for whether or not you'll see counterfeit 90% silver coins, that's harder to tell.  If you see a bag of silver coins today, you'll see a wild mix of dates and conditions.  It would be hard to counterfeit the distribution like that.  That would require many molds and a lot of manual work.  The more valuable they become, the more likely counterfeiting becomes, though.  If someone offered me a bunch of coins with the same date that looked identical, I'd be suspicious, even though I know we can buy rolls of "Brilliant, Uncirculated" coins today... 

Cartoon of the Day

Actually, from a few days ago, but the more I look at it, the more I like it. 

Gary Varvel after Norman Rockwell.  There's just several good details in there that I didn't notice the first time I saw this.