And Still I Persist

Some folks may have noticed that we have yet to update our trend animator with banking data for the first quarter of 2008. It’s not because we don’t want to, it’s because the FDIC has yet to release their data.

Yes, that’s right - one of the more interesting quarters of the US banking industry since the start of the Great Depression, and the FDIC is still trying to compile the data. I don’t think they are trying to hide reality from us, rather there may be some problems getting the biggest banks to cough up the information required by law.

Some things I am really looking forward to shining our floodlight on
• Increase in non-performing loans
• Level of 90+ day late mortgages they are holding
• Changes to how much money they are getting from the discount window and other more exotic funding sources from the US Federal Reserve

We will have this all in graphical glory the moment we can get our hands on it.

You expect two major newspapers — say, the Washington Post and the New York Times — to cover the same major news stories, each with its own particular slant. What you don’t expect is for these two news papers to run, on exactly the same day (today), feature articles over virtually the same subject, particularly when that subject is probably not that big a topic in perspective.

The Washington Post: “Shuttered Homes, Thriving Wildlive” by Nick Miroff (5/27/08):

In neighborhoods across the region, a potent recipe is brewing on the front lawns and in the back yards of thousands of homes emptied by foreclosures. The combination of a rainy spring and a flood of the unkempt houses has local governments increasingly concerned about public health and struggling to keep nature at bay. As more people move out, the grass grows taller, the water puddles up and the wild things move in.

Mosquitoes thrive in the empty swimming pools and junk piles that have been filled and refilled by the recent rains. Ticks flourish in the tall grass. So do rodents, which also like the shelter of dry, empty houses and whatever garbage they might contain. Then come the snakes, with the rest of the animal kingdom not far behind.

“Anything that is not maintained creates a potential attraction for a lot of opportunistic wildlife,” said Scott McCombe, general manager for Critter Control of Northern Virginia, an animal-removal agency that specializes in nonlethal methods. “And this is typically the season when things start to get rocking and rolling.”

The New York Times: “Contractors Are Kept Busy Maintaining Abandoned Homes” by Vikas Bajaj (5/27/08):

These contractors and thousands like them see first hand the detritus of the subprime era: peeling paint, gutted interiors, family dogs left behind to starve, overgrown lawns infested with snakes.

In Florida, the crisis can seem overwhelming at times.

It can take months, even years, for some homes to wind through foreclosure in the backlogged local courts.

The longer a home sits vacant, the more vulnerable it becomes.

After a few months, the Florida weather starts to takes a toll. Mold and mildew creep. Algae chokes forsaken swimming pools. Sometimes vandals strike. And sometimes wiring or plumbing just give out.

It’s clear that these articles were researched and written separately, but the points of similarities between them is interesting nevertheless. I suspect that the authors this morning feel a bit like two women do when they show up at a party or formal event wearing nearly identical outfits. Or maybe they think it’s cool. As the quip goes, “If another guy shows up at the party wearing the same outfit, you just might become lifelong friends.”

Nah. I’d go with embarrassment. ..bruce w..

Over the long US holiday weekend, the latest Mars probe known as “Phoenix” landed near the Martian north pole. As wonderful as it is when we can actually get some of our gear on Mars to work correctly, it was even more fun that we were able to snap a picture of it taking place.

From space.com: Phoenix Lander’s Memorial Day on Mars

It was during Phoenix’s seven-minute plunge through the Martian atmosphere that NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter caught this view of the lander dangling from its precious parachute. It is the first-ever view of a spacecraft landing on another planetary body.

The 30-foot (10-meter) wide parachute is the white object on the right, with its connecting chords running to the Phoenix lander’s back shell to the lower left. The parachute appears to be fully deployed.

“This is an engineer’s delight,” Phoenix project manager Barry Goldstein said in a mission update today at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. “When this was first proposed, I was very skeptical.”

MRO caught this view of Phoenix from an altitude of about 472 miles (760 km) using its High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera.The HiRISE recorded this image on May 25, 2008, at 4:36 p.m. Pacific Time (7:36 p.m. Eastern Time), NASA officials said. It is a highly oblique view of the Martian surface, 26 degrees above the horizon, or 64 degrees from the normal straight-down imaging of Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, and has a scale of 0.76 meters per pixel, they added.

What is fun about the HiRISE camera is that it has high enough resolution and accurate enough positioning that they could catch this shot. It also shows how dead on everyone’s math was both for the Phoenix’s landing, and the MRO camera team. Given the speed that Phoenix was traveling, it was probably in the field of view for less than a couple of seconds, yet HiRISE was able to image it, seemingly without too much trouble.

I am looking forward to what kind of discoveries Phoenix is able to make near the Martian north pole. After the time and expense of sending the probe there, we are all hoping it landed some place interesting.

[Update - BRH] Seems it is in fact someplace interesting. Above is a picture of the Martian soil near the lander’s footpads. Notice the raised shape which scientists suggest comes sub-surface ice freezing and thawing to heave the soil into these shapes. Not only did the lander make it down safely, but it has deployed it’s solar cells, phoned home, set up its weather station and deployed the stereo camera. A busy little robot to be certain. Well done to JPL and everyone involved.

[Update - BRH] Another photo (below) of the Martian polar terrain from over at Bad Astronomy (excellent site for space nerdity!) showing the ground deformation possibly from subsurface water freezing and thawing.

Compare to this picture of similar deformation in the permafrost of Siberia.

Jeffrey Denning is a former TSA air marshal who has been serving in Iraq with the US Army Reserve. He just returned home only to face immediately a TSA investigation into an e-mail he received and forward asking “current and former air marshals to talk to CNN”:

My wife and I had an interesting conversation last night. It turns out Mr. Neiderer called my home and spoke with my wife while I was in Iraq. My wife of ten years said he knew I was in Iraq when he called our home. Of course, she was the only one home when he called.

She said he acted like he knew me, and since I had been a Federal Air Marshal (FAM) under the arm of the TSA, and since the caller ID read “U.S. government” with an area code “703” out of Virginia, she thought he may have been an old friend of mine. With that in mind, she told him I was in Iraq. “Yeah, that’s what I thought,” he said, and then he laughed.

There’s nothing funny about that, Mr. Neiderer.

To everyone else, Mr. Neiderer is not an old friend, or even an acquaintance. In fact, I’ve never heard of him in my life until a couple of days ago.

When I got home from Iraq last Monday, he didn’t even allow me a week to relax before calling me and probing me with questions in a supposed all-important government investigation. One would think the nature of this investigation would be terribly serious given the fact that Mr. Neiderer and his ilk at the TSA office in Virginia took some painstaking strides to conduct a thorough search on my recent activities since leaving the air marshal service.

From my personal email he, 1) found out I was a former air marshal; 2) found out I was in Iraq with the Army Reserves and knew that I wasn’t home yet; 3) dug up my personal phone number and called my wife while he knew I was in Iraq. What else did this guy find out about me or my family? Oh, probably everything. Shoot, I wonder if the private email conversations I had with my wife while I was in Iraq were being monitored too! It makes me livid.

All of this just because TSA wanted to know who sent me an email I forwarded in March of this year from my personal email account asking for current and former air marshals to talk to CNN.

Pretty appalling and inappropriate, if you ask me. I tend to cut the TSA more slack than most people, but this is unconscionable.  ..bruce w..

OK, Sandra and I just finished watching the first two hours of A&E’s mini-series, “The Andromeda Strain”, based on the Michael Crichton novel.

Sandra, about 45 minutes into tonight’s showing, turned to me and said, “This is like a SciFi Channel movie, but made with better actors.” What makes that really funny is that she said independently, almost word for word, what Charlie Jane Anders wrote over at io9 in his review. Actually, this miniseries also has much better effects and (for the most part) better writing than the various SciFi films.

But the plot is simultaneously goofy and heavy-handed, with a blatant political agenda/slant and some truly bad science. What made the original novel (and movie) so effective was the lack of villains and the low key scientific verisimilitude that didn’t attempt to explain everything.

But, you know, it’s still more watchable than most of the SciFi Channel movies, and I’ll definitely watch the final two hours tomorrow (Tuesday) night. Note that if you missed tonight’s Part I, it will show on Tuesday night just before Part II. [UPDATE: Here’s my review of Part II.]

Spoilers after the jump.

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