much coin, much care or the beagle boys versus the money bin

Part of the unintended but certainly foreseen consequences of holding interest-rates at historic lows has not provided the incentive for banks to loan money rather than hoard it.
And now faced with negative interest rates and the prospects of penalties on liquid assets with no end in sight, as Boing Boing reports, financial institutions are not backed into a corner but are rather redeeming their æthereal electronic funds for hard currency to avoid the fines put in place to stimulate the economy. The commercial bankers don’t strike me as protesting the policies of central banks—or even smugly side-stepping the regulators, merely taking the next logical step. Maybe we do not get to rush them with pitch-forks after all.  Though somewhat of a liability and inconvenience, banks are looking to secure all that physical cash in hidden vaults, just waiting for the tipping-point when negative interest becomes more costly than the price of guarding and moving around all that coinage. What do you think? I wonder if such an evasive manoeuver might hasten the demise and access to physical tender. I guess the next step would be to store one’s wealth in real-estate and start the boom and bust cycle all over again.

shoo fly or hectoring vectors

Business Insider has a pretty comprehensive primer on the facts and fictions on the ablutions and rituals that we perform to nudge away mosquitos.
Unfortunately, the majority of myths that we hold close are shown to be demonstrably wrong-headed and either a waste of time and effort or counter-productive. I would add one item to the list, which probably could be similarly debunked, but I think it works: mosquitos are not the most aerodynamically robust insects—that’s why they have their preferred hunting schedule and range, habitats and haunts themselves, and having a small oscillating fan blowing a breeze seems to knock them off course fairly tidily.

arboretum

Amusing Planet has a touching and gentle appreciation of Survivor Trees from all corners of the globe that bore witness all sort of human catastrophe and crime, but withstood the wreckage brought to its boughs and remained standing as a memorial. One of the more poignant profiles is that of the Miracle Pine that somehow made it through the earthquake and tsunami that devastated Japan in 2011 when everything else was washed away. This lone sentinel sadly too succumbed to the aftermath of the massive flood, poisoned slowly over the following months by salt water. An artificial tribute was put in its place and a high lookout tower surrounds it.

bandwidth and broomsticks

This latest item from the always brilliant BLDGBlog about the US Department of Defense exploring the “controlled enhancement” of the ionosphere by deploying fleets of tiny satellites high into the sky that would effectively self-destruct in bursts of plasma to create a temporary conduit for the propagation of radio waves made me immediately think of Project West-Ford—in that very special episode, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, under warrant of the government, seeded the upper atmosphere with hundreds of thousands of microscopic needles as a contingency measure in case the trans-Atlantic cables were cut.
The earlier project didn’t go over so well (it is cheeky to seek forgiveness rather than ask for permission), and with satellite com- munication having advanced so far, I had to wonder if this avenue was still a potentially profitable one. I suppose that greater accuracy in targeting signals and reducing some of the deteriorating effects of radio turbulence might prove useful and tending to essential in controlling larger fleets of aerial and autonomous drones. Moreover, relayed aloft by plasmatic mirrors, the curvature of the Earth would, in theory, no longer be a limiting factor in terms of range. What do you think? Be sure to check out the whole article for more synthesis and speculation. I also wondered if such a stratospheric infrastructure already being put into place might not also be used to reflect away some of the Sun’s radiation and combat global warming.