George Ure

We begin this morning by noticing that there is not much out there in the way of true innovation., anymore.

In order to get a handle on how global economics will play out, you can look at “the innovation problem” as a great predictor.

Take Television for example:

It started off as black and white.  Then it evolved to Color.  Then came rear projection.  Next DLP and Plasma.  Then LED, and the current battle is raging over ultra high resolutions, like 4K.

The problem that television has is simple:  A lack of fundamental innovation.

From a systems perspective, television was first and foremost, a “remote picture” concept.

Then color picture.

Now it’s higher quality picture.

And then will come 3D picture, but the core breakthrough will always be “pictures at a distance.”

When you see decisions that prevent live television from being streamed, what you’re really seeing is defense of the old paradigm for economic reasons.  The country is not yet ready for the local VHF TV station to sign off – there would be no web site in Milwaukee, for example, with a news helicopter.

Or will there be?

You see?  That is how innovation works, and few books are more revealing that Everett Rogers’ Diffusion of Innovations, 5th Edition.

Remote pictures are just one of the framing concepts of today’s world.  Another is “portable music” – and that’s behind more software (players), devices (iPod, MP3 players) boom boxes, blue teeth – the list never stops.

The fundamental insight, however, was what?  Portable Music.

Cars – which are holding up the entire economy if the retail figures out this week mean anything – are another fine example.

The Wikipedia entry on the “History of the Automobile” over here, is a fine read.

Viewed through the viewport of the systems engineer, we see that the evolution of cars has been painfully slow.

Four wheel cart gets a steam engine.  Four wheel cart gets internal combustion engine.

Now, on a recent trip, we come to discover that the major differences in most cars these days is “how the mouse works.”  The mileage, performance, suspension, automatic transmission and air conditioning are pretty event across brands.

I wanted to remind you of this fundamental versus incremental stuff because it has everything to do with where the global economy goes next; up or down.

I remember hearing a speech back in the 1980-s by Craig McCaw.  He articulated a wild (for the times idea)  we will move into a world where everyone will have a phone number.  Radical claim when there were pay phones on every corner and wireless was a dream.  Yet here we are in the global smartphone village.

Companies and brands rise and fall by their innovations.  General Electric rose on heavy industrial electrical goods.  Microsoft on its operating system.  Apple on its user interface,  and Lexus on absolute quality.  Campbell’s soup is still what kind of good?

If you want to rock and roll – soar in your professional life and investment decisions, a little time spent on the weekend thinking about where your choices are in terms of innovations and how you participate, is likely time well-spent.

Oh, and right now the world desperately needs a “keen new insight” that will – Like McCaw’s vision – be totally obvious once stated.

Find that company and invest all you can, even yourself if you can land a job with ‘em – because that’s how giants of the future are born and the best way to live is growing up with a giant.

The reason we have Minimalism taking off is we don’t have any new sizzle and we’re serving 20 to 60-year old steak.  Minimalism can crash the economy.

Political Crap is just That

No you don’t.

This is the time of life when being a serial victim of politics is really no fun.  Yet we are.

We are retired (at least on paper), over 66 (unfortunately, also on paper), we own our own home, and have some disposable income.  We is fodder for the political machine.

That uniquely ‘Merican political money machine.  So in response to the first email of the morning:

Dear Demoncratic Wannabe:

I charge $250,000 for an appearance, but that includes 10-minutes of speaking.

My 20-minute speech option is only $50,000 more – and it will all go to my campaign.

It goes without saying that private jet travel and a limo are thrown in, 6-bottles of water on the podium and links to my fun-raising campaign.  Medallion de Beouf over noodles with a wine and sour cream sauce after.  Dom, of course.

Oh.  Unless you are planning to hire me, take me off your damn list.

Ures truly

(Next email, please?)_

Dear Emily’s List

Ya’ll are playing the sex card.  Sex belongs between consenting adults, not in fund-raising emails, as I see it.

Personally, I don’t like all kinds of discrimination (racial, sexual, religious,  preference, etc.).  I find it disgusting and counter to the goals of unity and equality.

Since you are playing Divide and Conquer – another lowlife approach to politics, remove me from your list – second notice.

Ures truly

Lest you think I am picking on the Clintonistas, I am equally cynical when it comes to the repugnant party.  You have to know someone’s campaign is in the deep doo-doo when they start endorsing moon bases as a campaign ploy.  Look, it’s a MoonJeb.

We live in a country where we are basically facing the same problems we faced in 1945.  Russia was a threat, China was a question, we had mounds of federal debt, and a burgeoning depressionary feel to the place.  Lack of jobs and on and on…

Fast-forward 70 years and we are what?  Facing the same damn problems:  Russia, China, and a mountain of federal debt.  Plus we have pissed off so many countries, I’ve lost count.

Since what we have been doing hasn’t worked, I will again wheel out the white board (sniffing some marker fumes on the way) and offer a way to clean up the systemic corruption that has afflicted America like a political version of H. Pylori bacteria.  You know – the bacteria that causes ulcers…

1.  We need to reform the vote.  In the early days of America, the  landowners were the only ones with the franchise.  Problem is:  When you throw the electoral process open to those who don’t have to pay for it, you stand in harms way:  the free lunchers will vote working people into unemployment through higher taxes in order to pay for their laziness.

In Ure’s world, only working people, or those receiving Social Security after working some years would be allowed to vote…and no foreign immigrants would be allowed to receive Social Security or SSI unless they meet the same work requirements (x quarters of work) in order to receive benefits.

Ures truly figures that if coming to America meant land of opportunity, but only if you jump in the melting pot and work hard (like it used to) a lot of freeloaders would simply leave.

Sadly, the number of illegal immigrants deported and returned has collapsed under the (illegal) executive amnesty and sanctuary cities nonsense which will – over time – break the US budget as explained in the lead story this morning.

2.  We need to turn off election money machines and kill political action committees.  This would be simply done by a) barring any out of district money for any office and b) no campaign contribution more than $10 per named person for the national office of President.

Throw out Citizens United by law.

3.  End the two party system such as it malfunctions now.  In the early part of American history, the President was the fellow who got the most votes.  The Vice President was the number-two vote-getting, regardless of party.

That worked for the longest time…

4.  Either do away with the Electoral College, or bind them to the popular vote of their state because right now, Electors are not bound and that’s as crooked as you get.

As Wikipedia points out:

Prior to 1913, U.S.

Read More

In  ‘rithmetic, that would be the reciprocal…When things are going good, they spiral up.  Virtuous Cycle it’s called.  But when things go badly, they can really spiral.

As of this morning, we’re at a toss-up point.

Note to the reader who was all over my case for mentioning deflation all the time:  TODAY’S REPORT is why I have been screaming deflation.  We operate in advance of, not in reaction to current events when possible.

Und zo?

New Consumer Price Report is hot off the press release:

“The Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U) decreased 0.2 percent in September on a seasonally adjusted basis, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today.

Over the last 12 months, the all items index was essentially unchanged before seasonal adjustment.

Read More

Things have become more and more curious in the world of future predicting – a field I have been involved in (peripherally) since it began to become clear at the dawn of Big Data (2000) that there was more to the data than just the data.

Although there was a good bit of success with early approaches that involved purely linguistic shift, since 2012, or so, I’ve been working on a broader spectrum approach. Future does not belong to one – it belongs to all.

The reason for going broad spectrum:  The future doesn’t hide itself from us in just one way.

Even a simple observation like that, however is misleading in a sense:  Because the future doesn’t necessarily hide – we just don’t happen to be able to perceive it.

To be sure, in early predictive linguistics there were some marked successes.  But at data continued to explode, the misses did, as well.

But in the meantime, I was noticing how other predictive methods were generating some pretty good hits:  Both my personal experiences with dream work as well as those posted to the www.nationaldreamcenter.com website have shown marked areas of high correlation between images commonly associated with words – and later events to follow.

The work of others has continued as well, such as www.recordedfuture.com.

It doesn’t stop there, either.  Another amazing source of information about the future has come from simply setting up a deliberate series of Google searches.  This has been highly rewarding as well.

I’m sure you’ve been over to look at www.google.com/trends website – because – if you haven’t – you’re missing a key part of how we make decisions around here when comes to judgment calls about period news events.

Here’s not a poll, but a summary of web searches done around the demoncratic presidential debate:

Say what you will about Bernie Sanders – He was the rock star of Search – and for that reason, we turned the “big data microscope” on him in our analysis yesterday for Peoplenomics readers.

I figure Google doesn’t lie.  Hillary?  Um…you see the point?

Not to rehash that debate here, but you can clearly see the hand of the co-opted Mainstream Media with their pro Hillary bias leaking all over the place.

As one example, a BBC news story was dissected and it referenced Clinton 23 times to Sanders being mentioned 17 times.  Even more astounding was the BBC “analysis” called Hillary the winner.

Sorry, the future – and Reality – don’t look like that in modelspace; and it doesn’t matter which methodology you use – Sanders kicked it and Hillary lost.

Still, this demoncratic and repugnants hack class of political suck-ups, is a fine group of wannabes to study because one of them is likely to become the next president.  Save us, please.

The problem with the data is that while we can see the candidates more clearly now, the public hasn’t yet made up its mind which is the least of the evils and that, as much as anything, will determine the next resident of The Oval.

Part of the problem is we don’t know the next president yet because the inputs are varying.  While my “dream ticket” which would offer real choice about our future is not on the horizon yet, something like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren on the demoncrat side with Trump and Carson on the repugnants’ side, would sure be fun – and offer a sincerely different outcome, I expect.

Problem is:  There’s no data to point to and say “This is coming.”  It’s not.

Each approach to futuring gives us different things to think about.

At the emotional, Jungian, archetype level there’s a high level of frustration in the country right now and for this year the Year of the Outsiders and Non-Corporates is holding sway.

This is something the mainstream repugnician party doesn’t understand because if they did, an old way corporate sell-out like Paul Ryan (pro secret trade deal, open border supporter)( would not have been floated

At the data level – both polls and search – the outsiders are also showing strong as the repugant core can’t seem to figure out that the We the People types are fed up with They the Multinational tax-avoiders and jobjackers..

What the public is slowly coming to realize is the that future has transitioned from being a collection of outcomes based on ideals to a world where the future is determined as much by transactions.  This was cast in stone when the Supreme Corps outrageously decided that legal fictions *(corporations) have the same right to influence the future as flesh and blood voters – perhaps the worst case of “misprudence” in the past century.

As if you couldn’t tell, I’m off working on “new thinking” about the future. 

The screenscrape (top of page) from the www.nostracodeus.com development lab (Grady’s basement) shows how we are starting to work in Grady’s discoveries about Fine Structure Constants (FSC) to the predictive engine.

You may remember from our previous work that there seems to be a “murder cycle” afoot – and it runs from about 135 days on the short end to 150 on  the long – which centers around 143 days.  This is when we expect  to see mass murders pop up in  headlines.

This, then, leads to a couple of new challenges.  One of them is refining the prediction so that it’s useful:  It does no good to say “in a week or two we will have a mass murder.”  Because information that is not actionable is useless. 

The specificity problem is huge, though.  Our inputs can be as vast as G.A.

Read More

We are in one hell of a pickle.

Usually in the fall, the market will make a serious downward plunge, there will be an intervention or naturally occurring bottom.  Following that, everyone steps back from the abyss and figure “Well hell, Merle, that there was sure some excitin close brush with Economic Collapse, but shore looks lack we made it fer ‘nother year...”

Not that we have out of the woods – since the market still has plenty of time between now and the end of the year to collapse – but we are seeing some huge underlying shifts in how the “economic game” is played.

This morning we will go poking around the feedlot and see where some of the bull is.  Even if you don’t join us on the tour, though, the concept of a Feedlot Economy is a useful way of understanding what are some mighty curious changes in spending, saving, and consumption.

Read More

Some of a global decline is baked in the opening of markets this morning.

U.S. futures are down about 70  93 on the Dow when I looked, but around the world it looks like the average decline is in the vicinity of 1.25%.

You can work the numbers yourself, but Japan was down 1.1% and in Europe France and Germany (did we ever give them any of their gold back?) are down over a percent each and the Brits are getting there fast.

Nimble fingered pundits are tripping over one-another to find an excuse for why this is happening, but the simplest reason is always the best: More sellers than buyers.

“Stocks on edge ahead of earnings; Dell gets it done; Ferrari races to IPO” says a Yahoo Finance piece.

Got news for you:  Stocks are always edgy ahead of earnings, but what’s not mentioned is that this is options week – and by the time expiration gets here (Thursday for indices and Friday for the underlying (emphasis on what syllable?)) the market should be inflicting more pain than a dominatrix on bad drugs.

Might even hurt your target body parts in the same way, since we’re in the period when according to our work, things could go very badly for the next month.  Not to be a pessimist, though:  I live to make money on declines and we need a big one right about here for me to break-even.

Still, you can’t keep a good country down.  Despite all the doomsayers around, the outlook for 2016 is still strong because democrazy has a chance to throw the bums out.  You’ll have several to pick from in the demoncratic “debate” tonight.  I’ll be rooting for Bernie because he’s closer to Diogenes than anyone else on the platform.

So who was this Diogenes of Sinope?

“He believed that virtue was better revealed in action than in theory. He used his simple lifestyle and behavior (which arguably resembled poverty) to criticize the social values and institutions of what he saw as a corrupt or at least confused society.

Read More

One of our more prolific commenters – on the discussion side  of UrbanSurvival – is a very nice expat fellow named Bruce down in Ecuador.

Bruce moved their a long time back and operates some very nice apartments that offer amenities that would price them out of the market for many Americans living on fixed incomes if they were in the states.

They are not – hence they are affordable.

Point is:  Bruce is an Expat – an American living outside the country and we have a fairly large crop of similar folks who have given up and taken off for different parts of the world – and thus has a very different take on what passes for “news” here.  Bruce isn’t subversive – he just happens to like the perpetual spring and agreeable people in the highlands of Ecuador.

He’s written on numerous occasions to warn me of several things, not the least of which is that we are likely in a period that can only be framed as “Terminal Madness in End Times.”  He worries I will catch the disease – spread by reading corpmedia slop.

The idea is that as social pressures build, out of control events infringe and start changing how we think and therefore how we live – and let’s not forget the whole national addictions to mood-shifting psychotropic drugs – people will go (impolitely)  NUTS when the SHTF.

A few years ago, I would have mocked his viewpoint, but the spate of gun violence (real or staged matters not) and many of the headlines crossing on the wire have tended to support his case rather than undermine it.

A few examples from current headlines that go to the idea of both widespread social insanity developing illustrate the point:

Here is a story about a woman getting drunk and streaming her “being lost and exasperated” on her cell phone. First drunk driving live vid we’ve heard of.

Somehow the report that “Iggy Azalea wants nothing to do with Rita Ora’s “Lady Marmalade” idea” is worth spinning electrons around.

Playboy Magazine, reports the Washington Post – starting in March 2016 – will be giving up on full nudity and opting for covered – (scantily and very tastefully we assume) – models.

And last – but not least – the democratic contenders for the White House will be spewing on the tube tonight.  And the pandering toward Hillary is already well underway.

The psychiatric points that could be gleaned from such a list are rather straight-forward.  I’m no psychiatrist, but I do have a copy of Jung’s The Red Book (Philemon) ($150) on the desk.

1.  The drunken streamer shows us that people have started to move their consciousness off-planet and into the computational world in something that seems to be Second Life leaking out the wrong way and into this reality.  Narcissism meets broadband.

2.  A pointless fascination with the glitterati has replaced what was once national participation and prioritization of public policy.  Since public input into policy collapsed (having been hijacked by the K-Street mafia’s legions of bribe-slingers) the disenfranchised are being slopped swill as “content” and so as to keep their snouts buried in the digital trough.

Read More

(updated as caffeine soaks in) Till opening time…..It is Columbus Day and that means the U.S. banks  are closed in honor of something – maybe the beginning of the North American genocide which is which is how unabashed history informs us.

Why we would celebrate the arrival of European disease laden Spanish imperialists is beyond my comprehension, but I don’t make up trading schedules.

Fortunately, we can still see bits of reality in the global futures market…

A glance at them  reveals in a flash why the price of gold is up another $11 bucks and why the price of silver is getting comfortable above $16 here lately.

The good news – and bad – of it is the US dollar is cratering.

The Dollar and stock prices have a contentious relationship. 

When the Dollar is strong, it doesn’t take as many of these higher-powered pieces of paper to buy so  much of a fraction of the American consumer market.  As a result, since things are measured in dollars, it seems like the market is going down when this happens.

The flip side this morning (see the Euro to Dollar chart at the top of this page) is that when the dollar goes down in purchasing power, the number of Dollars to buy the same slice of Americana goes UP.  And that means (since it takes more scrip) it seems like the market is going up.

It’s not unlike inflation:  When there is more papers chasing the same amount of goods and services, prices seem to go up.  Or, more accurately, they actually go up since you can’t walk out of an auto dealership paying last year’s prices.

So that’s where we are this week.  The dollar is declining relative to everything else on the planet, seems like.  Does that mean the US is “leading an economic recovery?”  Absolutely not. But it does make the prices of foreign markets cost more scrip here which is why Japan seemed to go up 1.64% overnight while the Chinese SSE was up 3.28%.

European markets were stable though, after the run-up in Asia, so we shall sit back and see how the rest of the week develops.

The Week Ahead

The main thing to be looking at in market action should come Thursday when the U.S.

Read More

As I lay in bed at about midnight, brain on fire again with too many ideas, one of the major gripes about modern life formed in my mind.  It’s something so simple that even a child should be able to figure it out.  Yet no one actually does.

It’s this matter of planned and accidental obsolescence.

Seemed like everything I touched this weekend had some kind of planned “end of life” built into it.  Here’s the story…

Panama had come over one morning last week wondering why his computer was making a whining noise.  He’d taken it into the shop, opened it up, blown out the accumulated dust since the machine was coming up on its six-month inspection time anyway. 

We try to do that around here:  Take each computer we own  and check it out thoroughly at half-year intervals.  Mainly it’s blowing out the dust, but there can be more to it, as well:  Driver checks, disk checks with SpinRite from Gibson Research, and so on.

Powering it back up, the culprit in the brother-in-law tower turned out to be the power supply and once that was discovered, all I had to do was go into my office, open the supplies cabinet and pull out the right replacement power supply.  15-minutes later, the power supply was in, the computer back in service – absent the whining fan – and Panama and his SO/GF could get back to her online homework.  Runs like a top.

I didn’t think much about it – at least not right then:  It vaguely occurred to me that we may be the only hard-core preppers in the world whose idea of prepping includes a back-up power supply wrapped in foil for every computer on the premises, though..

Saturday, I got up and while working on projects outside (the deck) I decided to get serious about the bothersome computer in the recording studio.  That computer had been showing serious instability issues and I got to wondering whether it was somehow related to a slowly-failing power supply.

Diagnostics followed and sure enough, what’s the one thing that can cause instability once you have chased down drivers and run half a dozen anti-virus, rootkit, and malware hunting programs?

The damn power supply.

The recording computer is nothing special:  A four or five year old Acer. The kind which they stupidly put in a DVD without the emergency open paper click hole.  Other than this design flaw, it hasn’t been a good or bad machine – it’s just a Win-7 box running 64-bit mode with 8gB and a recently added high end graphics card to drive the dual monitors.

Just for the hell or it, out comes another power supply:  This one was a recent Sentey® Power Supply 725w Xpp725-hs / Computer Power Supply ATX / 140mm Fan Sleeve Bearing / 48ampers / 5 Sata / 2 Pci-e 6-2 / SLI Ready / Crossfire Ready / 115-230 Voltage / Power Cord / 3 Years Warranty which goes for $47 if you have Amazon Prime. Don’t order it yet…you’ll understand why in a minute.

Not too surprisingly, after installing the new power supply, I fired off the music computer, reran the upgrade readiness tool, the HotFixes, and cleaned up the old update crap.  Fired it off and it was like a brand new machine.

It has been happily “healing itself” overnight, but updates that previously wouldn’t load are going in fine and confidence is high that it will work as planned.  Although that’s often a sign of disaster in the wings, so knock on wood..

This is not to say that every computer failure is linked to heat and power issues, but I suspect quite a few are.  And if you really want to be “prepped” from an I.T.

Read More

We’ll chat this morning about life beyond prepping and PCO: post-collapse operations.  Let me ramble here and explain why.

When UrbanSurvival started down the “invincibly prepared” path in 1997, I was living on a 40-foot sailboat up in Seattle and wondering “Just how bad could it get, this Y2K stuff?”

As it turns out, while there were tons of small computer issues, massive code rewrites to deal with the date-rollover saved the day – at least for then.

Next came the events of 9/11 and we saw how financial markets could (and did) react to something going terribly wrong.  Money in markets was simply not available if instantly needed in the face of calamity. 

Although it’s popular to let the Bush administration off the hook, that the ensuing war was a manipulation in order to invent a “Security State” overnight (employing a million people, directly and indirectly) is hardly deniable.

Read More

So let me ask you something:

If you knew that one of the keys to future economic success for your country was oil, would you think the stock market should be going up, or down?

Hint:  Oil is going up.

Second Question:  If there was a regional war going on where cruise missiles were being tossed around and your country was on the wrong side of the conflict and had just pissed away a multi-billion dollar program of making up enemies in order to effect regime change, should the stock market of that country be going up, or down?

Hint:  See last story in this morning’s column.

Yet here we are, barely an hour and a half from the opening of the market and the futures are pointing to a tiny gain come the open of trading.

You need ViseGrips to pinch yourself and a hookah to self-medicates in markets like this one.  Although to me it has a kind of air of the Friday before Black Monday back in 1987…

The drivers are all there for vicious downside action:  futures have run up hugely since the last options expiration, and Wall Street doesn’t like paying gamblers.

Then there’s the fact of Brent Crude oil which is over $53 a barrel this morning.  And as if that is not inflationary enough, have you been watching the price of gold and silver in the past couple of weeks? 

Silver is over $16 and Gold is holding above $1,150.

Now let’s toss into the equation that the US dollar is falling relative to the Euro as well.

To me?  It’s a case for rapidly escalating prices – and that would/ought to be trashing the Bond market in here.  But, no, the 10-year Treasury Note is holding about 2.11 percent – which is way below where it should be, given all the gathering forces of future inflation to come.

All of this is incredibly mysterious to me:  the market should be in the crapper – we’re losing a war in Syria.  The price of oil is climbing, and while that will be good for US oil companies, it will mean hell on Houston’s freeways is likely to become a permanent feature of life.

New import and export price data:

Prices for U.S. imports edged down 0.1 percent in September, after a 1.6-percent decrease in August, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today.

Read More

Things are becoming surreal, these days.

We have Russia kicking the butts of ISIS, a feat the U.S. hasn’t been able to do with all of our [purported] might and which the Putin shock troops seem to have accomplished in a month.

The main problem created is what?

The U.S. public – common folks like you and me – might begin to see through the global Kabuki of it all and figure out that what we are fed is not what we should eat.

But how does a security state-framed West go about defusing a serious story like Syria, especially when it is one that could go theater nuclear as early as this weekend?

Well, the answer, strange as it may seem, is to press the restart button on some older conspiracies.

It’s psychological control.  Consider fighting forest fires, think of it as a “back fire” – a little fire, or three – set to deny the larger fire fuel.

Fuel, in the case of U.S.

Read More

WW III is on, at least in part:  The Russian-backed Syria government has launched another massive attack on ISIS this morning.  Later today, the U.S. markets may wake up to the fact we’re been flanked and fooled and Iran may taken Iraq.

Over on the www.peoplenomics.com side of the house, we’ve been chasing down a crackpot theory about how the market of today has a curious resonance with an earlier period.

In this highly experimental work, we are considering the period that would match today with September of 2011.  That was a period of marked decline, just as today is, or should be shortly.

This is terribly important stuff to watch for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that it demonstrates the “Manufacturer’s Resource Wars” which should put the 30-years War to shame.

Since we suspect this fall of 2011 period, I went looking for more details about how the U.S. was doing with its “foreign entanglements” back then:  And from a BBC website page:

2011 August – Violence escalates, with more than 40 apparently co-ordinated nationwide attacks in one day.

Read More

I haven’t done this for a while, but it is one of those things that should be on your list of things to do periodically around the house, particularly if you are extremely sensitive to radio frequency noise.

“Yeah, yeah…sounds like engineering crap to me…”

Maybe because it is.  But it doesn’t make it unimportant. 

Granted, if you listen to FM radio and streaming only, chasing down AM radio noise is a time sink.  But, with winter coming, there’s a certain magic in being able to tune the dial and mentally transport yourself to a different city. 

Up in Seattle, as a young whippersnapper, I listen to Ira Blue on KGO – first of the talk radio greats. 

I can categorically state that I sleep better when two conditions are met in my surroundings.

First, I like to sleep grounded.  We have been enjoying our “earthing half sheet” for months now and consider it a worthwhile experiment.

Secondly, I don’t do well when there is electrical noise around.  For someone who has spent half his life around AM and FM radio stations, that might seem paradoxical.

But there are radio signals (which are not terribly disturbing to my energy) and there are audio signals superimposed on those carriers.

That ain’t noise.

No sir, what I’m talking about is the broadband hash that comes of line-frequency switched mode power supplies.  This are simply god-awful things to hear.

The Test Tool

I have a cheap AM/FM radio of the sort you can get for $20-bucks. I keep it next to the bed and when I wake up in the middle of the night (see Brain on Fire) and can’t get back to sleep, I will tune around the AM radio band and unless there is a big geomagnetic disturbance, either Ground Zero or Coast to Coast AM will be coming in from WOAI down in San Antonio.

I haven’t been listening much to the radio lately because I have been so damn busy.  Flight plans, travel plans, reservations, cruise, writing, novel, finishing up projects around the house – there’s a daily list that never gets down.  You know how that rolls.

But the other morning, I happened to wake up and there went the brain…not on fire yet, but definitely smoldering.

The quickest way to zone out, I figured would be a dose of AM radio.  So I turned on the radio and @#$%T^&*BZZZZTTTTT!!!   Static. 

From one end of the AM  dial to the other…static.  Horrible whining generator noise broadband power supply noise.  I have a pretty good ear for signal strength and in most positions, the noise on the little radio would have been 40 to 60 over S-9 on a real communications receiver…

….except…  There was one position where if I held the radio absolutely steady and not letting it move more than an eighth of an inch, the static would be off to the side of the built-in AM ferrite bar antenna (which is very directional) and I could hear the station.

Hell of it was that each time I was about to snooze out, my hand would move, thus the radio and I’d get another earful of @#$%T^&*BZZZZTTTTT!!!   Static.

Knowing the only tool I would need would be this AM radio, tuned between stations around 700 on the dial, I swore that before the day was out, I would find the source of this damn electrical  PITA and solve it once and for good.

The first thing I did was wander around the house.  AM radio on.  Seemed like the noise was louder in the bathrooms and the kitchen, but couldn’t be sure.

OK, step two then:  I killed all the power to the house.

Whoosh…….just nice normal atmospheric noise.  Please.

Next:  Turn the big stuff back on: 

Stove, hot water heat, dryer.  Blissful Whoosh….as quiet radio bands are supposed to sound.

One by one the breakers went on…until finally, next to last breaker on the right side of the panel was flipped on.  Care to guess?

@#$%T^&*BZZZZTTTTT!!!   Static.

OK…now all I needed to do was wander around the house and find that circuit and begin to manually unplug things.

There, in the kitchen, I found my culprit.

Our Foodsaver!.  What the hell?

So I grabbed an AC line filter and threw it on thinking that ought to cure the problem.

Wrong.

Actually made the noise worse.

The simple remedial action was to unplug the Foodsaver.  There was something else about this outlet that was interesting:  Even plugging in the lame $15 Wal-Mart toaster increased the noise level a  bit.

Damn odd, curious, and confounding. 

Now I have another project on the list:  Dig out my outlet checker and find out what’s going on with that outlet.  Is the ground off it? Are the hot and cold wires reversed on the plug?  Or, WTF is going on with it?

That’s as far as I got on it…there are more pressing items.  But sure as hell, this was a strange one and while I love my Foodsaver, the idea of this outlet being noisy leads to all kinds of other suppositions.

Might a GFI protector be in the process of failing and somehow that’s figuring into how things on this circuit are working?  Is the neutral and ground touching?

Or, is the Foodsaver power supply in this particular unit really noisy (electronically) for reasons that aren’t clear to me, except there would have to be a solid-state switch to turn the sealing element on and maybe that somehow is connected to the AC line?

Hell of a fine adventure.

By the way, when you find a problem (like this one) where you can narrow down the source of noise (which went completely away when the Foodsaver was unplugged) you can use the noise source to “calibrate the null” on your AM portable radio.

This is a true story:  When I was young I learned that with a cheap AM radio like this, and a $5-compass, that you could steal a boat in any harbor in the world and go anywhere you want with nothing more than an AM radio and some stations that identify themselves often.

By daylight, it’s more useful to follow jet contrails, but you get the idea there, right?

If you’re not tracking yet, go watch this video about how Ira Blue on KGO brought fishermen home through the notorious fogs off the Golden Gate:

Have fun…I sure did, and it was a dandy 15-minute break from not getting the rest of the stuff on my list done on Wednesday.

I have been chasing noise sources this way for more than half a century.  Most common culprits are fluorescent light fixtures, silicon-controller rectifier based dimmers (SCRs) and Triacs plus switched mode power supplies.

In the event of a real serious EMP type event, the good news is that the AM radio band should be exceptionally clear of manmade noise like this.  The only downside is you may die in the ensuing violence.  But the DX’ing (distance listening)_ should be superb.

Read More