Ramblings on a Sunday; Curiosity on Mars

View 736 Sunday, August 05, 2012

Something today reminded me:

The Servant When He Reigneth

"For three things the earth is disquieted, and for four which it cannot bear. For a servant when he reigneth, and a fool when he is filled with meat; for an odious woman when she is married, and an handmaid that is heir to her mistress." — PROV. XXX. 21-22-23.

Three things make earth unquiet
And four she cannot brook
The godly Agur counted them
And put them in a book —
Those Four Tremendous Curses
With which mankind is cursed;
But a Servant when He Reigneth
Old Agur entered first.
An Handmaid that is Mistress
We need not call upon.
A Fool when he is full of Meat
Will fall asleep anon.
An Odious Woman Married
May bear a babe and mend;
But a Servant when He Reigneth
Is Confusion to the end.

His feet are swift to tumult,
His hands are slow to toil,
His ears are deaf to reason,
His lips are loud in broil.
He knows no use for power
Except to show his might.
He gives no heed to judgment
Unless it prove him right.

Because he served a master
Before his Kingship came,
And hid in all disaster
Behind his master’s name,
So, when his Folly opens
The unnecessary hells,
A Servant when He Reigneth
Throws the blame on some one else.

His vows are lightly spoken,
His faith is hard to bind,
His trust is easy broken,
He fears his fellow-kind.
The nearest mob will move him
To break the pledge he gave —
Oh, a Servant when he Reigneth
Is more than ever slave!

Rudyard Kipling

Of course no one says such things now. Perhaps we have evidence that they are not true as we once thought? Or perhaps they used to be true but are no longer?

I hold no real brief for the Mamalukes – the Military officers who formerly ruled Egypt – but I am not at all certain that rule by those who have the means to sieze and hold the public square in Cairo is preferable, and I am fairly certain that the rule of the Muslim Brotherhood is not a step towards progress. Mr. Romney has said that a major difference between Palestinians and Israelis is cultural. Martin Peretz, former owner of New Republic, said recently “Mitt Romney was said to have made an enormous faux pas when he said that,” but “I have no great anticipations in the Morsi government because it seems to me the Muslim Brotherhood’s program in its essentials will not alter the social rules of Arab societies. That is, if you expect that in two years someone will be able to say that what Romney said is not true, you will be bitterly disappointed.”

Today I heard a radio bulletin that there have been heavy casualties in the border area where Gaza, Israel, and Egypt come together. This can hardly be a surprise.

The US abandoned Miubarek, a long time ally and keeper of the peace. I expect most of my readers will be too young to remember the seemingly endless wars of 1948, 1956, 1967, 1969, 1973, as well as hundreds of incidents. Then in 1979 Egypt recognized Israel and made peace. It was an uneasy peace, and committed the US to pay heavy tribute to help preserve it, but it was a form of peace. The Muslim Brotherhood apparently does not recognize the right of Israel to exist.

Democracy in Egypt cannot easily be defined. It is not clear what will come in Tunisia. It is less clear what will be the future of Libya. Syria is in turmoil but we don’t know much about the rebel factions.

A source has told me that Harry Reid is a pederast. Of course sources have told me that Newt Gingrich is an alien, that President Obama was not born in the United States, that a secret unit at Wright Patterson Air Force Base has a secret vault containing wreckage and bodies from crashed alien spacecraft – apparently multiples!. Harry Reid says that sources have told him that Mitt Romney has not paid his taxed in ten years. Sources have told me that Roosevelt deliberately provoked the Japanese into attacking the United States but Roosevelt did not expect it to be at Pearl Harbor. Sources close to Admiral Kimmel have told me that Roosevelt knew precisely when the attack on Pearl Harbor was coming, but did not warn Kimmel. Sources have told me that – but surely the point is made. There is probably no story so improbable that someone will not tell it to someone else as an anonymous source. Of course some improbable stories are true, even if they surface in the silly season during an election campaign.

Facebook stock continued to fall. When it first came out I guessed that the stock would fall until its Price to Earnings ratio fell below the P/E for Apple and Google. P/E is not an exact estimate – particularly since estimating future earnings for any of those companies is not all that accurate a process and involves a good bit of guesswork – but it is an estimate of what “the market” thinks of the growth potential of the company. A very high P/E says that the company has very high growth expectations. The objective evidence for the growth potential of Facebook being that much higher than Apple has always been lacking. I leave conclusions as an exercise for the reader.

Looking at fundamentals, Google clearly had a far more modest valuation than Facebook’s. For the two reported financial quarters that ended June 30, 2004, Google earned $143 million on sales of $1.35 billion. Doubling those numbers for an annualized figure, you get $286 million net income on $2.7 billion in revenue. That would have given Google a price-earnings ratio of 80.5, and a price-to-sales ratio of 8.5.

Those are not lean numbers in and of themselves, but when you consider how fast Google was growing its top line, they were not ludicrously in the stratosphere. Revenue surged 234% in 2003 from 2002, and was still jumping 162% and 125% in the first and second quarters of 2004, respectively. Those are the kinds of growth rates that make an 80 P/E palatable.

Now take a look at Facebook’s last two quarterly income statements. For the final quarter of 2011 and the first one of 2012, Mark Zuckerberg and his crew earned net income of $507 million on revenue of $2.19 billion. Annualized, you get $1.14 billion profit on $4.38 billion in sales. That’s a profit margin of 26%, blowing away Google’s of less than 10% for the first six months of 2004 when it was still private.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/johndobosz/2012/05/17/facebook-is-flat-out-expensive-compared-to-google-at-ipo/

I note that there seem to be few recent analyses of Facebook P/E.

Curiosity has landed on Mars. It appears to have been a nominal mission. Of course it had to be – that is, there’s no such thing as a small failure in an operation like this. It all has to go right or nothing does. Cal Tech/JPL/NASA have brought it off and deserve the praise they will now get. And that’s really all we are going to know until the dust covers come off the cameras, and all the cameras – I believe there are seventeen of them – are in operation. We have every reason to expect all that to work properly. The existence of the blurred black and whites taken through the dust covers shows that the relay linkages are all working, the Deep Space Network is working, the power sources on both Curiosity and the orbiter are in order, and all the pieces are talking to each other.

The mission cost several billion dollars.The photographs and other data will be streaming in for days, weeks, months, probably years. It was worth it. We will learn a lot from that.

Having said that, I will add that I would not make Mars exploration the next high priority space event. I still believe that the next step in space exploration ought to be a permanent Lunar Base. We have to learn to live in space and exploit space resources, and the Moon is the logical next step. It has resources, nowhere near those of Mars, but extensive, and the Moon is comparatively easy to get to. A Moon base can be supported from Earth when we inevitably discover that we forgot to bring along something that we need for life. But that’s another discussion for another time. For now it’s enough to congratulate the Curiosity team, and shout loud huzzahs.