There have been 21 World Cups since 1930. This one is the 22nd. Eight nations have hosted the trophy. Five of those countries are from Western Europe: Germany (4), Italy (4), France (2), Spain (1), and England (1). That’s twelve of the twenty-one winners. South America has produced the other nine winners: Brazil (5), Argentina (2), and Uruguay (2).

So it’s not the World Cup. It’s the Western Europe-v.-South America soccer tournament!

No Asian team has ever won. Nor has an African team. This year we will see Senegal reach the knockout phase (the final 16 teams). Other teams like Japan, Ghana, Cameroon, Iran, and Tunisia are still in the hunt. North America (USA-Canada-Mexico) has never had a winner. This year both Mexico and USA are still in contention. Perennial favorites like Brazil and France are expected to take the trophy home this year, however. The big countries with a long history of competition are most likely to win. We will probably get another repeat champion—one of the “elite eight” past winners.

The 2026 World Cup will feature 48 teams, up from the usual 32. FIFA (world football’s governing body) recognizes over 200 nations! Maybe by 2030 (the 100th anniversary of the World Cup) we’ll get a winner that hasn’t won before. Or maybe we’ll get a surprise in Qatar this time. I think that would be a good thing for the “World” Cup, don’t you?

The United States nickel, or five-cent piece, is made of an alloy called cupronickel. It’s 75% copper and 25% nickel. These days the melt value of the coin exceeds the face value. According to coinapps.com I can get six cents for my nickel! Apparently this is not allowed. You can’t melt US-minted coins and sell the metal.

Nickels aren’t very useful or convenient any more. Neither are most coins but we still pound out billions of them each year.

The element Nickel—atomic number 28 and symbol Ni—is used in a lot more things than coins. Mostly it is alloyed with iron (in small quantities) to make stainless steels. Alnico magnets (Al-Ni-Co, aluminum-nickel-cobalt) are another important use. And we are all familiar with Ni-Cd or “nicad” (nickel-cadmium) rechargeable batteries. We can’t get through the day without using steel products and portable electronics.

Worldwide 2.7 million metric tons of nickel were produced in 2021. That’s up from 1.6 M in 2010. Indonesia and the Philippines are the top exporters. China is the largest consumer as they have a massive steel industry.

Nickel is a shiny, durable, and corrosion-resistant metal. It is substituted for silver and is also used to electroplate other metals to provide a tougher, more attractive finish. Nickel compounds can be very colorful and some make lovely solutions in the test tube.

Here’s a nickel for your thoughts:

This is my term for the “geniuses” that can’t help themselves and do incredibly stupid things. Some people are fortunate and are born with strong intellectual abilities. These talents are spotted early by parents and schoolteachers who then lavish praise on these youngsters. They are told again and again how special they are and that they are destined for greatness.

This unfortunately backfires. These really smart young people begin to believe that they are so smart that they can’t ever be wrong. This blinds them to their shortcomings. They surround themselves with sycophants who either can’t see the truth or happily hide the truth so they can continue to ride on the coat-tails of these “geniuses.”

It doesn’t always end well. Case in point: Elizabeth Holmes.

The former founder and CEO of Theranos was sentenced to an 11-year prison term for fraud. She made up a phony blood test and sold the idea to a bunch of rich, famous people (all of whom clearly suffer from SPS) and rode the wave of celebrity worship to its breaking point. When the whole thing was revealed as a con Ms. Holmes used her youthful, doe-eyed countenance to try to bullshit us into believing it wasn’t her fault. It was all because of her mean boyfriend/husband/partner! Thankfully the judge and jury didn’t buy it and she got a well-deserved punishment.

Holmes either believed her own nonsense about her scientifically impossible scheme, which makes her delusional, and a fool of the first order. Or she knew she was full of shit but carried on with the big lie because that’s what rich, entitled fucks like her do when the real world crashes the party. That would make her a sociopath. Either way the world is better off without her crap.

The next case is crypto-currency big-shot Sam Bankman-Fried.

SBF, as he’s known, created and ran FTX which was supposedly an exchange for crypto-investors to buy and sell tokens. Turns out he and his cabal of techies were running a really bad Ponzi scheme. They took the money and made a lot of really dumb “investments” and also squirreled away a bunch for themselves. They were also terrible accountants and made a giant mess of the books. The entire FTX empire was built on woo-woo and hand-waving.

SBF hid his greed and shiftlessness behind a wall of charitable giving called Effective Altruism which is just another Silicon Valley bullshit scheme. Crooks love things that make them look good! I hope Mr. B-F gets the Holmes treatment. He’s a thief and a con artist and should go to jail.

The world champion SPS sufferer is of course Elon Musk. It must be hard to have so many people tell you what a brilliant visionary you are all the time. After a while you actually believe it. Musk, as we have seen, is not nearly the great businessman everyone thought. He made a vanity bid for Twitter, thinking he could weasel out of the purchase if it went south, then discovered he was stuck with his over-priced toy. So what did he do? He trashed it! He fired everyone who made the thing work and then shit on everyone who stayed. He is actually going to lose a lot of REAL MONEY on this deal. In fact, I expect Twitter itself to gradually fade away. I’m no fan of the medium, but a lot of people use it and it has some social utility. Leave it to an asshole like Musk to mess it up just because he can.

If I’m an employee or stockholder of either Tesla or SpaceX (two other companies in the smelly grasp of Musk’s grubby paws) I’d be worried. He’s clearly irrational. And he’s so in love with himself that whatever stupid shit he does he’ll spin it to make himself look like a hero. It should be clear by now that Elon is NOT an engineer and has no real idea about the technological feasibility of his many claims. We aren’t going to colonize Mars and we aren’t going to have hyperloops between cities!

The problem with these three twits is not just that they are amoral jerks. The problem is that people believe them! We desperately want heroes and we just as desperately want magic techno-solutions for everything. Life ain’t like that. There are no quick fixes. But we live in a world where being a celebrity is more important than being a good person. We think that wealth means you are smart and we judge a person’s worth by the size of their bank account.

Smart People Syndrome is all around you. Keep an eye out for it. It is usually easy to spot. Plenty of smart, accomplished people are humble and decent. Those folks fly under the radar and we don’t notice them. The real assholes make themselves known. Remember that just because someone is brainy that doesn’t mean they can’t also be stupid.

The Greek prefix krypto-, Latinized to crypto-, means “hidden” or “concealed.” The science of codes and ciphers is called cryptography. For the longest time the only people who ever talked about “crypto” were computer scientists and mathematicians who worked with sensitive data. They came up with all kinds of schemes for hiding (encrypting) and then revealing (decrypting) that information. Our entire economy now depends on the robustness and practicality of these cryptographic tools. Every time you log on to the internet you rely on cryptographic technologies to protect your identity and your transactions.

But these days when people say “crypto” they mean that crypto-currency nonsense. It seems like all of a sudden everyone is an expert on “blockchains” (an interesting technology that emerged from cryptographic applications), much like everyone was suddenly an expert on viral epidemiology when COVID hit!

Krypton wasn’t isolated until 1898. It’s a so-called noble gas meaning it is mostly inert and does not react with other elements. It was hard to separate krypton from the others of its kind (helium, neon, argon, xenon) and thus it seems appropriately named.

Superman comes from the planet Krypton. And we all know he is vulnerable to kryptonite. I always had to spend time in science class explaining that Superman is make-believe and that there’s no such stuff as kryptonite. Comic books present a more appealing reality, I suppose. The periodic table is pretty dull by comparison!

Krypton is used in lasers and for fluorescent lighting. It is a fission product of uranium decay and can thus indicate the presence of nuclear fuels. People could tell that North Korea and Pakistan were able to process those materials by detecting krypton in the air. You might find krypton (or argon) in the gap in your double-paned windows. Over time that stuff leaks out and the insulating properties are compromised. Krypton causes narcosis if breathed in and could have potential as an anesthetic. Our atmosphere contains only 1 ppm of krypton compared to about 5 ppm for helium, 18 ppm for neon, and over 9300 ppm for argon.

We are finally free of the dreaded imposition of Daylight Savings Time. I prefer to think of it as Darkness Squandering Time. But most people want their days to last as long as possible. And they don’t like their days to start too soon. So they mess with the clocks and we all have to “spring forward” and add an hour. I much prefer to “fall back” and dispense with that annoying adjustment.

What everyone hates, I think, is the time change. Folks want to pick one over the other.

People in the tropical zones don’t worry about this stuff. Day lengths are pretty much the same all year long. In the northerly and southerly extremes the day lengths vary dramatically. The coastal city of Galway in the West of Ireland is at the same latitude as Juneau, the capital city of Alaska. 58º North. I remember being astonished at the late sunsets when visiting there in July. They add an hour to their clocks at the end of March and in fact call their summer time Irish Standard Time (UTC+01). They turn the clocks back at the end of October and align with Greenwich Mean Time (UTC) for winter.

Here in the mid-latitudes the subject is up for debate. Obviously you add an hour if you live far from the equator, say perhaps at 45º of latitude or higher. If you live between the Tropic of Cancer (23.5º N) and the Tropic of Capricorn (23.5º S) you keep your hands off your clocks and keep the same time year round. Those of us in the temperate zones (like California) are literally caught in the middle. The Oregon border is 42º N and the Mexico border is between 32 and 33º N. That means we get some benefit to the time change in the high summer, but by the time autumnal weather hits we really need to turn the clocks back.

The Romans lived in a temperate region but they didn’t have modern timepieces. So they just had shorter hours in the winter and longer hours in the summer. That would never fly in our hyper-speed, hyper-competitive world marketplace. We have to chop time up into very small bits and we have to synchronize it with each other continuously. The Sun is a lousy timekeeper. Fortunately the Time Lords (er, Geeks) of the United States Naval Observatory are on the job:

We visited the Royal Observatory in the aforementioned Greenwich, a village on the Thames River on the edge of London. That’s the home of the original Time Geeks. Turns out it was clock-makers and not scientists or mathematicians who solved the biggest time problem of them all—finding longitude. The modern mercantile system of global commerce was perfected by the British Empire in the 19th century and their mastery of navigation was crucial to its hegemony. It had to have galled the aristocrats and philosophers that mere tradesmen were responsible for Britannia’s glory. But that’s the story of all empires: the plebians are buried and forgotten and the patricians write the histories.

Here in the American Empire we are more egalitarian: we are all slaves to time! There is a movement afoot to create permanent Daylight Savings Time in the U.S.A. with the perfectly politically-named “Sunshine Protection Act” (S.623). Only a vainglorious dipshit like Marco Rubio (the bill’s sponsor) would think the sun needs his protection!

In the meantime, enjoy the fall and its promise of cold temperatures, rain, snow, and lengthening nights!