GDP Now -- Trending Back Toward 2% -- And I Recall Pundits Suggesting Hurricanes Would Have No Impact -- The Market And Energy Page, T+241 -- September 18, 2017

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Chips: CNBC is excited about semiconductors. It looks like XLNX hit a 52-week high but did not close above that intra-day high.

Markets: Dow 30 and S&P 500 set new records on opening and are holding their gains through morning trading. NYSE:

• new highs: 141, including Boeing, CAT, Valero Energy,
• new lows: 8

Gasoline demand: was record gasoline demand reported last week an anomaly? See this post.

GPD Now: latest forecast: 2.2 percent — September 15, 2017.

The GDPNow model forecast for real GDP growth (seasonally adjusted annual rate) in the third quarter of 2017 is 2.2 percent on September 15, down from 3.0 percent on September 8.

The forecasts of real consumer spending growth and real private fixed investment growth fell from 2.7 percent and 2.6 percent, respectively, to 2.0 percent and 1.4 percent, respectively, after this morning's retail sales release from the U.S. Census Bureau and this morning's report on industrial production and capacity utilization.

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A Note To The Granddaughters

We joke that our oldest granddaughter knows something about everything.

Last week, out of the blue, I happened to ask her if she had heard of the expression, a "10-gallon hat." It turns out she had and she explained it to me.

Now, why would I bring that up this morning?

Today, driving to school, we saw a bumper stick, "Never never."

The middle granddaughter was upset that this was a "double negative" and went on and on about not using double negatives. Of course, it is not a double negative in this context. After several minutes of listening to this craziness, the oldest granddaughter just rolled her eyes and quoted Justin Bieber (I am not making this up):

There's gonna be times when people tell you that you can't live your dreams, this is what I tell them, Never Say Never. -- Justin Bieber from a-to-z quotes.

For the record, the  “Never say never” expression was first recorded in Charles Dickens's Pickwick Papers (1837).

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Searching For The Oldest Stars:

Ancient Relics From the Early Universe

Anna Frebel

c. 2015

Princeton Press

DDS 523.8FRE

 
For now, just some quick data points. Maybe I'll expand this later so it make sense.

• at the turn of the century (1890s)
• Edward Charles Pickering, Harvard College Observatory
• Henrietta Leavitt begins work as one of several female research assistants, 1893
• the assistants became known as "computers"
• predecessors included Williamina Fleming and Antonia Maury
• extended Secchi's classification of stars
• Pickering was so frustrated with his male research assistants said even his housekeeper could do better
• he hired her -- Williamina Fleming -- who completed every single assignment she was given
• Leavitt: confirmed period-luminosity relationship, 1912; Magellanic Clouds
• at the time, it was not yet known whether the Universe was any larger than the Milky Way itself
• Edwin Hubble, Mount Wilson, southern California, sorted that out
• Leavitt died of cancer in 1921 at 53 years of age; had she not died she would have been nominated for a Nobel Prize (1924)
• another computer: American astronomer Annie Jump Cannon started working for Pickering in 1896
• her task: catalog an extensive compilation of stellar spectra, called the Draper Catalogue, and develop a classification system
• Cannon was the first to sort spectra by stellar temperature after realizing that a dependence existed between temperature and spectral line strength
• her new system later became famous as the Harvard classification scheme
• O, B, A, F, G, K, and M: "Oh Be A Fine Girl / Guy, Kiss Me"
• O-type stars are the hottest
• M-type stars are the coolest
• Cannon became known for her classification of over 200,000 stars
• numerous awards
• honorary doctorate from Oxford University in 1925 -- first ever woman to be conferred with that title
• 1931: US National Academy of Sciences awarded her the prestigious Henry Draper Medal
• Harvard, in 1938, appointed her, at the age of 75, to the academic postof William Cranch Bond Astronomer, with the same "rank" as a professor
• Cannon published her huge catalog with updated editions from 1901 t0 1937
• her work has continued, even after her death in 1941
• The American Astronomical Society had introduced the Annie J. Cannon Award back in 1934; Antonia Maury received it in 1943