Problem 294: Right triangle, Circumcenter, Excenter, Hypotenuse, Perpendicular

Proposed Problem
Click the figure below to see the complete problem 294.


See also:
Complete Problem 294
Collection of Geometry Problems

Level: High School, SAT Prep, College geometry

Want the suppressed pictures of US army personnel raping women and men in Ghraib?

Ten Percent has the new photos and the link is here. Be warned, not pretty.

Press freedom in Bolivia

Hey, let's play the "you be the judge!" game today. On the subject of press freedom in Bolivia, would you rather believe;

a) Opposition newspapers that support the ousting of a democratically elected and popular President?

b) Far right wing rabid pressure groups and sold-out bloggers based in Washington and picking up stipends from big biz for spreading lies?

c) The Inter American Press Association?

"Who they, Otto?", I here you ask. Well the IAPA is the journalists' association covering 1,300 publications and in the business of protecting free speech for its members and the wider press corps since 1943. This from the IAPA website gives more detail:

The Inter American Press Association is a non-profit organization dedicated to defending freedom of expression and of the press throughout the Americas. Its chief aims are to:

Defend press freedom wherever it is challenged in the Americas;
Protect the interests of the press in the Americas;
Advocate the dignity, rights and responsibilities of journalism;
Encourage high standards of professional and business conduct;
Foster the exchange of ideas and information that con-tribute to the professional and technical development of the press;
Foster a wider knowledge and greater interchange among the peoples of the Americas in support of the basic principles of a free society and individual liberty.
IAPA enjoys a membership in excess of 1,300,representing newspapers and magazines from Patagonia to Alaska, with a combined circulation of 43,353,762.

So there you go, now you know a lot more. Yesterday the president of the association, Enrique Santos (also a reporter at El Tiempo in Bogotá), was in Bolivia to meet with Dr. Morales and hold meetings on the subject he most cares about. Here's what he had to say on press freedom in Bolivia:

"What we have been able to ascertain is that press freedom exists in Bolivia. For all that one hears and sees, nobody here can say that there isn't an opposition press, that there is no criticism of the government. I think it's important to make this clear."

Any further questions?

no link mining bits

Rusoro (RML.v) started today at bid $0.465 ask $0.44. I mean, whatever makes you think they're holding down the stock, eh?

Ventana Gold (VEN.to) suddenly did very large volumes at the end of yesterday's trading, finishing up with 2.4m shares done.

Junior miners in the Lima stock market continue to be bought like hotcakes, including big volumes in VEM, MIRL and DNT amongst others.

I did wonder about that Linear Gold (LR.to) purchase that shot the PPS up this week...I didn't look into it much (up in Canada, y'see) but it seemed so clean and shinyhappy for a property that has been around a while and never moved into prodution. So now we know that ownership is disputed...ahhhhh. LRR.to down today.

Duggie at GRZ vows to "fight on" over Brisas which will come as no surprise to anyone. Hey, here's a phun phactoid about Belanger; guess how many times he has visited Venezuela this decade? (Hint: if you guessed "1" you're overestimating).

Now that the US dollar hasn't broken 80 to the downside, will Jim Sinclair apologize to his flock about all the "it's happening now!!" shilling from last week? Ok, stupid question....

The gold silver ratio

Silver is morphing back into Doctor Jekyll.


Do you have your shares in Fortuna Silver (FVI.v) yet?

Chart of the day is....

...Brazilian steel consumption, 2008 and 2009 forecast.

According to this report in BNAmericas, the head honcho at the IBS Brazil steel institute says that even in the most optimistic of situations and a 5% GDP growth from 2010, steel consumption won't return to the 2008 level until 2011. The same dudes are also forecasting a 14% world slump in steel this year and a large supply glut.

By the way, I thought about using the US bonds yield curve as chart of the day today, but you're probably bored or scared to death by it already so let's not bother.

You sure that Colombian coffee is from Colombia, Señor Valdez?

There's something fishy going on in the Colombia coffee world and it might be time for Juan Valdez to swap that donkey for an alpaca.

In a good report yesterday, Bloomie's Heather Walsh caught up with Jorge Lozano of the National Association of Colombian Coffee Exporters who predicted that, due mainly to inclement weather factors, Colombia would produce less than 11 million bags of coffee this year for the first time since 2001. For the record a "bag" weighs 60kg, so as 2008 production was 11.5m bags we're looking at a difference of 30,000 metric tonnes (hey, lotta coffee there people..world's third largest producer after Brazil and Vietnam). Lozano is quoted as saying;

“The figures we’re seeing show a substantial reduction. Eleven million would be a miracle....Colombia has been selling all of its production.”

Indeed it has been selling it all. Keen to do it too, as coffee is one of the main export products of the country and is driven by the famous Juan Valdez "100% Pure Colombian Coffee" campaign as the dude and his donkey wander over the TV screens of the USA. But is it that pure? This year there's good reason to suspect that those 100% Colombian beans are currently being cut with coffee imported into Colombia from other countries.

Exhibit one: This report in Peru's El Comercio that has local coffee growers complaining about unfair competition. Apparently Peruvian coffee growers have been selling a lot of their wares to Colombians for better prices than they would have obtained by selling on the open market or via established deals and the Peru coffee people are worried about making the contracted quotas due to this selling to Colombia. El Comercio reports the words of César Rivas Peña, head of the National Coffee Group, in the following way:

Mysteriously, so far this year 132,000 quintales of coffee have been sent to Colombia when normally only 80,000 are sent.

As a Peruvian "quintal" is a measurement of 46kg, this means that so far this year 6,072MT of Peruvian coffee beans have made their way into Colombia, or in other words 1/5th of Colombia's theoretical YoY shortfall.

Exhibit Two: Your humble servant wondered whether Colombia's stats office, DANE, was also registering higher coffee imports this year. So off I trotted to the DANE site and got to the right page (if you really care and are as wonky as me you need to click "annexos estadísticos 2009 (Marzo)" to get the right XLS file to pop up and then it's the line item 24 on the Excel page A11) and sure enough, the diligent people at DANE had registered an increase in coffee imports in the first three months of 2009.

An enormous, eye-popping 405% increase, in fact (yes, that says four hundred and five percent). Imports of "coffees, teas and infusions" (read 'coffee') have risen from 1,412MT in the first quarter of 2008 to 7,134MT in the first quarter of 2009, a difference of 5,722MT. It also means that if Colombia keeps importing at the same rate throughout 2009 it will end up buying around 28,500MT of foreign coffee...which is weirdly and strangely close to the 30,000MT production shortfall predicted by Jorge Lozano in his interview with Heather Walsh. On another level, by cutting that down into monthly averages it means we can estimate 2/3rds of the coffee imports have so far come from Peru. It remains to be seen whether Peru will keep supplying Colombia at such and accelerated rhythm, however, if its own export association is starting to cry foul.

Exhibit three: And here's the strangest thing. While Jorge Lozano, a 79 year old past master expert of his field, was telling Bloomie that 11m bags in 2009 would be "a miracle", the Colombian minister in charge of the coffee sector was making soothing and smoothing noises to the world in London today. Colombian Agriculture Minister Andres Fernandez Acosta was quoted by Reuters as saying:

"We have no defaults at the moment and we won't have defaults. Because of weather conditions there have been delays. By June everything will be in place and we will have no problems meeting our commitments."

He then went on to say that Colombia's 2009 production would be 11.5m bags, a full half a million bags (and again, that coincidental 30,000MT) greater than Lozano's "miracle limit" of 11M bags.

Conclusion: It looks to me as if Colombia isn't going to live up to its advertised "100% Colombian" claims this year. That a political talking head can predict a substantially higher harvest of coffee than someone who knows the industry backwards and has worked in it all their life is one reason to be very suspicious. That Peruvian coffee producers are complaining of unfair competition from Colombian buyers who are snapping up their coffee (and not any old bean either, as Peru complains that Colombia only wants its top "export quality" product). And the sudden 400% increase in coffee imports registered by the Colombian stats office gives the issue a numerical backbone, too. With all the numbers (the shortfall, the imports, the ministerial overestimation) all hovering around the 30,000MT mark the coincidences become too much to ignore.

So next time you enjoy a cup of Valdez's "100% pure Colombian" finest, don't fret too much if you start having visions of the Nazca lines or Machu Picchu.