President Obama’s Science Czar John Holdren is worried about global warming. Having noticed that there hasn’t actually been any global warming since 1998, he feels it ought to be called “global climate disruption” instead. That way whether it gets warmer or colder, wetter or drier, less climatically eventful or more climatically eventful, the result will be the same: it can all be put down to “global climate disruption.”
And that will be good, because it will give Holdren the excuse to introduce all the draconian measures he has long believed necessary if “global climate disruption” is to be averted: viz, state-enforced population control; a rewriting of the legal code so that trees are able to sue people; and the wholesale destruction of the US economy (“de-development” as he put it in the 1973 eco-fascist textbook he co-wrote Paul and Anne Ehrlich Human Ecology: Global Problems And Solutions).
Holdren is not the only person having problems with the “world not warming and everyone growing increasingly sceptical” issue. So too is Dave “Grocer” Cameron’s excuse for a government. Its solution? Work out ways of brainwashing the populace with state-funded propaganda.
James Delingpole, “Global warming is dead. Long live, er, ‘Global climate disruption’!”, Telegraph.co.uk, 2010-09-17
September 17, 2010
QotD: Goodbye “climate change”, hello “global climate disruption”
September 16, 2010
No wonder the government wants to control this information
It’s obvious why: it contradicts the deeply held religious convictions of certain members of cabinet . . . that the Earth is just over 6,000 years old:
This week, we learned more details of how the federal government systemically muzzles its scientists on controversial issues such as climate change and the oilsands. The revelations reinforced complaints contained in an Environment Canada document leaked last March pointing out how senior scientists had to seek permission from their political bosses before speaking to reporters. “Our scientists are very frustrated with the new process,” said the document. “They feel the intent of the policy is to prevent them from speaking to the media.”
In one recent example, a scientist wasn’t allowed to talk to reporters until after the request had been funnelled through communications managers, policy advisers, political staff and senior advisers. And that was for a non-controversial report dealing with a flood that swept across Canada 13,000 years ago.
Andrew Weaver, an outspoken climate scientist at the University of Victoria, has called the Canadian government cone-of-silence policy “Orwellian.”
See, it couldn’t possibly have happened, because the Earth hadn’t been created yet, dummy!
H/T to Colby Cosh.
Christchurch: that shaky town
To get an idea of what the poor folks in Christchurch are still going through, here is a visualization of the 664 tremors (to date):
Click here to see the full series.
H/T to Nelson Kennedy for the link.
September 10, 2010
Japan now admits it can’t find over 230,000 elderly citizens
Remember that post from a while back about some Japanese families concealing the death of elderly relatives to scam their pensions? It appears to be a much more widespread problem than they first thought:
More than 230,000 elderly people in Japan who are listed as being aged 100 or over are unaccounted for, officials said following a nationwide inquiry.
An audit of family registries was launched last month after the remains of the man thought to be Tokyo’s oldest were found at his family home.
Relatives are accused of fraudulently receiving his pension for decades.
Officials have found that hundreds of the missing would be at least 150 years old if still alive.
September 7, 2010
Another reason we don’t think we’re as fat as we really are
It’s because our clothes are lying to us:
. . . I immediately went across the street, bought a tailor’s measuring tape, and trudged from shop to shop, trying on various brands’ casual dress pants. It took just two hours to tear my self-esteem to smithereens and raise some serious questions about what I later leaned is called “vanity sizing.”
Your pants have been deceiving you for years. And the lies are compounding:
H/T to Mark Frauenfelder for the link.
September 2, 2010
Rival electric car manufacturers already positioning for dirty ad campaigns
Lewis Page rounds up the GM-versus-Tesla ad campaigns of the near future:
As US motor mammoth GM gears up for the launch of its plug-in hybrid Chevrolet Volt, it has applied to trademark the term “range anxiety” — meaning the fear suffered by battery-car owners regarding their ability to get home again after a given journey. Upstart battery car maker Tesla Motors has issued a panicky and unconvincing statement in response.
[. . .]
GM feels that “range anxiety” is a major reason why its original EV-1 battery car of the 1990s failed.
”We’ve been here before,” says GM marketing honcho Joel Ewanick. “We have first-hand experience with what the issues are.”
In short, the difficulty with an all-electric battery car is that there is little certainty of actually being able to complete any journey even close to the vehicle’s rated range, as battery endurance is highly variable — and manufacturers can’t publicise the worst-case (or even perhaps the likely-case) figures. If they did, nobody would ever buy their products.
[. . .]
Meanwhile, reputable Swiss boffins have lately pointed out that in fact a VW Golf powered by one of the new, super-low-emission injected turbodiesels is responsible for less carbon emissions over its lifespan than one with a li-ion battery running on typical grid power.
So, to wrap up the discussion briefly, nobody will be buying Tesla Roadsters or Government Motors Volts for their economic virtues: they’ll be buying them as expensive status-signalling devices to show off their (real or imaginary) environmental awareness.
August 31, 2010
Commercial hypocrisy, oilsands edition
Ezra Levant isn’t amused by some US businesses trying to make political statements by slagging Alberta’s oilsands while being less than clean themselves:
Walgreens is the largest pharmacy chain in the U.S.
It’s also corrupt.
For years, they secretly altered their customers’ prescriptions, without their doctor’s knowledge, in a giant insurance scam across 42 states. They targeted Medicaid, the program for low-income Americans. So they were stealing from taxpayers and the poor at the same time. That kind of big thinking is why Walgreens is number one.
Walgreens replaced inexpensive drugs with drugs that were up to four times more costly. Only when an honest pharmacist finally blew the whistle on them were they stopped — and fined a whopping $35 million.
Are you ready to take moral lessons from Walgreens? Because they’ve just announced that they’re switching their trucks to fuel that doesn’t come from Canada’s oilsands — as an ethical statement.
Taking ethical guidance from Walgreens is sort of like taking abstinence lessons from Hugh Hefner.
I’d call for a boycott of Walgreens, but they don’t have any stores in Canada (and, despite their name, they are no relation to Walmart).
But Walgreens isn’t the only moral hypocrite to come out against Canada. So did The Gap, which also owns Banana Republic and Old Navy.
Do yourself a favour: Don’t buy their clothes.
Do we live in a “basement” universe?
Many years back, one of the mailing lists I regularly read had a long and interesting discussion about the possibilities of creating new universes. Not in a science-fictional sense, but based on the theories then current and using the technologies which were already under development at the time. They were referred to as “basement universes”, “pocket universes” and so on. It was fascinating, although my weak math abilities forced me to skip over the parts of the discussion with all the numbers and symbols.
Elizabeth sent me a link to John Gribbin’s “Are we living in a designer universe?”, which took me back to those fascinating discussions:
The argument over whether the universe has a creator, and who that might be, is among the oldest in human history. But amid the raging arguments between believers and sceptics, one possibility has been almost ignored — the idea that the universe around us was created by people very much like ourselves, using devices not too dissimilar to those available to scientists today.
As with much else in modern physics, the idea involves particle acceleration, the kind of thing that goes on in the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. Before the LHC began operating, a few alarmists worried that it might create a black hole which would destroy the world. That was never on the cards: although it is just possible that the device could generate an artificial black hole, it would be too small to swallow an atom, let alone the Earth.
However, to create a new universe would require a machine only slightly more powerful than the LHC — and there is every chance that our own universe may have been manufactured in this way.
August 25, 2010
“How can I buy the kind of food I want without supporting dangerous delusions?”
Eric S. Raymond has qualms over what some of his food preferences are actually going to support:
My mouth watered. “Oh Goddess,” I muttered in her direction, “it’s packaged crack for me . . .”
Ah, but then came the deadly disclaimers. “VEGAN GLUTEN-FREE NO GMOs NO TRANS FAT.” and “We support local and fair-trade sources growing certified organic, transitional, and pesticide-free products.” Aaaarrrgggh! Suddenly my lovely potential snack was covered with an evil-smelling miasma of diet-faddery, sanctimony, political correctness, and just plain nonsense. This, I find, is a chronic problem with buying “organic”.
So, what specific parts of those fluffy pro-foodie marketing terms bother ESR?
Take “no GMOs” for starters. That’s nonsense; it’s barely even possible. Humans have been genetically modifying since the invention of stockbreeding and agriculture; it’s what we do, and hatred of the accelerated version done in a genomics lab is pure Luddism. It’s vicious nonsense, too; poor third-worlders have already starved because their governments refused food aid that might contain GMOs.
[. . .]
Vegan? I’ve long since had it up to here with the tissue of ignorance and sanctimony that is evangelical veganism. Comparing our dentition and digestive tracts with those of cows, chimps, gorillas, and bears tells the story: humans are designed to be unspecialized omnivores, and the whole notion that vegetarianism is “natural” is so much piffle. It’s not even possible except at the near end of 4000 years of GMOing staple crops for higher calorie density, and even now you can’t be a vegan in a really cold climate (like, say, Tibet) because it’ll kill you.
[. . .]
Who could be against “fair trade”? Well, me . . . because the “fair trade” crowd pressures individual growers to join collectives with “managed” pricing. If you’re betting that this means lazy but politically adept growers with poor resource management and productivity at the expense of more efficient and harder-working ones, you’ve broken the code.
I share a lot of ESR’s concerns — and tastes. I don’t go out of my way to buy organic produce, but we do tend to buy local produce (in season) and our local butcher shop has been a great source of slightly-more-expensive but definitely-better-tasting meat and chicken. As I’ve mentioned in an earlier post, we have to pay more attention to food labels than most folks, but we’re looking for specific ingredients, not for the marketing bumph.
August 24, 2010
Gluten-free food not the dietary silver bullet
With a celiac in the family, we’ve been very aware of all the ways the food industry uses gluten as a cheap filler (because we have to read ingredient lists very carefully). The recent boom in gluten-free products has been wonderful: we still read all the labels, but there are more products we can safely buy and use with confidence. But some folks buy the products thinking that gluten-free means guilt-free:
The notion that a gluten-free diet can help people lose weight or avoid carbohydrates is a myth. “Many packaged gluten-free products are even higher in carbs, sugar, fat and calories than their regular counterparts, and they tend to be lower in fiber, vitamins and iron,” says Shelley Case, a registered dietician on the medical advisory board of the Celiac Disease Foundation. “Gluten-free does not mean nutritious,” she notes.
Gluten, a protein in wheat, barley and rye, is not only a key ingredient in baked goods. It’s also used as a thickening agent in ketchup and ice cream. It helps ferment vinegar and alcoholic beverages. It’s even in lip gloss and envelope adhesives.
For people with celiac disease, ingesting even tiny amounts of gluten can set off an autoimmune reaction that flattens the finger-like villi lining the small intestine. The most common symptoms are bloating, gas, diarrhea and constipation, as well as early osteoporosis. The autoimmune reaction can also cause skin rashes, chronic fatigue, bone and joint pain, neurological problems, liver problems, diabetes, infertility in both men and women and cancers, including lymphoma. An estimated three million Americans have celiac disease — and the vast majority don’t know it because it can have no symptoms or mimic other diseases.
Separately, a smaller group of people have a specific allergy to wheat; exposure can lead to rashes, asthma and even anaphylactic shock.
A third category of people — as many as 20 million Americans — appear to be sensitive to gluten without having full-blown celiac disease. For them, symptoms may be less typical, involving depression, mental fogginess, mood swings and behavior changes. Much less is known about this group.
August 23, 2010
QotD: Peak Culture
The height of their society peaked in 1969. They used militarism and socialism to put two guys on the Moon, they trotted out their public-private partnership (Concorde) to build exclusive supersonic transport for the rich. Max Faget and some other brilliant engineers designed a space shuttle fleet of ten vehicles capable of hundreds of flights a year to make access to low Earth orbit cheap and routine. And the Advanced Research Projects Agency had some geeks create an inter-networking protocol that could survive a nuclear war.
Obviously, they shot their wad, as it were, and no longer put guys on the Moon. They no longer fly supersonic transports. Their space shuttle is going to stop flying soon, if it hasn’t already. Those geeky guys went on to develop open source cryptography, open source software, and totally private economic transactions. The future we’re creating is going to be very, dramatically different. It is going to be decentralised to a fare thee well.
Right now, today, two people anywhere in the world *can* have a totally private economic exchange that cannot be detected by anyone else. And since it cannot be detected, it cannot be regulated, it cannot be prohibited, and it cannot be taxed. Even inflation cannot tax it, if the exchange is denominated in some money like silver or gold. Which means that those who dream of ruling the world sowed the seeds of their own damnation?
Jim Davidson, “Peak Culture”, Libertarian Enterprise, 2010-08-22
August 14, 2010
China’s petroleum producers make more sense than the US government
Not everybody has bought into the “ethanol as a clean alternative to petroleum” bullshit: China’s petroleum producers are asking the Chinese government to stop subsidizing the corn-to-ethanol project (similar to the US government’s subsidy program).
[. . .] to enjoy the subsidy of 1880 Yuan per ton of alcoholic gasoline for vehicles and the tax-exemption policy for the corn-to-ethanol project, some plants in China began a wave of buying corn, causing the severe shortage of corn for animal feed and the rapid increase of corn prices.
“In the first half year of this year, China imported 78 million tons of corn, mainly due to the higher domestic corn price than overseas. In July, the average corn price in northeast China was 1845 Yuan per ton, rising by 15.7% year on year” said Zhang Jianbo, a market analyst with Distribution Productivity Promotion Center of China Commerce…
Of course the US has also been criticized for this insane subsidy of corn ethanol as well and blamed for dramatic price increases in corn based products in Mexico, and South/Central America.
The bottom line is corn ethanol makes no economic sense, never did, and when the total environmental impact end-to-end from dirt farm to tailpipe is considered, its even worse than ordinary gasoline. Its always been a lose/lose proposition all the way around, and many of the environmental groups have started to cool on their enthusiasm for it as the real cost/impacts manifested themselves.
Even if you’re not a whole-hearted “green”, this kind of market-rigging by government intervention should be greeted with derision: it’s not “green” to consume more resources to produce a less energy-intensive end-product and pretend it’s a viable substitute. This is another case where the government would produce better environmental results by burning the dollar bills rather than using them to subsidize corn production for ethanol.
August 12, 2010
Champagne serving tip
Shereen Dindar warns us that even though common sense has been vindicated on this issue, we shouldn’t get too cocky:
We now have a scientific study to confirm the widely accepted ritual of pouring bubbly down the side of a flute before drinking it actually makes sense.
Scientists in France found that pouring bubbly in an angled way and chilling the beverage in advance is best for preserving its taste, fizz and aroma.
Gérard Liger-Belair and colleagues — who published their findings in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry — studied carbon dioxide loss in champagne that was poured straight down the middle of a glass, as well as, down the side of an angled glass. They found that pouring champagne down the side preserved up to twice as much carbon dioxide.
I’m not a big Champagne fan — I don’t mind sparkling wines, but generally there are better values in Spanish Cava than in French Champagne — but no matter what your preference in bubbly, do yourself a big favour and serve your sparkling wine in the right kind of glass. Don’t use the caterer’s special — what they laughingly call a Champagne glass is almost ideally suited to producing the worst the wine has to offer. Use a proper Champagne “flute”, a tall narrow glass that concentrates the aromas (and the bubbles), not a wide, flat glass that dissipates ’em quickly.
August 11, 2010
The search for the geekiest beer
Betsy Mason reports on the ongoing search for the Venn diagram showing the intersection of microbrewing and science geeks:
I’ve already proven the connection between beer and geologists, but the number of brews out there with awesomely geeky science names suggests that the beer-science link is even more primordial. After stumbling across a few of these, like Shale Ale (named for the Burgess Shale, a famously fossiliferous outcrop) and Homo Erectus (an IPA made by Walking Man Brewing), I decided the matter required further investigation.
With the help of my friends and Twitteronia, I tracked down a bunch more science-geek beers, and a few with super-geeky tech themes (this is Wired, after all). I managed to get seven of them into Wired HQ, because, let’s be honest, this was all just another elaborate excuse to make drinking beer part of my job.
Sadly, I couldn’t get my hands on some of the geekiest beers. A few were short runs for special occasions, like The Empire Strikes Back All-English IPA and Galileo’s Astronomical Ale (tagline: Theoretically the best beer in the universe), brewed by astronomy geek Ken Grossman of Sierra Nevada Brewing Company to celebrate the 400th anniversary of the telescope. And some are seasonal, like 21st Amendment’s Spring Tweet, a beer brewed for Twitter (which brings up the obvious question: Where’s Wired’s beer?)
August 10, 2010
Hey kids, are your parents uptight about you having sex?
That’s to be expected. They’re even more uptight about their parents having sex:
Over the last few months there have been numerous headlines about the sex lives of the over-50s — almost all negative. The HIV infection rate in this group has doubled, we are told. The numbers of over-50s suffering from chlamydia, syphilis, gonorrhoea, herpes and genital warts is growing. One doctor even wrote about his shock at treating the sexual diseases of what he called “cheerfully promiscuous” baby boomers.
It is true there are probably some people at middle age who mistakenly think their sexual partners are above suspicion, and others who did not enter their dating lives using condoms. Safer sex practices may not come so easily for them, yet the prominence and style of these articles underscores the sexual ageism that pervades our society. Where are the positive messages about the sex lives of people in their 50s, 60s, 70s and beyond? Do we ever hear the truth about how sexually vibrant they can be — without an attached warning about physical dangers and moral pitfalls? Sex among elders is surely one of the greatest sexual taboos in western society.
