The Weekly Standard does a very good job documenting all of the scandals and forced retractions by the IPCC. As you might expect, there are rather more of them than have been published in the "mainstream" media. It makes for a long article, and taken together, they are incredibly damning. Having read them, I do not think "hoax" is too strong a word to describe these instances - and the comparison of Climategate to The Pentagon Papers is apt.
Though the cover drawing of an unclothed Al Gore isn't really something I wanted seared into my brain....
I'm talking about ads for mass spectrometers, genetic sequencers, and other stuff that leaves your "4G smartphone hacked to run Linux" huddled in some corner, crying over its basic inadequacy.
My favorite might be the boy band takeoff, for its oh-so obvious send up.
I would never in a million years have guessed that these kinds of creative approaches existed in that sphere. I'll take that as a signal to stretch my imagination a bit in future.
Very smart approach. Swim in shallow flats where fast-moving fish live. Begin by circling around them, beating your flukes into the seabed to raise sand clouds. When the circle closes, the fish try to jump out. And hey! Those tricks from Sea World have a real world counterpart after all.
Well, this was interesting. Just a couple weeks ago, another IPCC scandal revealed that Himalayan glaciers wouldn't be melting away by 2035, as claimed. More like, uh, 2305. Maybe. The whole controversy, and process by which this grossly unsubstantiated claim became very financially beneficial to the people making it, was aptly described as "nice work if you can invent it." So, why was the material in the IPCC report? Well, this pretty much sums up the IPCC as politics, not science:
"In an interview with The Mail on Sunday, Dr Lal, the co-ordinating lead author of the report's chapter on Asia, said: 'It related to several countries in this region and their water sources. We thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact policy-makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action.'It had importance for the region, so we thought we should put it in.' "
Just let that statement sink in for a bit.
Now, the real expert whose contrary (and correct) glacier work IPCC chair R.K. Pachauri blackballed as "voodoo"science wants an apology. And the Indian government has decided that science is too important to be left to the IPCC. Environment minister Mr Jairam Ramesh, who notes that while some glaciers are shrinking, others are advancing, had an announcement:
Some modern motorcycles have begun to include onboard, computerized self-diagnostic functions, just as cars do. But they haven't eliminated the kind of judgment mechanics exercise. If we can understand why they haven't, this will help illuminate further the limitations inherent in the idea of an "intellectual technology," and the perversities that get laid upon work when those limitations aren't heeded.
The journal Bioscience (October 2009) recently published "The Rise of the Mesopredator" [PDF]. Science Codex covers the researchers' coclusions:
"In case after case around the world, the researchers said, primary predators such as wolves, lions or sharks have been dramatically reduced if not eliminated, usually on purpose and sometimes by forces such as habitat disruption, hunting or fishing. Many times this has been viewed positively by humans, fearful of personal attack, loss of livestock or other concerns. But the new picture that's emerging is a range of problems, including ecosystem and economic disruption that may dwarf any problems presented by the original primary predators.... "The economic impacts of mesopredators should be expected to exceed those of apex predators in any scenario in which mesopredators contribute to the same or to new conflict with humans," the researchers wrote in their report. "Mesopredators occur at higher densities than apex predators and exhibit greater resiliency to control efforts." The problems are not confined to terrestrial ecosystems...."
Interesting article. Hopefully, it will lead to smarter interactions with nature. We're the apex species, which means stewardship whether we like or not. Might as well get good at it.
One wonders, too, if there may be some applications to human predators, as well.
I was amazed. A NY Times guest op-ed that actually acknowledged the need for attitude adjustments on the part of militant atheists like Richard Dawkins, as well as a dishonest creationism that even if true at its core, is not and never can be science (negative hypothesis, anyone?). The reconciliation of religion and science is important on many levels, not least of which is the fact that religious morality and the ethic of science form the twin pillars upon which our civilization rest. I've discussed this before.
Robert Wright of the New America Foundation:
"The "war" between science and religion is notable for the amount of civil disobedience on both sides. Most scientists and most religious believers refuse to be drafted into the fight. Whether out of a live-and-let-live philosophy, or a belief that religion and science are actually compatible, or a heartfelt indifference to the question, they're choosing to sit this one out. Still, the war continues, and it's not just a sideshow. There are intensely motivated and vocal people on both sides making serious and conflicting claims.... William James said that religious belief is "the belief that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto." Science has its own version of the unseen order, the laws of nature. In principle, the two kinds of order can themselves be put into harmony - and in that adjustment, too, may lie a supreme good."
Some of you may have seen the stories about Robert Elwood's research, which makes a pretty good case that crabs, lobsters, and prawns can feel pain. Hermit Crabs also remembered it later, and changed their behaviour. That second bit is key, as it takes it out of the realm of a mere reflex response. There go our rationalizations, and even reflex responses may deserve attention:
"It was also thought that since many invertebrates cast off damaged appendages, it was not harmful for humans to remove legs, tails and other body parts from live crustaceans. Another study led by Patterson, however, found that when humans twisted off legs from crabs, the stress response was so profound that some individuals later died or could not regenerate the lost appendages."
The good news is that there is a new alternative to boiling lobsters alive, approved by the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals no less, and it has a number of benefits to chefs in the bargain. The "Crustastun" is a shoebox-sized device that uses salt water and electric current. Its approach reduces the cortisols and adrenaline that stress can create in boiled critters, resulting in tenderer and tastier meat. The voltage also kills bacteria, which means the dead crustaceans can safely be stored for up to 48 hours - a bonus for restaurants, which reduce their throw-away losses.
Looks like a win solution all around. Hat tip to inventors Simon and Charlotte Buckhaven.
File this one next to the earlier posts re: the "Medea Hypothesis," aka. "if the Earth really is a single organism, it's awfully mean." New Scientist's "Dawn of the animals: Solving Darwin's dilemma" discusses how life on earth as we understand it really got started by the mother of all mass extinctions:
"Put together, all the recent findings and ideas paint a picture of early evolution dramatically different from what we long imagined. The oceans did not suddenly become hospitable places for large animals 2.5 billion years ago when the atmosphere began to fill with oxygen, nor did animals suddenly appear during the early Cambrian. Instead, the first animals appeared much earlier but were limited to a thin layer of surface water in hostile oceans still dominated by bacteria. They were restricted in size by the lack of oxygen, starved of vital nutrients and regularly killed en masse by toxic upwellings.
Their deaths were not in vain, though. As their bodies sunk to the bottom of the toxic seas and were buried, carbon dioxide was sucked out of the atmosphere, triggering a series of deep ice ages [JK: so deep, some believe that even the oceans froze] that reset the chemistry of the oceans. The surviving animals seized the opportunity to wrest control of the oceans from the bacteria, producing clear waters rich in oxygen in which larger, more complex animals could evolve. Thus the stage was set for the Cambrian explosion."
So, here's the thing about black holes. They tend to be either super-massive vortexes in the center of galaxies that are, as Carl would put it, millyuns or billyuns of times the mass of our Sunn - or a remnant stellar black hole of between 3-20 solar masses.
We think we know how the smaller ones form. Supergiant star goes up the periodic table, fusing heavier and heavier elements for fuel, until its temperature and hence its outward pressure drop below key gravitic thresholds. Result: implosion, accompanied by rebound and a cataclysmic supernova explosion that blows off most of its mass. If last-stage atomic forces can hold the tiny remnant up after everything is collapsed into neutrons or quark "degenerate matter," you get a neutron star/quark star, where one teaspoonful would weigh about as much as an earth mountain. If it's a more massive remnant, however, it will continue collapsing in size, without losing mass. What's left makes such a big dent (hole? hard to say) in space-time, that even light ends up circling the drain and unable to escape if it passes within the thing's "event horizon".
What we don't know, is how the super-massive black holes form. The most popular current theory is merger: black holes combined. OK. But if that's so, there should be more of a size continuum. We should see mid-size black holes that are larger than we could expect from a single star's collapse: somewhere between 100 and several thousand solar masses.
The first strongly-confirmed example may have come in 2004, when the Hubble Space Telescope found one at the center of the giant G1 globular cluster near Andromeda galaxy. These medium-size black holes have been theoretically linked to some of the massive x-ray bursts we pick up now and then, but they aren't the only thing that could cause them. That's why the recent HLX-1 discovery using the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton X-ray space telescope may have just added a 2nd medium black hole to the catalog - and an important piece to the puzzle.
Quantum Physics offers some weird results, to say the least. Paul Quincey, a physicist at Britain's National Physical Laboratory, points out just how weird the concept of gravity is, when you think about it. And offers an explanation that offers a much clearer philosophical view of some key quantum physics results. From the Nov/Dec 2008 Skeptical Inquirer, "Quantum Weirdness: An Analogy from the Time of Newton"
"...the borderlands of scientific knowledge have always contained some ideas considered virtually supernatural at the time, and it is instructive to see with hindsight how such ideas are ultimately accepted or rejected by mainstream science. Second, there are illuminating parallels between gravity and quantum theory that may help us come to terms with the current philosophical difficulties surrounding quantum theory."
I like this quote best:
