For instance, when the lefties start tittering about some self-serving study that claims to show liberals are smarter – another round of which we’re no doubt due for.
It’s good for a giggle – or, if you’re not so bright, as a keystone of your worldview.
So it’s with that subtext in mind that I submit this without additional comment.
I’m just running on a hunch here – but I’m going to guess that if this is a “solution to global warming”, then so “are” gun control, single-payer health care, shuttering charter schools and abortion.
I remember my first day of college biology class. My professor, Doctor Claflin, said something about the scientific method that I shall never forget. When publishing results from your experiments and your research, he said to always be respectful of the inquisitive nature of the scientific method.
He used to say of this process…:
Please use the comments to demonstrate your own ignorance, unfamiliarity with empirical data, ability to repeat discredited memes, and lack of respect for scientific knowledge. Also, be sure to create straw men and argue against things I have neither said nor even implied. Any irrelevancies you can mention will also be appreciated. Lastly, kindly forgo all civility in your discourse . . . you are, after all, anonymous.
And it was from that that I learned my respect for the rigorous inquiry of the Scentific Method.
I used to play in a band with a guy, a keyboard player. He was a bit of a prodigy; he’d been sent off from North Dakota to the Berklee College of Music in Boston; he was one of the most amazing keyboard players you’ve ever seen.
Of course, like a lot of prodigious talents, he had some issues. He was bipolar. The illness left him unable to function at Berklee, so it was back to North Dakota. Psychiatrists put him on lithium – which enabled him to function. To thrive, really – when he was on his meds and everything was well-tempered, he would practice, perform, put on recitals that’d stun the locals, play in bands, hold a job, function in society.
Then he’d feel he could function without the meds. He’d go off ‘em…
…and, inside of a few weeks, wind up in the papers for having driven to Fargo and remodeled the inside of a Catholic church with a sledgehammer. Followed by another bout of treatment, and then another course of lithium. Lather, rinse, repeat.
He functioned about 95% of the time. About 5%, he was incapacitated. Was he a success story, or a failure?
———-
Psychotropic medication has been a boon to many people. They’ve helped pull back the gray fog on the lives of millions who suffer from depression. They allow many with serious mental illnesses to function, and often thrive.
But as my keyboard-playing friend showed, there’s a downside; when the medication doesn’t work, or when the doses get changed, or abruptly stopped? Bad things can happen.
As at least one Catholic church in Fargo discovered back in the early eighties.
And sometimes, much, much worse.
The site “SSRI Stories” – it stands for “Seratonin-Specific Re-Uptake Inhibitor”, a class of anti-depressants that includes Zoloft, Paxil and Wellbutrin among many others – catalogs crimes and other violent and bizarre incidents that have some link to psychotropic meds. The stories on the site are open to some discussion – and there is discussion – and correlation doesn’t equal causation. But the site chronicles a hell of a lot of correlation.
The list of school shootings alone is below the jump. The incident at the Red Lake Reservation school seven years ago is on the list. There’s much, much more there.
Speaking of correlations that don’t necessarily equal causation – is it any wonder the Psychiatric community is so hell-bent on calling gun crime a “public health issue?” It’d sure be more convenient than addressing their own stake in violent crime, especially spree shootings, wouldn’t it?
His answer on “when was the world created?” flirts with Creationism and “Intelligent Design!”
Oh, those bitter freaks, taking solace in Jeebus!
…I wish had boned up on my math to the point where I could actually have taken a shot at astrophysics.
Because this looks really, really cool.
Joe Doakes of Como Park writes:
Mayor Chris Coleman once said in his State of the City Address that the greatest threat facing St. Paul was global warming; hence, the need to build refrigerated outdoor ice rinks.
Here’s an interview with an actual scientist talking, not a politician. It shows.
Joe Doakes
Como Park
Joe hasn’t gotten the memo; Libs only care about “science” that ridicules the GOP.
More of that universal consensus on global warming in action:
Based on readings from more than 30,000 measuring stations, the data was issued last week without fanfare by…
By whom?
What bunch of tea bagging wing nuts released this bit of heresy?
…the [UK] Met[eorology] Office and the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit. It confirms that the rising trend in world temperatures ended in 1997.
Meanwhile, leading climate scientists yesterday told The Mail on Sunday that, after emitting unusually high levels of energy throughout the 20th Century, the sun is now heading towards a ‘grand minimum’ in its output, threatening cold summers, bitter winters and a shortening of the season available for growing food.
It might be lonely at those “Nuremberg Trials for Denialists”.
Lonely and cold.
Researchers at Tufts have a single molecule that acts as an electric motor - a tiny little armature and pivot:
The motor, made from a single molecule just a billionth of a metre across, is reported in Nature Nanotechnology…The butyl methyl sulphide molecule was placed on a clean copper surface, where its single sulphur atom acted as a pivot.
Its primary applications so far are a) driving the next generation of “Smart Car”, and b) powering the printer in Tom Bakk’s office.
NASA “scientists” have skipped past holding “Nuremberg Trials” for “denialists”, have gone directly to invoking Krugman’s alien attack:.
It may not rank as the most compelling reason to curb greenhouse gases, but reducing our emissions might just save humanity from a pre-emptive alien attack, scientists claim.
Watching from afar, extraterrestrial beings might view changes in Earth’s atmosphere as symptomatic of a civilisation growing out of control – and take drastic action to keep us from becoming a more serious threat, the researchers explain.
No, you read that right. NASA. Not Art Bell.
Isn’t that how your smug atheists describe religion? ”Do what we tell you or some extra-terrestrial pseudo-mystical being will smite you?”
Just saying.
Ozzie envirofascist calls for tattoing “deniers”:
Surely it’s time for climate-change deniers to have their opinions forcibly tattooed on their bodies.
Not necessarily on the forehead; I’m a reasonable man. Just something along their arm or across their chest so their grandchildren could say, ”Really? You were one of the ones who tried to stop the world doing something? And why exactly was that, granddad?”
But he has a conscience:
On second thoughts, maybe the tattooing along the arm is a bit Nazi-creepy.
Did I say “conscience”? I meant “rudimentary PR savvy”.
The Good New: We will probably eventually win the war on terrorism, one way or the other.
The Bad News: Our biggest opponent may be yet to come; scientists are learning more about the ingenuity of the Fire Ant:
Ants have exoskeletons that are naturally hydrophobic, or water repellant. A single ant can walk on water because of the buoyancy of the air bubbles trapped next to its body, and the water’s own surface tension. However, when thousands of ants stand on top of each other, their multiplied weight should cause them to sink. But for years, biologists have observed fire ant colonies floating down flood plains and rivers in their native South America.
For the first time, a group of engineers has attacked the question of ant flotation from a physics perspective. Ants float as a group because they can harness the power of nearby air bubbles. Grasping each other’s mandibles or front legs with a force 400 times their body weight, the ants are able to trap small pockets of air between them — like a group floatation device.
“The ants are so tightly knit together, that air pockets form between the water and the ants, and water cannot penetrate through any part,” said Nathan Mlot, a graduate student at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta and one of the study’s authors.
…
“Ants are like little computers, acting on a few simple rules of engagement,” said Mlot.
Today, floating.
Tomorrow – hijacking planes?
Politics may not be rocket science, but apparently it is brain surgery.
Understanding the genesis of political orientation has long been a subject of biological interest, with every few years a new study suggesting our ideological differences aren’t skin-deep, they’re sub-atomic.
Add to the list the findings of the University College London, which takes the theory of different liberal and conservative genes to another level. Liberals and conservatives have always thought the other had their brains wired differently and, according to the University, physically speaking they’re right.
But the University’s study is also a case example in the sideshow of the politicization of science – namely, “proving” that conservatives are mentally (or genetically) deficient:
Using data from MRI scans, researchers at the University College London found that self-described liberals have a larger anterior cingulate cortex–a gray matter of the brain associated with understanding complexity. Meanwhile, self-described conservatives are more likely to have a larger amygdala, an almond-shaped area that is associated with fear and anxiety.
Using every inch of my larger amygdala, it’s hard not to notice how many of these studies inevitably lead to a conclusion that liberal physiological differences are viewed as genetically preferable – if not superior. A similar outlook could be found just this last year with the ballyhooed discovery of a so-called “liberal gene”:
As a consequence, people with this genetic predisposition who have a greater-than-average number of friends would be exposed to a wider variety of social norms and lifestyles, which might make them more liberal than average. They reported that “it is the crucial interaction of two factors — the genetic predisposition and the environmental condition of having many friends in adolescence — that is associated with being more liberal.”
Outgoing, popular kids equals well-balanced, politically liberal adults? Conservatives are creepy, adolescent shut-ins? Curse my shriveled anterior cingulate cortex for reading anything into that study.
Of course, not all scientists are inferring that our political and genetic differences are so stark as to invite a Cro-Magnon/Neanderthal comparison. In fact, some recongize the potential for political bias in such a report and actively work to tap down any broad-based partisan conclusions…including the actual authors of the study:
While the London study does find distinct differences between Democrats and Republicans, its authors caution that more research needs to be done on the subject. One unknown is whether people are simply born with their political beliefs or if our brains adjust to life experiences–which is a possibility, Kanai writes.
“It’s very unlikely that actual political orientation is directly encoded in these brain regions,” he said in a statement accompanying the study. “More work is needed to determine how these brain structures mediate the formation of political attitude.”
Talk about burying the lead. And I thought we were just told that larger anterior cingulate cortexs led to understanding complex subjects better.
Truthfully, we want our differences to be genetic for they absolve us of needing to convince others. And seeking to find that absolution – that genesis of political thought – in the genius of others brings to mind the words of the discoverer of the double helix, J.D. Watson:
“
One could not be a successful scientist without realizing that, in contrast to the popular conception supported by newspapers and mothers of scientists, a goodly number of scientists are not only narrow-minded and dull, but also just stupid.”
The ongoing disaster at the Fukushima nuclear power plant shows the perils of following the left’s policy on nuclear power.
The debris from the first hydrogen blast had barely settled when DFL-affiliated bloggers and tweeps started chanting “yeah, good job trying to lift Minnesota’s nuke moratorium! Haha! You are teh stupid!”.
We’ll come back to the DFL’s dim-witted politicization in a moment.
The headlines paint a dire (and direly confused) picture of the situation at the Fukushima plant, it’d seem nuke opponents have a point. Things sound bad.
But let’s make sure we’re clear on the facts: the Fukushima plant, like all Japanese plants, were designed to withstand ground motion equal to twice that occurring in a 1000-year quake – which in that part of Honshu is in the low 8-point Richter range (it’s not a perfect measurement scale, since Richter measures energy release, not ground motion). The Japanese earthquake was 9 points on the Richter scale – 5-10 times as intense. And yet by all indications so far, the containment vessels – the steel, lead and concrete capsule that contains the actual reactor cores – are holding up. It was the release of the intensely interactive fuel from the core – many thousands of times more intense than the fairly limited hydrogen and steam-borne radiation we’ve seen from Fukushima – that made Chernobyl the disaster it was. Bear in mind, Chernobyl had no containment vessel. The reactor cooling at Fukushima, of course, seems not to have been up to the damage it suffered in the earthquake and tsunami – or, more directly, to the complete loss of the power grid and backup diesel generators to run the cooling systems.
“Is it wise to build nuclear power plants in areas prone to very serious earthquakes and tsunamis” is a very, very valid question. It is a fact that engineering can make almost anything withstand almost any disaster imaginable – but the costs escalate drastically, as well. Power utilities can no more afford to buy plants that can survive every possible disaster than you can afford to buy a car that will protect you from every possible highway accident. Perhaps building nuke plants in active high-risk quake zones, or low-lying coastal areas, isn’t so smart.
You’ll note, by the way, that Minnesota is prone to neither earthquakes nor tsunamis.
Now, according to the latest reports from Japan, the biggest radiation danger is coming from a fire in a building that contains spent nuclear fuel – uranium that no longer can support a nuclear reaction, but is still radioactive. It’s being kept, basically, in a swimming pool – because water is an incredibly effective radiation shield…
…unless it boils away due to a fire in the building, which seems to be what may be happening.
Now, the people at Fukushima are dealing with conditions that are unimaginably difficult – even finding food to eat in that area is difficult, without having to deal with a damaged nuke plant and all the things that can go wrong.
But the best way to prevent nuclear waste from getting caught up in a building fire is to get it out of the building, and put it someplace where a fire is both impossible and irrelevant. Say, miles underground.
Which has been proposed in the United State for over twenty years; the Yucca Flats waste storage facility would have made disasters like the potential blazing waste plume at Fukushima impossible. But the American left – the “environmental” movement, in this case – scuppered that idea. Partly because of the danger of transporting waste by rail (real, but manageable); partly because of danger to future generations thousands of years from now if the signage, for example, got obscured.
Which leaves us with fifty-odd nuclear waste sites more or less like the one at Fukushima today – including two in Minnesota – vulnerable, in extreme circumstances, to the same kind of disaster.
Thanks, Democrats.
But the issue of waste disposal can’t be laid at the feet of the DFL alone; it’s a national issue.
What we can lay at their feet is the economy-crippling shortsightedness of cutting off Minnesota’s energy-production nose because of an accident that could not be replicated in Minnesota, or for that matter most of the US; with a 45-year-old reactor design, arguably built in an inadvisable place, with backup power that couldn’t withstand twin disasters that are exceedingly rare to nonexistant away from the American west coast.
Especially given that advances in nuclear technology promise to make proposed nuke plants meltdown-proof by replacing mechanical and human safeguards -which are fallible – with the laws of physics.
Gary Miller – late of the great, lamented Truth Vs. The Machine, from which this blog’s “First Ringer” is a refugee, has switched hos oeuvre to Facebook, a medium whose Ambrose Bierce he very clearly is.
And Gary notes something that had flashed across my mind as I listened to the State of The Union:
…the President’s continued references to Sputnik as a way to inspire young people would be much more effective, if: 1. They still taught kids in publik skouls about Sputnik. 2. The country which launched Sputnik, the Soviet Union, still existed and hadn’t collapsed under the burden of a socialist command economy similar to one which the President hopes to implement here. Other than that, heck of a story.
Heh.
A look back on ten climate predictions based on “incontrovertible evidence“, over the past forty years.
I don’t begrudge your choice to smoke cigarettes as long as you:
1) Keep it out of my face.
2) Keep it out of my kids’ face.
3) Quit throwing them out of your god-damned window.
4) Pay your fair share: don’t expect me to pay higher life, disability or health insurance premiums. You should though.
5) Let me bum one off of you once a year or so for old times.
But seriously, if you don’t know smoking is dangerous by now, is it because the government hasn’t done an adequate job of edumacating you?
Apparently the government thinks you’re so damn stupid that the dangers can only be conveyed to you in pictures.
Corpses, cancer patients and diseased lungs are among the images the federal government plans for larger, graphic warning labels that would take up half of each pack of cigarettes sold in the United States.
Whether smokers addicted to nicotine will see them as a reason to quit remains a question.
Sounds like another shovel-ready project to me.
The share of Americans who smoke has fallen dramatically since 1970, from nearly 40 percent to about 20 percent, but the rate has stalled since about 2004. About 46 million adults in the U.S. smoke cigarettes.
In the same period, the average cost per pack has gone from 38 cents to $5.33. Much of those increases are from state and federal taxes.
It’s unclear why declines in smoking have stalled. Some experts have cited tobacco company discounts or lack of funding for programs to discourage smoking or to help smokers quit.
I would submit to you that there are a certain percentage of us that are going to smoke cigarettes. They like to smoke. It aint illegal. They know it aint good for ‘em. And they don’t give a rip.
In the mean time are we to assume the federal government intends to spend more and more of everyone’s tax dollars until there are no smokers left? Maybe we should just let evolution run its course.
I used to be a technical writer, working in software, science and engineering.
And this piece from the Guardian made me howl with laughter.
Your mileage may vary.
Science is joining forces to analyze…
Ozzy Osbourne’s genome will be sequenced, in hopes that scientists can figure out how the notoriously self-destructive rocker is still alive.
“Sequencing and analyzing individuals with extreme medical histories provides the greatest potential scientific value,” Nathan Pearson, director of research at Knome, a leading gene-sequencing company, told the U.K. newspaper the Daily Mail.
Although the 61-year-old Osbourne has been sober for eight years, he spent the bulk of his life consuming legendary amounts of alcohol and hard drugs, as well as engaging in other high-risk activities.
Perhaps next “Knome” can analyze the genomes of people who thought Black Sabbath didn’t suck.
The science behind global warming is taking more hits than Jean-Pierre Koopman against Mohammed Ali:
The United Nations climate panel faces a new challenge with scientists casting doubt on its claim that global temperatures are rising inexorably because of human pollution.
In its last assessment the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said the evidence that the world was warming was “unequivocal”.
It warned that greenhouse gases had already heated the world by 0.7C and that there could be 5C-6C more warming by 2100, with devastating impacts on humanity and wildlife.
Sounds bad.
However, new research, including work by British scientists, is casting doubt on such claims. Some even suggest the world may not be warming much at all.
“The temperature records cannot be relied on as indicators of global change,” said John Christy, professor of atmospheric science at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, a former lead author on the IPCC.
The doubts of Christy and a number of other researchers focus on the thousands of weather stations around the world, which have been used to collect temperature data over the past 150 years.
These stations, they believe, have been seriously compromised by factors such as urbanisation, changes in land use and, in many cases, being moved from site to site.
Long story short; humans do cause warming – where they live:
Christy has published research papers looking at these effects in three different regions: east Africa, and the American states of California and Alabama.
“The story is the same for each one,” he said. “The popular data sets show a lot of warming but the apparent temperature rise was actually caused by local factors affecting the weather stations, such as land development.”
Do you think a weather station surrounded by strip malls and houses is going to be warmer than one out on the lone prairie?
The IPCC faces similar criticisms from Ross McKitrick, professor of economics at the University of Guelph, Canada, who was invited by the panel to review its last report.
The experience turned him into a strong critic and he has since published a research paper questioning its methods.
In other words, he was part of that universal consensus, before he wasn’t.
I was a biology major for one semester. I’m not going to claim to be an expert on science or the scientific method.
But then, either should Algore.
But I digress. One of the key tenets of the scientific academy is the notion of “peer review” – the idea that scientific work is going to get a rigorous going-over by other scientists, to try to find weaknesses, errors or gaps in the thesis.
At any rate, more details are emerging about how climate “scientists” got their “universal consensus”:
Scientists sometimes like to portray what they do as divorced from the everyday jealousies, rivalries and tribalism of human relationships. What makes science special is that data and results that can be replicated are what matters and the scientific truth will out in the end.
But a close reading of the emails hacked from the University of East Anglia in November exposes the real process of everyday science in lurid detail.
Many of the emails reveal strenuous efforts by the mainstream climate scientists to do what outside observers would regard as censoring their critics. And the correspondence raises awkward questions about the effectiveness of peer review – the supposed gold standard of scientific merit – and the operation of the UN’s top climate body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
The bottom line? The “scientists” involved in the scandal engaged in back-channel back-biting no less venal and stupid than you’d find at the most vapid Humanities department, to get their pet theory (and all of its attendant funding) accepted.
The scientists involved disagree. They say they were engaged not in suppressing dissent but in upholding scientific standards by keeping bad science out of peer-reviewed journals. Either way, when passing judgment on papers that directly attack their own work, they were mired in conflicts of interest that would not be allowed in most professions.
Read the whole thing. And the next time some chattering hamster chants “the science is settled”, ask them if they have the faintest clue what that means.
The Earth is getting warmer! And Humans are causing it!
Don’t question the theory, peasants! It is SETTLED SCIENCE!
No, really! It’s all solid peer-reviewed science, and when the peers speak, you peasants must hold your filthy tongues!
In its most recent report [the IPCC] stated that observed reductions in mountain ice in the Andes, Alps and Africa was being caused by global warming, citing two papers as the source of the information.
However, it can be revealed that one of the sources quoted was a feature article published in a popular magazine for climbers which was based on anecdotal evidence from mountaineers about the changes they were witnessing on the mountainsides around them.
The other was a dissertation written by a geography student, studying for the equivalent of a master’s degree, at the University of Berne in Switzerland that quoted interviews with mountain guides in the Alps.
The revelations, uncovered by The Sunday Telegraph, have raised fresh questions about the quality of the information contained in the report, which was published in 2007.
Silence, Peasants! When we say “the science is settled”, it means “go away and talk about last night’s Desperate Housewives” or something, and let the Elites think Big Thoughts.
Via, ironically, the Sun:
A STAR primed to explode in a blast that could wipe out the Earth was revealed by astronomers yesterday.
It will self-destruct in an explosion called a supernova with the force of 20 billion billion billion megatons of TNT.
I look for it on cable in three months.
Vegetarians choose not to eat meat for a variety of reasons. Some cite the lower fat and cholesterol and higher fiber on their plates. Others for more emotional reasons: they don’t want to eat anything that smiles back at them. Hypothetically at least.
I stopped eating pork about eight years ago, after a scientist happened to mention that the animal whose teeth most closely resemble our own is the pig. Unable to shake the image of a perky little pig flashing me a brilliant George Clooney smile, I decided it was easier to forgo the Christmas ham.
George Clooney’s political bent certainly qualifies him as a pig, but I hardly think he looks like one. Or vice versa.
If God didn’t want us to eat animals, why did he make ‘em smell so good when they’re cookin’?
Now scientists (possibly those furlowed in the recent Global Warming controversy) are telling us that vegetables should be off the table too.
we might consider that plants no more aspire to being stir-fried in a wok than a hog aspires to being peppercorn-studded in my Christmas clay pot.
Plants are lively and seek to keep it that way.
It’s time for a green revolution, a reseeding of our stubborn animal minds.
Sorry, what? I couldn’t hear you, I was trying to bite off a chunk of my laptop battery. I think I chipped a tooth.
When plant biologists speak of their subjects, they use active verbs and vivid images. Plants “forage” for resources like light and soil nutrients and “anticipate” rough spots and opportunities. By analyzing the ratio of red light and far red light falling on their leaves, for example, they can sense the presence of other chlorophyllated competitors nearby and try to grow the other way. Their roots ride the underground “rhizosphere” and engage in cross-cultural and microbial trade.
Maybe so, but can they dance?
Plants can scream though. Sort of.
Some of the compounds that plants generate in response to insect mastication [that means chewing gutter-huggers-JR] — their feedback, you might say — are volatile chemicals that serve as cries for help. Such airborne alarm calls have been shown to attract both large predatory insects like dragon flies, which delight in caterpillar meat, and tiny parasitic insects, which can infect a caterpillar and destroy it from within.
So dragon flies can eat delicious caterpillar meat but I can’t?
It’s a small daily tragedy that we animals must kill to stay alive.
If that’s not a bumper sticker yet, it should be.
Plants are the ethical autotrophs here, the ones that wrest their meals from the sun. Don’t expect them to boast: they’re too busy fighting to survive.
Well then, why didn’t the Democrats include plants in the health care bill? Don’t they care?
So as you sit down to your bountiful (hopefully) table later this week, have compassion. Remember: you can’t eat animals; you can’t eat plants. Merry Christmas!