Web Surfing

Google's Annoying Ad Onslought

2011-05-26T07:47:00.007-05:00

We can't do much about ads while web-surfing beyond trying to ignore them. But Google's most intrusive innovation is extraordinary annoying. They keep track of the web sites you surf and, if they are among their paid advertisers, you are in for a dose of ads that are unbelievably stupid and apparently forever.

Example: I bought my grand daughter a dress for her birthday a month in advance, had it shipped to her, and that was that, right? Wrong. I am being bombarded with Google ads from that same store for children's clothes. That's dumb. If I am a parent buying lots of clothes, I already know about that site and am likely to return (or not) as a result of my experience with their products. Ad after ad does not change that, at least not in their favor.

Example: Last week I was looking for Haggar slacks because I have lost a little weight. I was very unhappy with the Haggar choices and decided to look at some of my old, smaller slacks. I discovered, looking through my closet, that Haggar quality has deteriorated dramatically over the past five years. The latest pairs are very poor fabric that is so wrinkle free that they won't hold the factory crease, and they don't even contain labels showing their size. My reward? The price has dropped from $35 to $30 since last Fall. It's not worth it. So much for Haggar.

I also looked for Gold Toe socks, but decided to buy the socks locally because they were so poorly described everywhere I looked on the web.

Same story. I am now bombarded with Haggar and Gold Toe ads. I am NOT going to buy them on line; my web-shopping experience is complete and was a big disappointment. Why keep annoying me with reminders that I was unhappy?

There is a remedy. It, too, is annoying, but it's effective. Close the page containing the ad. In Firefox go to Tools/Clear Recent History and select what you want cleared. You may have to click the Details drop-down. I check everything except cookies, select the appropriate time frame, then close my browser immediately and restart it. It's most effective if I shout "SHUT UP" at the same time. No doubt other browsers have a similar escape route.

Google Mapmaker

2011-04-27T19:00:00.001-05:00

Google has released Mapmaker as a way to crowd-source corrections to their notoriously poor maps. Unfortunately, Mapmaker was written by an infinite number of monkeys crowded into a room full of keyboards. The result is chaos. I cannot recall ever seeing a piece of software that was so completely unsuited to its task.

My advice is to wait for release ten. Unless, of course, you revel in becoming frustrated.

Spam. I hate it!

2011-03-20T15:43:00.002-05:00

My ISP uses a spam filter by Postini, a subsidiary of Google. The ISP charges $3 a month for it. But Postini acts like a giant corporation that cannot fix anything. For example, Postini allows passage of at least four emails a day that have the following characteristics:

From: Delmy Petros
To: patricia warrick
CC: venu julepally 55864 [followed by my address botched with caps]
Subject: Pa tro nsFee lHap pyToHa veSeenCaps ulesOutl et

http://pulse.yahoo.com/_5GPQVH5QIDEJXQ4V4SV5P7YKWM/blog/articles/196430/

Aseasy asaboo k andnoton lytellyoufif tyorsi xt yth ingsthat sgo ingto happ entoyou bu tfif tyor.

Oden

I got fed up and started using MailWasher today (free version.) It appears to be heuristic; it learns what spam looks like. If that's the case, it's cheaper than Postini and far superior. We shall see.

Meanwhile I discovered the source of these awful emails. It's Yahoo! Anyone with a Yahoo address is just asking for spam. Yes, it's possible to change your Yahoo settings to minimize who can see your address but why bother? Just cancel your Yahoo account. Yahoo is just another giant corporation that cannot or will not fix anything.

How to cancel a Yahoo account. Google to the rescue!

Hey, Google took my suggestion!

2011-03-11T02:40:00.000-06:00

Well, maybe they started before I made the suggestion last month, but "Google is giving users the ability to block sites that annoy them from ever showing up again in their search results, via a new link next to search results," to quote wired.com. Click the title of this entry to read the Wired article.

It's supposed to be available yesterday and today on English-language sites. I just checked and couldn't find anything new. I really, really, really want to block results on huffing-puffing post! Even their headlines annoy me.

The Intelligence Officer's Bookshelf

2011-02-19T19:16:00.002-06:00

While researching Brian Wynne Garfield's body of work, I ran across this unusual web site. I suppose it's not surprising that professionals read books related to their specialty, but I do find it amusing that the CIA would make the reading list public.

Stumbleupon

2011-02-17T17:31:00.002-06:00

Stumpleupon.com, previously sold to eBay for $75 million, has been repurchased by its original owners for an undisclosed sum. See bits.blog.nytimes for details. I hope that it will regain the original promise that it showed.

If you are not familiar with stumpleupon, I highly recommend it. It's free and, for the moment, ad free. You sign up with a short questionnaire covering your interests. It then guides you into stumbling upon Internet sites that appeal to you. Thereafter you can rate each site with thumbs up or down to improve the accuracy of your future finds.

Take a look and report back on the most interesting pages that you stumble upon.

Al Gore Admits Ethanol Bill Was An Error

2010-11-24T17:51:00.002-06:00

Energy: Former Vice President Al Gore admitted Monday that his pivotal 1994 Senate vote for ethanol subsidies was bad policy but good politics. That says a lot about the reality of environmentalism in government.
As the ethanol tax credit comes up for renewal in Congress on Dec. 31, it's worth noting it only came about because the vice president cast the decisive 51st vote in favor of it in 1994.
At the time, he packaged it as a big move to preserve the environment in a market-friendly, sustainable manner, and for years defended his vote because it was supposedly good for us.
"The more we can make this home-grown fuel a successful, widely-used product, the better-off our farmers and our environment will be," he recounted in 1998.
Now the real story emerges. On Monday he matter-of-factly told a bankers group in Greece it was actually about helping himself.
"One of the reasons I made that mistake is that I paid particular attention to the farmers in my home state of Tennessee, and I had a certain fondness for the farmers in the state of Iowa because I was about to run for president," the former vice president said.

See the original article for the estimates of what this has cost taxpayers and people who depend on corn for nourishment.

Phosphates in Detergents

2010-11-03T19:11:00.012-05:00

Well, I've had it with the eco-terrorists. As of July there are enough states that outlaw phosphates in detergents that all national brands of detergent have switched to phosphate-free (<0.5%) formulations. And the feds have proposed that the ban become nationwide. In other words, dish washing detergent is now useless. There are other solutions in the clothes washer, like pre-wash sprays and borax, that mitigate the problem. But dish washers are no longer functional. Glassware comes out with lip prints on the rims. I'm not talking about lipstick, though I doubt that comes off either. It doesn't even remove dried saliva! And stainless steel flatware comes out stained.

New York has gone so far as to ban phosphorus in lawn fertilizer by 2012! No more flowers or healthy root systems. 13-0-13 doesn't seem to cut it.

This is ludicrous. It won't work, simply because there is no ban on trisodium phosphate (TSP.) But beware, I have seen a product in hardware stores with the brand name TSP that contains no phosphates!

So you can add your own TSP (~$3.50 a pound) and use the cheapest store-brand detergent as a bonus. It should work better than anything else you can buy. I hope those who chose to add their own phosphates do it wisely. TSP is 20% phosphorus by weight. No more than 9% phosphorus, please. If my math is correct, that means no more than one part TSP to two parts phosphorous-free detergent. But check the label on your TSP and adjust accordingly. Not all real trisodium phosphate products are 100% trisodium phosphate.

Update 18 November:

After some experimentation, I discovered that the film on my dishes was primarily CaCO3 - hard-water deposits. The older detergents seemed to have kept it at bay. I tried white vinegar in the wash water, but it didn't do much. I finally resorted to Lime Away, a gel containing HCl. Hand washing with it cleaned up my dishes, glassware, and flatware nicely. Next I bought some Seventh Generation dishwasher cleaner to remove the old calcium deposits and finally some Lemi-Shine and Savogran TSP. The Savogram is not completely soluble. It tends to leave a powder on the dishes if used in the main wash, but it takes very little of it. My final solution was Lemmi-Shine in the soap dispenser and one-quarter TSP and three-quarters cheap dishwasher detergent in the pre-wash cup. I'm also using Cascade Rinse Aid in the rinse dispenser, but I'm not sure it's contributing much.

Sparkling clean dishes. I may also experiment with borax and baking soda.

Sunday web surfing and amazon.com

2010-10-10T15:50:00.003-05:00

My favorite Sunday pastime is web surfing. It seems no matter where I start, I end up at Amazon.com.

Today it started half way through watching CBS Sunday Morning when Osgood ran a 20-minute piece on Steig Larsson, author of the Millennium Trilogy. I paused the TiVo and went to the web to read more about his relationship with Eva Gabrielsson, his domestic partner. There I saw a comment that he was the second best selling author in the world, after Khaled Hosseini, who I was forced to look up. Ah yes, The Kite Runner. Now I know who he is. Turns out he does have a new novel called A Thousand Splendid Suns released in October, 2010.

Next stop was the Best Seller List in the New York Times. It occurred to me that the Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa, so I looked for him (in vain.) The list has nine categories, all self-explanatory except the last which is called "Graphic Books."

Graphic Books appear to be highly illustrated books that don't fit well under children's books, like the Oz books by L. Frank Baum. His second book, The Marvelous Land Of Oz, is on the best selling graphic books list. That thought that odd; he's dead. So I went Wikipedia and sure enough, he died in 1919. But I did discover that it was the second book in his ten-book canon Ruth Plumly Thompson who wrote 19 Oz books, all considered to be in the canon. about Oz. There I learned about

By this time I needed a better definition of canon, so I Googled "define literary canon" which lead me to Protocanon and ultimately to Deuterocanon, and Apocrypha. Aha! I had never thought of the connection between literary canon and canonization of saints. Makes perfect sense. Along the way, I ran into the term Septuagint, or LXX. That same Protocanon Wikipedia article has a nice to know piece of trivia regarding why the Greek version of the Hebrew Bible is called LXX. (No mention of why it was called LXX instead of the Greek number οϝʹ, but I had digressed enough by then and didn't try to find out.) But there was an interesting bit of trivia associated with LXX.

"King Ptolomy once gathered 72 Elders. He placed them in 72 chambers, each of them in a separate one, without revealing to them why they were summoned. He entered each one's room and said: 'Write for me the Torah of Moshe, your teacher. 'God put it in the heart of each one to translate identically as all the others did.'"

Well, I guess LXX means 70-ish. Still, I had to ask about which Ptolemy. Turns out he was Ptolemy II Philadelphus, the king of Ptolemaic Egypt from 283 BCE to 246 BCE and the son of the founder of the Ptolemaic kingdom. Hmm, and who was Cleopatra's (and Antony's) son? He turns out to be Ptolemy Philadelphus, too, named after his distant, but not direct, ancestor.

At this point I had about five browser tabs open that I had yet to visit. You've Won The Nobel Prize -- Wait, Don't Hang Up! and a bunch of Amazon.com links. One was to The Marvelous Land of Oz. Turns out that this is the 100th anniversary of the first Oz book, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz in 1900. Reading the customer reviews, I saw " I just finished reading this one, a chapter each night, to my preschool age son. He loved it." So I put it on my wish list as a reminder to get the first two books for my granddaughter when she is five or six.

The other Amazon tabs? One was The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values. Sorry, I don't agree with Mr. Harris that scientifically determined values can replace religion. Improve it, perhaps, but for my money, I like the threat of eternal damnation. Maybe it doesn't affect me, but there are a lot of folks out there who need better self-control.

Why do I always end up at Amazon? Probably because that's where the ultimate references still point. The web has not replaced books, but it has made them more accessible in a variety of formats, including immediate download. So why is the publishing business declining? Turns out that the decline is in advertiser-supported publications. The book publishing business seems to be thriving despite the new costs of converting to digital equipment.

The Electric Sky

2010-10-06T01:39:00.005-05:00

Surfing the web, I ran across The Electric Sky by Donald E. Scott. It is a fresh breeze in cosmology and astrophysics. Dr. Scott is an electrical engineer who thinks that physical scientists have gone astray with their theories of galactic and solar theory. The key word is plasma. Many astrophysicists ignore the existence of plasmas in space. Dr. Scott thinks this is a serious problem.

Before the space program it was assumed that space was empty. Space probes have shown that not to be the case. Space is full of plasmas, fields of atoms in random shapes. The technical definition is that a plasma is a fourth state of matter distinct from solid or liquid or gas and present in stars and fusion reactors; a gas becomes a plasma when it is heated until the atoms lose all their electrons, leaving a highly electrified collection of nuclei and free electrons. "Particles in space exist in the form of a plasma."

From Amazon.com's review of the book: "A Challenge to the Myths of Modern Astronomy. It is clear that electric plasma research affords simpler, more elegant, and more compelling insights and explanations of most cosmological phenomena than those that are now espoused in astrophysics. This book contains astronomical science for the expert written for the public."

At the heart of it, Scott is saying that astrophysics has lost its way. They are inventing many, many particles (dark matter, dark energy) and ideas (like black holes) that cannot be seen or measured to explain elements of atomic and galactic theory when a far simpler explanation exists. His most amazing conclusion (in my opinion) is that the sun is not driven by fusion reactions. The sun gets its energy from the electrical power in the Milky Way. The fusion reactions near the sun's surface are incidental to the overall power of the sun. There is also some suggestion that the Big Bang never happened.

We know that Newtonian physics cannot explain the universe. Newtonian gravitational theory does not explain the shape of galaxies. Gravity is simply too weak to contain a galaxy. Furthermore, the motion of galaxies makes no sense. Stars in the outer limbs of the galaxy should be moving faster then those closer to the center. But they don't. They move at the same rate.

Scott shows over and over that the only explanation for what we observe is electromagnetic phenomena, not gravity,

I recommend this book to anyone who wants an educated layman's view of the controversy.

Hard Drives

2010-08-24T14:01:00.005-05:00

An incipient hard drive failure recently forced me to go shopping for a bare drive for the first time in about six years. The fact that I saw it coming is miracle enough. Windows XP actually warned me each time I rebooted that the boot drive would soon fail and I should back it up immediately. Well, I had a spare, even larger 250 GB drive, but it took me a week to get the proper software I settled on Acronis True Image because it gets better reviews than Ghost. A few hours after the backup, the boot drive failed. The symptom was one I had never experienced. The boot drive was master and the clone drive was slave. When the master failed, Windows couldn't switch to the slave because the master controller was what failed. So I disconnected the bad drive and replugged the clone as master. I had forgotten the F2 trick to open BIOS setup, but the True Image CD came to the rescue. It has a clickable link that says "Boot Windows." So at least I could surf the web to find the F2 trick and fix the BIOS..

Anyway, now I needed a spare drive. The previous one had been spinning alongside the failed drive since I bought the desktop in 2004. Best to assume it is doomed to fail before long.

Drives have changed a lot in six years! The old style interface, ATA/ATAPI (aka IDE or parallel ATA) is hard to find and prices are rising. The new standard is the cheaper SATA (serial ATA.) On top of that, my "old" PC has the almost as old PCI bus on the motherboard. Big decision: buy old technology or new? Web surfing to the rescue!

It turns out that even after buying new signal and power cables (of course SATA had to be different!) and buying a PCI version of the SATA controller, it was a break-even deal to go with the new technology. A 500 GB SATA drive goes for an amazing $41.00 to $45.00. There are cheaper ways than a new controller, but adapters cost just a few dollars less and you can only attach one SATA drive to it. That's a nice solution for a TiVo upgrade, but I had to assume I would need a second SATA drive soon. My new controller can accept two SATA internal drives or one internal and one external.

It had been a long time since I looked at the technology, but a few hours on the web brought me up to speed. Still, rather than order on line, I decided to call Tiger Direct and get them to validate my choices. Good move. I had missed the fact that it needed a power cable adapter.

The drive, controller, and cables are due here in two days. I feel comfortable that it will go well. Frankly, the worst part of the install is likely to be getting the failed drive out of the case. It's already disconnected, but the screws holding it in require a 90-degree Phillips screwdriver.

As for Tiger Direct, more news there. They now charge Texas state sales tax. Seems they have a hookup with one CompUSA store in the Dallas area and are opening a TigerDirect store near it.

Media "Censorship"

2010-05-22T15:48:00.003-05:00

One of the great advantages of the Web is that readers can comment on what they read and even help keep the article up to date. That feature is rapidly slipping away. Too many web sites delete comments that they don't want others to read, not because they are rude, but because they disagree with some part of the article.

Media Matters for America is arguably one of the worst. They say:

"Media Matters for America is a Web-based, not-for-profit, 501(c)(3) progressive research and information center dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media."

They accept comments, but rational rebuttal is not permitted. You can test this for yourself or simply check the number of comments on an article for a few days in a row. The number often goes down - dramatically.

It's one thing to chose articles that prove your point. Censorship is quite another. However, many media outlets do not accept comments at all, notably the NYT. KTRK TV (ABC 13 in Houston) never accepted comments and just recently stopped accepting "contact us" notes.

I find these trends unsettling and I cannot accept any argument that says it costs too much to maintain those features.

A Quote Worth Requoting

2010-05-16T09:35:00.003-05:00

Nothing like cutting to the chase. Doug Badgero, in a comment on WUWT, wrote:

I don’t want scientists stating normative arguments about policy as scientifically based. I want scientists explaining a hypothesis, providing me with ALL of the data that supports or refutes that hypothesis, and the uncertainties involved in that data. Their opinion on the normative arguments about what, if anything, to do about their hypothesis is no more important than mine.

I don't know who Mr. Badgero is, but I suspect he is a retired horticulturist in Michigan.

Watt's Up With That?

2010-03-26T21:47:00.000-05:00

My favorite web site has become Watt's Up With That, a place that skewers the anthropomorphic global warming crowd several times a day. One of today's follies is a forecast by the UK National Trust that England will be tropical within 90 years with palm trees and tropical fruit. The Arctic will see temperature increases of 16 degrees Centigrade!

Never mind that the temperature of England has increased only 0.5 degrees C in the last 80 years and that is likely be the effect of Urban Heat Island encroachment on existing weather stations. We have no idea about the arctic trend because there are no weather stations north of 80 degrees north latitude. The Goddard estimates of arctic temperatures are based on measurements up to 1200 kilometers (750 miles) away.

Al Gore should be proud. And rich.

Yet another web annoyance

2010-03-06T11:26:00.005-06:00

It was bad enough when pop-ups began to dominate web advertising, but at least we had a counter weapon in the browsers themselves, as well as add-ins like Ad-Block. Pop-unders seem to remain unaffected, but they are no annoyance until you close the browser.

And then there are those annoying roll-over JavaScript pop-ups. I haven't found a solution to that except to disable JavaScript and hope to be properly notified where it needs to be re-enabled. But it's not, in the case of this blog's editing software. I'm sure it causes other problems.

The best solution seems to be to use Readibility. It's free and cleans up 99% of the garbage by reformatting the entire page, presenting only the text portion. It's especially useful to get rid of flashing advertisements. However, it also tends to ignore the comments on an article, if any.

Now a new, insidious menace is creeping in. Even major web sites like Time Magazine are including third-party ads to which they link by way of including them in their own web site. But those third-party servers are frequently down or perhaps overloaded. Either way, well after the web page is loaded you get an error pop-up saying they cannot contact junksite.com (or whatever.) Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn.

What a bunch of amateurs!

Science in the 21st Century: Knowledge Monopolies and Research Cartels

2010-03-01T17:35:00.001-06:00

A paper by Henry H. Bauer back in 2004 is worth reposting. For that matter, people with a serious interest in what's going on in science should be aware of the Society for Scientific Exploration and their quarterly periodical Fringe Science where they now publish scientific mysteries and the more speculative articles that previously appeared in their main journal. For example, there is some scientific evidence that the rate of natural radioactive decay varies cyclically ever so slightly on an annual basis. The speculation is that solar-generated neutrinos may be the source of the phenomenon. There's some really weird stuff in that journal!

Anyway, back to the paper titled Science in the 21st Century: Knowledge Monopolies and Research Cartels.

Abstract—Minority views on technical issues are largely absent from the public arena. Increasingly corporate organization of science has led to knowledge monopolies, which, with the unwitting help of uncritical mass media, effect a kind of censorship. Since corporate scientific organizations also control the funding of research, by denying funds for unorthodox work they function as research cartels as well as knowledge monopolies. A related aspect of contemporary science is commercialization.
Science is now altogether different from the traditional disinterested search, by self-motivated individuals, to understand the world. What national and international organizations publicly proclaim as scientific information is not safeguarded by the traditional process of peer review. Society needs new arrangements to ensure that public information about matters of science will be trustworthy.
Actions to curb the power of the monopolies and cartels can be conceived: mandatory funding of contrarian research, mandatory presence of contrarian opinion on advisory panels, a Science Court to adjudicate technical controversies, ombudsman offices at a variety of organizations. Most sorely needed is vigorously investigative science journalism.

His comments are especially relevant today when huge, untethered intergovernmental monopolies like the IPCC seem to be able to say what they please in order to influence public policy and there is no investigative scientific journalism in the main-stream media. If it were not for the newly emerging "blogosphere," few would have any reason to doubt Al Gore.

Solar Activity

2010-02-12T08:56:00.011-06:00

The folks who think that the sun is the principle determinant of climate have an interesting forecast based on the number of sunspots in each solar cycle. This chart shows the historic pattern, and based on the duration of past cycles, they predict ahead a few years. Basically they are saying that the average solar cycle is 10.7 years, but those preceding and during the Dalton Minimum were about 13 years. The current cycle (24) should have started in 2007, but is just now getting under way.

A low number of sun spots correlates well with lower than average global temperatures. The Year Without a Summer, in 1816, occurred during the Dalton Minimum.

The chart runs from 1700 to 2025 in 20-year tick marks. "Projected" starts in 2007, the date of the report in May, 2007, when they said the next cycle was at least one year away. In fact, we now know it was more than two years away. The original reference is

http://www.warwickhughes.com/agri/pastandfuture2.pdf.

About a year ago, a NASA solar scientist agreed that we may be in for another Dalton Minimum. However, the current sun-spot cycle has started out aggressively and we initially went to 75 spots which was considered the peak for a minimum cycle. It later subsided to 17 spots. (see current number in gadget in the upper right corner of this page)

The Wikipedia article on Solar Variation is a bit more conservative. There are several different superimposed cycle lengths in the "solar cycle." Quoting Damon and Scott (1989)*, the following forecasts are possibilities:

Cycle length	Cycle name	Last positive ¹⁴C anomaly	Next "warming"
2241	Landscheidt	AD 1400 (cool)	AD 2520
232	--?--	AD 1922 (cool)	AD 2038
208	Suess	AD 1898 (cool)	AD 2002
88	Gleisberg	AD 1986 (cool)	AD 2030

* "Solar Variability: climatic change resulting from changes in the amount of solar energy reaching the upper atmosphere.". Introduction to Quaternary Ecology http://www.geo.arizona.edu/palynology/geos462/20climsolar.html

The 2002 "warming" wasn't detectable or ran late. Maybe 2030 will be another major upswing. Meanwhile, we should have some warming, then cooler weather in the usual (approximately) 13-year cycles.

Who dat say who dat?

2010-02-09T20:19:00.002-06:00

The current controversy over who "owns" the phrase is so much malarkey.

I am old enough to remember the joke "Who dat say who dat when I say who dat?" about 65 years ago. It was a parody on black (in those days aka negro) phobias of the dark. Sadly, Google does not easily come up with this conclusion after all these years.

To say that anyone owns that phrase is absurd. It's in the public domain.

Cargo Cult Science

2010-01-17T15:26:00.023-06:00

I was reviewing some of the problems with climate change science when I came across an old friend, Richard Feynman. Not a personal friend, but someone I have read, read about, and admired for many years. His writings and the volumes written about him make marvelous reading.

His interests ranged over a wider variety of experiences than anyone I can think of in the modern world. For example, he made friends with bikers and he frequented topless bars, talking to the people there to find out what they and life were all about. He studied Mayan heiroglyphics, biology, percussion, lock picking, and more. He took up art at the age of 44, signing all his art "Ofey." His purpose seemed to be to understand the world. And that made him a great scientist.

His 1974 speech is still cogent in light of the current work masquerading as climate change science.

Cargo Cult SciencePrinciples of Researchaddress by Richard Feynman
(Caltech Commencements, 1974)

During the Middle Ages there were all kinds of crazy ideas, such as that a piece of rhinoceros horn would increase potency. Then a method was discovered for separating the ideas -- which was to try one to see if it worked, and if it didn't work, to eliminate it. This method became organized, of course, into science. And it developed very well, so that we are now in the scientific age. It is such a scientific age, in fact, that we have difficulty in understanding how witch doctors could ever have existed, when nothing that they proposed ever really worked -- or very little of it did. But even today I meet lots of people who sooner or later get me into a conversation about UFO's, or astrology, or some form of mysticism, expanded consciousness, new types of awareness, ESP, and so forth. And I've concluded that it's not a scientific world.

Most people believe so many wonderful things that I decided to investigate why they did. And what has been referred to as my curiosity for investigation has landed me in a difficulty where I found so much junk that I'm overwhelmed. First I started out by investigating various ideas of mysticism and mystic experiences. I went into isolation tanks and got many hours of hallucinations, so I know something about that. Then I went to Esalen, which is a hotbed of this kind of thought (it's a wonderful place; you should go visit there). Then I became overwhelmed. I didn't realize how MUCH there was.

At Esalen there are some large baths fed by hot springs situated on a ledge about thirty feet above the ocean. One of my most pleasurable experiences has been to sit in one of those baths and watch the waves crashing onto the rocky slope below, to gaze into the clear blue sky above, and to study a beautiful nude as she quietly appears and settles into the bath with me.

One time I sat down in a bath where there was a beatiful girl sitting with a guy who didn't seem to know her. Right away I began thinking, "Gee! How am I gonna get started talking to this beautiful nude woman?"

I'm trying to figure out what to say, when the guy says to her, "I'm, uh, studying massage. Could I practice on you?"

"Sure", she says. They get out of the bath and she lies down on a massage table nearby.

I think to myself, "What a nifty line! I can never think of anything like that!"

He starts to rub her big toe. "I think I feel it", he says. "I feel a kind of dent -- is that the pituitary?"

I blurt out, "You're a helluva long way from the pituitary, man!"

They looked at me, horrified -- I had blown my cover -- and said, "It's reflexology!"

I quickly closed my eyes and appeared to be meditating.

That's just an example of the kind of things that overwhelm me. I also looked into extrasensory perception, and PSI phenomena, and the latest craze there was Uri Geller, a man who is supposed to be able to bend keys by rubbing them with his finger. So I went to his hotel room, on his invitation, to see a demonstration of both mindreading and bending keys. He didn't do any mindreading that succeeded; nobody can read my mind, I guess. And my boy held a key and Geller rubbed it, and nothing happened. Then he told us it works better under water, and so you can picture all of us standing in the bathroom with the water turned on and the key under it, and him rubbing the key with his finger. Nothing happened. So I was unable to investigate that phenomenon.

But then I began to think, what else is there that we believe? (And I thought then about the witch doctors, and how easy it would have been to check on them by noticing that nothing really worked.) So I found things that even more people believe, such as that we have some knowledge of how to educate. There are big schools of reading methods and mathematics methods, and so forth, but if you notice, you'll see the reading scores keep going down -- or hardly going up -- in spite of the fact that we continually use these same people to improve the methods. There's a witch doctor remedy that doesn't work. It ought to be looked into; how do they know that their method should work? Another example is how to treat criminals. We obviously have made no progress -- lots of theory, but no progress -- in decreasing the amount of crime by the method that we use to handle criminals.

Yet these things are said to be scientific. We study them. And I think ordinary people with commonsense ideas are intimidated by this pseudoscience. A teacher who has some good idea of how to teach her children to read is forced by the school system to do it some other way -- or is even fooled by the school system into thinking that her method is not necessarily a good one. Or a parent of bad boys, after disciplining them in one way or another, feels guilty for the rest of her life because she didn't do "the right thing", according to the experts.

So we really ought to look into theories that don't work, and science that isn't science.

I think the educational and psychological studies I mentioned are examples of what I would like to call cargo cult science. In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they've arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head to headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas -- he's the controller -- and they wait for the airplanes to land. They're doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn't work. No airplanes land. So I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they're missing something essential, because the planes don't land.

Now it behooves me, of course, to tell you what they're missing. But it would be just about as difficult to explain to the South Sea islanders how they have to arrange things so that they get some wealth in their system. It is not something simple like telling them how to improve the shapes of the earphones. But there is one feature I notice that is generally missing in cargo cult science. That is the idea that we all hope you have learned in studying science in school -- we never say explicitly what this is, but just hope that you catch on by all the examples of scientific investigation. It is interesting, therefore, to bring it out now and speak of it explicitly. It's a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty -- a kind of leaning over backwards. For example, if you're doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid -- not only what you think is right about it: other causes that could possibly explain your results; and things you thought of that you've eliminated by some other experiment, and how they worked -- to make sure the other fellow can tell they have been eliminated.

Details that could throw doubt on your interpretation must be given, if you know them. You must do the best you can -- if you know anything at all wrong, or possibly wrong -- to explain it. If you make a theory, for example, and advertise it, or put it out, then you must also put down all the facts that disagree with it, as well as those that agree with it. There is also a more subtle problem. When you have put a lot of ideas together to make an elaborate theory, you want to make sure, when explaining what it fits, that those things it fits are not just the things that gave you the idea for the theory; but that the finished theory makes something else come out right, in addition.

In summary, the idea is to give all of the information to help others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the information that leads to judgement in one particular direction or another.

The easiest way to explain this idea is to contrast it, for example, with advertising. Last night I heard that Wesson oil doesn't soak through food. Well, that's true. It's not dishonest; but the thing I'm talking about is not just a matter of not being dishonest; it's a matter of scientific integrity, which is another level. The fact that should be added to that advertising statement is that no oils soak through food, if operated at a certain temperature. If operated at another temperature, they all will -- including Wesson oil. So it's the implication which has been conveyed, not the fact, which is true, and the difference is what we have to deal with.

We've learned from experience that the truth will come out. Other experimenters will repeat your experiment and find out whether you were wrong or right. Nature's phenomena will agree or they'll disagree with your theory. And, although you may gain some temporary fame and excitement, you will not gain a good reputation as a scientist if you haven't tried to be very careful in this kind of work. And it's this type of integrity, this kind of care not to fool yourself, that is missing to a large extent in much of the research in cargo cult science.

A great deal of their difficulty is, of course, the difficulty of the subject and the inapplicability of the scientific method to the subject. Nevertheless, it should be remarked that this is not the only difficulty. That's why the planes don't land -- but they don't land.

We have learned a lot from experience about how to handle some of the ways we fool ourselves. One example: Millikan measured the charge on an electron by an experiment with falling oil drops, and got an answer which we now know not to be quite right. It's a little bit off because he had the incorrect value for the viscosity of air. It's interesting to look at the history of measurements of the charge of an electron, after Millikan. If you plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little bit bigger than Millikan's, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, until finally they settle down to a number which is higher.

Why didn't they discover the new number was higher right away? It's a thing that scientists are ashamed of -- this history -- because it's apparent that people did things like this: when they got a number that was too high above Millikan's, they thought something must be wrong -- and they would look for and find a reason why something might be wrong. When they got a number close to Millikan's value they didn't look so hard. And so they eliminated the numbers that were too far off, and did other things like that. We've learned those tricks nowadays, and now we don't have that kind of a disease.

But this long history of learning how to not fool ourselves -- of having utter scientific integrity -- is, I'm sorry to say, something that we haven't specifically included in any particular course that I know of. We just hope you've caught on by osmosis

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself -- and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that. After you've not fooled yourself, it's easy not to fool other scientists. You just have to be honest in a conventional way after that.

I would like to add something that's not essential to the science, but something I kind of believe, which is that you should not fool the layman when you're talking as a scientist. I am not trying to tell you what to do about cheating on your wife, or fooling your girlfriend, or something like that, when you're not trying to be a scientist, but just trying to be an ordinary human being. We'll leave those problems up to you and your rabbi. I'm talking about a specific, extra type of integrity that is not lying, but bending over backwards to show how you're maybe wrong, that you ought to have when acting as a scientist. And this is our responsibility as scientists, certainly to other scientists, and I think to laymen.

For example, I was a little surprised when I was talking to a friend who was going to go on the radio. He does work on cosmology and astronomy, and he wondered how he would explain what the applications of his work were. "Well", I said, "there aren't any". He said, "Yes, but then we won't get support for more research of this kind". I think that's kind of dishonest. If you're representing yourself as a scientist, then you should explain to the layman what you're doing -- and if they don't support you under those circumstances, then that's their decision.

One example of the principle is this: If you've made up your mind to test a theory, or you want to explain some idea, you should always decide to publish it whichever way it comes out. If we only publish results of a certain kind, we can make the argument look good. We must publish BOTH kinds of results.

I say that's also important in giving certain types of government advice. Supposing a senator asked you for advice about whether drilling a hole should be done in his state; and you decide it would be better in some other state. If you don't publish such a result, it seems to me you're not giving scientific advice. You're being used. If your answer happens to come out in the direction the government or the politicians like, they can use it as an argument in their favor; if it comes out the other way, they don't publish at all. That's not giving scientific advice.

Other kinds of errors are more characteristic of poor science. When I was at Cornell, I often talked to the people in the psychology department. One of the students told me she wanted to do an experiment that went something like this -- it had been found by others that under certain circumstances, X, rats did something, A. She was curious as to whether, if she changed the circumstances to Y, they would still do A. So her proposal was to do the experiment under circumstances Y and see if they still did A.

I explained to her that it was necessary first to repeat in her laboratory the experiment of the other person -- to do it under condition X to see if she could also get result A, and then change to Y and see if A changed. Then she would know the the real difference was the thing she thought she had under control.

She was very delighted with this new idea, and went to her professor. And his reply was, no, you cannot do that, because the experiment has already been done and you would be wasting time. This was in about 1947 or so, and it seems to have been the general policy then to not try to repeat psychological experiments, but only to change the conditions and see what happened.

Nowadays, there's a certain danger of the same thing happening, even in the famous field of physics. I was shocked to hear of an experiment being done at the big accelerator at the National Accelerator Laboratory, where a person used deuterium. In order to compare his heavy hydrogen results to what might happen with light hydrogen, he had to use data from someone else's experiment on light hydrogen, which was done on a different apparatus. When asked why, he said it was because he couldn't get time on the program (because there's so little time and it's such expensive apparatus) to do the experiment with light hydrogen on this apparatus because there wouldn't be any new result. And so the men in charge of programs at NAL are so anxious for new results, in order to get more money to keep the thing going for public relations purposes, they are destroying -- possibly -- the value of the experiments themselves, which is the whole purpose of the thing. It is often hard for the experimenters there to complete their work as their scientific integrity demands.

All experiments in psychology are not of this type, however. For example, there have been many experiments running rats through all kinds of mazes, and so on -- with little clear result. But in 1937 a man named Young did a very interesting one. He had a long corridor with doors all along one side where the rats came in, and doors along the other side where the food was. He wanted to see if he could train the rats to go in at the third door down from wherever he started them off. No. The rats went immediately to the door where the food had been the time before.

The question was, how did the rats know, because the corridor was so beautifully built and so uniform, that this was the same door as before? Obviously there was something about the door that was different from the other doors. So he painted the doors very carefully, arranging the textures on the faces of the doors exactly the same. Still the rats could tell. Then he thought maybe the rats were smelling the food, so he used chemicals to change the smell after each run. Still the rats could tell. Then he realized the rats might be able to tell by seeing the lights and the arrangement in the laboratory like any commonsense person. So he covered the corridor, and still the rats could tell.

He finally found that they could tell by the way the floor sounded when they ran over it. And he could only fix that by putting his corridor in sand. So he covered one after another of all possible clues and finally was able to fool the rats so that they had to learn to go in the third door. If he relaxed any of his conditions, the rats could tell.

Now, from a scientific standpoint, that is an A-number-one experiment. That is the experiment that makes rat-running experiments sensible, because it uncovers that clues that the rat is really using -- not what you think it's using. And that is the experiment that tells exactly what conditions you have to use in order to be careful and control everything in an experiment with rat-running.

I looked up the subsequent history of this research. The next experiment, and the one after that, never referred to Mr. Young. They never used any of his criteria of putting the corridor on sand, or being very careful. They just went right on running the rats in the same old way, and paid no attention to the great discoveries of Mr. Young, and his papers are not referred to, because he didn't discover anything about the rats. In fact, he discovered all the things you have to do to discover something about rats. But not paying attention to experiments like that is a characteristic example of cargo cult science.

Another example is the ESP experiments of Mr. Rhine, and other people. As various people have made criticisms -- and they themselves have made criticisms of their own experiments -- they improve the techniques so that the effects are smaller, and smaller, and smaller until they gradually disappear. All the para-psychologists are looking for some experiment that can be repeated -- that you can do again and get the same effect -- statistically, even. They run a million rats -- no, it's people this time -- they do a lot of things are get a certain statistical effect. Next time they try it they don't get it any more. And now you find a man saying that is is an irrelevant demand to expect a repeatable experiment. This is science?

This man also speaks about a new institution, in a talk in which he was resigning as Director of the Institute of Parapsychology. And, in telling people what to do next, he says that one of things they have to do is be sure to only train students who have shown their ability to get PSI results to an acceptable extent -- not to waste their time on those ambitious and interested students who get only chance results. It is very dangerous to have such a policy in teaching -- to teach students only how to get certain results, rather than how to do an experiment with scientific integrity.

So I have just one wish for you -- the good luck to be somewhere where you are free to maintain the kind of integrity I have described, and where you do not feel forced by a need to maintain your position in the organization, or financial support, or so on, to lose your integrity. May you have that freedom.

Michael Crichton on Global Warming Skepticism

2010-01-09T14:20:00.000-06:00

I just rediscovered Michael Crichton's speech to the National Press Club on January 25, 2005. The Case For Skepticism On Global Warming is worth re-reading, especially by the National Press. Apparently they weren't listening the first time.

Dr. Freeman Dyson on Climate Modeling

2010-01-07T17:39:00.002-06:00

Freeman Dyson (the doctorate is honorary - he didn't complete his graduate work) is one of the most respected scientists of our time and probably the most respected scientist still living. He "retired" long ago, but he remains active and still has an office at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where he worked most of his life.

Early last year he was invited to speak at a Furman College colloquium on faith and reason. His talk, titled "The Environment: Is it Science or is it Religion?," is one of the best analyses of the current state of climate science I could possibly imagine. It is basically what I have been thinking for 30 years. Not the religion part - that's more recent. But as a geologist who is also familiar with computers and computer modeling, I have yet to see what I would consider scientific proof that recent increases in atmospheric CO2 have a significant affect on climate when compared to all the natural processes that affect climate.

Naturally he has been severely criticized for his position, especially by those in the religious flocks of Al Gore and James Hansen. Even his wife, who is not a scientist, was taken in by watching "An Inconvenient truth." But, as usual, his critics don't attack his reasoning, they attack him personally. "He is 86 and losing his marbles." What a ridiculous thing to say with no proof whatever, especially since he has held these views for decades. In truth, he is an environmentalist, politically liberal, and voted for Obama. Surely these same prople don't think those are the characteristics of a blithering idiot.

I commend his talk to your attention. It's food for thought.

A Climategate Analysis

2010-01-06T12:34:00.004-06:00

The amount of University of East Anglia material made public by an unknown person is pretty overwhelming. Just reading it all takes a lot of time and first you have to know who these people are. Luckily, there is a very good analysis on the web written by John P. Costella. It's on his website at http://assassinationscience.com/climategate/.

He doesn't review all of the e-mails. He concentrates on those that show poor science at work or reflect on the attitudes of the senders. And he does a great job of annotating them and commenting on their significance.

He actually color codes the e-mails by sender for the key players:

* Mike Mann: lead conspirator in the United States

* Phil Jones: lead conspirator in the United Kingdom

* Tom Wigley: older conspirator who becomes increasingly worried about the unfolding scandal

* Keith Briffa: older conspirator whose blunders lead the others to all but abandon him

* Ben Santer: dangerously arrogant and naive young conspirator in the United States

* Other conspirators: of varying degrees of complicity and integrity

* Skeptics and other unrelated parties

Costella's analysis is still underway. It currently stops at May, 2008. (The emails extend into October, 2009.)

Good reading. It's recommended!

Zinc Fingers

2009-12-30T13:30:00.000-06:00

"Only one man seems ever to have been cured of AIDS, a patient who also had leukemia. To treat the leukemia, he received a bone marrow transplant in Berlin from a donor who, as luck would have it, was naturally immune to the AIDS virus. If that natural mutation could be mimicked in human blood cells, patients could be endowed with immunity to the deadly virus. But there is no effective way of making precise alterations in human DNA"

Until now.

Now, for the piddling price of $39,000, you can order up a protein that will slice and splice a DNA molecule at the precise location where you want to insert a modification.

Absolutely amazing!

Copenhagen

2009-12-06T17:18:00.000-06:00

The amazing part about the Copenhagen conference on climate change is that the results are completely predictable. They will not get the promises from the countries of the world that they want and even if they did, and if those countries actually lived up to their promises, the Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) scientists are saying that it's not enough to avert disaster. That was also the result of the Kyoto conference.

Seems to me that it's time for plan B. If we fear flooding by the oceans, it's time to pull back from the coasts or build dikes. Take a clue from the Dutch. It's infinitely cheaper than Plan A, which seems to require the destruction of the global economy.

Climategate

2009-12-05T16:56:00.000-06:00

Well, we finally got some action out of our very secretive climate researchers. Most of the action is the usual bluster, but if the release of these emails and files forces them to be more transparent, it will be a great victory for science.

It has been completely inexcusable from the beginning that hundreds of millions of tax-payer dollars have been spent on research that is not open to the public. Results, yes. But data, computer models and methodology have been hidden from anyone who is not in "the tribe." In other words, it was impossible for real science to work.

DIY Synthetic Biology

2009-11-24T15:43:00.001-06:00

Synthetic biology has only been around since about 2004 when the first conference was held at MIT. As the name implies, it is the creation of biological material from scratch. For example, DNA can be created using just the four nucleotides called adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymine or, as usually abbreviated, A, G, C, and T. In practice, it is cheaper simply to buy DNA strings (oligonucleotides) from labs like GenScript or DNA 2.0 that will create them to your custom design for as little as $0.39 per base pair, where a base pair is either C+G or A+T. Newer techniques are predicted soon to bring that cost down to 20,000 base pairs for one dollar.

Synthetic biology includes several different engineering strategies, including genome design and construction, protein design, natural product synthesis, and the construction of functional genetic circuits in cells and microorganisms. The "products" include, among others, biofuels, drugs, and genetically modified plants. Much has been written about the potential benefits and dangers of those products, most recently in The New Yorker. But this posting is about Do-It-Yourself synthetic biology.

The computer revolution brought with it patents on software and some virtual software monopolies. Likewise, patents on genetically modified materials could threaten the rapid development of synthetic biology. One solution in the computing industry was a trend toward "free and open source" software. In synthetic biology, one solution is BioBricks, standard, unpatented, biological parts like DNA sequences of defined structure and function. A complete parts registry is maintained by Randy Rettberg at MIT. They are the Lego bricks of synthetic biology.

Which brings us to DIYbio.org, an organization that aims to help make biology a worthwhile pursuit for citizen scientists, amateur biologists, and DIY biological engineers who value openness and safety. SEED Magazine has a good review of them. They are basically a focal point for what's going on in the community.

It probably won't produce any Steve Jobs or lead to the biological version of Apple or Microsoft, but bringing people of very diverse backgrounds to look at biological systems is likely to produce some surprises.

Lingua Franca Online

2009-11-01T18:15:00.001-06:00

Lingua Franca, a magazine web site I mentioned in my previous post, is a delightfully academic place to browse. For example, the article titled "Mistaken Identity Theory" looks at eponymy, the practice of naming things after people (real or mythical) who are associated with them. The author points out that, in practice, they are usually named after the wrong people. In fact, Stigler's Law of Eponymy, which, in its simplest form, states that "no scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer," was actually formulated by a sociologist of science named Robert K. Merton, according to Stigler himself! The number of other examples given is surprising.

Humorous book reviews, too. Seinfeld and Philosophy: A Book About Everything and Nothing explores the philosophical underpinnings of the Seinfeld show.

Being a philosophical place, there is no section for science, but they do cover the history of science. Lingua Franca is a keeper. I'll bookmark it.

Surfing and Drilling Down

2009-11-01T17:03:00.009-06:00

The most rewarding, and time-consuming aspects of surfing the web is "drilling down" through a subject to get more and more detail. One thing leads to another and often leads to facts or thought processes that one would never encounter outside of a university environment.

Two things came up this weekend, so I confess to getting little else done.

1. TED Talks posted six talks from their conference "Charter for Compassion." The 15-minute talks included comments by a Christian, a Rabbi, a Tensin, an Imam, a Swami, and an atheist. While I haven't watched them all, I found the one by the atheist Robert Wright best for drilling down. He basically talks about the evolutionary basis for compassion, that is, for the Golden Rule, using simplified game theory. The comments on the talk obviously mentioned Charles Darwin and Richard Dawkins, they were no surprise, but one mentioned George R. Price, an unfamiliar name - so I surfed. Aside from the Wikipedia article, I found a fascinating biography and review of his work in the archives of Lingua Franca which also explains some of the work of William D. Hamilton. Well worth the time to read because he was such an unusual person.

Robert Wright's web site, http://meaningoflife.tv/, is also worth surfing.

2. The other topic that came up somehow led to an article in American Spectator online magazine titled Unscientific American that pillories the article on the November, 2009 cover of Scientific American magazine. One of my favorite activities is blasting that magazine. So the article was garbage, as usual, but one of the comments led me to a Scientific American article in 2005 titled Smarter Use of Nuclear Waste. It reviews the Integral Fast Reactor (IFR), a fast breeder reactor developed at Argonne National Laboratory in the 1980s which GE later converted to a commercial design called the Advanced Liquid Metal Reactor (ALMR), and started to build a plant on the Clinch River in Tennessee. It was 80% complete when Jimmy Carter cancelled it in 1979. Later, the Clinton administration cancelled the last couple of years of the Argonne program because "Nobody is clamoring for nuclear power." Ronald Regan briefly revived the Clinch River project in1981, but Congress cancelled it in 1983 because cost overruns would make the plant uncompetitive with oil or coal.

The bottom line is that these reactors not only consume the nuclear waste that existing thermal reactors produce, they also consume the Plutonium and other Actinides in the waste. "A 1,000-megawatt-electric thermal-reactor plant, for example, generates more than 100 tons of spent fuel a year. The annual waste output from a fast reactor with the same electrical capacity, in contrast, is a little more than a single ton of fission products, plus trace amounts of transuranics." So, instead of producing products with half-lives of 10,000+ years, ... its radiation would decay to the level of the ore from which it came in several hundred years..." Beyond that, since conventional reactors consume a very small part of the Uranium in their fuel rods, we could face shortages of Uranium within 100 years, about the same time we completely run out of very expensive oil. Fast breeders are 100 times more efficient because they consume 99% of the fuel. And if that's not enough, these reactors are inherently safe. Unlike thermal reactors, they need no mechanical or human intercession if something goes wrong. They shut down on their own. The worst that can happen is a fire after the release of some liquid sodium. No nuclear debris.

As if that's not enough, these plants are designed to purify their own spent fuel rods in house. No transportation off site is required, nor does the re-processed fuel need to be transported back. Only the original fuel need be brought in, the same fuel that we are now planning to store in Yucca Mountain for 10,000+ years!

I'm surprised I had not known about this technology. If we had been working on it for the last 30 years, it would be perfected by now. Instead, the Russians, French, Japanese, Chinese, and South Koreans are way ahead of us.

Web Surfing in France

2009-10-16T12:51:00.005-05:00

Well, not really. Despite all the hullabaloo about free Wi-Fi in Paris, we spent six days there and were unable to find a single free public Wi-Fi spot in the vicinity of two different hotels. Even the railroad stations expected you to log on to your own subscriber network through their "free" Wi-Fi. Luckily, the hotels had Wi-Fi and one of them was actually free to guests.

There were no free hot spots along the Saone River, either. We cruised from Port sur Saone almost to Dole without finding any unlocked "Wee-Fee."

But everything else was great. Take a look at the photos we took.

2009-10 France

Health Care Rationing

2009-08-28T13:29:00.001-05:00

A very thoughtful article, written by an oncologist who makes those decisions for an insurance company.

New finding in spinal cord injuries

2009-07-27T18:20:00.003-05:00

Scientists have discovered that a commonly used food additive FD&C blue dye No.1 is remarkably similar to a lab compound that blocks a key step in nerve inflammation. It makes mice recover more quickly from spinal cord injuries. Just one problem:

New Uses For Pluripotent Skin Cells

2009-07-23T13:38:00.007-05:00

[Reuters] "Chinese researchers have managed to create powerful stem cells from mouse skin and used these to generate fertile live mouse pups.

They used induced pluripotent skin cells, or iPS cells -- cells that have been reprogrammed to look and act like embryonic stem cells. Embryonic stem cells, taken from days-old embryos, have the power to morph into any cell type and, in mice, can be implanted into a mother's womb to create living mouse pups."

One more step and there will never be any need to use embryonic stem cells. That last step is to segregate the iPS cells by type, enabling the laboratory to grow specific organs in vitro. In other words, skip the embryo-creation step in cloning and go directly to cloning a specific organ to match a specific donor. Now that we have all these life-prolonging procedures, there would be a good chance that the donor would live long enough to become their own organ recipient with no potential of rejection.

One approach would be to discover, if possible, the difference between iPS cells made from skin and those made from another organ. So far, there is no known difference between iPS cells and embryonic stem cells produced by the current procedures, so research looking for such differences will become very important.

Silencing the Climate Warming Critics

2009-07-07T22:41:00.006-05:00

Stunning article in the Wall Street Journal today about the two-faced "scientists" in our government. The WSJ rightly points out that Jim Hansen, the biggest loudmouth in government has given over 1,400 speeches touting his version of anthropogenic global warming, many of them during the Bush administration, and had the audacity to claim that "the Bush administration" was "censoring" his work and fiddling with the science. The Obama administration has grabbed onto that claim and issued very public memos demanding transparency in government and science. Lisa Jackson, the nominee to head the EPA, joined in with "I will ensure EPA's efforts to address the environmental crises of today are rooted in three fundamental values: science-based policies and program, adherence to the rule of law, and overwhelming transparency."

So what about Alan Carlin, a senior analyst (B.S. in Physics from CalTech, PhD in Economics from MIT) who has 35 years in the EPA's National Center for Environmental Science? Last March, the Obama administration decided to declare carbon a "pollutant," and gave the EPA the authority to regulate it. And this was completely without any action by Congress. "Mr. Carlin and a colleague presented a 98-page analysis arguing the agency should take another look, as the science behind man-made global warming is inconclusive at best. The analysis noted that global temperatures were on a downward trend. It pointed out problems with climate models. It highlighted new research that contradicts apocalyptic scenarios. 'We believe our concerns and reservations are sufficiently important to warrant a serious review of the science by EPA,' the report read."

Can you guess what happened? Well, his boss forbade him to do any more work on climate change because his effort was getting in the way of EPA policy! Subsequently, anonymous people in the EPA have been bad-mouthing Mr. Carlin's work.

The WSJ concludes "Mr. Carlin is instead an explanation for why the science debate is little reported in this country. The professional penalty for offering a contrary view to elites like Al Gore is a smear campaign. The global-warming crowd likes to deride skeptics as the equivalent of the Catholic Church refusing to accept the Copernican theory. The irony is that, today, it is those who dare critique the new religion of human-induced climate change who face the Inquisition."

Obama's claims of "transparency" are basically lies. And what happened to the promise that no new legislation would be voted on without being available for debate for five days? Apparently that doesn't apply to anything in Washington these days.

Please read the whole article in the WSJ.

Good Writers.

2009-07-02T09:18:00.003-05:00

Good writers, especially clever writers, fascinate me. I wonder how they do it. Literally, I wonder if it's spontaneous, sweat and tears, or just how it comes about.

I know a few good writers personally and have no clue how they do it, either. But what brings it to mind is today's Woot. How do they do it? How do they create something different every day? Always irreverent, of course. And usually funny.

My hat is off to good writers, be they comics or poets.

Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells (iPS)

2009-06-04T02:11:00.002-05:00

Slowly, the science media is realizing the potential of induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS). Their use for reprogramming genes to correct defects will likely soon become a reality. iPS has the potential of providing all the touted benefits of embryonic stem cells with none of the medical or ethical issues.

The Salk Institute in La Jolla, CA has reported research that corrects a gene defect in human stem cells. The study focused on patients with a rare condition, Fanconi anemia, which causes skeletal problems and bone-marrow failure, and raises sufferers' risk of cancer. When coupled with iPS, it has the potential for correcting the defect in patients and a similar technique could do the same for many other genetic defects.

"For the first time, researchers have fixed the gene defect in cells from patients with an inherited disease, and then transformed the tissue into stem cells with the potential to reverse their condition. While scientists haven't yet tested the treatment in humans, the research could mark the beginning of a new age of curative treatments for many genetic disorders."

It's time for all the hullabaloo about embryonic stem cell research to quietly disappear. It's no longer an issue.

"The New Economy"

2009-05-26T05:26:00.007-05:00

"The New New Economy: More Startups, Fewer Giants, Infinite Opportunity," is the title of the 22 May article in Wired. It's the latest re-visit of socio-economic theory based on "the new paradigm." In other words, "Gee whiz, it's a new world and we told you so first." A bit like "The End of History."

You can read the article faster and easier than I can summarize it, so let's move on to analysis. Frankly, it reminds me of many prior attempts at insight that failed even the simplest reality tests. They usually had more in common with wishful thinking than insight. A few from my own experience:

In about 1964, I had a college professor who was, more than likely, a closet socialist. He was a scientist, but not involved with computers, so I was a little surprised to hear him say that computers would be the salvation of Communism. Computers would make it possible to effectively manage state-controlled enterprises. In other words, the obvious failures of Communism would be overcome by electronic brute force. I didn't argue the point, or even comment, as I recall. It said more about the man than the idea.

About 1989, I was a consultant to a company in Europe that was in the data business. They collected it and sold it. For a fee, they would also analyze it. Their problem was that their half-million-dollar computer was no longer big enough or fast enough to handle the volumes involved. Their computer guru had recommended that these new gadgets called personal computers were so cheap that the problem could be solved using several dozen PCs instead of stepping up to a million-dollar mainframe. Management was skeptical and I basically agreed with management; it was too early to make that leap.

These two examples, and the Wired article, have a lot in common. Brilliant insight is a long way from analytical proof. And time has an amazing way of defeating even the most exhaustive analyses.

Which is not to say that there will not be More Startups, Fewer, or at least Different Giants, and Infinite Opportunity. But that's the way it has always been in our society.

Does Eczema Lead To Asthma?

2009-05-22T09:09:00.006-05:00

Eczema and Asthma are have in common that they are diseases of the developed nations. Researchers think that's no accident; they have found some evidence that eczema causes asthma.

A report in the Public Library of Science Biology, as documented in The Economist, suggests that skin cells damaged by eczema secrete thymic stromal lymphopoietin (TSLP) which, in turn, elicits a strong immune response from the body to fight off invaders. Eczema-induced TSLP enters the bloodstream and, when it arrives at the lungs, sensitizes them so that they react to allergens that would not previously have bothered them. In other words, they become asthmatic.

Nobody really knows what causes eczema. One theory is that cleanliness is the culprit. Detergents, by degreasing the skin, might lead to infection, inflammation, and immune responses with severe side effects like asthma. If so, the "old wives" missed a chance to tell a tale. Maybe little Johnny is not sickly despite how well his mommy takes cares of him, but because his mommy takes such good care of him.

New CAFE Targets. Do They Compute?

2009-05-20T02:28:00.015-05:00

The White House made a big announcement this week that auto manufacturers have agreed to new fuel-efficiency standards to be implemented by 2016. This is a federal standard and supercedes the fragmented state standards that were previously in effect. So far, so good.

The core of the presentation can be summed up by the quote on Bloomberg.com. "The five percent annual increase in fuel mileage over five years would save 1.8 billion barrels of oil and reduce 900 million metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions by 2016, according to the administration. That is the equivalent of taking 177 million vehicles off the road."

Well, there's a slight correction there - the 177 million vehicle reduction is over five years, not the one year mentioned by Obama in the press conference. But is it even accurate? What would it take to reduce consumption by 1.8 billion barrels total between now and 2016?

I created a spreadsheet to test the figures. Obviously I have made a mistake! Take a look.

It's fairly self-explanatory except for the column Avg MPG. That was calculated from the other columns with the formula =+((B6*C6)+(D6*F6)-(E6*(C6-3)))/A7. That is, current # of vehicles times avg MPG + new vehicles sold times their avg MPG minus old vehicles scrapped times their avg MPG (divided by total vehicles in use). What is the avg MPG of the scrapped vehicles? I guessed it was three MPG less that the average vehicle in use. But even if I had used eight MPG lower mileage, the result doesn't change more than 40%. In fact, assuming the scrapped vehicles MPG was 20% of the average car on the road, the savings is still under one billion barrels.

In short, I don't get a savings of 1.8 billion barrels. I get about 500 million barrels. No number of poor-mileage vehicles scrapped can explain the discrepancy. 500 million barrels savings over 5 years is equivalent to removing about 3.5% of the 1.4 billion passenger vehicles on the road over that same five years. The math cuts both ways; if you insist on using savings over five years in order to make the numbers look bigger, the percentages don't change.

Anybody care to find my error? I thought I was being conservative by assuming all the MPG increase did not occur in 2015/1016. And shouldn't the administration publish their calculations so we can see what assumptions they made?

*********************************************************************

I've recalculated the difference using a simpler formula and come up with different figures. Unfortunately, these figures are even lower. What's wrong with this calculation... ?

(Vehicles retired*12,000 mpy)/avg MPG yields gallons not used (where the average of retired vehicles is 3 MPG less that the overall average.) Subtract from that the consumption of the new vehicles sold. The difference is net millions of gallons saved for that year. I'm getting a total savings of 300 million gallons over five years; that's less than the 500 million I got using the more complex and probably less precise method.

Nitrous Oxide and Global Warming

2009-05-20T00:32:00.004-05:00

Scientists at Cornell have been looking at the net effect of growing various biofuels on climate change and found that some crops, especially shallow-rooted corn, produce large amounts of nitrous oxide when fertilized heavily. Nitrous oxide, by weight, has 300 times the ability to warm the planet as that of an equivalent mass of CO2. They are saying, without grinning, that nitrous oxide is no laughing matter. From a geochemical standpoint, not only do we not understand the carbon cycle well enough to guide public policy, we don't understand the nitrogen cycle. As for the oceans, good luck modelling them in a computer.

The Economist reviewed the Cornell work recently. The reader comments are all over the block, most of them simply advocating one point of view or another, but one struck me as worth repeating:

"It is apparent that we do not understand how climate works, and thus don't know either what problems we have, or what the results of our actions will be. I suggest that those who trust computer models of climate consider the results of having trusted computer models in finance."

But politicians are determined to take action, even though they don't know what action(s) will work, if any. Nor have they looked at the potential for unintended consequences.

Cap and Trade is doomed to failure - except for the lucky recipients of government largesse.

New Gardening Blog

2009-05-18T20:51:00.001-05:00

Rather than clutter up this blog with my gardening hobby, I've started a separate blog for that purpose. See http://dcc-gardening.blogspot.com/ if you are interested.

The "Science" Behind Cap and Trade

2009-05-12T14:52:00.023-05:00

The EPA's recent ruling that CO2 is a pollutant and harmful to humans (via anthrophmorphic climate change) has at last been getting some scrutiny. Several things crossed my screen this morning.

1. An amalgamation of government agency comments sent from the Office of Management and Budget to the EPA earlier this year is in stark contrast to the official position presented by President Barack Obama and his Cabinet officials.Among other warnings (see below), the memo says the basis for the EPA's statement that greenhouse gases "overwhelmingly" endanger public health and welfare because they contribute to global warming was "especially weak." The report says that predictions of devastating climate change are "accompanied by uncertainties so large that they potentially overwhelm the magnitude of the harm." Here are some more points from those memos as posted on the Senate's Committee on Environment and Public Works web site yesterday.

OMB Memo: Serious Economic Impact Likely From EPA CO2 Rules
WASHINGTON (Dow Jones)

U.S. regulation of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide "is likely to have serious economic consequences" for businesses small and large across the economy, a White House memo warned the Environmental Protection Agency earlier this year.

The nine-page document also undermines the EPA's reasoning for a proposed finding that greenhouse gases are a danger to public health and welfare, a trigger for new rules.
...
Cabinet officials, including the president's climate-change czar, Carol Browner, have said the administration would prefer Congress create greenhouse-gas regulations through legislation, and not through the EPA's Clean Air Act authority.

But the White House has given the EPA the green light to move ahead with regulation under the Clean Air Act, a move deemed by some analysts as political leverage to push Congress to act because of the bluntness of the tool.

According to government records, the document was submitted by the OMB as comment on the EPA's April proposed finding that greenhouse gases are a danger to public health and welfare, a key trigger for regulation of the gases emitted from cars, power plants, and potentially any number of other sources, including lawn mowers, snowmobiles and hospitals.

While business groups have warned about the potential for a cascade of regulation and litigation, the EPA has said that greenhouse-gas rules would only be for large emitters.

The memo - marked as "Deliberative-Attorney Client Privilege" - doesn't have a date or a named author. But an OMB spokesman confirmed it was prepared by Obama administration staff as part of the inter-agency review process of the proposed endangerment finding.

"It's a conglomeration of counsel we've received from various agencies...and it's not indicative of an OMB or administration-wide position," an OMB official said.

OMB spokesman Tom Gavin said, "It's up to the EPA now to consider the various suggestions that were part of the interagency review and make some decisions on which direction they want to move."

The position outlined in the memo is at odds with other White House documents on the proposed endangerment rule, which appear to affirm the EPA's decision to move ahead with the endangerment finding.

"Making the decision to regulate CO2 under the [Clean Air Act] for the first time is likely to have serious economic consequences for regulated entities throughout the U.S. economy, including small businesses and small communities," the OMB document reads.

"The finding should also acknowledge the EPA has not undertaken a systemic risk analysis or cost-benefit analysis," it reads.

The head of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's environment and regulatory affairs, William Kovacs, said the memo "confirms almost everything we've been saying on the spillover effects of regulating greenhouse gases." He said the OMB legal brief exposes the administration and the EPA to litigation if it finalizes the endangerment finding and begins to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act, particularly because it was drafted during the deliberation process.

Although an official within the EPA's Climate Change Division said the agency "considers everything we receive," an EPA spokeswoman couldn't immediately comment on the extent to which memo influenced the drafting of the proposed rule.

Earlier this year, EPA chief Lisa Jackson dismissed concerns raised by groups such as the Chamber and the National Association of Manufacturers, saying, "It is a myth...[that] EPA will regulate cows, Dunkin' Donuts, Pizza Huts, your lawn mower and baby bottles."

The White House legal brief starts by questioning the link between the EPA's scientific technical endangerment proposal and the EPA's political summary. Jackson said in the endangerment summary that "scientific findings in totality point to compelling evidence of human-induced climate change, and that serious risks and potential impacts to public health and welfare have been clearly identified..."

"The finding rests heavily on the precautionary principle, but the amount of acknowledged lack of understanding about the basic facts surrounding [greenhouse gases] seem to stretch the precautionary principle to providing regulation in the face of unprecedented uncertainty," the memo reads.
For example, the memo notes, the EPA endangerment technical document points out there are several areas where essential behaviors of greenhouse gases are "not well determined" and "not well understood."

The OMB memo questions with concern the adequacy of the EPA finding that the gases are a harm to the public when there is "no demonstrated direct health effects," and the scientific data on which the agency relies are "almost exclusively from non-EPA sources."

Based on the "dramatically expanded precautionary principle," the EPA would be petitioned to find endangerment and regulate many other alleged "pollutants," including electro-magnetic fields, noise, and salts called percholorates.

The memo also warns that the endangerment finding, if finalized by the administration, could make agencies vulnerable to litigation alleging inadequate environmental permitting reviews, adding that the proposal could unintentionally trigger a cascade of regulations.

The administration last week avoided requiring permitting reviews that would need to consider the impact of greenhouse gases when it decided not to revoke a Bush administration rule on polar bears. Although the Interior Secretary said greenhouse gases were the primary cause of the bear's loss of sea-ice habitat, the animal's listing as a threatened species couldn't be used to prevent oil refineries and coal-power plants from being built.

The White House, in a tortously written rebuttal, at first appears to be denying the report exists. On closer reading, they seem to be saying "So what? OMB is just reporting that other people have other opinions!" Never fear, the White House knows all and is infallible.

Meanwhile, apparently seeing the writing on the wall, the Obama administration announced that they would prefer a solution through legislation. What a coincidence; the House Democratic leaders said this evening they had reached agreement within their caucus on climate-change legislation that sets easier targets for emissions reductions and renewable-energy requirements than originally proposed. Mr. Waxman told reporters late Tuesday that he has agreed to amend the legislation so that it requires a cut in U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions of 17% below 2005 levels by 2020, rather than a 20% cut in that time frame and to give, rather than sell, a certain percentage of the carbon emission "permits" to various industries.

The madness continues. The Obama administration is next in line to compete on "Dancing With The Stars."

2. A computer programmer/modeler named Dan Hughes has submitted comments to the EPA (see EPA Docket ID No. EPA-HQ-OAR-2008-0508) throwing doubt on the validity of the climate simulations and the science behind them.

"One crucial and necessary first step is that application of Verification procedures have shown that the numbers produced by the software accurately reflect both (1) the original intent of the continuous equations for the models, and (2) the numerical solution methods applied to the discrete approximations to the continuous equations. That is, Verification shows that the equations have been solved correctly. Verification procedures are designed to answer the question, Do the calculated numbers actually satisfy the coded discrete equations and do the solutions of the discrete equations converge to solution of the continuous equations. Neither of these extremely critical properties has been demonstrated for any GCM. None of the GCM codes, and very likely none of any of the enormous number of other computer codes, used in the IPCC processes have been Verified to be correct. Equally important, none of the Journals in which the papers reviewed by the IPCC process are published have editorial policies that require that the software on which papers are based to be Verified.

"All software can be Verified. Objective technical criteria and associated success metrics can be developed and applied in a manner that provides assurances about the correctness of the coding of the equations and their numerical solutions. Lack of Verification leaves open the potential that the numbers from the software are simply results of “bugs” in the coding."

Fatal? Maybe not. But it's one more in a string of evidences that the "science" behind "global warming" is sloppy. Step two, if it turns out that the models can be verified, is to determine if they would have accurately predicted what has happened in the past. From everything I have seen, they do not.

Can The Kindle DX Save Publishing?

2009-05-07T10:57:00.005-05:00

Amazon this week announced the Kindle DX, a larger version of the original. The Kindle DX at $489 weighs 18.9 ounces compared to the earlier Kindle $359 at 10.2 ounces. It is touted for reading textbooks, newspapers, magazines and PDFs at potentially huge cost savings over printing and distributing paper-based products.

The Kindle DX, about 1/3" thick, has a 9.7" screen with 16 shades of gray, about 2.5 time the size of the earlier B/W model (known as the Kindle 2,) making it easier to represent 8.5" x 11" sheets as well as newspaper pages, including advertising and photos. It has 3.3 GB of storage, enough to hold about 3,500 books and can download additional material from Amazon via 3G cellular towers in about 60 seconds. There are no wireless fees or contracts.

Kindle DX can also read text out loud to you, provided the copyright holder allows it. It also can host an eight GB SD card for copying from internal memory or importing external data and music files.

Everyone has an opinion on where this technology is going and Amazon is not without competition. Their biggest advantage of Amazon's Kindle seems to be their legal arrangements for content.

The New York Times, The Boston Globe and The Washington Post plan pilot programs offering the new Kindle at a discount to some readers who sign up for subscriptions to read the news on the device. However, the Times/Globe in their usual short-sighted way, won't offer Kindle subscriptions in areas where their print edition is available.

Three textbook publishers (Pearson PLC, Cengage Learning and John Wiley & Sons Inc.) have agreed to sell books on the device. Collectively, they publish 60 percent of all higher-education textbooks, according to Amazon.

About six universities have agreed to run Kindle pilots in the fall, including Pace, Arizona State University, Case Western Reserve University, Princeton University, Reed College and the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia.

But Kindle and some other e-book readers have lots of drawbacks. No color and little or no interactivity. For example, only a few readers allow making "notes in the margins." And people used to the wonders of HTML and the web will find huge shortcomings in e-book readers. Even the iPhone is superior in that sense.

For all those reasons, the future of electronic books is very uncertain. The potential cost advantage is the only convincing element in the mix. But it also has to be an acceptable medium to the end user.

Are Newspapers Obsolete?

2009-05-06T20:07:00.010-05:00

The Senate Commerce Committee's Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, and the Internet, chaired by Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, is holding hearings on what laws, if any, need to be written or changed to assist the nation's newspapers. The conclusion seems to be that nothing seems likely to help. There was a suggestion that media cross-ownership restrictions might be softened (lift the ban on common ownership of broadcast and print media in the same market.) There was even a suggestion that print media be allowed to operate as non-profit organizations, but, judging by Kerry's comments, nothing is likely to be done.

"As a means of conveying news in a timely way, paper and ink have become obsolete, eclipsed by the power, efficiency and technological elegance of the Internet," Kerry's pre-hearing statement said. He also said the emerging media industry "is going to require a new economic model, one that everyone is still trying to figure out." Almost as an afterthought, Kerry pledged to work with Senate Rules Committee Chairman Charles Schumer to ensure online journalists receive proper credentialing from the Senate's Standing Committee on Correspondents.

Early this week, the New York Times filed the required 60-day notice that it intends to close the Boston Globe, leaving much of New England without a premium newspaper. However, intensive bargaining sessions with Globe unions apparently produced about 25% of the cost savings needed to keep the paper alive and the filing has been avoided. Advertising revenue is the culprit; it has dropped dramatically nationwide and already the Rocky Mountain News and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer have ceased publishing a print edition. The latter is still published on-line. The Times itself is in danger of folding. It recently mortgaged its Manhattan headquarters and borrowed $250 million at 14% interest after a layoff of 100 newsroom staff and a 5% salary cut for the remainder. Some, but not all of the revenue decrease can be attributed to the recession. However, newspaper subscribers have been dropping their subscriptions and that means lower advertising and lower subscription revenues.

The Internet, of course, is the culprit. For the moment, it provides a better sampling of the same news more conveniently and at no cost. Nor is the TV news immune from falling ad revenues. Of course, if all the news gathering organizations fold, that leaves the Internet with nothing to report, so Kerry's comment about a "new economic model" is no help at all.

One possibility, advanced by Jim Moroney of the Dallas Morning News, is to provide temporary antitrust protection for publishers to let them band together and demand a bigger share of revenues collected by Google, AOL, Yahoo and other online news aggregators. Google, for example, paid publishers over $5 billion last year, and is developing new tools to help everyone earn more. Publishers say $5 billion was not enough.

The NewspaperDeathWatch web site keeps close track of papers that have failed since March, 2007, and those about to fail. It also references the more thoughtful articles that provide potential solutions, like Jason Pontin's blog in MIT's Technology Review titled How to Save Media and The World Editor's Forum article titled Keep Internet News Open With An Online Payment System.

The only thing that's clear is that information collection, i.e. journalism, costs money. Some means must be found to assure the flow of credible information about what's happening in the world.

If You're Stupid, the Law Doesn't Apply

2009-05-04T16:43:00.003-05:00

The US Supreme Court ruled unanimously today that if you are so stupid that you can't understand the law, then you can't be prosecuted for breaking it. At least that's the essense of it.

Undocumented workers who use a fake ID cannot be prosecuted for identity theft unless they "knowingly and unlawfully" use another person's identity. The plaintiff, a Mexican citizen, initially used a fake ID and fake Social Security number (which did not belong to anyone) to get a job. Apparently, that was OK and broke no laws. Six years later he "came clean" and offered his real name and forged Social Security and alien registration cards — documents that bore numbers that happened to be assigned to other people. He was prosecuted for identity theft.

He pled guilty to a number of offenses, but contested the identity theft charge because he had no way of knowing those numbers belonged to someone else. Duh! And the Supreme Court agreed! Not guilty.

"As for the immigrants rounded up in Iowa a year ago, an interpreter assigned to their hearings testified that most of the immigrants did not know that the numbers they used belonged to other people. Indeed, the immigrants generally did not know what a Social Security card was."

It really pays to be stupid if you are a crook and have a slick lawyer! It's time that our stupid Congressmen started writing laws that work. And while they are at it, they can re-authorize E-Verify so employers can catch phoney Social Security numbers in the first place.

This country is deteriorating rapidly.

Panasonic Lumix GH1 Camera and HD Video Combined

2009-04-30T20:10:00.006-05:00

Keeping up with the new digital cameras is basically impossible. Maybe if you are a professional photographer or David Pogue. There was a time when all you needed to know was which parameters changed and what were the new numbers. No more.

Digital cameras are changing dramatically. They have features you never dreamed could exist. The Panasonic Lumix GH1 SLR, available in June, is a case in point. Granted, it's currently a camera best suited for professionals. The $1,500 price and interchangable lenses tells you that, though professional film SLRs costs more like $10,000. And the great part is that it tells us what is coming for the amateur.

The referenced article gives you the GH1 basics; 14-140mm lens included, huge sensor, true SLR, but without the mirror (meaning you can see precisely what you are shooting and get it in a smaller camera.) But it's not just a still SLR, it can also shoot 1080p high-definition video with continuous automatic focus and stereo microphones!

But that's not all. Computers add some fascinating features. This camera has face-recognition software! Not face-detection, that's old hat. It can recognize Uncle Joe and make sure he is in focus!

Save your shekels. Your camera will be obsolete (periodically.)

When is "Science" not science?

2009-04-22T20:46:00.012-05:00

Apparently, "science" is what a politician makes of it. Lately, science has been the excuse for the most outrageous political decisions ever made in the USA. Perhaps you recall my comment about the clueless media applauding the Obama decision to cancel the G. W. Bush Executive Order regarding embryonic stem cell research. (It "took Bush politics out of science.") Now we have a judicial decision that is justified on equally asinine grounds:

U.S. District Judge Edward Korman ruled in New York that Bush appointees let politics, not science, drive their decision to allow over-the-counter access to the "morning after pill" only to women 18 and older without a prescription. He ruled that the FDA should allow 17-year-olds to get the pill and further required the FDA to look at the possibility that all ages should have access to the pill. How very convenient that "science" makes this a requirement! Just what "science" has to do with it, the judge doesn't say. Nor does he say why the previous rule, which honored the legal distinction between adult and juvenile females, was "unscientific."

Naturally, the Obama Administration reveled in their good fortune. By obeying the judge and otherwise remaining silent, they once again completely avoided their responsibility to provide leadership.

And once again, politicians made "science" a scapegoat for requiring them to do exactly what they wanted to do. "Science" has replaced the ancient excuse that "We are doing God's will."

Dear Mr. & Ms. Politician (and that includes you, Judge Korman.) Science does not make political decisions. Nor does it require a specific political decision. Remember the invention of the atomic bomb? What did "science" tell you to do with it? Or was that a political decision left to you?

Embryonic Stem Cell Update

2009-04-20T17:40:00.007-05:00

About six weeks ago, in my blog article titled "The Media Have No Clue," I reviewed the hullabaloo surrounding Obama's "reversal" of the G. W. Bush Executive Order banning use of federal funds for embryonic stem cell research. What Obama actually did was tell the NIH to draw up some guidelines. Two things have happened since.

1. The NIH has published Draft Guidelines for Human Stem Cell Research, and,
2. The 2009 Appropriations Act became law including, once again, the Dickey-Weiker Amendment.

The bottom line is that the Dickey-Weiker Amendment continues the ban on creation of new embryonic stem cell lines and the NIH guidelines, while extremely strict about just how those embryos can be donated, reaffirms that so long as there is a ban in the law, no federal funds may be used.

The Executive Order repeal is just as meaningless as the original Executive Order, because the Dickey-Weiker Amendment has been part of every federal funding bill since 1995. What has really happened is that the political pressure has increased to get Dickey-Weiker repealed and Obama got out of the line of fire.

The ban remains in place.

35 Inconvenient Truths

2009-04-18T21:39:00.008-05:00

Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" is such bad "science" that it's embarrassing. That this clown could get a Nobel Prize for producing lies, is beyond comprehension.

In October, 2007, the High Court in London identified nine “errors” in Gore's movie. The judge stated that, if the UK Government had not agreed to send to every secondary school in England a corrected guidance note making clear the mainstream scientific position on these nine “errors”, he would have made a finding that the Government’s distribution of the film and the first draft of the guidance note earlier in 2007 to all English secondary schools had been an unlawful contravention of an Act of Parliament prohibiting the political indoctrination of children. In short, it would be illegal to show that film in the UK to a child.

Those nine "errors" were simply the ones noted by the judge. The list has since been expanded to the 35 errors of fact published at scienceandpublicpolicy.org. And these are just the errors that Gore made that are contradicted by advocates of anthropogenic global warming!

To get the mistakes that the IPCC and their clique of friends have made, you need to look at "The Great Global Warming Hoax." I love their summarizing list:

1. The "Greenhouse Effect" is a natural and valuable phenomenon, without which, the planet would be uninhabitable.

2. Modest Global Warming, at least up until 1998 when a cooling trend began, has been real.

3. CO2 is not a significant greenhouse gas; 95% of the contribution is due to Water Vapor.

4. Man's contribution to Greenhouse Gasses is relatively insignificant. We didn't cause the recent Global Warming and we cannot stop it.

5. Solar Activity appears to be the principal driver for Climate Change, accompanied by complex ocean currents which distribute the heat and control local weather systems.

6. CO2 is a useful trace gas in the atmosphere, and the planet would actually benefit by having more, not less of it, because it is not a driver for Global Warming and would enrich our vegetation, yielding better crops to feed the expanding population.

7. CO2 is not causing global warming, in fact, CO2 is lagging temperature change in all reliable datasets. The cart is not pulling the donkey, and the future cannot influence the past.

8. Nothing happening in the climate today is particularly unusual, and in fact has happened many times in the past and will likely happen again in the future.

9. The UN IPCC has corrupted the "reporting process" so badly, it makes the oil-for-food scandal look like someone stole some kid's lunch money. They do not follow the Scientific Method, and modify the science as needed to fit their predetermined conclusions. In empirical science, one does NOT write the conclusion first, then solicit "opinion" on the report, ignoring any opinion which does not fit their predetermined conclusion while falsifying data to support unrealistic models.

10. Polar Bear populations are not endangered, in fact current populations are healthy and at almost historic highs. The push to list them as endangered is an effort to gain political control of their habitat... particularly the North Slope oil fields.

11. There is no demonstrated causal relationship between hurricanes and/or tornadoes and global warming. This is sheer conjecture totally unsupported by any material science.

12. Observed glacial retreats in certain select areas have been going on for hundreds of years, and show no serious correlation to short-term swings in global temperatures.

13. Greenland is shown to be an island completely surrounded by water, not ice, in maps dating to the 14th century. There is active geothermal activity in the currently "melting" sections of Greenland.

14. The Antarctic Ice cover is currently the largest ever observed by satellite, and periodic ice shelf breakups are normal and correlate well with localized tectonic and geothermal activity along the Antarctic Peninsula.

15. The Global Warming Panic was triggered by an artifact of poor mathematics which has been thoroughly disproved. The panic is being deliberately nurtured by those who stand to gain both financially and politically from perpetuation of the hoax.

16. Scientists who "deny" the hoax are often threatened with loss of funding or even their jobs.

17. The correlation between solar activity and climate is now so strong that solar physicists are now seriously discussing the much greater danger of pending global cooling.

18. Biofuel hysteria is already having a disastrous effect on world food supplies and prices, and current technologies for biofuel production [are said by some to] consume more energy than the fuels produce.

19. Global Warming Hysteria is potentially linked to a stress-induced mental disorder.

20. In short, there is no "climate crisis" of any kind at work on our planet.

Supercavitation

2009-04-05T16:24:00.005-05:00

Cavitation, as any old salt knows, is the bane of propellor-driven boats and ships. Props that run too fast cause "holes" to appear in the water and the result is both a decrease in efficiency and, in extreme cases, physical damage to the propellors as the cavities collapse with a "bang."

In the 1970s and 1980s, the Russian Research Institute of Applied Hydromechanics in Kiev developed a practical use for cavitation. Called supercavitation, it created a vapor-filled cavity around a torpedo that was so big that the water no longer touched the torpedo body. The result was a rocket-powered torpedo called the VA-111 Shkval, capable of speeds above 200 knots (230 mph.) They produced quit a few and actually sold about 60 of them to China in the 1990's. Unfortunately, the Shkval was a "strait-shooter," meaning the Russians had not found a way to manuver the torpedo without destroying the cavity.

The US Navy has belatedly started work at ONR to find ways to use and to defend against supercavitation weapons. Theoretically, small vehicles can travel at speeds up to 600 MPH and submarine-sized vehicles can travel at speeds of 100 mph.

Needless to day, such weapons are super secret. Nobody is willing to talk about how they might be deployed and what defenses are possible. One obvious way is to use ship-ro-surface missles which themselves supercavitate, but detection and tracking, not to mention guidance, are left as "an exercise to the student."

The problem is especially acute given our current dependence on "conventional" nuclear aircraft carriers and submarines. The USS George H. W. Bush (CVN 77), commissioned in January, is the last of the Numitz-class carriers to be built. But the next generation of carriers, beginning with the USS Gerald Ford (CVN 78) is well into design and the keel has been laid. It's not stealthy; it's built on a hull about the same size and shape as the Nimitz class. It's due for delivery in 2015.

Spring Surfs Into Montgomery

2009-03-10T14:06:00.013-05:00

Spring has arrived! The winter debris has been removed from the front porch and the bouganvillea repotted. It wasn't doing well in a soil rich in compost. It likes dry feet.

The schefflera is getting out of hand. The next time we get a solid freeze, I may not be able to protect it. It's probably due for a severe pruning, but I've never had any luck with air layering and it would be a shame to waste the branches.

The bouganvillea in the ground has always done well, despite neglect and little water. I pruned it last Spring when it got leggy. It has bloomed continuously ever since.

This beauty is a Bauhinia, probably Bauhinia blakeana, aka the orchid tree. It has been featured on the flag of Hong Kong since the British left in 1997.

I bought it as a one-foot plant at the Mercer Arboretum four years ago. It has grown to about 15' and will be full of 4" blooms next week. Gorgeous!

The double azaleas are doing well by the back door, despite a very dry Winter. This group was planted maybe 18 months ago. They will get fertilized and pruned back to the same height after blooming.

The single azaleas have been here more than my five-year stay. More pruning and fertilizing to do.

I know. The kalanchoes with the iridescent red flowers clash badly with the azaleas. They were planted by gf. The yard is full of her kalanchoes and bromeliads.

The Media Have No Clue

2009-03-09T18:47:00.017-05:00

When it comes to science, the media are absolutely clueless. The reporting today on Obama's decision to allow stem cell research using discarded human embryos is the latest proof. They have never reported the facts properly, but it just gets worse. Can't they even do basic Internet research?

1. Since the beginning, they have reported that the Bush administration had forbidden the use of federal funds to do stem cell research. That was and remains false. Federal funds may not be used for research involving the sacrifice of human embryos - except for a set available as of August, 2001. As I recall, there were about a 21 lines that can be used. So that's two mistakes; federal funds can be used for stem cell research as long as it doesn't involve the destruction of new embryos and nothing in the executive order stops others from funding embryonic stem cell research. The States of California, Connecticut, Illinois, Iowa, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and New York have done do for several years as have some private philanthropies.

2. Embryonic stem cells are not the best solution for use in patients because they are essentially foreign bodies; there is a potential for the patient's rejection mechanisms to produce damaging antibodies. As a result, in September of 2005, researchers at Harvard produced stem cells from skin cells using the existing pool of embryonic cells as a "catalyst." That research was probably federally funded. It was barely reported while the media ranted and raved over "the ban."

3. Last Fall, researchers at Harvard again found a way to create stem cells from skin, this time adding cell-reprogramming genes to adenoviruses, a type of virus that infects cells without affecting their DNA. It was confirmed that no DNA damage was induced, but researchers continued seeking a way to do the job without using viruses. The media either ignored or misreported the discovery by emphasizing the "danger" of using a virus.

4. Last week, Canadian researchers published a paper in Nature reporting they had created stem cells from the skin of a mouse without using adenoviruses. Before long, there will be no need to destroy human embryos because a better method is being developed. Not one word about this breakthrough was on any news report that I saw this evening. Instead, they all fawned over "Obama reversing the Bush ban." Even that was not true!

5. What Obama really did was give instructions to NIH to come up, within 90 days, with a set of ethical guidelines for using embryonic stem cells in federally-sponsored research. This is not a trivial difference. Presumably, NIH knows that the whole controversy is about to become moot; there will soon be no need for destroying human embryos to harvest stem cells. Under the circumstances, I expect there to be some severe restrictions placed on their use and perhaps some sunset provisions. Whatever NIH decides, the president will have to take additional action to approve the new guidelines and allow existing federal funding, if any, to be used under those guidelines. Ultimately, nothing really changes unless Congress funds more research.

Meanwhile, the clueless media publishes sound bites from equally misleading researchers who are thrilled for a chance to suck the federal teet. One had the audacity to say that this took Bush politics out of science. Wrong. Bush didn't inject politics into the situation, he inserted ethical guidelines based, in part, on religious principles. It's the media and some supporters of embryonic stem cell research who injected politics into the situation.

The message: when you hear the media reporting on science, you can believe they got it wrong. Ignore them, or do your own research on the Internet.

***************************************************************************************

March 14th. Flip-flop already. The omnibus spending bill signed by Obama this week included the Dickey-Wicker Amendment. That amendment bans federal funding of any "research in which a human embryo or embryos are destroyed, discarded, or knowingly subjected to risk of injury or death." So much for the political grandstanding of reversing the Bush Executive Order banning funding of embryonic stem cell research - at least until the next spending bill is passed. But that amendment is a measure Congress has included in spending bills in every fiscal year since 1996. And even if it's not included some day, good luck getting Congress to fund stem cell research without it.

It's far from clear whether the Dickey-Wicker Amendment only applies to research in which the embryos are destroyed; some contend that it does not apply to stem cells created since 2001 by other researchers. But, once again, good luck getting funds appropriated.

Also this week, Obama said the stem cell policy is designed so that it "never opens the door to the use of cloning for human reproduction. Such cloning," he said, "is dangerous, profoundly wrong, and has no place in our society or any society." Now that's a weird statement! Use of human embryos in stem cell research almost always involves cloning. The alternative is to use a new embryo for every experiment. So is Obama making a distinction between "human reproduction," meaning taking clones to full-term and birth as opposed to cloning embryos, growing them for a while, and destroying them for stem cell research? You have to wonder if Obama knows what he just said.

Politicians are so devious that you need a score card to keep track. Don't count on the media to give you the full story. Meanwhile, (surprise!), the New York Times editors are pushing for repeal of Dickey-Wicker while Sheryl Gay Stolberg, a writer for the New York Times, discusses the impossibility of "removing politics from science."

NCO Financial and Similar Crooks

2009-02-19T18:56:00.006-06:00

If you haven't been harassed by NCO Financial, it's just a matter of time. This Pennsylvania company claims to be a legitimate collection agency, but they have been sued by several state attorneys general, have a huge file of complaints at every BBB in the country, and violate every rule of conduct required of collection agencies by law. Google them. Or Goggle 18666278195. Both their name and number usually show up in your caller ID.

They started harassing me about two months ago. I get at least one call a day, usually more. They use predictive dialling, so it's easy to spot them, even if you don't have caller ID. My habit is simply to hang up if a real person is not immediately on the line. Sometimes they have a recording that gives you a clue.

Today I finally got the only clue I need; the recording said they wanted to speak to David Somebody. I forget the name, but it wasn't mine.

I've had this phone number for about ten years, far longer than the statute of limitations for most kinds of debt in this state. So even if they have the "right" phone number for the debtor, they are basically beating a dead horse. That explains the horror stories you can read on the Internet about people who have been silly enough to stay on the line and try to reason with them. The NCO Financial people actually start screaming and using foul language if you dare tell them they have the wrong number.

They can do a reverse look up of the phone numbers they call and find the name of the person who owns that number. If that doesn't convince them that they have the wrong number, I'm certainly not able to do it by staying on the line and hearing their tirade.

NCO Financial is not the only bunch of crooks trying to collect noncollectable debts from the wrong people. Googling sleazy or crooked collection agencies will turn up many more.

Bottom line is that any legitimate debt collection agency will have the Social Security number of the debtor; they can easily find the current address of the right person. If they can't send you a certified letter, they are not legitimate.

Since these slimebags don't even know my name, I feel fairly safe from damage to my credit report, but I'll keep an eye out. The last thing I want to do is tell them my real name; with my luck they would claim I'm using an alias and then I would really feel their assault. Meanwhile, let them waste their time calling the wrong number. Caller ID and Google are my friends.

Now if only Vonage would offer a call-blocking feature! You would think that some bright engineer would offer a device that handles this for you, but the only one I have ever found is Caller ID Blocker and it appears to be permanently out of stock.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

2/20/09 Good news! I found a used Caller ID Blocker for 1/2 price and also found some PC software (callclerk) that does the same job and more. Also, the mystery of what became of the Caller ID Blocker company is solved. They (InterceptorID) are working on a new version and ran into quite a few unexpected snags - like their manufacturing vendor lost the tools used to make the original and they are now being recreated by InterceptorID.

Blessed BeThe Newsmakers

2009-02-11T12:11:00.002-06:00

Steven Bates has a priceless article in Slate today titled Blessed Be The Newsmakers. His thesis is that newspapers can stop their decline by declaring themselves as a religion.

"... as New York University's Jay Rosen points out (and noted earlier), American journalism itself constitutes a sort of religion, "a belief system and meaning-making kit that is shared across editorial cultures in mainstream newsrooms." What qualifies as news reflects an idealized notion of democracy. Public corruption brings forth righteous wrath from the press's pulpit. Reporters strive to "evoke indignation at the violation of social values," media scholars James S. Ettema and Theodore L. Glasser observe in their book "Custodians of Conscience"—as, they add, the prophet Jeremiah did."

"Just as the Puritans vowed to purify the Church of England, journalists seek to purify the country's institutions of self-government. "Democracy," Philadelphia Evening Bulletin editor Fred Fuller Shedd declared in 1931, 'functions largely through the efficient service of the newspaper'—no great leap from 'No one comes to the Father except through me.' The Scripps Newspapers' motto admonishes, 'Give Light and the People Will Find Their Own Way.' See also John 8:12: 'I am the light of the world.'"

Bates concludes with "It shouldn't be that hard to reposition the press as a church. It's already halfway there." Well, maybe that's an average, but the New York Times has been there for decades.

Long Droughts & Rising Seas

2009-01-27T07:14:00.008-06:00

The message from "top international scients" remains confused. This from the Washington Post today:

Tuesday, January 27, 2009; Page A04

"Greenhouse gas levels currently expected by mid-century will produce devastating long-term droughts and a sea-level rise that will persist for 1,000 years regardless of how well the world curbs future emissions of carbon dioxide, an international team of scientists reported yesterday.

"Top climate researchers from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Switzerland and France said their analysis shows that carbon dioxide will remain near peak levels in the atmosphere far longer than other greenhouse gases, which dissipate relatively quickly.
...

"The new study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, projects that if carbon dioxide concentrations peak at 600 ppm, several regions of the world -- including southwestern North America, the Mediterranean and southern Africa -- will face major droughts as bad or worse than the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. Global sea levels will rise by about three feet by the year 3000, a projection that does not factor in melting glaciers and polar ice sheets that would probably result in significant additional sea level rises."

Huh?

Let's review a little history. The Kyoto conference was a failure for two reasons. 1. The US has not ratified their 7% reduction committment. China, India and Russia made no commitment to reductions. 2. It was widely admitted that even if all countries made a committment of reducing emmissions by 8%, it would not significantly reduce the CO2 content of the atmosphere. Presumably nothing short of eliminating the human race would help. So what has happened since 1998?

Very few countries made progress by 2005 toward their 2012 CO2 reduction goal. The few that have reduced emissions did so for reasons unrelated to Kyoto, for example the economic collapse of the USSR. The price of oil and other economic conditions have far more to do with CO2 emissions than political rhetoric.

And what about sea level? 30 foot rises! in 1000 years. 92 cm per century for ten centuries. Somebody is fudging the numbers again. In the 20th century, in geologically stable areas, sea level rose 20 cm at a constant rate, the prime contributor being thermal expansion. Previous estimates of the maximum possible rise had been 80 centimeters including the maximum rate at which glaciers could travel to the sea. Every "expert" has a different number. None of them seem to explain where they got it. Let's be grateful they didn't plot this new "hockey stick" on graph paper.

The predictions simply don't hold up when compared to historical records. If CO2 content is the critical factor in the temperature of the atmosphere, why have temperature and sea level risen so steadily in the past 8000 years? Why is there absolutely no correlation between CO2 content and temperature over geologic history?

As for the dust bowl threat, don't these people even read human history? 5000 years ago southern Iraq was a vast forest. The human race was not destroyed as a result of the desertification of Babylonia, no matter what caused it.

So now the big news is that nothing we can do will change anything and [therefore] we must act now! Somehow, the message is getting garbled. Apparently we can all agree that nothing we pitiful humans can do is likely to affect global temperature. So how much money will it cost to try? And how much money would it cost to move up hill 30 feet in the next 1000 years?

By the way, is anyone asking what the benefits may be of "global warming?" If they aren't asking, why not? If there are no benefits, then show that to be the case. This "thing" looks less like science than politics.

Who Writes Wikipedia?

2009-01-03T10:47:00.011-06:00

Ever wonder who writes the entries in Wikipedia? "Conventional wisdom," coming mainly from the speeches of Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, says that about 1,400 people, aka 1,400 obsessed freaks, make over 73% of the edits.

Aaron Schwartz, who blogs Raw Thought, decided to look into those statistics. He knew that Wikipedia keeps a complete history of every change ever made to every article, as well as who made the change, and that history is available to the public. Some changes are made anonymously by people who never log in, but not the 1,400 mentioned by Jimmy Wales. Wales says that they all know one another and he knows them all. Schwartz found just the opposite.

"Curious and skeptical, I decided to investigate. I picked an article at random ("Alan Alda") to see how it was written. Today the Alan Alda page is a pretty standard Wikipedia page: it has a couple photos, several pages of facts and background, and a handful of links. But when it was first created, it was just two sentences: "Alan Alda is a male actor most famous for his role of Hawkeye Pierce in the television series MASH. Or recent work, he plays sensitive male characters in drama movies." How did it get from there to here?

"Edit by edit, I watched the page evolve. The changes I saw largely fell into three groups. A tiny handful -- probably around 5 out of nearly 400 -- were "vandalism": confused or malicious people adding things that simply didn't fit, followed by someone undoing their change. The vast majority, by far, were small changes: people fixing typos, formatting, links, categories, and so on, making the article a little nicer but not adding much in the way of substance. Finally, a much smaller amount were genuine additions: a couple sentences or even paragraphs of new information added to the page.

"Wales seems to think that the vast majority of users are just doing the first two (vandalizing or contributing small fixes) while the core group of Wikipedians writes the actual bulk of the article. But that's not at all what I found. Almost every time I saw a substantive edit, I found the user who had contributed it was not an active user of the site. They generally had made less than 50 edits (typically around 10,) usually on related pages. Most never even bothered to create an account."

What Schwartz discovered is not really surprising. It would be impossible for 1,400 people, no matter how brilliant, to write 75% of the roughly 2.5 million articles currently in Wikipedia. The truth is that over a thousand people working virtually full time are required simply to edit the articles as they increase and change. Editors, book salesmen, and the price of paper, is what made the Encyclopedia Britannica so expensive.

So what does this say about Google's competing "encyclopedia" called Knol? Knol is supposed to be written by experts who are paid from advertising revenue and only the author is allowed to make changes to their own articles. That way, Google argues, the material can be trusted and can't be vandalized. But the Knol scheme is fatally flawed, as Henry Blodgett points out in "Oops, Google's Knol Won't Be Killing Wikipedia After All." The "experts" are not exactly renowned and nobody seems to be making the easiest possible checks for plagiarism. For example, take most any complete sentence from the Schwartz quotation above and stick it into Google. You will immediately find a reference to the source of that sentence or at least a reference with a very low "Kevin Bacon number." And, as Blodgett explains, that's the least of the problems with Knol.

Hmm, a Kevin Bacon number for a link is amusing. Stephen Dolan, who appears to be a mathematician, has blogged on that concept. In his article "Six Degrees of Wikipedia," he discusses the links between articles in Wikipedia using graph theory. He looked for the "departure center" of Wikipedia, defined as the Wikipedia article from which it is possible to link to the most articles with the fewest clicks. Not all articles are referenced anywhere else, but he found that excluding articles that are just lists, years or days of the year, the "real article" closest to the centre is United Kingdom. Of the 2,301,486 articles existing on 3 March, 2008, 2,111,479 were reachable from some other article. From United Kingdom, you could reach them all in an average of 3.67 clicks. Next came Billie Jean King, oddly enough, at 3.68 clicks, followed by United States at 3.69 clicks. As an aside, he points out that it takes an average of 3.98 clicks to get from Kevin Bacon to anywhere else.

That ought to fill our trivia quota for today.

Climate Change

2008-12-28T11:36:00.022-06:00

Those who know me are not surprised that I am a "global warming" skeptic. But rest assured that it is not from life-long iconoclast-ism, but from years of study and experience, both in the earth sciences and in computer modeling, coupled with more years of observation of the topic than even Al Gore can claim. And, unlike Al, I began my observations with a scientific background.

In fact, one of the hallmarks of science is a form of skepticism. It takes a variety of approaches. One is that the best way to prove a theory is to try, honestly, to disprove it. Or find someone else to find holes in it. If that fails, the theory is strengthened. Another is argument in the classical sense. The Talmud is an excellent example of that. To understand the truth, scholars literally argue in the margins and others reply in the margins of the margins.

So, for umpteen years, I have looked for evidence that runs counter to the "prevailing wisdom" that anthropogenic activity is a major contributor to climate change. Whoa! That's a lot of words to describe a simple concept like global warming! Yes, it is. But notice that it is conclusion-neutral. The term "global warming" all by itself is a presumption of something. What kind of science is that?

Well, I am happy to report that not only am I not alone in this search, but it looks like more people are becoming skeptical of the "science" behind "global warming" all the time - president-elect Obama not withstanding. Unfortunately, his approach seems like the same old political thinking that got us here in the first place. He probably thinks he is pandering to the masses, but more likely he has been buffaloed by talking to too few people and not using his head.

So why am I optimistic that real science will prevail, despite the incredibly political approach taken by the UN's IPCC and RealClimate.org? Well, it's not because of the equally political opposition that has resulted in so much wasted effort between the two camps. But I am hopeful that, given time, two things are happening. 1) The poorly funded (by comparison) scientific opposition is increasingly being heard and 2) the general public seems to be awakening to the importance of getting this thing right; the serious economic consequences of government meddling in this matter can no longer be ignored.

The Internet can be thanked for this. Frankly, the establishment and their "peer-reviewed" science have failed us. Witness the origin of the original Mann, Bradley and Hughes (MBH98) paper with the "hockey stick" graph showing recent dramatic increases in global temperature. It was published in Nature in 1998 without any peer review. Then, in the third assessment report of the IPCC (2001), it was republished despite the fact that it completely disagreed with charts published by the IPCC in earlier reports. Why? Obviously because it agreed with the political opinion of the authors of the IPCC report. Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick tried to publish a dissenting view in Nature but were rejected twice, once because the article was "too long" and again, because the 500-word revision was "too technical." What a shame, a scientific article that was too technical. They subsequently published on the Net and in Geophysical Research Letters (2005), totally demolishing the original work by Mann. They also published a corrected version of the same data which showed that there has been no significant increase in global temperature over that time period. The IPCC has yet to publish a correction and RealClimate.org continues to make excuses for Mann, et al. Not surprising, because Mann is one of the founders of realclimate.org.

McIntyre found a variety of errors in the corrections applied to the data by Mann. He also found a duplicated set of data. Here's what the corrected chart looks like. Average global temperature has actually decreased over the 450 years chosen. But what about that spike starting in 1920? Surely that's when the CO₂ began to make a difference. Well, Mann made yet another error. He applied a rather "non-standard" set of corrections there, too. McIntyre discovered that using Mann's corrections on a set of random numbers, the data always spiked at the end!

The next chart shows twelve sets of random numbers subjected to the same mathematical massage that Mann used on his data. The bottom line here is that Mann is sloppy and dishonest, he has never admitted his errors, And the folks at the IPCC who used Mann's chart without vetting it are equally careless and incapable of admitting error. This does not speak well for the IPCC nor realclimate.org. It's extremely obvious that these people can't be trusted. Yet they are asking the world economy to turn upside down, perhaps collapsing in the process! My personal approach is to refuse to believe anything they say without having it approved by an independent third party.

So much for the hot shots. But what about the rest of the members of the IPCC and who is this guy Dr. James E. Hansen who heads the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City and is a professor at Columbia? I'll have more to say about them later, but here's a clue; none of them any longer deserves the title of "scientist." Real scientists are skeptics and they spend a lot of time looking for holes in their own data and theories.

Footnote: You can click on most of the charts to see a larger version.

World Wide Words, the OED, and Bill Gates

2008-12-19T08:23:00.007-06:00

The Oxford English Dictionary has always fascinated me. It's always amazing that people actually know, or think they know, where all these words and phrases came from. It's like an early Wikitionery, as seen through the provided magnifying glass.

This came to mind when I wanted to know the origin of "to wit." Instead of walking across the room to get my copy of the OED, I Googled it. And there is was. And it has been there since 1999.

Kudos to Michael Quinion and his labor of love, "World Wide Words." Unfortunately, he doesn't mention "kudos." But Wikipedia does!

How did we ever do without these tools? I find myself watching TV and wishing I had a laptop at hand to look something up. The Gates Foundation recently recognized the problem by making some pilot grants to libraries that will give them better Internet access.

I think I was born too soon, but at least got a glimpse of the future.

DARPA

2008-12-06T15:04:00.023-06:00

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is an arm of the US Defense Department with an annual research budget of $3 billion. It was charted 50 years ago, shortly after Sputnik, for the purpose of anticipating technological developments that might otherwise be surprises unveiled by enemies. It has since morphed into an advanced projects development agency for DOD. Earlier successes of DARPA include the computer mouse, the Internet, the Global Positioning System, and stealth aircraft.

Current projects look tame by comparison, at least the projects they will talk about. But we are assured that more life-changing inventions are under development. Some of the projects that they will talk about include:

Boomerang; a device designed to determine the origin of an incoming bullet or rocket-propelled grenade (RPG). It was developed in about two months in 2004 and deployed to Afghanistan. It doesn't wait for the sound to reach it; by that time, it would have been blown to pieces. It detects the shock wave that precedes the object. Shock waves travel faster than the objects which produce them.

Knowing that you are about to be destroyed in the next few milliseconds is not much consolation, so DARPA developed the "Iron Curtain," a somewhat bulky add-on to a Humvee that both detects and destroys incoming RPGs before that can strike the vehicle.

Iron Curtain and several of the other devices mentioned here were the subject of a National Geographic special titled "America's Secret Weapons Lab." It was broadcast today and will be rebroadcast 11 December.

DARPA is also developing a self-generating network for field communication and situational awareness. For example, three or more Humvees using Boomerang could precisely pinpoint the location of a sniper or grenade launcher and communicate that information to all vehicles and personnel in the area.

DARPA and Raytheon have developed a 200 pound aluminum exoskeleton which, when energised, not only holds up it's own weight, but gives the human wearer a ten-fold increase in arm and leg power. In the example given, supply personnel could lift and load 35-pound boxes of ammunition all day without tiring. But it requires a lot of power and is tethered to the source. It's not for portable use in the field.

The WASP is an electrically-driven remotely-controlled "model" airplane about 26" long capable of carrying daylight or infrared cameras for 45 minutes.

Powerswim is a device that lets swimmers travel 150% faster than using swim fins and with less effort because it uses more powerful muscles (quadricep and gluteal muscles.) It's shape is derived from observation of whales, dolphins, and seals as they swam.

But not every project is cheap. DARPA, working with the Lockheed-Martin Skunk Works, is developing the Falcon HTV-3X scram jet, capable of travelling for hours at over 4,000 miles per hour.

The Foliage Penetration Reconnaissance, Surveillance, Tracking and Engagement Radar (FORESTER) can be carried aloft by unmanned helicopters and see through foliage to detect troops and vehicles not otherwise visible.

Perhaps their best-known project is the DARPA Grand Challenge, first issued in 2004 with a $1,000,000 grand prize for the first autonomous vehicle capable of negotiating a long obstacle course in a limited amount of time with no external control other than start and stop. Hundreds of teams have participated from high schools, universities, businesses and other organizations. The only requirement is that at least one member of the team be a US citizen. The prize was increased to $2,000,000 in 2005 and was finally claimed in 2007. The first, second and third places winners in the 2007 Urban Challenge received $2 million (CarnegieMellon, 4 hrs, 10 mins,) $1 million (Stanford), and $500,000 (Virginia Tech), respectively.

And there are hundreds of other projects that you can get an idea about by going to the DARPA web site list of on-going programs.

Zombie Science

2008-11-27T08:20:00.007-06:00

Hmmm, I wonder if we can find an example of this in climatology ...

Zombie science: A sinister consequence of evaluating scientific theories purely on the basis of enlightened self-interest

Although the classical ideal is that scientific theories are evaluated by a careful teasing-out of their internal logic and external implications, and checking whether these deductions and predictions are in-line-with old and new observations; the fact that so many vague, dumb or incoherent scientific theories are apparently believed by so many scientists for so many years is suggestive that this ideal does not necessarily reflect real world practice. In the real world it looks more like most scientists are quite willing to pursue wrong ideas so long as they are rewarded with a better chance of achieving more grants, publications and status. The classic account has it that bogus theories should readily be demolished by sceptical (or jealous) competitor scientists. However, in practice even the most conclusive ‘hatchet jobs’ may fail to kill, or even weaken, phoney hypotheses when they are backed-up with sufficient economic muscle in the form of lavish and sustained funding. And when a branch of science based on phoney theories serves a useful but non-scientific purpose, it may be kept-going indefinitely by continuous transfusions of cash from those whose interests it serves. If this happens, real science expires and a ‘zombie science’ evolves. Zombie science is science that is dead but will not lie down. It keeps twitching and lumbering around so that (from a distance, and with your eyes half-closed) zombie science looks much like the real thing. But in fact the zombie has no life of its own; it is animated and moved only by the incessant pumping of funds. If zombie science is not scientifically-useable – what is its function? In a nutshell, zombie science is supported because it is useful propaganda to be deployed in arenas such as political rhetoric, public administration, management, public relations, marketing and the mass media generally. It persuades, it constructs taboos, it buttresses some kind of rhetorical attempt to shape mass opinion. Indeed, zombie science often comes across in the mass media as being more plausible than real science; and it is precisely the superficial face-plausibility which is the sole and sufficient purpose of zombie science.

c 2008 Published by Elsevier Ltd

Finding Cancer in a Drop of Blood

2008-11-26T16:22:00.009-06:00

A new test uses microfluidics to diagnose cancer with a single drop of blood at a much reduced cost.

Current testing technology takes several vials of blood and each test costs about $500. The new test needs only one drop of blood, takes ten minutes, and uses a slide costing about five cents per targeted protein.

James Heath at CalTech and Leroy Hood of the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle, have founded Integrated Diagnostics to produce and sell their new blood-drop method.

The new technique uses an "integrated blood bar code chip" designed to separate organ-specific proteins from the blood and pass them through tiny channels coated with strips of DNA bound to antibodies that capture these proteins. The proteins are then coated with a material that lights up under a fluorescent microscope.

Clinical trials are underway.

Zeus, The Army Ray Gun

2008-11-24T11:30:00.011-06:00

There has been a lot of research into weapons that use light or atomic particles destructively. But until this century, it was just research. We now know that the US Army deployed a real ray gun in 2003. Zeus, aka the Humvee Laser Ordnance Neutralization System (HLONS,) was one-of-a-kind when it was sent to Afganistan March 18, 2003. After six months it was returned to the US where more powerful versions were under development. Full deployment of Zeus is expected in fiscal year 2009.

The field-tested version of ZEUS had a 0.5 kW laser mounted on the roof of a Humvee. Current versions have more than four times that power and weigh 2,000 pounds less. They have an effective range of more than 300 meters.

During its six-month deployment, Zeus proved its worth exploding 210 explosive devices like old Russian missles and roadside IEDs. It is doubtful that it has ever been used against an enemy combatant because there is a controversy over the legality of such use under International Law.

Zeus was developed by General Dynanics. It is part of a larger DOD program call Directed Energy Weapons (DEWs.) Experimental DEWs have been around since Nickola Tesla worked on his charged-particle "teleforce" weapon in the 1930s.

Barge Cruising in France

2008-11-21T13:51:00.022-06:00

For many years, I have dreamed of a barge trip through France, preferably the Burgundy region. Something always got in the way. Finally, with my fingers crossed, GF and I will get our chance in 2009.

We have invited a couple to join us. They have been my friends for almost 50 years. We served together in the Navy in Taiwan when I was a newly minted Ensign. I think I last saw them in the 1970s. Now that we are all retired, it's our big chance to get together again. It's going to be amazing.

The barge we have chosen is the Nilaya ("Heaven" in Indian Sanskrit) and the route will be one of the three choices in and around Burgundy. It's almost impossible to choose between them, but the skipper has asked us to rank our choices one through three.

I think the classic Burgundy Canal looks great. Market day in Dijon or wine tasting in Cote de Nuits! Another difficult choice!

Burgundy & the Petite Saône through the "waterways capital of France," wonderful restaurants, and market day in Port-sur-Saône.

Or maybe Burgundy and the Côte d'Or with a little wine tasting in Beaune?

Better yet, return every year and do them all!

And how did we find this fabulous deal? Surfing the web, of course.

Music Surfing

2008-11-17T12:48:00.011-06:00

GF asked about HD Radio the other day. I had not paid attention to it because I'm not accustomed to listening to music on the radio, iPod, CD, or bandstand. It simply never occurs to me to listen, except in the car. But Houston radio stations are, shall we say, not the best.

Anyway, I discovered that HD radio in Houston is scarce, but KUHF (NPR) and KODA broadcast in HD and KODA HD is all jazz, all the time; that's what she wanted to hear.

A quick check of the Internet told me that HD radio receivers were also scarce - and often expensive. The majority seemed to be replacements for car stereos. So I went to the KODA web site and discovered they stream "HD radio" over the Internet. Several tweeks to Firefox later, I was streaming jazz into my Sony sound system. Not bad. GF will be happy, now.

But I didn't care for the KODA DJ and her choice of music, so I surfed the web (imagine that!) and found a plethora of streaming jazz stations. San Diego City College's Jazz88 immediately became my favorite. Amazing. All it takes is high-speed Internet, some free software, a little browser tweaking, and a reasonably good sound system. I may listen to music while web surfing in the future. If it occurs to me.

What does occur to me is that if everyone switched from listening to the radio to listening to streaming music, it would require a lot of Internet band width, not to mention what it takes to watch a music video over the Internet. And with the forthcoming improvements in wireless, you could easily have music all over the house for a relatively minor investment in suitably equipped speakers.

Record labels and the RIAA have been worried about loss of revenue for years. In 2007, Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) of the Library of Congress created a new royalty structure - with rates going from the then current flat rate of $0.0007 per online performance to annually escalating rates increasing to $0.0019 per performance by 2010. But that created a huge burden on amateurs and others who made no money through streaming. More recently, music publishers have agreed that providers of such services can pay a mechanical royalty of 10.5% of revenue after other royalties are calculated. This agreement does not cover merchandise or permanent downloads. A ruling on this proposal by Copyright Royalty Judges is expected by Oct 2, 2008.

The Web never ceases to amaze.

Great Architects

2008-11-14T21:21:00.023-06:00

When I was a teen, I wanted to be an architect. That faded, partly because I didn't know any architects and partly because I felt I didn't have the imagination needed. Since then I have met some architects and they all assured me that too much imagination was a bad thing for most architects.

My idol back then was, of course, Frank Lloyd Wright. I especially admired Fallingwater. I've never seen it, in fact I can't recall but one of his designs that I've actually visited; the Phillips Petroleum tower in Bartlesville, OK, which now houses the Price Tower Art Center.

I once drove up the "driveway" of Taliesin West, but chickened out before I reached the main building; they didn't hold tours in those days.

There are actually people who collect Frank Lloyd houses and the FLW Conservancy currently lists 16 such homes that are for sale. Today, my idols would have been Frank Gehry and Richard Meier. Renzo Piano is no match for either of them, though all three have won the Pritzker Prize. Jørn Utzon, another prize winner, is worth remembering, if only for his Sydney Opera House.

Richard Meier is probably best known for his design of the Getty Center and Frank Gehry for the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain.

But all architects have their critics. The Prince of Wales is one of them.

Who is your favorite architect?

Fractals

2008-11-13T10:32:00.007-06:00

About 30 years ago, Benoît Mandelbrot, working at IBM Research, developed a new branch of mathematics called fractals. Few people realize how much fractals have changed our world.

In addition to the beautiful graphs created with fractal number sets, we have much smaller and more versatile cell phones thanks to fractal antennas. They make it possible for one small antenna to receive the wide variety of frequencies needed to operate in any country of the world and to receive GPS signals at the same time. Fractal mathematics has lead to much stronger concrete, to fractal landscapes in art and films like Star Trek II, and much, much more.

Last month, Nova broadcast an excellent documentary on fractals. Hunting the Hidden Dimension is available for viewing on their web site. I highly recommend it.

Arduino

2008-11-13T07:00:00.013-06:00

The electronics hobby is more fun than ever. You can buy some very sophisticated devices to control almost anything you want to build. One of the most interesting is a microcontroller called Arduino, an Italian design.

"Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software. It's intended for artists, designers, hobbyists, and anyone interested in creating interactive objects or environments."

Open-source? Yup. The design can be freely copied and modified, just like Linux. Strange idea. So how do they make a buck? Well, they manufacture and distribute the board, but apparently their main revenue comes from consulting. Great article on the company in a recent Wired magazine. Wired also did an article on the Arduino board itself earlier this year.

There have been dozens of versions made in Italy and hundreds made by others. The Diecimila (after they made 10,000 Arduinos) and the current version, the Duemilanove, cost about $35.00 in the USA. A third-party version with Bluetooth goes for $150.

One example of a project that several people have tackled is a toy Segway, this one built with Legos. As I recall, the parts for it totaled about $350, so the hobby is not for the faint of pocket. But it's an incredible learning tool for schools and educational cooperatives like Studio Bricolage, the grown-up version of Leonardo's Basement in Minneapolis.

Wow, it's great to be a kid these days!

The New Yankee Stadium Is Geeky

2008-11-12T13:00:00.007-06:00

The New York Yankees and Cisco Systems are turning the new Yankee Stadium into a Technogeeks paradise with 1,100 flat-panel HDTV screens all over the place, even in the restrooms, and the technical capability to send different information to each one. The folks in the 51 $600,000+ (per season) luxury suites can order up hot dogs and merchandise on touch screen phones. (No, they didn't mention the iPhone.) The long-range plan is to connect the system to fans in their seats, first in the stadium and later at home. There's a good article on it in today's New York Times. (Registration required.)

Trivia note: Rice University alumnus John Cox ’27 gave his alma mater his ownership of the old Yankee Stadium, including all leasing rights, in 1962. Rice made several million dollars off the gift, leasing the House that Ruth Built to the Yankees for almost a decade. In the winter of 1966, the stadium was painted blue and white, but perhaps that was a coincidence. The city of New York eventually forced Rice to sell Yankee Stadium in 1971 for the meager price of $2.5 million.

Trivia compounded: I was a grad student at Rice in 1962 and the story I remember was that Cox owned the land under the stadium, not the stadium itself. But I found the stadium story in a 2006 copy of the Rice Alumni magazine, then called The Sallyport, so I'll take their word for it.

What's a sallyport? I thought you'd never ask. It's the passageway through Lovett Hall, the administration building at the entry to Rice.

BPL - Broadband Over Power Lines

2008-11-12T10:27:00.005-06:00

Broadband Over Power Lines (BPL) in the USA may have gotten a much-needed boost from IBM this week. They contracted with International Broadband Electric Communications (IBEC) to install high-speed Internet service to rural electric cooperatives (RECs). The 900+ RECs in America provide electricity to almost half of the nations power grid. IBEC plans to offer the systems to co-ops for no capital expense on their part in order to bring Internet service to rural communities not currently served by cable and often poorly served by the smaller telephone companies. Ars Technica has a good article on the IBEC/IBM arrangement.

BPL should be faster and cheaper than satellite Internet service. Current BPL technology is capable of Internet speeds about the same as low and medium-speed DSL. More advanced versions have been demonstrated at speeds up to one gigabit.

Unfortunately, BPL has a spotty record, so it remains to be seen if IBEC and IBM can really make it happen.

Hybrid Diesel Trucks

2008-11-10T20:14:00.011-06:00

UPS recently announced they will test a newly-developed hybrid diesel that uses stored hydraulic pressure rather than a large, expensive battery. No mention of the size of the reservoir nor the pressures involved. In addition to using the braking system to pump hydraulic fluid into a high-pressure reservoir, the drive train is driven hydraulically. The estimated cost of the trucks is 14% to 18% more than standard diesels and they expect a 50% savings in fuel costs. In addition, carbon emissions are cut by 30%.

The EPA funded the research into these vehicles and holds the patents. Eaton manufactured the seven test vehicles that UPS will deploy. There are other folks interested in applying the technology to buses and other start-stop vehicles where the technology yields its greatest efficiency.

A Ford Taurus diesel was actually prototyped by the EPA in 2000 that achieved 80 miles per gallon, but it was never mass produced because of the auto industry slump and funding cuts. The EPA believes that a 100-MPG sedan is possible.

Click the title of this post for a related BusinessWeek article.

TED and TEDTalks

2008-11-10T11:14:00.026-06:00

If you are not familiar with TED, I highly recommend you surf their web site. TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) is an organization that defines its mission as "ideas worth spreading". See the WikiPedia article for an overview.

TEDTalks are by invited speakers at their annual conference. TED posts new talks on their web site at the rate of about five per week. Not surprisingly, you can get an updated list via TED's RSS Feed.

Not all TEDTalks are on science or technology, but when they have one, it's usually a doozie, Al Gore's talk notwithstanding. One example is Paul Rothemund's talk at TED2007, held in February, 2008. The talk title is "The Immense Promise of DNA folding." Watch the video. Watch it twice; Rothemund (CalTech) talks so fast that he is hard to follow. No doubt inspired by the 18-minute limit on TedTalks, though they often run almost to 25 minutes. Or maybe it's my personal aversion to learning through lecture; I much prefer to read it.

Rothemund calls his technique DNA folding or scaffolded DNA origami. Scaffolded because the resulting DNA is a structure composed of individual DNA strands. Like the smiley faces.
Surf TED.COM! Well worth a few hours or even a few hundred hours of your time. For a quick introduction, watch the Top 10 TEDTalks video. Or watch Clifford Stoll On Everything for the sheer joy of it.

Mystery Medical Diagnoses

2008-11-09T19:55:00.021-06:00

I'm a big fan of the Learning Channel show "Mystery Diagnosis." Each show follows two cases that went undiagnosed (or misdiagnosed) for a significant period of time. Luckily they finally find a doctor who has his/her head screwed on frontwards and are given the proper treatment. Naturally, the ones who die before finding a decent doctor never make it to the show. They are the folks you see on Dr. G, the central Texas coroner; she solves mysterious deaths one at a time. (Her real name, Garavaglia, is virtually unpronounceable.)

"Mystery Diagnosis" has one big flaw. They never tell you the names of the noodnick doctors who screw it up, so the instant they introduce someone by their real name, you know the proper diagnosis is at hand!

My TiVo offered me about six shows tonight and got me to wondering why doctors don't just surf the web to correlate symptoms. Well, presumably they have better search capabilities in some on-line medical dictionary somewhere, but I decided that Google could do almost as well.

One case tonight involved a female college student, early 20s, who developed a cough that wouldn't go away with antibiotics. Well, not for long, anyway. She was constantly fatigued. Her chest X-ray showed what looked like a mild case of pneumonia. She later developed extreme fatigue, itchy skin and night sweats. If you put all of those symptoms into Google, two big possibilities pop out, AIDs and Lymphoma, with the latter being the closest match because AIDS has a lot more symptoms. Sure enough, by the time she was properly diagnosed three years later, she had a football-sized tumor in her right lung.

Makes you wonder about doctors.

Another episode of "Mystery Diagnosis" concerned a very young child whose breathing and heart often stopped. Her mother was taught CPR and she was constantly calling EMS. A few years later, the child developed a harlequin disease where one side of the body flushed red and the other remained normal, accompanied by extreme pain. The child's mother found the diagosis on the web and told her doctor what it was: PEPD, Paroxysmal Extreme Pain Disorder, a genetic mutation known to affect only eight people in the world.

Yet anthor episode got the correct diagnosis from a local doctor. It was Schwannoma. The mother used the Internet to find the best surgeon in the United States to remove the tumor.

Don't forget to surf the web if you feel out of sorts. Having said that, be careful because, in most of the examples above, it took years of searching before the correct answer was found. It's not clear if that resulted from tenacity or the maturation of the web. However, I can say that several years ago, I came down with shingles. The web, in particular an Australian web site that cost a few dollars, was absolutely no help. But a call to my doctor's nurse diagnosed it in a few minutes.

OK, so it's not all web surfing, it's also channel surfing. TV still has a few uses.

Should You Get A Flu Shot?

2008-11-08T12:25:00.011-06:00

My gf got a flu shot the other day and has been feeling very punk ever since. No headache or fever, but she feels terrible and has been both sad and irritable. So naturally I had to web surf and check out what happened.

Click on the title of this post for some comments on the Injury Board. The health column in the Washington Post has some interesting comments. Quite a variety of symptoms are reported by people. As usual, there are some kooky comments, too, but the possibility of getting a shot that doesn't contain the preservative Thimeserol is worth investigating. The fact that the new vaccines use dead virus is encouraging.

The CDC publishes a map showing where flu is most prevalent in the US. Looks like states that voted for Obama have the most flu cases at the moment. :-)

I have never had a flu shot and don't plan to get one. I've never had the flu, either. Nor do I find myself in crowds very often except when I travel. My theory has been that since my immune system is working well, I don't want to give it something else to tackle.

Reading about it on the web, I discovered that the vaccine isn't very effective on people over 70, so that about cinches the deal; no flu shots for me. Of course, the vaccine may not be effective because the immune system in older folks tends to be weaker. So I may yet wind up with the flu some day.

And yes, some of my other physical capacities are in decline, too. Have you noticed the large type font I use here? :-)

PS: Google has unveiled a new service called Flu Trends. They discovered that there is a close correlation between people searching for words related to the flu and cases of the flu in their area. At the moment (11/11), Texas and Nevada are the only states reported with "minimal" flu.

LED Lamps Are Better Than Ever

2008-11-06T15:36:00.012-06:00

The bright ones are still expensive, but two recent announcements made headlines. Lighting Science Group has a 600 to 800 lumens floodlight (roughly the same as a 50-60 Watt incandescent) that uses only 15 Watts and has a projected life span of 50,000 hours. It's $145 (oops). The 300 to 400 lumen version draws 6 Watts and costs $80.00.

And they both look really cool with their built-in heat sinks. The Journée Lighting track lights are even sexier.

And how about a projector that you can put in your pocket? Take a look at the Optoma Pico Projector available before Christmas in Europe and Asia, next year in the USA at a projected (pun intended) $430 list price. It’s only 2 by 4.1 by 0.7 inches, and weighs 4.2 ounces. The trick is using an LED light source. It only produces nine lumens, but that's enough for two people to watch the same movie projected on an airplane seat back or a 65" display 8.5 feet away (in a dark room.) See the reviews by David Pogue, Engadget, and Gizmodo.

Given time, LED prices will come down. Even if efficiencies don't improve, they offer a significant reduction in energy use. One quarter of the energy we use in the USA is for lighting.

Favorite Web Sites

2008-11-06T10:17:00.014-06:00

Lots of web sites are interesting, but I find myself returning to a small number of them quite often. Wired magazine is one of them. I confess I am letting my print subscription expire because I prefer to read it on line. Their print edition uses extremely small fonts and they have the nasty habit of using black pages with white text, an abomination that should be outlawed both in print and on the web.

The science and technology section of The Economist has stuff you can't find elsewhere. And, unlike Scientific American magazine, they are apolitical.

A periodic look at World Architecture News is fun. They picture and describe virtually every new important architectural design in the world. I gather that the design firms themselves provide the material. They also review architectural prizes. The Australian Institute of Architects gave their 2008 prize to an Australian firm for the Watercube National Swimming Centre at the Beijing Olympics.

Wikipedia is an excellent research tool, better than Google for many purposes. Contributing to Wikipedia is a bit of fun, too. I got some small pleasure this morning in updating the article on Raymond Lowey to note that his daughter Laurence died in October. I added the "mandatory" pointer to her obituary in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, of course.

WikiDashboard is an interesting recent appendage to Wikipedia. It's a project at PARC, the folks who brought you the mouse, the GUI, Ethernet, and laser printing. WikiDashboard indexes changes to Wikipedia in real time so you can see who modified an article and when, or you can see a list of mods made by a particular individual.

Then there's the lesser-known Wiktionary, the free dictionary. It includes etymologies, pronunciations, sample quotations, synonyms, antonyms and translations, as well as a thesaurus, a rhyme guide, and phrase books. Given time, it could rival the OED and Roget's. Worth checking daily just for the 'word of the day.' Today it's nychthemeron. Unfortunately, not a very useful word - unless you are Greek.

Another favorite, though little needed web site is the WaybackMachine. This site, unbelievable as it may seem, makes a copy of every page of every known web site and saves it. You can retrieve the list of snapshots as well as the snapshot itself if you know the old URL. Talk about archiving!

I often use Google for a spell checker. It loads faster than Word.

Least favorite sites? Digg.com and similar (too messy.)

Of course the blogs of friends and family and the pictures of my granddaughter are always surfed.

Artificial Neural Networks

2008-11-05T21:16:00.011-06:00

Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) crossed my mind this morning. They were big news a few years back. Whatever happened to them?

Turns out they are alive and well, but not the blessing that some thought them to be in stock trading.

Here are some notes from a blog by hassam.

"ANNs are widely used in a number of fields like finance, industry, agriculture, business, physics, statistics, cognitive science, neuroscience, weather forecasting, computer science and engineering, spatial analysis and geography. Some banks have found that the failure rate on loans approved by neural networks is lower than those approved by some of their best traditional methods. Some credit card companies are also using neural networks in their application screening process.

"One of the major areas, where a large part of ANN research is focused, is pattern matching. ... ANNs are extensively deployed for this task for they are capable of finding patterns in auditory data, analysing handwriting, comparing fingerprints, processing written and oral language and translating languages."

Lots of free ANN software is available. There's a list in Part 5 of the Usenet neural-nets FAQ.

Expanding their use is somewhat limited by the speed and size of available computers. Increasing the number of neurons simulated exponentially increases the computer power needed.

Plasmonics and Plasmonic Applications

2008-11-05T18:52:00.012-06:00

You can do your own web research to expand on plasmonics, the science surrounding plasmons. There was a good summary in Scientific American by Harry Atwater in 2007. The article is titled "The Promise of Plasmonics."

There are an amazing number of applications; miniature transistors (plasmonsters), cancer treatment, and hazardous material detection, among others. There is even a plasmonic laser, a SPASER, that is theoretically possible, with resolutions 100 times smaller than visible-light lasers. Who knows what else? How many of the current applications of lasers were foreseen when it was first invented?

The downside? Design and manufacture. It will be a while before we see computer chips running at terahertz. However, UC Berkeley reported in Technology Review that they have made some recent progress assembling cheap nanoscale photonic and plasmonic crystals.

Why blog?

2008-11-05T10:45:00.004-06:00

Now that blogging is "out" and Twitter is "in," I decided to start a blog. Maybe nobody will notice.

More to the point, I didn't think I had anything to say. I much prefer to learn from others, especially through web surfing. It's amazing what you can learn in just a few hours of research. Basically, I am a perennial student, especially of science and technology. It doesn't pay much, but it's great fun.

Then, this morning, while trying to find out what the heck is a plasmon, it occurred to me that 1) I probably wouldn't remember unless I wrote it down, and 2) there might be other people out there who are also weird and want to be introduced to the same question. Hey, that's called a blog!

Higher aspirations are always good. Maybe I can become a little-known version of David Pogue.