Zinc Fingers

"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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

New finding in spinal cord injuries

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

[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

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.

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)

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"

"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?

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?

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

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

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

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?

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?

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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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

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.

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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.