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.